Beauty Will Redeem the World: My Favorite Scene from TV This Year

This scene is great, my favorite scene I've seen on TV in months. But it’s not on YouTube or anywhere else legally online that I can find. Try to find a re-airing of it on the Sundance Channel or On Demand. If you can’t find it, it’s worth your $2.99 to buy the episode on Amazon or iTunes.

The Scene: From the Rectify Season 2 Episode "Mazel Tov"

Daniel is an inmate on death row. Dressed in an all-white jumpsuit, he’s lying on his white bed, clutching the white pillow under his head while distantly staring at the white bricks of his cell. His silent world has been interrupted this day by the chaplain named Charlie (of course!) who’s sitting outside his white metal door, out of his view, chatting with him.

Charlie: On Tuesdays, I go to this hospice in Macon.

Daniel: You’re a saint, Charlie.

Charlie, chuckling: Mm, they’re just people dyin’. Happens every day.

Daniel: Am I dyin’?

Charlie: Do you want to die, Daniel?

Daniel, lowly: My sister keeps interfering.

Charlie: You’re mumbling.

Daniel: She’s a little busybody all grown up.

Charlie: Anyway, I play music for them. Sometimes that’s all I do. Words can pale in comparison.

Daniel: Yours sure do.

Charlie, chuckling: For some, it’s the only thing that will let them sleep. It’s the only thing that gives them solace. How long has it been since you’ve heard music, Daniel?

Charlie takes a tape player from his lap, sits it on the meal tray of Daniel’s door, and pushes play. This violin piece plays.

Charlie, whispering: Beauty will redeem the world.

Daniel, incredulous and crying: You’re a fool, Charlie.

The camera cuts back to Charlie, sitting outside the door, listening, when suddenly Daniel’s hand reaches slowly, gently through the opening in the door to rest on the tape player. The scene cuts with Daniel staring at the tape player, hand resting on it, a tear dripping from his nose.

 

“Beauty Will Redeem the World” vs. “You’re a Fool, Charlie”

As skeptical as I may be personally (I think I was born this way), I feel a lot like Daniel—moved by beauty but skeptical that it has any power to change a thing.

But maybe there’s hope. If God is beauty, in other words if He is the very source of all beauty so that any beauty we see is really His beauty being temporarily borrowed and used and put on display, maybe there’s hope. Maybe beauty will redeem the world.

We could argue that this is true (in fact, I think we can make this argument from the Bible), but doing so is superfluous. Beauty is its own argument, for as much as we ignore or deny or question its power, we melt in its presence. Human hearts may be nearly impossible to change; but beauty changes them. Beauty pierces us. Beauty reorients our values and purposes. It can drive us and inspire us. Beauty, weak as it may seem, has the power to do what almost nothing else can.

I have no idea where the writers of Rectify are coming from. I have no idea if they’re Christian or transcendentalists or Buddhists or something else. I know they must have read some Dostoevsky (whose The Idiot had the line “beauty will save the world” a century and a half ago), but I don’t know much about what they believe. But whatever they believe, it seems clear that they hope like I hope: beauty can, and will, redeem the world.