Andrew Garfield’s search for meaning

I tend to justify many of my decisions —my impulsive choices and my mercurial disposition— by quoting Anaïs Nin, who famously turned down a profile on Harper’s Bazaar by saying:

My life is not possible to tell. I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations. I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles. I weep when I find others play them for me. My real self is unknown.

This sentence has become a sort of creed for me, and I choose to believe the same about others. So while that means that I refuse to categorize people, and therefore, this text is not an attempt to classify Andrew Garfield’s beliefs into any specific box, it also means that I understand my own personhood —and others’— as a continuous exploration, and this text is, too, an exploration of the things that his acting choices have made me think about religion and spirituality.

I will preface this by saying that I classify myself as an agnostic atheist (someone who doesn’t believe in the existence of any specific deity, but that also thinks that the knowledge of the existence of a deity is unattainable) while Garfield did, back in 2016, declared himself to be “pantheist, agnostic, and occasionally atheist”, while also being culturally Jewish, an identity that seems to be one of the strongest building blocks on the make-up of his personality.

It might be a weird assertion to say that I started thinking about this topic after watching Under the silver lake, which is probably one of the less spiritual movies in Garfield’s credit list, discounting The Amazing Spider-Man (which doesn’t mean that Spider-Man doesn’t also have its own spiritual subtext in the context of Garfield’s career). In one of the first scenes in Under the silver lake, which is as weird and psychedelic of a movie as you’ve ever seen, we get to see a graffiti painted on a glass screen through the eyes of the protagonist, and this sends us along with him into a paranoic and obsessive chase, which in the end is nothing else but the search of self and meaning by a character who lives in a world with a warped sense of reality. There’s very little that I can say about this without spoiling the entire movie, which is a whole trip and deserves you watching it, but Sam made me wonder how this weird-ass story made sense in the career of my favorite actor, and the answer was right there, written in the glass: that this keen interest in spirituality is, in fact, an obsession with the concept of self and meaning.

The character in Under the silver lake, like all characters portrayed by Andrew Garfield, is embarked on a search for meaning. But “meaning” can be many things —for the Jesuit pastor he portrayed in Scorsese’s Silence, meaning was Jesus and his chance to show people the way he thought they could find redemption. For the amazing character he portrayed in the criminally underrated Hacksaw Ridge, where he was blatantly stolen of the Oscar he deserved, meaning was making a difference without compromising his truth. For The Eyes of Tammy Faye, where he performs an incredible transformation into American televangelist Jim Bakker, meaning was more deeply linked to a sense of self built from ego, and religion —and spirituality— became not a goal in itself, but a tool, a tool for manipulating the world and himself into transforming the person he wanted to believe he was. 

As I hold a lot of respect and a lot of contempt and a lot of pain for evangelism as a religion —my own family’s religion, from where it stems my already very complicated relationship with faith and meaning—, I believe that Garfield’s Bakker is a symbol of a foundational stone of most branches of this particular church but also of others as they approach the shape and characteristics of a cult: replacing any possibility of finding meaning in self-acceptance with the only alternative of self-transformation towards a fictional ideal of perfection, golden gates, singing angels. 

As Andrew Garfield himself has said, both Silence and Hacksaw Ridge deal with faith, sacrifice and the destruction of ego. This notion of ego as linked to spirituality is, I believe, at the core of his entire career, since the concept of “faith” in the human experience is extremely diverse and personal. For some religions, ego must be destroyed to become a servant of their god; for others, ego becomes the core of leading, an indestructible concept that requires worshipping a person in the same way they do their god. We build ourselves from the pieces of the things we believe in —thus me, starting this piece with Anaïs Nin’s quote, which as I said, is one of the many pieces to my personal creed, the creed of an atheist, built with sentences from Nin and Bradbury and Welles and Atwood and Vuong—, but also, from these pieces we might build many different configurations of a “self”, and our choice in how to assemble them is deeply personal. Therefore, what Jim Bakker and Desmond Doss and Sebastião Rodrigues made out of their Christianity transformed into completely different life choices.

In Mainstream, Link also gets tangled in the creation and destruction of his own ego. This absolutely fascinating, impossibly narcissistic character goes through every stage of building himself up and then watching everything burn down, in what is probably the most egotistical, selfish of the characters mentioned in this text. Meanwhile, Peter Parker’s search of his own meaning is linked, evidently, to his ability to save people’s lives, after he saw his own uncle die in the hands of delinquency. Garfield’s Spider-Man -again, criminally underrated and only recently appreciated in its true value— goes from becoming a savior to finding himself unable to save the things he loved the most, having to reconstruct meaning through new paths.

It is in this crossroad where we encounter Jeb Pyre, Garfield’s most recent character before his hiatus, which he portrays in Under the banner of heaven. Pyre is a Latter-day Saint (a Mormon) who finds himself in charge of the investigation of a crime committed within the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. While not being a fundamentalist himself, investigating the Church obviously doesn’t only open him and his family to criticism, threats and possible ostracization, but also questions his faith and his beliefs on his Church’s authorities. We find, once again, questions about wether it is feasible to hold blind faith on things one doesn’t understand, while also struggling to maintain some semblance of selfhood and control over one’s life.

I have no clue if any of this is how Garfield’s sees or thinks about his own work, obviously —send him this link if you have his email—. What I personally think is that these movies as a body of work are about a kaleidoscopic vision of faith, about the same thing Anaïs Nin was so adamant about: not only people are never one-sided —in that every approach to spirituality, even if as organized religion, is at the end individual and different— but that people change every day and the real self is therefore always an unknown, because any possibility of capturing it is dead: even the act of attempting to capture the self changes it, as just the act of looking at a particle makes it different.

In a recent interview, Andrew said that religion is just an ideology, but when you deal with spiritual questions you’re really talking about life and death, about choosing something bigger than you to which to serve, and added that -however- it is the conscience that all living beings are interdependent is what will save us. He says:

There is a Mayan legend that explains that after creation, God felt that something was missing and decided to create humans so that there would be a creature on Earth at least that was conscient of the wonders of it all. (…) Art is there to attempt to reach toward something deeper.

This is the reason why I believe that Tick, Tick… Boom!, Lin Manuel Miranda’s feature directorial debut, where Garfield embodies American composer and playwright Jonathan Larson, and which seems to deal very little with the spiritual, might actually be the place where all the main topics in Garfield’s career converge. Larson, as so many other artists, replaced the creation, destruction, and re-creation of his own ego with his ability to create new worlds. It’s commonplace to say that artists believe they are little gods, but there’s truth in every commonplace. Larson was not searching for any god. Instead, he was searching for the force of creation within himself, his own greatness, and this process (the creative process) is more about ego than anything else I know, but it is, also, about the destruction of ego: the artist needs to displace herself to provide space for her creation, or else her world would not have any place to exist, since from the moment the new world is created, is lives and grows inside the creator’s self, nourishing itself from her. And then, the only moment the artist feels fulfilled, filled with any sort of divine grace, is the moment where her creation comes to life, where it can be birthed into the world for others: the wheel now has turned, the artist is again empty and needs to re-create her own self once again.