"Letters From the Exiles": Letter 2
Graphic by Abby Miller and James Gocke
The opinions reflected in this OpEd are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of staff, faculty and students of The King's College.
Dear friends,
I spent the two months of Zoom University in my previous apartment on the Upper West Side. With no need to commute to school everyday, I had extra time on my hands to spend my weekends watching movies with my roommates. One evening in April, we streamed the musical Bandstand, a story of six World War II veterans and a war widow facing their traumas from the war in a world ready to move on. As my roommate closed her laptop, she asked for my thoughts and I was speechless. I needed time to process what I’d just seen–this entailed listening to the soundtrack on repeat for the next week to draw memories of the movie to mind. It might just be my favorite musical now, which says a lot because I generally don’t pick things out as “my favorite...”. Bandstand powerfully faces the reality of trauma with a beautiful narrative of healing, and I’d like to share my thoughts on this idea, as I’ve found it applicable to the events of 2020.
The opening scene forces the audience into the perspective of the main character, Donny Novitski, as it jarringly vacillates between the upbeat ensemble victory song and Donny’s repeated memory of his best friend Michael’s death. Donny, (played by Corey Cott), is a musical prodigy and comes home trying to move on from the war by looking for work as a local musician. He finds very little work and has no family to come back to. At a particularly low point, he hears an ad on the radio for a contest in which musical groups across the country perform an original song that celebrates the troops coming back from the war. The winning group is promised to be featured “in a spectacular new motion picture musical, and [to] be immortalized in Hollywood history.”
Donny decides to compete, bringing together a band of veterans who have each been wrecked by the war in their own ways and now deal with marriage problems, unemployment, alcoholism, insomnia, brain damage and other issues. Their lead singer, Julia Trojan, lost her husband, Michael, (Donny’s best friend), in the war and deals with her own pain in trying to move on. The world around them tells them that everything will be fine so long as they can get life back to “the way it was before.” They set off to win this competition with the mindset that “when [they’re] named the winners [they] will finally get / to have order out of chaos / and money to burn / no more need for teaching / the promised return / to life the way it was.”
The turning point in their story comes after Donny tells Julia the gruesome details of how Michael died and, having been there, blames himself for Michael’s death. Julia is heart-broken and blames Donny as well, but comes back to him a few days later with a poem that becomes the lyrics for the song they compete with, “Welcome Home.” In the words of this poem, Julia shows that she sees how the war has broken Donny and others and is welcoming them home with all of their pain and brokenness.
Corey Cott allows his voice to crack as Donny is hit and initially confused by the gentleness of this message. He’s happy to learn that the part of himself that he despises most—his memories and guilt, his pain and insomnia—Are understood and cherished; that he is being welcomed home and walked alongside by someone who sees his brokenness. This starkly contrasts the opening scene, where the ensemble gleefully sings about how “the boys are back” and how they’ll get things back to “the way it was before.” Instead, Julia looks beyond her own suffering as a widow to see and care for another person, one whom she had previously blamed for causing her husband’s death.
Some will say this scene is great because it’s where Donny and Julia's love story really takes off. However, I think the more powerful part of the story is the moment when the narrative of true healing counters the natural but cowardly tendency to say that things will be fine if they can just go back to normal. Instead, healing in Bandstand begins when someone sees the deep brokenness of the situation, doesn’t know the answer to these problems, and welcomes pain, promising to walk with those who are hurting.
This counter-cultural mindset is evidenced in Donny by the climactic scene in which the band discovers, right before competing, that they’ve unknowingly given The American Songbook legal rights to the song they originally submitted for the competition, “Love Will Come and Find Me Again,” prohibiting them from ever performing it without the company’s permission. In response, the band decides to compete with “Welcome Home,” sharing the truth of the trauma that they all bear from the war.
We see a change in mission as Donny makes this call, knowing they probably won’t win and could ruin their musical careers, but also declaring that they need to “let the guys who made it home know that somebody out there has got their backs.” No longer does Donny care about winning fame and wealth so that he can move on from his memories of the war. The care that Julia showed him in letting down her own guard against pain changed the way Donny understood healing. Instead of it being a solitary quest to just move on in a self-protecting shell, healing becomes a reckoning with painful memories and present realities, which needs the support of others who are willing to walk through that discomfort.
I’m grateful I watched Bandstand in 2020 because in it I see certain elements of the Gospel that have helped me process the craziness of this year. In Genesis 3, one of the first things God did after the fall was reveal hints of a plan for redemption and reconciliation—one that involved him suffering and taking on the brokenness of the human condition to bring about healing in the world. In Bandstand and in the Gospel itself, we see the choice made to honestly face suffering and to sit with brokenness with the hope that doing so will eventually bring healing. Having chosen the harder way, the characters in Bandstand grow in courage, strength, and their capacity to love others. Embracing suffering allowed them to treat life not as an endless struggle for comfort, but as a gift to be cherished throughout its journey of joy and pain, laughter and sorrow.
As Christians, we have the promise of Revelation 21 to look forward to, in which God will forever dwell with us and “will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes, and death will be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain.” But we’re also placed here and now, in a historical moment of great pain, conflict, and confusion. In this moment, we continue to pray “God’s kingdom [to] come” and that His “will be done on earth as it is in heaven” while bearing the responsibility to “seek justice, to love mercy, and walk humbly with [our] God.” We know that somehow this prayer is partially answered in our obedience, and we still need to seek wisdom in what obedience actually looks like in our everyday contexts. But as I think about the responsibility as Christ-followers to our present world, I find the narrative of healing in Bandstand helpful as it demonstrates the value of choosing the harder, more uncomfortable way of dealing with trauma, or really any form of brokenness. The story shows that doing so brings a truer and more lasting cure—one that is less lonely and grows us in our capacity to love others, rather than simply ignoring the pain we feel and constantly striving to return to what was once comfortable and normal.
Obviously, coming back to school this fall is by no means the same as coming home as shell-shocked soldiers from World War II, but this year has stripped many of us of the things we cling tightly to for security and comfort. Some of us have been richly blessed by our time in quarantine, while others have been miserable. For most of us, I suspect it’s some messy combination of the two and more. But as we move forward into this semester, let’s not forget God’s presence in all this chaos and just how much we need each other. Let’s use this year to learn how to truly walk with each other as we find our new normal. May the legacy of 2020 be one that made us realize our deep dependence on God and on each other, and though difficult, just how good that dependence is.
With love,
Arianna