Walking the Line with Johnny Cash
I was very surprised to read a review of the movie Walk The Line from an astute Christian cultural reviewer that concluded that the movie had missed Johnny Cash’s love for God. I could not have disagreed more. Yes, there were many themes running through it. There is the loss of a brother and of having taken the blame. There is the bad relationship with a father as a result. It discusses family and marriage and how they work in the middle of a life tempted by alcohol, pills and pop fame. Yet, the climax of the movie is far more than Johnny Cash finally getting June Carter Cash to agree to marry him. This is a story of redemption, rebirth and redirection. Threaded through this storyline is the hymn book that Cash’s mother gives him before he heads off to the army. That hymn book is so crucial that Cash would record an album of those hymns just before his death.
The scene where is mother hands him that hymn book and indeed the entire movie could be straight out of Jesus story of the Prodigal Son. Of course Jesus parable was not a true story though it was powerfully true. That is a good thing for Christians to remember. The truth of a story is not about the factual detail being correct. Cash’s story is far more accurate in authenticity and just as true in spiritual insight. There are differences. The Father figure in Walk The Line is not very God-like in his gruffness and lack of love. And the good son, in this case Jack Cash, is dead before the prodigal leaves never mind returns.
But Johnny Cash lives the life that Jesus described for the Prodigal Son. The majority of the film is about Cash’s struggle with hedonistic pill popping drunkenness. The climax however is as powerful as the end of Jesus most famous parable. Having found himself a wonderful house, Johnny Cash invites his parents and June Carter and her parents to Thanksgiving. The tension between him and his father is palpable and in their spat at the table his father tells him that he has nothing; he owns a big empty house with nothing. It is a telling insight into the world’s accumulation of things rather than what is important. What good Johnny, his father could have said to have gained the world and yet have lost your very soul.
A couple of scenes later and June Carter is telling Johnny that God is giving him another chance. The scenes after that run in quick succession and in many ways give a microcosm of the rest of Cash’s life. First they go to Church. Then he is in the offices of Columbia Records where he is trying to convince them to allow him to record a live album in Folsom Prison. When the Columbia executives tell him he has Christian fans and they don’t want to see him cheering up prisoners. His response is, “Well they are not Christian then!”
This gives a couple of clues to the Christian faith of Johnny Cash. Firstly, this was not something he had just come to in a Damascus Road type conversion. Cash claimed to have had a conversion experience when he was 12 years old and that was an experience that he never rejected. He found himself up some very dodgy blind alleys in the next twenty years of his life but all of those were off the narrow road that he followed Jesus down early on. That hymn book, the Scriptures and indeed his brother’s Christian witness always went with him. His second chance, proclaimed by June, was a second chance at that Christian life that was critically ill and hanging on by a thread but still very much alive. And that leads to the second thing it shows us. When the recommitment to it came he knew what being a Christian was and for Cash that was not avoiding the marginalized or the prisoner but reaching out to them. He became the man who wore black for all the poor and beaten down, hopeless and hungry; all the people that Jesus hung out with him and told him to follow him towards.
The third scene in that vital end-of-movie trilogy (oh how DVD chapters change reviews!), just after his second chance kicks in, is in Folsom prison. This scene is crucial in Cash’s life and is full of applicable lessons. As Cash is about to go on, for what must be the encore, the prison Warden asks that he might not play things to remind them that they are in prison. “Do you think they’ve forgotten,” quips Cash. The warden begs him to play “a spiritual.” This is spiritually provocative dialogue. Surely the newly re-converted Baptist boy would see the invitation to play “a spiritual” as an opportunity to share the Gospel, to bring his faith into this hall full of convicted sinners.
Instead of the nice and predictable spiritual Cash, with the righteous anger Jesus must have had when he threw over the money changers tables in the temple, makes a prophetic stand for justice. Holding up a glass of yellow water that the prisoners are forced to drink, while their warden is a self confessed “coke man,” he empathizes with their rough treatment and sympathizes with them in their humanity and dignity. Instead of a spiritual he prefers to rock out Cocaine Blues. It is without doubt walking the line of what is appropriate in that narrow ledge between mercy and justice but Cash had gone there to lift the criminal from judgement to grace and this was the hard living style that made Bono comment that we were all sissy’s compared to Johnny Cash.
Dare I quote my own Cash tribute at the time of his death, “It has always been a tricky thing after Christian conversion to hold to truth and grace with humility and em…well…grace! Integrity often gives way to pretension; admission of guilt to arrogance! Cash somehow held together the tension. He never allowed the confession of his fallen state to be used as an cheap excuse for an anything-goes-this-is-just-how-I-am slackness. Nor did he allow himself to be so righteous that he separated himself from the marginalized that populated his songs or set himself apart from anyone who was drawn by the candle or needed warmed at the hearth. There was no pseudo self righteousness that he wasn’t like the Church. There was no religious self righteousness that he wasn’t like the world. Johnny Cash exposed traces of humanity’s fall in the Garden of Eden and Christ’s blood dripping from Calvary’s wooden cross. He was judgement and grace. He was the sinner and the redeemed. He was the perfect/imperfect balance of a human being. God bless him!”
Walk The Line is about the prologue of this particular version of Johnny Cash; a prodigal once lost but found once more. He would spend his last 35 years happily married to the woman who God used to save his life. He would be a witness for a masculine earthy Christianity. Rolling Stone testimonies would see Sheryl Crow call him “the salt of the earth.” Steve Earle would tell of how he had received a letter from Cash while he was in prison, when most were rejecting him, saying that he and June were praying for him, pulling for him and looking forward to seeing him when he got out. When they did meet again June had sent tenderloin and biscuit in a picnic basket!
Cash’s redeemed life was lived in the middle of Paul’s lengthy dissertation in the middle of Ramnas about how sin and redemption, law and grace live all mixed up in our post justified pre perfect-in-heaven lives. His honesty and authenticity is a huge challenge to evangelicals who set themselves apart and above their non believing friends and neighbours. It tells us that deluding ourselves and others that we are better or holier leaves us as some fake counterfeit version of the sinner who has been saved from the penalty of past sin but is still being saved from the power of sin in the present and is still far from ultimately being saved from the very presence of sin in the future. Cash’s last video for the astonishingly appropriate song Hurt expressed this living between the cross and the gates of heaven perfectly.
There is also a vocational challenge in Cash’s life in generally this movie in particular. His father says in the discomfort of their Thanksgiving meal stand off, “I hadn’t much talent but I used it as best I could… what about you JR?” Cash always felt called to sing. He intended to be a Gospel singer when he first went to Sun Studios but Elvis Presley changed that and just about everything else. His conviction that God had a purpose for his singing never left him. American writer Frederick Buechner says that our vocation is found in that place where our deepest desire meets the world’s greatest need. So it did with Johnny Cash after the Walk The Line re-conversion moment.
Walk The Line is as close to an evangelistic sermon as Hollywood has ever released. The emptiness of hedonism, wealth and fame is exposed. The purpose of a life and the redemption that God can bring are the truths that the entire script journeys toward. In the best form of art, where nuance and allusivity are more powerful than dogma and tract, this is a film of spiritual power, perfectly expressing the God dynamic of Cash’s life. How that could be missed is a mystery to me.
One of my students, Ryan Kee, texted me as he left the cinema to tell me he had just watched Walk The Line and that there were at least three sermons he was looking forward to me preaching about it. As I watched the movie his words were at the top of my page of notes; and I was scribbling the entire time.
This movie was a difficult challenge; biographical movies always are. How could they make a story that many of us knew interesting? How could ******* play a legend like Johnny Cash with any sense of convincing? What would the music sound like? Would end up bad karaoke? Well there no fears on that count. Witherspoon and ******** are sensational. There may be one or two moments particularly while he is on the stage that his mannerisms are a little over emphasized but they sing wonderfully and you begin to see Johnny and June.
I guess with a story everyone knows the underlying themes need to be strong to give it the twist of provocation. There are so many issues in this movie. The loss of a brother, the relationship of son and father, the marriage relationship, the pressures and temptations of being in the vanguard of modern music, the reason for living.
Centre to this movie is the story of sin and redemption, spiritual alienation and Christian salvation. It could be the illustration of any southern preacher that Cash grew up listening to or that the brother Jack that he lost so young wanted to be. Indeed, the movie may be young Jack Cash’s great sermon to the world. Through the movie the rebellious, I can’t be as good as my brother, Johnny has his brother walking with him, haunting him yes, but ultimately leading him with a huge dollop of help from June Carter salvation.
June Carter is the figure that God mysteriously brings into Johnny’s life to replace that brother so badly missed. She shows a great sense of wisdom in how she deals with Cash that she didn’t seem to show in her own failed marriages but this serial divorcee, from the most famous Gospel singing family in America with her sense of inferiority becomes an amazing human channel of redemption finally uttered when she tells Cash straight out that God was giving him a second chance.
The other scene that is quite profound into the middle of the Christian testimony is when at a Thanksgiving meal going very wrong, Johnny’s father who never seems to like his second son tells him that though he has a big house and lots of money and fame he has nothing. It is a traditional, “all that the world can give you is not enough” speech but it is a fulcrum on which Cash’s life changes.
With this second chance, coming clean from his drug and alcohol dependence and finding true love with June, he revives his career. There is a powerful scene where he is in his Record Companies offices telling them he ants to play Folsom Prison and record the concert as his next album. It is not being received well and it is mentioned that he has a Christian audience that won’t like it. Cash’s response is that they are not very Christian then. Jesus said that those who visit the prisoner will go to heaven and the grace of Cash’s new birth has got him switching his allegiances to giving to people rather than taking for himself In the thirty five years that Cash lived after the credits to this movie go up, he did just that.
Back
