Visual Theology in Contested Spaces: Cinema's Mediation of Faith and Medicine
Visual Theology in Contested Spaces: Cinema's Mediation of Faith and Medicine
This paper examines how cinema creates contested epistemological spaces that mediate between religious faith and scientific medicine, offering a unique theological lens through which to understand embodied suffering. Drawing from Christian theological traditions on healing and Catholic perspectives on embodiment, I demonstrate how film's visual language engages viewers in a form of embodied theological reflection that transcends the limitations of both materialist reduction and disembodied spirituality. Rather than merely representing cultural conflicts, cinema actively participates in theological meaning-making by constructing visual spaces where competing frameworks interact without collapsing into a single dominant view. Through analysis of Matthew Brown's Freud's Last Session (2023) and Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain (2006), I illustrate how these films employ distinct visual and narrative strategies to engage viewers in theological reflection on suffering, mortality, and healing. Freud's Last Session maintains a productive tension between faith and reason through embodied suffering that challenges both frameworks, while The Fountain moves toward integrating scientific pursuit with spiritual acceptance through visual experimentation and temporal fragmentation. This analysis contributes to theological hermeneutics by revealing how cinema's unique formal properties enable new ways of understanding the theological significance of embodied human experience in an increasingly medicalized world.
Keywords: visual theology, cinema, epistemology, medical humanities, embodiment, theological aesthetics
Contemporary cinema offers a powerful medium for capturing the tension between religious faith and scientific medicine, extending beyond mere cultural conflicts. Films fundamentally challenge how we understand human suffering, mortality, and healing. While medical breakthroughs continue to accelerate through technological advancement, some of the most pressing existential questions about meaning and transcendence remain elusive and resistant to scientific explanation. Cinema offers a potential bridge, constructing new ways of understanding the relationship between these competing frameworks.
Films can create contested epistemological spaces, or environments where competing frameworks interact, challenge, and potentially transform one another without collapsing into a single dominant view. Within these dialogical spaces, cinema’s distinct visual language, narrative structure, and character development reveal the limits and possibilities of both scientific and religious approaches. Suffering, in turn, gains meaning beyond its abstract principles, becoming embodied as lived experience. This tension becomes particularly vivid when we examine the visual cultures of religion and medicine. Medical imaging technologies like X-rays and MRIs frame suffering within a materialist paradigm focused on physical intervention. In contrast, Christian iconography, ritual objects, and sacred architecture situate suffering within symbolic systems, offering transcendent meaning. Cinema’s ability to juxtapose and transform such visual elements makes it especially effective for examining these tensions.
Film theorist Laura Mulvey argues that cinema creates “visual pleasure” through narrative progression and spectacular imagery (Mulvey 6). Yet, this pleasure becomes more complex when we try to address suffering. Viewers inherently both seek and resist narrative closure and aesthetic satisfaction, especially when confronting illness, death, and existential doubt. As Mulvey explains, “The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect... [it has] structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego” (Mulvey 9). This dual operation through simultaneous detachment and identification uniquely positions cinema to dramatize the friction between religious faith and scientific medicine. Through “embodied vision,” films engage our multisensory experiences and evoke physiological responses (Sobchack 149). In a contested epistemological space, discomfort, relief, tension, and catharsis resonate with our senses and emotions. Hence, faith and medicine can operate not as abstract concepts but become lived experiences involving physical sensations, emotional responses, and meaning-making.
In this paper, I aim to demonstrate cinema’s unique capacity to create contested epistemological spaces. To do so, I draw from scholarly sources in film theory, medical anthropology, and religious studies and argue that competing approaches to healing and suffering can interact meaningfully in film. Specifically, I examine how visual composition, narrative structure, and character development reveal and negotiate the tension between Christian faith and scientific medicine in two films. First, Matthew Brown's Freud's Last Session portrays the intellectual contest between faith and reason, deliberately maintaining productive tension through embodied suffering that challenges both frameworks. Second, Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain offers a visual meditation on mortality that moves toward integrating scientific pursuit and spiritual acceptance. These two films not only represent cultural debates but also actively participate in meaning-making by staging distinct approaches to epistemological negotiation. By analyzing how each film either sustains or resolves these tensions, I argue that cinema enables viewers to rethink the boundaries between spiritual and scientific approaches to suffering.
In Matthew Brown's 2023 film, Freud's Last Session, the intellectual confrontation between Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and C.S. Lewis’s Christianity exemplifies an embodied negotiation, where suffering resists simplistic resolution. The broader tension between religious and scientific paradigms is dramatized as an imagined meeting between Freud and Lewis in a contested epistemological space. While the central theme does not focus on physical medicine per se, the film explores psychological suffering through opposing interpretive frameworks. In the following sections, I analyze the film’s construction to show how Freud's Last Session does not merely represent these frameworks but actively enacts their ongoing negotiation.
To understand the relationship between faith and medicine in films, we must first recognize that both address suffering from fundamentally distinct epistemological standpoints, each claiming distinct forms of cultural authority. Medical anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere's fieldwork in Sri Lanka offers a key insight: “If a cluster of symptoms operationalized by a foreign psychiatrist does not exist as a conception of a disease (i.e., illness), it is neither disease nor illness but it may be something else, for example, religion” (Obeyesekere 139). This observation reveals how scientific medicine often pathologizes religious experiences that do not conform to biomedical categories. Freud's Last Session engages this contested boundary directly. Freud's psychoanalytic framework interprets religion as a symptom of underlying psychological mechanisms, such as father projections, wish fulfillment, or neurotic guilt. Lewis, in contrast, insists that spiritual experiences should be understood as genuine encounters with transcendent reality. In this dialectic, the film resists privileging one interpretation over the other, embodying its contested epistemological space.
The film’s narrative structure reinforces this refusal to resolve epistemological conflict, oscillating between abstract theological debate and embodied suffering. Freud’s terminal oral cancer is both a literal manifestation of pain and a metaphorical ground on which contesting approaches to human suffering are tested. Here, suffering is not reduced to either material or spiritual dimensions but presented as physical, psychological, and existential at once. This interplay challenges Cartesian dualism, in which scientific medicine privileges physical causation and religious frameworks prioritize spiritual meaning. The film suggests that neither scientific materialism nor disembodied spirituality alone can fully encompass the lived reality of suffering. That being the case, the viewer is left to reconcile their co-presence without closure, as the film intentionally leaves it unresolved.
This resistance to closure becomes more apparent through the film’s visual composition. Notably, intimate close-ups of Freud’s face communicate his physical pain and inner turmoil, visually conveying the fragmentation often associated with materialistic views of the self. By way of contrast, wider shots of his office are filled with religious artifacts, like Buddha statues, Egyptian figurines, and Christian relics, which complicate his professed atheism. Similarly, soft backlighting produces a momentary halo effect when Lewis recounts his conversion. This visual strategy creates a “sacred gaze,” connecting our physical reality to transcendent dimensions. As Morgan explains, “a sacred gaze is the way of looking that invests an image, a person, a time, a place with spiritual significance” (Morgan 3). This subtle visualization of his spiritual framework without privileging it over Freud's perspective serves as a counterpoint, adding embodied dimensions to the verbal debate that resist purely intellectual resolution. Hence, visual juxtapositions of embodied suffering and religious symbolism deepen the film’s epistemological pluralism.
While philosophical debate forms the foundation, the film’s emotional force lies in how each character embodies their respective frameworks. Crucially, neither is presented as definitively correct or complete. Freud's materialism traces suffering to psychological repression, making suffering meaningful only within psychoanalytic logic. Lewis views suffering as potentially meaningful within divine purposes that transcend human understanding. Hence, both frameworks reveal truths but also limitations. Morgan notes, “religious visual culture is not simply about looking at images, but about engaging in practices of seeing that make knowledge and belief possible” (Morgan 55). In the same way, the film actively constructs a visual and dialogical space where science and religion are performed, challenged, and made meaningful through embodied acts of seeing. Freud's psychoanalytic lens shows how internal mechanisms shape belief, while Lewis's theological framework reveals existential questions that psychoanalysis cannot resolve. Through this layered character development and visual strategy, the film sustains productive tension, refusing synthesis in favor of epistemological co-presence.
While Freud’s Last Session stages the tension through philosophical debate, Darren Aronofsky's 2006 film The Fountain constructs its contested epistemological space through visual experimentation and temporal fragmentation. Whereas Brown’s film operates within the bounds of rational dialogue and interior space, Aronofsky’s film expands the tension across nonlinear time and mythic imagery. In what follows, I examine how The Fountain uses fragmented narrative and symbolic visual imagery to explore competing frameworks of mortality. Here, the film’s three interwoven storylines, spanning the 16th century, present day, and a speculative future, illustrate how scientific pursuit and spiritual acceptance gradually converge rather than remain in conflict.
The Fountain’s tripartite narrative follows neuroscientist Tommy Creo, who embarks on a desperate effort to cure his wife Izzi’s brain tumor. As the plot unfolds, Tommy’s character shows transformation from a controlling scientist to someone who ultimately accepts death, which mirrors the broader epistemological shift. This central storyline is interwoven with two parallel narratives from the past and the future: a 16th-century Spanish conquistador’s quest for the Tree of Life and a futuristic journey toward a dying star. Across these contexts and temporalities, Aronosfky presents a sustained meditation on mortality, each narrative grounded in distinct epistemologies: secular science, religious mythology, and metaphysical transcendence. This differs from the more contained, dialogue-driven space of Freud’s Last Session. In the following sections, I argue that the film externalizes this conflict, expanding into visual and temporal dimensions.
The Fountain powerfully visualizes medical anthropologist Aihwa Ong's critique of how scientific authority can suppress indigenous perspectives on healing. Ong notes that “positivist science acquire[s] a quasi-religious flavor,” often suppressing “lived experiences apprehended through the worldview of indigenous peoples” (Ong 38). This insight directly parallels theological critiques of medical reductionism that dismiss spiritual experiences as mere psychological or neurological phenomena. In the historical narrative, Tomas's quest for the Tree of Life is treated as a secularized pursuit of immortality. The tree is stripped of its sacred meaning, despite its profound symbolic status and religious significance in Christian and Mayan traditions. In the same way, Tommy’s aggressive medical research treats Mayan plant knowledge as raw material for scientific exploitation, failing to understand its context within spiritual cosmology. Looking at both instances of the “desacralization” of religious symbols in modern consciousness, we see that sacred objects have become mere utilitarian resources (Eliade 151). By juxtaposing the Spanish conquest of Mayan territories with the scientific appropriation of sacred Mayan knowledge, the film creates a contested epistemiological space of visual theology. In a sense, this becomes an act of resistance against epistemic violence that devalues religious understandings of healing and mortality. Whereas Freud's Last Session presented religious and scientific perspectives as intellectual equals in dialogue, The Fountain more explicitly addresses the power imbalance we often encounter, which privileges scientific epistemology over religious knowledge in contemporary healing contexts.
The film’s visual language introduces another layer of contrast between scientific and religious approaches to mortality. Contemporary medical scenes are marked by cool blue tones, harsh lighting, and geometric compositions. These visual choices reflect “technical reason” in modern consciousness, which “focuses on the means-end relationship” and underlies “controlling knowledge” aimed at power through experimental verification (Grean 152). These visuals convey the body as an object to be diagnosed, treated, and ultimately controlled, emphasizing a clinical worldview. In contrast, the historical and futuristic sequences embrace warm golden illumination, organic compositions, and diffuse lighting, creating a visual language that resists objectification. Reminiscent of religious iconography, these aesthetic choices evoke sacred mandalas, resisting abstraction and suggesting divine presence. Rather than control, these images open up a space for “receiving knowledge,” where symbolic meaning, spiritual reflection, and emotional resonance have “communion with or participation in what is known” (Grean 152). This deliberate aesthetic contrast embodies a cinematic negotiation; it captures the struggle between secular and sacred ways of seeing. Together, the film’s visual language thus becomes a theological discourse in itself where divine reality is apprehended through sensory experience rather than abstract reasoning.
The film’s nonlinear narrative further challenges the temporal assumptions embedded in modern biomedicine and religious tradition. Contemporary medicine operates within ordinary or “secular time,” a homogeneous and empty continuum supporting the progressive medical intervention narrative (Taylor 54). In contrast, religious traditions operate within “higher times” which “gathered, assembled, reordered, punctuated profane, ordinary time... [introducing] ‘warps’ and seeming inconsistencies in profane time-ordering” (Taylor 54–55). Notably, the destabilized linear chronology allows the viewer to experience a visual contrast between secular and higher time. Besides, it invites the viewer into a layered temporality more akin to “sacred time,” a mode of experience in which “religious man periodically finds his way into mythical and sacred time, re-enters the time of origin, the time that ‘floweth not’ because it does not participate in profane temporal duration” (Eliade 88). In other words, these sacred ruptures offer moments of transcendence that reframe mortality not as terminal but symbolically continuous.
The Tree of Life, a central visual motif, conceptually links the film’s fragmented narratives and integrates its epistemological tensions. This technique leverages “archetypal images,” using recurring symbols to generate patterns of meaning that transcend individual contexts (Frye 108). Frye argues, “The myth is the central informing power that gives archetypal significance to the ritual and archetypal narrative to the oracle. Hence the myth is the archetype” (Frye 103). Indeed, the Tree of Life is involved at every stage of the film's tripartite structure. As a mythical fountain of youth in the past, as a potential cancer treatment in the present, and finally as a cosmic vehicle in the future, the tree undergoes a visual evolution. Thus, this progressive technique collapses the boundaries between scientific pursuit and spiritual quest, giving the tree its unified mythic structure. For this reason, the tree’s integration culminates in the film’s most visually striking sequence. Tommy is depicted traveling through space toward the Mayan underworld inside a translucent bubble containing the dying tree. Above all, this scene is particularly notable for using microphotography of chemical reactions rather than CGI to convey the cosmic imagery. Aronofsky’s production technique employs literal scientific processes to evoke transcendence, enacting the film’s core philosophical claim that material and spiritual realities are not opposed but interwoven. Thus, by materializing this cosmic journey through real physical processes, our sensory perceptions mediate the convergence of abstract spiritual concepts and concrete scientific reality.
Looking at both films, we see a common theme of contested epistemological spaces in cinema where competing frameworks for understanding suffering can interact. While Freud's Last Session maintains productive tension through embodied suffering that resists resolution, The Fountain moves toward integration through visual experimentation and temporal fragmentation. Though different in approach, both films create experiential spaces that allow viewers to inhabit multiple epistemological frameworks at once. Equally, when we consider healing, instead of an “either-or” approach choosing between frameworks, we should develop the capacity to move between them, as we recognize the limitations and insights of each perspective.
As we navigate an increasingly complex future with unprecedented technological growth, we can only anticipate more polarized divides between accelerated medical capabilities and persistent existential questions. Nevertheless, as these films suggest, neither scientific materialism nor disembodied spirituality alone can fully address human suffering. United by cinema’s unique visual language, these films ask us to reconsider how contested epistemological spaces can transform our understanding of healing, faith, and scientific medicine—and what it means to be human.
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