Elmer Gantry

Last weekend I saw the Tulsa Opera’s production of Elmer Gantry, based upon the famous novel by Sinclair Lewis. I read the novel decades ago, so my memory may not be clear. I have a copy of it in front of me, but not enough time to reread it. I also saw the classic Burt Lancaster movie decades ago.

The primary message of the novel is that religion is just a way of getting money from gullible people. (Lewis modeled Gantry after Billy Sunday who, despite the image created by Lewis, was apparently a sincere man, and who did not drink and dally.) Gantry’s principal launch to success in the opera was the generous support of local businessmen, who saw religion as a good source of black ink.

But the opera changes this message ever so slightly. The opera, as the novel, begins with Elmer Gantry (star football player for a Bible college in Missouri) drunk in a bar, in the company of his more level-headed roomie Jim Lefferts. Well, that’s the name in the novel. The opera changed it to Frank something. And changed the character. In the opera, Frank became a preacher, just like Elmer, only he was sincere. There is a long scene in the opera in which Reverend Frank struggles, with intense sincerity, with the fact that he cannot force himself to have the simple faith that his parishioners have. He sits alone at a piano, picking out the tune of “Take it to the Lord in prayer,” with harmony that starts falling apart. If there was such a scene in the novel, I cannot relocate it now. In a move that Sinclair Lewis—in his quest to prove that everyone who disagreed with him was evil—would presumably have never made, the opera presents an honest clergyman. Only he is an agnostic clergyman.

The opera also presents other religious figures as sincere, although deluded. First, consider the evil ones. The president of the Bible college, Quarles (changed in the opera to Baines), was deluded enough to overlook the obvious insincerity of Gantry in order to get him to become a preacher. In both the book and opera, Gantry’s arch-enemy is Eddie Fislinger, a sincere zealot. In the movie, Gantry is framed when he sincerely tries to help the prostitute Juanita with whom he had previously interacted; but in the opera, the bait is none other than Lulu Baines, the daughter of the college president and the wife of Eddie Fislinger. Baines and Fislinger and their women were sincerely religious, but blind to the fact that the ruse they designed to entrap Gantry (in the opera, Fislinger offering his wife as sexual bait to Gantry) was if anything more evil than anything Gantry did. The opera’s Lulu was so primly innocent; or was she more sinful than Juanita?

Second, consider other sincere but deluded religious figure, the evangelist Sharon Falconer, whom Lewis modeled after Aimee Semple McPherson. This character apparently believed herself chosen by God to spread the gospel of love. In the opera, Falconer finally gives in to the amorous advances of Gantry; but she remains sincere to the end about her vocation. The famous climax scene is when the tabernacle catches fire and everybody dies except Elmer Gantry. Sharon Falconer has the chance to flee with Gantry, but chooses to die with her parishioners.

In the movie, Gantry had been an insurance salesman before getting into the religion business, and he went back to selling insurance at the end. But in the opera, Gantry goes off to join an Eastern mystic and, we presume, to eventually turn faux Buddhism into a money-making venture. So the opera presents other religions, not just fundamentalist Christianity, as ways of making money. The novel, in contrast, ends with Gantry continuing to preach about morality from his pulpit, even while ogling the choir girls.

The opera did a good job of focusing on many important ideas. It had a great dramatic structure too: Act One ended with Eddie Fislinger’s rage and his vow to take revenge against Gantry, the perfect way to keep the audience in anticipation of Act Two. There were running gags, also: the sermon topic of “What is love?” kept resurfacing, much to the amusement of the audience; and Fislinger’s anger at the end of Act One took the form of writing a sermon about “What is rage?”

But the impression I came away with was that this was an opera I should have liked. It did everything right. But the music, dramatic at times, just seemed chaotic most of the time. And when it was over I was glad to leave; in the parking garage, where voices boom, I sang operatically and atonally, “What was I think—ing? To come to this opera?” The echoes gave me a feeling of relief. The climax fire scene could have had flames projected on the back screen but instead there were big red mounds that did not look like fire but rather like tubeworms along a deep sea volcanic fault.

During the intermission, I had a book to occupy me: Lame Deer Speaks, the biography of a Lakota medicine man, published in the 1970s. I read the part about how some diseases were caused by gophers shooting porcupine quills and blades of grass into people, and medicine men would cure the people by sucking the quills and blades out of them. I have seen documentaries of this practice, in which the medicine men sneak quills and grass blades in their hands and pretend to suck them out. It would appear that much of Native American religion is also psychological manipulation. But there is a difference. Lame Deer said that the medicine men got lots of gifts in return for their healing, but then they gave these things away, and continued to live in shacks. They were psychologically manipulating their people, but not to accumulate wealth. One could say that they were knowingly purveying placebos. But placebos sometimes work, so long as the patient does not know that they are placebos.

From this juxtaposition, I began to think that even if religion is a placebo, it can do some good. It is just that in many cases preachers use the placebo as a way of getting your money and controlling you. Caution advised.