Jessica Hahn Born Again Photo Shoot
The Eyes of Tammy Faye, starring Jessica Chastain in the title role, is the latest in a burgeoning cultural project: the ongoing effort to reexamine and repossess the legacies of women who were wronged in recent history. Monica Lewinsky. Britney Spears. Marcia Clark. Podcasts (like Tiresome Burn and You're Wrong About), documentaries (Framing Britney Spears), and based-on-a-true-story Television set dramas reframe the stories that sensation-seeking media and late-nighttime comedians pitched to the American public as a clown show, a train wreck, a lady who's in trouble and worthy but of our gawking.
In this way, Tammy Faye Messner, formerly Tammy Faye Bakker, was ahead of her fourth dimension. In 2000, she was the subject area of a documentary, also chosen The Eyes of Tammy Faye, that aimed to reintroduce audiences to a woman they'd previously encountered as either a scandal or a punchline. (Technically, the new film is a lightly fictionalized accommodation of the older documentary.) It's a weird, campy, wonderful piffling moving picture. Sock puppets introduce various sections of the story; RuPaul narrates.
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At the documentary's center is Tammy Faye herself, i-half of an infamous televangelist couple who saw their reputations and empire autumn later on Faye's then-husband, Jim Bakker, was convicted of postal service and wire fraud. Allegations of improper fiscal dealings had indomitable the Bakkers for years, merely they came to a head in 1987 when allegations that Jim raped a young woman named Jessica Hahn and then used ministry funds to pay for her silence became public.
The allegations sent shock waves through non merely the conservative Christian community but besides the country at big. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the pair had been at the head of the PTL Network, a massively popular TV network that aired, among other programming, the Bakkers' own daily variety shows. PTL stood for both "Praise the Lord" and "People That Beloved," though some joked information technology meant "pass the loot": Its broadcasts were friendly and inspiring, filled with music and commemoration and encouragement directed toward at-domicile viewers. They were also filled with pleas for donations from their "partners," Jim's appreciating but calculated term for viewers who gave coin. For a long time, that formula bore fruit; the Bakkers' abiding telethons raised many millions of dollars and garnered an audience of 20 million viewers.
The Bakkers also leveraged their PTL platform to launch many other projects, the most famous of which may be Heritage United states of america, a kind of Christian Disneyland that in the '80s was 1 of America's well-nigh popular vacation destinations. The park featured, amidst other things, a 12-acre waterpark and a recreation of the Upper Room (where Jesus had his final supper before his crucifixion). At the time, the park was 10 times larger than California'southward Disneyland and 20 times larger than Orlando'south Magic Kingdom, co-ordinate to Religion & Politics. The Bakkers envisioned information technology as a pilgrimage site.
When the allegations became public in 1987, swain televangelist Jerry Falwell took over the Bakkers' empire after Jim stepped downwards. Falwell was the founder of both the Moral Majority (with Pat Robertson) and Liberty University, and an architect of the then-new brotherhood between conservative Christians and the Republican Party. At the time, Falwell broadcasted his ain sermons via the Freedom Dissemination Network, which he claimed reached about 3 million people — a paltry number compared to PTL's 20 million. It seems he saw an opportunity and offered to help Jim by taking over PTL briefly in March 1987.
The Bakkers always maintained that they believed Falwell'southward control of PTL was temporary, but within a calendar month, Falwell had barred Jim from returning as the organization'due south head. He declared that the Bakkers' lavish lifestyle and other illicit beliefs (including allegations that Jim had made sexual advances toward men) made the couple unfit to render, and chosen Jim "the greatest scab and cancer on the confront of Christianity in two,000 years of church history." Before long, the Bakkers were a joke, with Tammy Faye's makeup, campy performances, penchant for excess, and supposed airheadedness ofttimes taking the burden of it.
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(Falwell passed abroad in 2007; his son, Jerry Falwell Jr., was the president of Liberty University until the summertime of 2020, when he resigned amid scandal.)
By the fourth dimension the documentary was shot in the tardily 1990s, Heritage USA had closed permanently and Tammy Faye and Jim's divorce was in the past, the papers signed while Jim was in prison. Most of the film features Tammy Faye telling her story. She still speaks with injure about Falwell, and suggests that she didn't trust him or his views from the kickoff, years earlier he ousted the Bakkers from PTL. All the same she too speaks with a buoyancy and guileless touch on that's surprising for a adult female who'south both in love with the camera and has really been through the wringer. (Her 2d married man, Roe Messner, besides went to prison for fraud continued to PTL; every bit a contractor, he was the programmer of Heritage Us.)
Her pep and vigor aren't surprising if you lot've watched Tammy Faye practise her matter on TV or listened to her many inspirational, upbeat Christian albums. The descriptor "live wire" seemed to have been invented simply for her. In the early on 1960s, when she and Jim were newlyweds, Tammy Faye sang and mounted boob shows at the churches the couple traveled to as young preachers in the Assemblies of God. When they started working in tv set in 1966, taking jobs at Pat Robertson'south Christian Dissemination Network (where Jim would launch The 700 Lodge, which Robertson subsequently took over after ousting the pair) she brought her effervescence and joy with her. She too brought her signature over-the-pinnacle centre makeup: spidery mascara, thick black liner, gleaming shadow.
That makeup, along with her love of flamboyant clothing and gaudy decor, would become a convenient butt of many late-night one-act jokes when the Bakkers savage from grace. In the 2000 documentary, withal, more a decade has passed since the PTL scandals, and Tammy Faye is working her fashion dorsum to public prominence.
She'd guest-starred on The Drew Carrey Show in the late 1990s and found an unlikely new life as a gay icon, dearest for her back up of the LGBTQ customs. After she was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1996, her illness became the basis for several interviews on Larry Rex Live. A few years after the documentary, she would announced on the VH1 reality prove The Surreal Life. By the fourth dimension she died in 2007, Tammy Faye had become a star again, one more beloved than her ex-husband.
(Jim Bakker is nonetheless alive and married to televangelist Lori Beth Graham; he also has a TV testify. Most recently, he's been hawking apocalypse preparedness kits, fake Covid-nineteen cures, and Donald Trump to his viewers. It's gotten pretty nighttime.)
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When it start came out, some reviewers dinged the documentary — which has since become a cult favorite — for being entirely one-sided, completely slanted in favor of its eponymous subject area. But that approach was conspicuously on purpose. The goal wasn't to offer a skewed version of events but to let a fascinating adult female simply talk, leaving any interrogation of the veracity of her account for another solar day. In that location'south an aspect of having fun at her expense; she is larger than life, a woman who adores the camera and, to some extent, seems to feel most at home when she knows people are watching her. (Likewise, I mean: sock puppets.)
All the same it'due south not a mean movie. Tammy Faye is a bit of a joke, but she's in on the joke as well.
With all that history in mind, what's the value in a new, more scripted version of The Eyes of Tammy Faye? Why retell the story once more? Her cultural status has already shifted from punching handbag to campy but love icon, and this motion-picture show doesn't shed much additional low-cal on its primal figure. It's an engaging enough introduction to the Bakkers, the fraud scandal, and the milieu of 1980s televangelism. But bated from spotlighting Tammy Faye'south support of LGBTQ people fifty-fifty in the confront of vocal opposition from Falwell, there's not a lot to surprise anyone with a passing understanding of the story.
Directed by Michael Showalter from a screenplay by Abe Sylvia, The Optics of Tammy Faye will at least reach a wider audience than the quirky, depression-upkeep documentary could have managed, and Chastain'due south performance brings affectionate warmth to a adult female who did, in the end, always seem to be performing. (Anyone looking for more than should mind to this excellent episode of the You're Wrong Nigh podcast centered on Tammy Faye and Jessica Hahn, the young woman who accused Jim Bakker of rape and whom he allegedly used PTL funds to silence.)
Still, this exceptionally well-cast version of Tammy Faye's story does manage to tap into a cultural moment with reverberations nosotros go along to feel today.
Chastain, who optioned the characteristic rights to the documentary and serves as the flick'southward producer, plays Tammy Faye from a round-cheeked, vivid-eyed Bible college student to a 50-something woman tentatively working her way back into the limelight. Andrew Garfield is a spot-on Jim Bakker, sporting the same smile (I've ever thought Jim'southward grin resembled the Grinch) and slightly drastic look in his eyes. Vincent D'Onofrio is the film's villain: Falwell.
In centering Tammy Faye's version of events, the documentary sidestepped a looming shadow over the whole matter: the battle taking place at the time over conservative American Christianity's link to the Republican Party. Tammy Faye doesn't seem to accept given the affair, or her role in it, much idea. In her telling, Jerry Falwell appears — and non inaccurately and so — mainly every bit the homo Jim trusted to rescue PTL when accusations of fraud hit the media.
That's not what Falwell is primarily remembered for, though. In American history, he goes down every bit one of the men instrumental in handing Ronald Reagan the presidency in 1980 by delivering conservative Christians, especially evangelicals and fundamentalists, as stalwart political party members. Prior to that time, right-leaning Christians were not counted upon as lockstep GOP voters; after it, they grew to go the party'south most reliable base.
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Many Christians' support of Reagan was all the more than surprising given that Reagan, who had been a Hollywood thespian, was running confronting Jimmy Carter, a deeply committed, cocky-described "built-in over again" Christian whose ability to attract evangelical voters during his 1976 presidential campaign was then notable that Newsweek declared 1976 "the year of the evangelical."
The term "born once more" had emerged to describe a sure diversity of devout evangelical Christians; start popularized by the Jesus Motility (kind of a hippie Christian movement in the 1960s), it became even more than prominent after quondam Nixon adviser Chuck Colson used the term in his 1975 memoir describing his conversion in prison house. Carter was the first presidential candidate to draw himself as "born again." In 1980, all three presidential candidates used the term to describe their faith.
When Reagan won the presidency over Carter, his victory was, in no small office, thanks to Falwell'southward ability to solidify a coalition effectually the Republican Party and its candidate. The wedlock of American evangelicalism and Republican politics occurred at that moment. Christians who became joined at the hip to the GOP frequently pointed to Democrats' support for abortion rights, gay rights, and feminism, as well as a desire to support "family values" as the key factors in that spousal relationship. (Historians have since shown that, at the start, evangelical support of the Republican ticket was even more linked to anti-desegregation efforts than to anti-abortion sentiment.)
The Optics of Tammy Faye never actually taps into Falwell's views on segregation at the fourth dimension. Instead, it'southward his vehement (and well-established) "anti-homosexual" views that become the spotlight, likewise as the implication that those beliefs may have motivated him to come for the Bakkers' empire. To the movie's version of Falwell, gay people are wrecking America and deserve to be struck down, pushed back at every plough.
Falwell's views stand in stark dissimilarity to Tammy Faye'south, at least in some respects. In 1985, she had the gall to invite an AIDS patient to announced on her testify Tammy's Firm Party, which aired live on PTL, and interview him compassionately. (The interview is a landmark moment, both in religious Television receiver history and in the film.)
The Optics of Tammy Faye zooms in on an interesting cultural fault line at the fourth dimension. On one side are difficult-liners like Falwell, determined to fight cultural battles with a cudgel and take no prisoners. Falwell was so set on pulling this off through political power that he told Jim Bakker, who endorsed Reagan for the first time in 1984 and was considering supporting Pat Robertson's presidential bid in 1988, that they need to "keep the evangelicals in the tent" by delivering the victory to George H.W. Bush.
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On the other side is Tammy Faye, who asks why they tin can't merely stick to Jesus and loving people and leave politics out of it. She speaks, in that moment, for a lot of evangelicals and other conservative stripes of Christianity at the time. (She and Jim were Pentecostals, and the interplay among Pentecostalism, evangelicalism, and fundamentalism is complicated. Many of PTL's devoted fans — the "partners" lining the Bakkers' considerable coffers — would certainly have been evangelicals, and in their heyday, the Bakkers lent a new credibility to Pentecostalism.) Until the late 1970s, many evangelical Christians were simply not involved in politics. Only in the period The Eyes of Tammy Faye covers, that was changing.
The Bakkers' programming, despite Jim's endorsement of Reagan in 1984, was on the whole apolitical, lacking in the kind of "united states of america versus them" rhetoric that marked Falwell's preaching and defines a great bargain of American Christian media today. To be sure, when investigative journalists were reporting on fraud at PTL, the Bakkers responded by suggesting the media was targeting them raising money on the merits. But politics wasn't a huge role of their programming — certainly not anything like Bakker'south piece of work today.
Withal the Television receiver programming wasn't all the Bakkers did, and they didn't have to engage in on-air partisan politics to lay the background for their rise. For one, they preached and lived a prosperity gospel that equates financial success with spiritual growth, fertilizing ground to be planted by those who do good from people'due south dreams of getting rich. And you tin can get a total grasp of the Bakkers' worldview when you lot call back that they built a theme park explicitly intended to link American patriotism and American Christianity. It's all of a slice — nostalgia, patriotism, Jesus, and a feel-adept, coin-driven gospel.
Their ministry came at the dawn of an American era in which faith and triumphalist patriotism became increasingly twined together, reliant on a wistful vision of a golden age. That vision was harnessed past political powers that be to solidify a conservative, partisan base of operations.
And so what The Optics of Tammy Faye may do best is illuminate a crucial moment in American history, a fork in the road. It was a time when a network like PTL could get massively popular, when Christian TV and Christian theme parks could describe huge audiences and, possibly, even meet themselves as part of the mainstream rather than a split entertainment universe outside of "godless Hollywood." This was a fourth dimension before God'south Non Dead and "worship protests" and "Jericho Marches." But even PTL, despite steering articulate of explicit politics in its programming, was laying the background for what was to come by placing a particularly jingoistic dearest of country and of God on the aforementioned level, painting a fantasy of America as God's chosen country.
Tammy Faye'due south place in that shift is complicated; whatever her personal feelings nigh Falwell and his politics, information technology's inescapably truthful that she and Jim were instrumental in pushing the right fly of American Christianity toward its partisan state. The Eyes of Tammy Faye gestures at that shift without spending enough time on it for the audience to really understand what's happening. Falwell comes off as cartoonish, bad mostly considering he hates the "homosexual agenda" and feminism, and minor and jealous plenty of the Bakkers' success to tear their empire out from under them. Tammy Faye, equally a foil to his macho hellfire-and-brimstone demeanor, is the opposite.
But there'due south a moment at the end of the movie that complicates her character just a bit more than. Having spent some time in obscurity later PTL's autumn, she receives an invitation to perform at Oral Roberts University, named for the famous televangelist who founded information technology. With trepidation, she agrees to perform and sings "The Boxing Hymn of the Democracy." In reality, she'due south solitary on the stage, but in her heed, she's backed by a full choir clad in pink robes. A giant American flag unfurls behind her; cerise and bluish balloons rain downwardly from heaven. She thanks God for letting her alive in this bully country, the Usa of America.
The scene links spectacle, faith, and patriotism overtly, serving as a reminder of Tammy Faye'southward real, complicated legacy. Aye, she ran against the grain of men like Falwell by embracing LGBTQ people wholeheartedly. She sang with a lightness that belied the tumult that followed her throughout her life. She was beloved by many. If Tammy Faye's version of Christianity had won out, America might expect very different today. But all those truths coexist with a syncretism that conflates honey of God with honey of country and leads straight to where we discover ourselves in 2021. Nobody's legacy, in the cease, is simple.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Moving picture Festival. It opens in theaters September 17.
Source: https://www.vox.com/culture/22652320/eyes-tammy-faye-bakker-explained-jerry-falwell-jessica-chastain-review
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