Identity & “The Good Shepherd”

His face is so customarily unchanging that the very slight strain at the edges of his lips immediately alerts the two strangers who have been his family that something terrible has happened.

He walks toward them, toward the church, with his usual slow step, as if he were pushing his way through the secrets that have built walls around him in every direction. His son—the almost-groom—and his wife understand before he can speak. The fear that has dogged them for so long has finally proven itself well-founded. His bride, her soon-to-be daughter—is dead. And it is all because of him, the man who would be loyal to his country, would keep its secrets, would serve—the CIA.

I am, of course, describing one of the closing scenes of The Good Shepherd, a 2006 film that received generally negative reviews from critics. The origins and early workings of the CIA are the ostensible subject matter of the film—although its accuracy has been severely challenged. Viewed as such, as an historical and inevitably political statement, it probably deserved its negative reception. The New York Times called the film a CIA origins story which boiled down, for the film-makers, to “fathers who failed their sons, a suspect metaphor that here becomes all too ploddingly literal.” But I am willing, remembering as carefully as I can, to affirm that the film was very gripping when I first watched it, taking it on its own terms, as what it was rather than what one might have expected it to be (a story—not an historical statement).

That story, as far as I could make out, was about identity. It dealt deeply with the subject. Because identity is such a pressing concern today, in this culture, especially for a rising generation, I recommend The Good Shepherd for viewing and reflection.

In the film the lead character Edward Wilson is once confronted by a question:

“Let me ask you something… We Italians, we got our families and we got the Church. The Irish have their homeland. The Jews their tradition. Even the niggers—they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Carlson [Wilson's current assumed name], what do you have?”

“The United States of America.”

That, indeed, is all that Wilson ends up with. His life story, told in flashbacks throughout the early part of the film, took him from a promising vocation in poetry and a budding romance with a beautiful, deaf young woman whose needs and personality exactly fitted his reserved attention to detail—took him from this idyll to membership in the secret Yale society Skull and Bones, and eventually to a shotgun wedding to a woman he could not love and an overseas job with the CIA. This combination of circumstances creates the situation on which the film focuses: a CIA operation in Cuba has failed because of an internal leak, and all the clues point to Wilson’s own son as the culprit. Only he knows this truth, and a KGB counterpart with whom he has been struggling for his entire career, offers to cover up the treason in exchange for a “little help, when the time is right.” It would be easy to take the film as a portrayal of the tension of loyalties between family and country—and, indeed, it is that.

But more deeply than that, the film is a prismatic reflection on one man’s desperate struggle to find and maintain an identity. The coherence of Wilson’s life is broken early, when his father commits suicide and rumors subsequently fly that he had betrayed his country’s naval service. For the first half of the film, Wilson’s unemotionality and lack of words seem more related to a drifting, undirected will than to secrecy. Gradually, through his CIA career, Wilson’s identity hardens into an abstract loyalty to his nations “interests.” The only tie he maintains to concrete, ordinary means of identity, is love for his son, for whom he remains with his wife and for whom he seeks only the best. When his son betrays their country, and any meaning that loyalty to country might have is brought into question by the potential danger of his son, Wilson’s sense of identity is, presumably, shaken even more deeply.

What the film highlights so powerfully is this: the deep connection between faithfulness and identity. Wilson is trying to find a rock to build the house of his identity upon, but (as my brother-in-law once said about rock-climbing in Arizona), when he commits to a rock, the rock doesn’t commit to him. This is the truest thing about the film—historically true in a way that even the best-documented account of the origins of the CIA could never rival. That is to say—it is true to life, in the deepest sense.

Identity is a vital possession. —As in the quotation above, identity is what one has. It is the possession according to which one values oneself. (Strange, isn’t it, that what we have dictates our value. But true.) The hard truth Wilson’s life illustrates is this: when you have to fight to protect the possession according to which you value yourself, the foundation of your identity, then your identity is constantly at risk. The only possible solution is to value yourself according to a possession that does not require defense. (Such as, dare I suggest it?, the possession of the Pearl of great price, the kingdom of God, participation in the divine perichoresis…)

This is a commonplace enough lesson, especially in religious circles, but the remarkable thing about The Good Shepherd is that it calls into question two rocks that tend to define folk who would claim “Christian values.” Country and family. For the average American evangelical these are indeed the touchstones of identity. Doesn’t Scripture hold up family life as supremely important? And isn’t America a Christian nation, which deserves our loyalties just as much as church (if not more—since the church comprises a bunch of sinners, while America is founded on CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES)?

What can a mere subversive gospeler like myself say to such unassailable claims? Perhaps just this: what you clutch is who you are.