Silver Linings Jesus
If you look closely, Jesus makes an important cameo appearance in the American Film Institute’s best movie of 2012, Silver Linings Playbook. Most of our attention goes to the bipolar Pat (dreamy Bradley Cooper) and the grieving Tiffany (sultry Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence). They jog, bicker, fanatically root for the Eagles, and dance in the most eyebrow-raising of ways.
But one constant amid the family chaos is a framed image of Jesus. You’ve probably seen this one before. It is Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ, that white, blue-eyed, long-haired Jesus who looks into the distance. Since first marketed in the 1940s, it has become the most reproduced depiction of Jesus on the globe.
In Silver Linings Playbook, Jesus resides on a wall in the family room, a common phenomenon that art historian David Morgan found when he examined placements of Jesus in 1950s and ‘60s America. In one critical scene near the end (warning: explicit language), the family explodes over a recent Eagles loss. Jesus watches. Unmoved and unmoving, unchanged and unchanging, his calm stands against their confusion.
