When I turned on Red State (Smith, 2011), my husband, the author of this blog, warned me: “It’s a horror movie. You might be scared.” I wanted to give it a try anyway, since I love Kevin Smith’s films. And it turns out, it is not a horror movie at all – in fact, it’s nearly impossible to describe, except to call it perhaps a sermon on the dark side of human nature and the reality of systemic evil. Smith himself describes it as “a Quentin Tarantino flick through the eyes of the Coen brothers with a bit of Kevin Smith mixed in” (a lofty aim, and not quite reached, but certainly helpful to know going in). One thing’s for sure: it is not a comedy in the vein of Smith’s earlier work, for which he famously mixed crass humor and coarse language to somehow make us laugh and think.

The film opens with a mother and son driving past a funeral that is being picketed by homophobic hate-mongers. There follows a brief scene in the son’s classroom where the teacher leads a discussion about first amendment rights and the unsavory way they can be expressed (using the hate group – which turns out to be a local church called Five Points – as the prime example). That scene closes with a seemingly throwaway question “And what is the second amendment?”, to which a smirking student answers: “We get guns.” This actually reveals the power of the villains in this film: they have freedom to express their beliefs and the right to bear arms to back them up.

The son and his friends answer an ad for a booty call with a local woman, and as the first act continues we believe we are headed into traditional horror territory: the teens are drugged, caged and tied up, and taken to the Five Points compound. We quickly realize that this cult does more than picket funerals – it is causing them. But rather than descend into torture porn or cat and mouse, Smith stops the action and allows the cult leader, Abin Cooper (Michael Parks) to preach for a good ten minutes or so about the sinfulness of America. His words were all too familiar to me – I have heard many similar sermons in regular old churches, not to mention certain political platforms – and throughout his tirade you couldn’t escape the twin visuals of a cloaked figure attached to the life-size cross on the stage (which turns out to be a man they will execute), and one of the teens locked in a cage on the floor. To further disturb, several children are scattered throughout the congregation (they are removed before any killing happens)…but like I said, as a kid, I heard plenty of talk about the evils of sinners, the fear of God, and the doom of our country. It’s not at all uncommon to have children exposed to this kind of talk, creating a frightening image of God in their formative years.

Anytime Kevin Smith talks about religion, my ears perk up. His Dogma (1999) is one of my all-time favorite movies, perfectly capturing the jumbled mess of organized religion while breaking through with moments of such perfect clarity about true faith that one can’t help but feel we have peeked behind the veil. I know Smith has belief in his bones, and while Dogma simply made fun of people who misuse religion, Red State is a brutal attack on those who would carry out evil in the name of God (a notable exchange between two characters observing the church’s giant cross from outside its gates: “How much you think a cross like that costs?” Answer: “You mean in dollars or common sense?”).

However, as the first act closes, the film changes gears significantly, bringing in a new plot line involving an ATF raid on the compound. Suddenly we find ourselves in a suspense-action thriller (though it is still horrific in many ways), as the ATF agents carry on an hour long fire-fight with the cult members. Smith rachets up the ante: the agent in charge, Joseph Keenan (John Goodman) is given direct orders to eliminate the entire church, as they have been classified a “domestic terrorist cell”. Keenan is conflicted about these orders and when they are carried out, at times brutally, we are shocked. We find ourselves connecting the actions of the government, in blindly dispatching all it sees as “Enemies” without distinguishing them as individuals (leader, believer, child, hostage), to the actions of the cult which also indiscriminately executed persons that it understood to be evil. How many times in the last ten years have we heard some version of, “We will root out and eliminate this evil”?

Joe Keenan sums up this disturbing reality with a story at the end of the film:

My grandma, on my mother’s side, she had these two dogs, pure bloodhounds. Both came up the same litter….Gentlest dogs you’d ever care to meet. So anyway, Thanksgiving of my ninth year these two old dogs are trailing me around ’cause they know the score: I’m a animal lover who never finishes his supper. So right before I get up from the table, I toss these two old timers a turkey leg attached to a hunk of cartilage, and it was like they’d never met. They went at each other so ferociously, all tooth and claw and jugular. They forgot anything they ever had in common and scrapped like that discard decided between their stayin’ and dying.

Smith makes abundantly clear to us the dangers of forgetting our common humanity, of seeing the Other as all threat and nothing like us. The preacher makes his case about how his flock differs from the rest of the world, destined for hell; there is no need to explain to the audience why we eliminate terrorists, as we have all lived in that reality since 2001.

Further troubling is the fact that the innocents – especially those who attempt to do right and help others – are mostly slaughtered, and the perpetrators of the violence – the masterminds behind it all – are not. This speaks to the complicated theological truth of systemic evil in the world, eloquently explained by Walter Wink in his book The Powers that Be and its followups. Wink suggests that the most insidious form of evil in our society – the principalities and powers to which St Paul refers – are found not in the human heart, but in the corporations, governments, and churches that control people. This is clearly on display in Red State, as embodied by Five Points with its brainwashed followers, and the US government with its blind obeying of orders (even when the agents know they are wrong). Wink argues that we have “enshrine[d] the ritual practice of violence at the very heart of public life, and even those who seek to oppose its oppressive violence do so violently.”

But I think there is a glimmer of hope behind all the carnage and despair of this film. Many viewers will take away a simplistic reading, “Oh, Smith just hates religion.” I disagree. For one thing, his original ending had divine justice being enacted on the cult leader (this was cut due to budget constraints). But even as the film stands, Smith clearly states that it is belief that is the problem, not God. Keenan’s dog story ends, “People just do the strangest things when they believe they’re entitled. But they do even stranger things when they just plain believe.” Recently my pastor posed the question to us: “Do you have faith in your system of beliefs, or in God?” Or as Smith himself says in the final lines of Dogma:

Rufus: Why, Bethany Sloane, are you saying you believe?
Bethany: No. But I have a good idea.

I don’t think this is the same as saying “you can have faith in anything, just have faith” (though Smith also says that in Dogma, via Chris Rock’s character). To me, it means that we can adhere so strongly to a human-constructed regimen of beliefs that we make it into a false god. Humility and true faith go hand in hand. You can’t have faith in the living God without accepting that it is a fluid thing, a growing thing, something that will evolve throughout your life as you experience more of God’s world – as you encounter more of the Other and see the Image of God therein. Beliefs tend to be static and need defending; faith is that seemingly naive approach that speaks truth to power, loves without fear, and willingly lays down its life.

This film is a huge departure for Kevin Smith: it is not funny, it is not crass, and Jay and Silent Bob do not belong here. It is very violent and full of the colorful language we expect from him, but it also reveals deeply felt convictions about religion, politics, human nature, and the state of our country. Red State isn’t just a reference to the redneck characters, it is about the blood and anger boiling over in our current climate. We live, it sometimes seems, in a permanent state of red that way. It is up to those of us who want a better world to buck the systems that seek to trap us in anger and fear, and live instead by the love that conquers all.

For example, the title is never explained in the movie, but comes from this passage in the book.  Zachery (the post-apocalyptic Tom Hanks character in the film) says the Abbess taught him that,

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ’morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass and’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’ clouds (p. 308).

This is the clearest hint in the novel to the intention behind the device of telling six stories.  Note that, while it initially sounds like reincarnation – a soul can stay the same while returning under a different appearance later in history – the point is really about epistemic uncertainty (“Who can say…”) in that, whenever we are encounter someone in life, we don’t know who they were before or who they will be later.  The enemy I’m tempted to kill now might have been my grandmother in a past life or could return as my grandson in the next life. And the point here is not metaphysical – the author doesn’t really believe in reincarnation.  The point is that we are all connected by a map only God knows.  So a “cloud atlas”, is a map of souls’ movements across history.

But “atlas” is something else, too.  It is the Greek titan who holds up the earth, the metaphor Ayn Rand used in her novel Atlas Shrugged to describe those “titans” of industry, job creators who prop up the economy while the rest of us lazily take from them.  Rand imagines the titans “shrugging” the world off their shoulders, going on “strike” and refusing to let others take from them any more.  Many newspaper editors used clever titles for their negative reviews of the film, playing on the phrase “Cloud Atlas Shrugged”.  But this is more true than they realized. The parallel is intentional.

Both novels end in apocalypse.  But, for Rand, the problem is that the government won’t leave self-made businessmen alone to pursue profit in their own way, and our only hope for salvation is unbridled self-interested competition and survival of the economically fittest individual.  For Mitchell, on the other hand, the problem is that the government has left businesses alone, and their endless pursuit of profit has cannibalized itself, so only altruistic suppression of self-will though a recognition of humanity’s interconnectedness can save us.

In short, Cloud Atlas is the anti- Atlas Shrugged.  Whereas Atlas Shrugged promotes egoistic individualism in pursuit of capitalistic greed, Cloud Atlas argues that the logic of corporate capitalism is self-destructive because individualism is an illusion.  According to Cloud Atlas, we are all connected and therefore altruism is the only appropriate way of life, even if individuals’ greed and egoism makes altruism a dangerous creed to hold.

Thus, despite is apparent affirmation of reincarnation, Cloud Atlas is actually close Christianity.  Christ’s call to love our enemies is certainly incompatible with Atlas Shrugged.  So is Paul’s statement that “we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another”, not to mention John Donne’s sermon in which he argues that “no man is an island entire of itself; … any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind”.  Collectivism, not individualism, is the Christian heritage.

So what about that reincarnation stuff?  That the film isn’t really about reincarnation should be indicated by the fact that the two symbols of reincarnation – the use of the same actor to play multiple roles and the use of the same birthmark showing up on different characters – don’t line up.  The birthmark doesn’t follow the actor.  Also, when Tom Hanks tells Halley Berry he thinks he knew her in a past life, he’s wrong – he won’t meet her again for 200 years.  (Here is the best discussion of the birthmark stuff I’ve read.)  The point in the novel is much clearer:  we all share the same universal human nature.

So we shouldn’t read the end of the gay character’s storyline as an affirmation that his particular soul will be reunited with his lover’s particular soul; instead, it is the recognition that, because we are all one, then the two of them will be eternally united anywhere anyone is in love. This is what he means when he says,

“All boundaries are conventions. One can transcend a convention if only one can conceive of doing so. … Separation is an illusion. My life extends far beyond me.”

This is not about overcoming all rules, only boundaries between people, those hierarchical distinctions between people that oppress them.  We’re all connected, and no one, however weak, is simply “meat” for the “strong to eat”.

I’m tempted to think this is Derrickson’s apology to his wife for making the same mistakes in his own life.  But really it’s the story of my life.  Like Oswalt, I too often let my work – even the “good” and “important” work I would characterize as furthering “the kingdom of God” – come before my family.  Sinister prophetically exhorts me to stop pursuing my own work at the expense of my children and to move my family back “home”.

I want to think of myself as helping make the world a better place – as helping teach my students how to be good and avoid the evil influences of non-Christian culture.  But how exactly are goodness and evil transmitted?  In the film, Oswalt finds a box of old home movies with images of horrific murders on them.  Eventually he realizes that the murders have something to do with a demonic figure who shows up in the shadows of each of the movies.  An occult historian tells Oswalt of a demon associated with similar imagery.  He claims that “ancient Christians” believed the demon lived “in the images themselves” and that children who saw these images would have their souls devoured by the demon.  When I first saw the trailer of for Sinister, I thought Derrickson was critiquing the horror genre itself.  This is basically what fundamentalist Christians claim about horror movies: if you watch them, demons will swallow your soul.

But that’s not quite what happens in the film.  As far as I could tell, the children never see the film itself.  Like a good fundamentalist, Oswalt keeps his horrific images locked up and eventually destroys them.  But it doesn’t prevent the spread of evil.  The problem isn’t the horror films hidden in the attic.  Instead, the evil seems to be transmitted from the father to his children. Oswalt tries to shelter his children from the evil by, for example, keeping his office door locked.  But this doesn’t work. It is interesting that all the other families that are killed by the demon are first seen having family fun:  having a pool party or a barbecue, watching TV together or just hanging out.  We never see Oswalt do anything with his family.  He’s too busy doing his “good work”.

Instead of literally locking himself away from his children so he can focus on fighting evil, he should have been spending more time with his family.  Likewise, neither is goodness transmitted through movies and books. Oswalt wants to find justice and make the world a better place through his writing.  Yet the film argues that this doesn’t happen through writing or filmmaking but through raising a good family.

In the past, Derrickson has taken great Christian films and remade them as horror films.  This time, he’s taken a great horror film –The Shining – and remade it as a Christian film.  Yet it is his most subtle Christian film yet.  Many viewers won’t even notice the “message” about the importance of family.  In fact, the ending of the film could easily seem nihilistic.  Nevertheless, beneath the blood spatter, Sinister is an interesting metafictional contribution to the theology of culture.  It is a rebuke to those of us who think culture is transformed primarily through art and philosophy.  Instead, we should be looking to our children as our legacy.

In most movies, a scene will begin with a wide shot to establish the setting so that, when the scene moves to close-ups, the viewer understands where the characters are standing in relationship to each other within the set.  But in Joan, Dreyer gives us no establishing shots, and we never have a sense of space.  (It doesn’t help that the film’s set is highly expressionistic and minimalist in design.) We’re left instead with a disorienting series of images, the vast majority of which are close-ups of faces.  Our experience as viewers is almost closer to flipping through a photo album than watching a movie.

Needless to say, you can’t watch Joan the same way you’d watch a normal Hollywood movie.  If you watch it for the story, for example, you’ll be disappointed.  Joan is on trial for heresy; she refuses to recant; she is burnt at the stake.  That’s all that happens.  The film isn’t about the plot.  If the film is about anything, it is about Maria Falconetti’s face (the actress who plays Joan).

One helpful way into this unusual viewing experience is to approach the film the way you would look at a painting.  In fact, I suggest the closest artistic analogy for the film is the Eastern Orthodox tradition of paintings known as “icons”.  Dreyer himself called the effect he was aiming at “realized mysticism”, by which I think he meant the embodiment of spiritual truth in realistic imagery.  This embodiment (or incarnation) of the spiritual in the physical – especially the physical representation of the human face, abstracted from the spatial setting of its minimal background – is what Christian iconography aims at.  Along these lines, then, watching the film can become a kind of prayer or communion with God.

In his book Praying With Icons Orthodox writer, Jim Forest explains the concept of an icon: “The icon is not an end in itself but assists us in going beyond what can be seen with our physical eyes into the realm of mystical experience.”  That’s why, Forest explains, in a typical icon, “There is either nothing at all in the background or, if a setting is required, it is rendered in the simplest, most austere manner” – just like The Passion of Joan of Arc. Russian iconographer Leonid Ouspensky’s description of Orthodox iconography could have been written about Joan:  “The image is reduced to a minimum of detail and a maximum of expressiveness.” Also recalling Joan, Forest emphasizes the role of the face in iconography:

“Gazing at the face, we are drawn especially into the eyes, the windows of the soul. The enlightened eyes communicate wisdom, insight, and heightened perception. Meeting the Savior and the saints face-to-face, we find ourselves in a relationship of communion.”

Twentieth-century Catholic mystic Thomas Merton elaborates on this theme of icon-aided communion, pointing out that ultimately it is always Christ that we experience, even in an icon of a saint like Joan of Arc:

“What one ‘sees’ in prayer before an icon is not an external representation of a historical person, but an interior presence in light, which is the glory of the transfigured Christ, the experience of which is transmitted in faith from generation to generation by those who have ‘seen,’ from the apostles on down.”

I challenge you to approach The Passion of Joan of Arc in a spirit of prayer, open to God’s presence.  Inscribed in light and moving shadows on a screen you may find a trace of God’s glory in this utterly unique piece of cinema about the face of an utterly unique human being.

But things are not quite that simple.  Elizabeth chooses to believe that the cave paintings she has found are an “invitation” to visit an alien planet and to meet those responsible for the origin of human life on earth – the aliens she refers to as “the Engineers”.  The other characters are not convinced.  How does she know there will be anything on the planet when they arrive?  But Elizabeth chooses to believe.  And she’s right.  Her faith is vindicated.  Sort of.

When Elizabeth and the crew of the Prometheus arrive on the alien planet, they do find the Engineers, but they are all dead.  Elizabeth’s husband Charlie, who initially shared her enthusiasm, gives in to despair.  There will be no answers after all.  Even after Elizabeth tells him the Engineers have human DNA, validating what one character sarcastically calls her unproven “thesis”, Charlie is not impressed.  So they created us, he says, but that doesn’t point us to God.  Elizabeth chooses to see the problem differently:  if they made us, then Who made them?

Of course, this is a horror movie in the Alien universe, so it turns out that not everything on the planet is dead.  And when the crew of Prometheus realize that the Engineers have been planning to destroy earth, things seem even worse for Elizabeth’s faith.  Maybe she did find her Creators, in a way, but they want to kill her.  This is the problem of evil times ten!  Near the end of the film one character comes to the sad conclusion that “there’s nothing” after death.  But it’s worse than there being no God; in this world, the gods themselves are evil.

The film takes place at Christmas – the feast of the Incarnation, when God became human – so it is not too much of a stretch to read the infertile Elizabeth’s miraculous pregnancy as a twisted parody of the Incarnation.  And it is probably not an accident that her half-human, half-alien offspring has the form of a squid, recalling the evil deities of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.  Elizabeth’s Creator has come in the flesh, but he wants to kill her.

Yet again, the film isn’t content to simply ridicule Elizabeth’s faith.  We discover that this isn’t the first time Elizabeth has been faced with the problem of evil.  Elizabeth is the daughter of a missionary who was killed by an Ebola infection.  Elizabeth could have lost her faith when her father died, but she didn’t.  She chose to keep looking for answers.  There is something ennobling about the film’s final moments when Elizabeth again chooses to keep the faith despite everything.

Many critics have been disappointed that Prometheus asks big questions about God and the origin of humanity and then turns into an action movie with nothing interesting to say about those questions.  This is an odd criticism, because it is such a great action movie, that the ideas are somewhat secondary.  Even apart from the wonderful action sequences, the beautiful production design and cinematography, Michael Fassbender‘s performance alone makes the film worth seeing.  Sure, the ideas are underdeveloped, and much of what the film does have to say about faith is a bit silly.  But that doesn’t ruin Prometheus as a movie.  Nevertheless I think the film does have something interesting to say about the nature of humanity.  I suspect the filmmakers are saving their “answers” for sequels.  But focusing just on Prometheus itself, the fact that there are no answers is a large part of the point.

The ship’s android David can’t understand why Elizabeth would care about the Engineers’ motives.  Her passion doesn’t compute.  But the point of the scene isn’t just that faith is something irrational or emotional.  Rather, the point is that faith is the essence of humanity – the source of what David earlier calls Elizabeth’s “survival instinct” – that which allows us to keep going despite the sort of fear and disappointment a robot can never understand.

Elizabeth says she was “so wrong” about the Engineers.  But rather than give in to despair, she adjusts her questions keeps asking.  This search for meaning is what makes her human.  As St. Augustine says, God has made us for himself and our hearts are restless until they rest in him.  The day Elizabeth’s heart stops feeling the restlessness of the search for meaning – the day she, like David, wants her Creator to die so she can be free – is the day she ceases to be human.  She has faith that understanding can be found, even if she can’t yet see the answer: “I’m still searching,” she says.

Thus both films have clear political dimensions, lamenting the way our social systems are designed to sacrifice some of us for the benefit of those in power.  The system is a bit more insidious in Cabin, because the sacrifices are rationalized as being necessary “for the good of society”, but both films play with the ways the system coerces its victims into “freely” choosing to participate in the method of their own death.

(Warning: don’t read any further if you don’t want to know how these two movies end.)

Most strikingly, both films end with two remaining teenagers, a boy and a girl. In both films, the girl is told that she must kill/sacrifice the boy to save countless other people.  In both films, the heroine refuses to kill her friend.  But, despite similar climactic scenes, there are importance differences between the films’ worldviews.  The Hunger Games is much more deeply aligned to Christianity than Cabin in the Woods.

At the climax of Cabin much more is at stake:  by refusing to complete the child sacrifice, the heroes Marty and Dana are condemning humanity to extinction at the hands of the “Ancient Ones”, evil Cthulhu-like gods who ruled the earth before the time of human beings.  In Games, however, the heroes Katniss and Peeta are fighting only for their own survival and ability to return to their families.  (In the novel they are fighting for food for their starving communities, hence the title “The Hunger Games”, but this element is not mentioned in the film version.)  More importantly, Katniss and Peeta are spared and allowed to return home, while Marty and Dana (along with everyone else!) die.

Obviously Joss Whedon is more pessimistic than Suzanne Collins.  Both films allow their heroes to gain some sort of political enlightenment and liberation from the oppressive system.  But in Games the heroes fight the system and survive, while in Cabin resistance is futile.  Yet there is more going on here than simply Collins’s hope in our ability to change unjust political structures.  The most important difference between the films is the way the heroes fight the system.  Though they (reluctantly) engage in violence throughout the film, at the climax of the film the heroes of The Hunger Games reject violence in a way that embodies a kind of Christian pacifism.

In both films, the heroes refuse to kill each other in the end, but they do so in importantly different ways. The heroes of Cabin are apathetic, even nihilistic.  In the end, they don’t fight the system, because they can’t see anything worth fighting for.  When given the choice of self-sacrifice, the opportunity to be a martyr, Marty is unmoved.  He will die as a sacrifice to save humanity or he will die along with everyone else, but either way he’s going to die, and it doesn’t matter to him.  He’s not just being selfish.  He reasons that if the only way humanity can save itself is by constructing a system of torture as evil as the demons the system is meant to keep at bay, then humanity isn’t worth saving.  And so Marty and Dana do nothing.  They rightly see that evil must never be done in the name of fighting evil, and their refusal to participate in the unjust system is admirable.   Yet they are entirely passive.

Passivism is not the same as pacifism.  Christian love does not call us to do nothing to stop evil.  Pacifism is peacemaking.  It is active non-violent resistance, not merely passive non-participation. This is the insight of The Hunger Games.  Unlike Marty and Dana, Katniss and Peeta find a way to act in opposition to the system. Peeta plants the seed earlier in the film when he tells Katniss, “I just keep wishing I could think of a way to show them, that they don’t own me.”  Katniss figures out how to do this at the climax of the film.  In full view of the cameras, she and Peeta begin to commit suicide.  If they die resisting the system (instead of dying as participants in the game), they become martyrs and their blood becomes the seeds of revolution.  The politicians running the game know better than to allow this.   They stop the show and pronounce Katniss and Peeta both winners.  But the damage has already been done.  The seeds of revolution have already been sown.

The end of Games isn’t a “happy ending” simply because the heroes live.  The ending is happy, because the heroes have defeated the system; they have achieved liberation.  The heroes of Cabin seem to think of themselves as liberated, too.  They, too, have broken the oppressive system designed for child sacrifice.  But they have won their freedom at the cost of human extinction.

The nihilistic implication of Cabin in the Woods is that human civilization, indeed creation itself, is founded on an original evil that cannot be defeated.  We will never be able to have a just social structure.  The best we can hope for is to “get off the grid”, to take a small group of friends and hide out in the wilderness.  Of course, this hope turns out to be illusory, because the system extends even into the woods.  The Hunger Games, on the other hand, has faith that creation is founded on an original goodness and dares to hope that through non-violent resistance, motivated by the power of self-sacrificial love, humanity can be saved.  God does not demand child sacrifice, and the oppressive system has already been defeated by the Resurrection of Christ.

“Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. … Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it over them. To have its own way.”

On this broadly Augustinian view, “Nature” primarily refers to human nature, the way human beings are apart from Christ, and “Grace” is the way we can only live with supernatural help. In The Tree of Life, the mother is clearly associated with the way of Grace, and the father with the way of Nature, and here we see another aspect of the dualism: Law vs. Gospel.  The father’s strict discipline based on seemingly arbitrary rules and an impulse toward an eye-for-an-eye suggests an Old Testament, pre-Christian vision of God, while the mother’s emphasis on love and forgiveness suggests a New Testament vision of God.

But there is something odd about the way the viewer experiences this distinction in The Tree of Life.  The movie – or at least the children through whose eyes we see the story – clearly preference the mother and the way of Grace.  Yet it is far too simplistic to say that the mother is good and the father is bad.  It is obvious that the father loves the children just as much as the mother does.  And his disciplinarianism is motivated by his love: he is simply trying to prepare them to succeed in a world he sees as harsh and cruel.  What’s more, the film recognizes that there is something good about the father’s strictness.  When the father goes away for a business trip, the children run wild without any discipline.

Likewise, the film doesn’t present the mother as always correct.  It is hard to take seriously her suggestion that the sky is “where God lives”.  She herself doesn’t entirely believe that God is this remote: when the priest comforts her for the death of her son by saying “He’s in God’s hands now”, she replies “He was in God’s hands the whole time”. In context, this is an accusation – how could God allow this – but it also shows an inconsistency in the mother’s thinking.  She, like the mainstream Judeo-Christian tradition, tends both to think of God as transcendent – far away in heaven looking down – and also to think of God as immanent – present here with us at every moment where “all the world is shining” and “love is smiling through all things”.

The odd thing is that the mother, following Thomas à Kempis, uses the word “Nature” for human fallenness.  Yet for most of us “Nature” most readily suggests the non-human world, the world of trees and waterfalls and stars, the world The Tree of Life presents as so beautiful and full of wonder.  Nature is where we most easily see God’s love smiling through, “Every leaf. Every ray of light”, as the mother says.  So Nature would seem to be something good, something that points us toward the way of Grace.  Yet the mother opposes Nature and Grace.

It seems to me that one of Malick’s aims in The Tree of Life is to overcome these dualisms – not just Nature and Grace, but also Law vs. Gospel and Transcendence vs. Immanence:  “Father. Mother. Always you wrestle inside me. Always you will.”  The goal is to see God as both Father and Mother.  The key scene for this interpretation is the sermon at the center of the film, the priest (referencing Job 1:21) says we must learn to see the Lord who gives as the same as the Lord who takes away.

I don’t think it is possible for interpreters to make too much of the quote from the Biblical book of Job that opens to movie:

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation … while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4, 7)

This line is from God’s speech to Job from the whirlwind, a mystical encounter with God that Job has after Job has, in essence, asked God why He allows (causes?) innocent people to suffer.  God doesn’t directly answer Job’s question.  Instead God gives a speech about the vastness, complexity, and terrifying beauty of the universe.  God takes Job on the same journey the movie takes us on with its journey though the story of creation and the evolution of the dinosaurs.

Part of the point of the God’s speech is that God is the creator of both the beautiful things and the horrible things in nature, the monsters like Behemoth (Job 40:15) and Leviathan (Job 41:1), represented by dinosaurs in The Tree of Life.  The movie begins with the death of the main character’s brother.  This is the event that Jack (played by Sean Penn as an adult) is trying to make sense of with his reflections on his childhood experiences.  Jack and his mother can’t understand why God would take away their brother/son.  But that is because they think of God as simply a God of love who smiles through the leaves.  They can’t understand that the natural world is as violent as it is beautiful – the creation sequence ends when a meteor strikes the earth, killing the dinosaurs that were the high point of the evolutionary narrative.  If God is willing to kill the dinosaurs which took billions of years of evolution to create, then why are we surprised that he is willing to kill a 19 year-old human child?

The difficulty is learning to see the short life of the human being, the brief flowering of a sunflower that is born, spends its life turning toward the light, and soon withers and fades.  Some of the flowers are destroyed by weather or animals or other natural mechanisms.  But even the short life of these flowers is beautiful.  And in fact the mechanisms that kill the flowers are themselves beautiful in a terrible way, like dinosaurs and meteors.

There’s a line from the trailer, that I don’t remember seeing in the movie:  “Someday we’ll fall down and weep, and we’ll understand it all. All things.”  That’s what’s happening at the end of the film.  The main character is coming to understand, to be reconciled to both his mother and his father, to see God shining through all things.  The mother is right to insist on the way of Grace: “the only way to be happy is to love”.  But she’s wrong to think that Grace is a matter of escaping Nature.  Nature can be terrible in its indifference to human concerns, but nature is not selfish, and even in Nature’s awe-inspiring terribleness we can see God smiling through. “Nature” is not the right term for human fallenness.

I’m not sure if Jack is supposed to be literally dead at the end and in heaven – I need to see the movie again – but he is certainly having a beatific vision, a mystical experience of the love and beauty of God.  We see him embracing both his mother and his father, the beauty of Nature’s grace and the terror of Nature’s law.  He’s having the same sort of experience that Job has when God speaks to him out of the whirlwind.  This mystical experience could be just a symbolic near-death experience.  Did you notice how the sound of the elevator beeping between floors sounds like an EKG?  And if I recall correctly, Jack comes back down the elevator after having the vision, symbolically returning to life.

Either way, the mystical experience Jack has had is occasioned by his childhood memories and reflections on the origin of the universe – the movie we have just watched.  Jack has glimpsed the big picture, the universe from God’s point of view.  He has seen the terrible beauty of Nature.  The goal is that we the viewers, having been inside Jack’s mind and therefore having experienced the same meditation as Jack will have the same mystical insight he gains at the end.  We will be able to walk away from the movie believing that the God who gives is the same God who takes away.  Nature, too, is supernatural Grace.

Performance art is an artwork where the “object” to be aesthetically contemplated is an action or event experienced by a live audience rather than a painting or some other physical object that can be hung on a museum wall.  Originally meant to free art from consumeristic mentality of the gallery system, performances are not objects that can be bought or sold.  They are ephemeral; they happen and then they’re gone.  They are usually interactive and often site or audience specific and therefore unrepeatable.  Eventually museums did begin to “buy” performances, but all that is in the museum is a card explaining what happened.

This year Marina Abramovic got a lot of publicity for her performance work at MOMA, “The Artist is Present”, in which thousands of people lined up around the block for a chance to sit silently across from her for a few minutes each.  Other important performance artists include Yoko Ono who famously invited the media to observe her as she spent her honeymoon in bed with John Lennon.  John and Yoko turned the TV coverage of their wedding into a “Bed-In for Peace”, an artwork protesting the Vietnam War.

But one of my favorite performance artists is Josef Beuys.  Consider two of his artworks.  In “I Like America and America Likes Me” (1974), he wrapped himself in a blanket and locked himself in a room with a coyote for 8 hours.  And in “How to Explain Pictures to Dead Hare” (1965) he hung artworks on a gallery wall, covered himself in honey and gold leaf, and then whispered in the ear of a dead rabbit, apparently explaining the art to it.  These are weird actions, to say the least.  But they do seem to have some mysterious symbolism about them.  They remind me a lot of things the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel did.

In Ezekiel 4:1-8, God tells the prophet to build a model of Jerusalem, then lay in front of it on his left side for 390 days and on his right side for 40 more days.  In Ezekiel 4:9-17, God tells him to make bread out of all kinds of unusual ingredients and then to cook it over a fire of burning human excrement.  (Ezekiel chickens out over the excrement, and God allows him to use cow dung instead.)  These actions – especially the excrement part – sound exactly like the kind of thing contemporary artists do that drive conservative commentators crazy.

What is especially interesting about Ezekiel’s actions is that, while the scripture explains some of the symbolism to us the readers, nowhere does it say Ezekiel explained the actions to the original audience.  God simply told Ezekiel to perform these actions and left it up to the Israelites to interpret them on their own.  Apparently Ezekiel was so provocative that the elders of the city would hang out around his house just to watch him and see what he might do next (Ezekiel 8:1).

The other Old Testament prophets did similar things.  Isaiah walked around the city naked (Isaiah 20:1-6); Jeremiah filled wine jars and then smashed them together (Jeremiah 13:12-14); Hosea married a prostitute and gave their children some crazy names.

N.T. Wright argues that Jesus saw himself in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, licensing us to interpret many of his actions in this symbolic way.  When he feeds the multitude or goes out of his way to heal on the Sabbath or casts a legion of demons into a herd of pigs, he is not just helping the oppressed, he is also telling us something about God.  There are other ways he could have accomplished the same goals, and thinking about this as a symbolic action helps us explain the particular details. Some of his actions can be understood in no other way: he cursed a fig tree for not bearing fruit even though it was out of season!

Take the legion example (Mark 5:1-20).  It is no accident that the demons are called “legion”, the name for a unit in the Roman army.  And it is no accident that Jesus casts them into a herd of unclean animals and drives them into the sea just as the occupied Palestinians wished they could drive their Roman oppressors into the sea.  Here Jesus is symbolically defeating the Romans while simultaneously showing that the real enemy is spiritual/demonic, not racial.  (See Ched Myers’s brilliant discussion of this passage in his book Binding the Strong Man.)

In John’s Gospel, the anointing at Bethany takes place the evening before the Palm Sunday triumphal entry into Jerusalem (see John 12), and as such it marks the beginning of a series of symbolic actions.  The Collect for Palm Sunday says:

Assist us mercifully with your help, O Lord God of our salvation, that we may enter with joy upon the contemplation of those mighty acts, whereby you have given us life and immortality; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

We contemplate the meaning and beauty of Jesus’s actions the way people contemplate art.

The two most obvious symbolic actions of Jesus’s last week are the cleansing of the Temple and the Last Supper.   In these two actions Jesus is symbolically destroying the Temple, enacting God’s judgment on the corrupt Jewish sacrificial system, and replacing that system with himself as the new focal point for worship of God.  (N.T. Wright has a great discussion of these events in Jesus and the Victory of God, chapter 9.  For a nice summary of the argument, see also p. 42-52 of Wright’s debate with Marcus Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions.)

What are the lessons of this approach to understanding Jesus’s life?  As with Jesus’s use of parables (symbolic stories), we can learn something about human embodiment.  Why does Jesus teach in stories and not just lectures?  He himself says it is to conceal the truth (Matthew 13:10-17), presumably to allow him to teach his disciples openly but to prevent the religious leaders from understanding the truly radical nature of his teaching and killing him before he was ready.  (Compare Matthew 7:6 on not casting your pearls of wisdom before swine, lest they turn on you.)

But that can’t be the whole purpose of the parables.  If it were, then why pass down the parables to the next generation?  Why not just pass down the literal explanation if the original purpose for the parables (protecting Jesus’s ability to teach) had become moot?

Jesus knows that we are not simply intellectual beings.  We are physical, emotional, embodied beings.  And symbols speak to us in our embodiment.  They draw connections with our everyday lives, they move our emotions, they stick in our memories, they reform our imaginations.

But perhaps more importantly, symbols are multivalent – they have more than one meaning.  Initially it might sound controversial to say that Jesus’s parables and actions have multiple interpretations.  Evangelicals are usually taught to look for “the one right interpretation” of any passage.  But even the most conservative Christian would agree that there is always another sermon to be preached about every passage.  We’re never “finished” understanding the Bible.  There is always more meaning to be found in the Scriptures.  The Scripture itself is more fundamental than any explanation.  We can never so perfectly “extract the meaning” out of the Bible such that we would no longer need to read the original text.  This is true of any artwork.  No explanation or description of a painting or poem or performance could ever replace the object or event itself.  There is always more than one meaning to be given to any symbol.

In a way I am arguing for an allegorical reading of Scripture.  But rather than looking for a meaning behind the literal text like medieval theologians did, in pointing to Jesus’s actions as performance art I am suggesting that the literal events themselves should be taken symbolically.  Hence taking the actions symbolically doesn’t mean thinking they didn’t really happen.  Jesus literally died on a Roman cross, but if the whole point of the crucifixion is simply substitutionary atonement, then he could have died in any way: stoning, fed to lions, hanging, beheading, electric chair.

But what if we take a stronger view of Providence?  God came to earth in the time and place he did, because there is something symbolically important about crucifixion.  This particular death was an enacted allegory, a performance artwork. John 3:14 connects the crucifixion to the serpent that was lifted up on a pole in Numbers 21.  Likewise Galatians 3:13 suggests that it is important that Jesus hangs on a tree.  Moreover, the whole idea of substitutionary atonement itself depends on the symbolism of sacrifice, killing one thing in place of something else.  Maybe we can extend the idea of performance art back into the Old Testament sacrificial system.  God doesn’t need the blood of animals (Psalm 50:8-13), so why does his Law require shedding blood for forgiveness (Hebrews 9:22)?  Perhaps there is important symbolism here.  The important point, however, is to remember that any explanation we give is only ever partial.

Connecting these two themes (embodiment and multivalence), we can say that symbols point us toward practices as primary and doctrines as secondary.  What God wants is us to tell the story of Christ, not necessarily to understand the story.  He wants us to do something, not just to believe something: faith without works is dead.  The Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20) is to go and make disciples, people who can obey Christ’s commandment to love one another, not just intellectually affirm that Jesus died for our sins (1 John 2:3-4, 3:23).

Finally the weekly Eucharistic liturgy is a performance artwork, one in which we are simultaneously the artists and the artworks.  We perform the symbolic actions of eating the bread and wine, but God performs the action of transforming us into the body of Christ.  And since this is an artwork, we shouldn’t feel like there must be a final literal explanation of what’s happening and how.  Is the bread transubstantiated into Christ’s literal body or is it a symbolic occasion for our remembrance or something in between?  We don’t need to decide once and for all.  There are many ways of interpreting the Eucharist-artwork.  As N.T. Wright has said, at the Last Supper Jesus didn’t give us a theory, he gave us a meal.  Our faithful performance is primary, not our intellectual understanding and explanation of it.

Medea

So von Trier’s work has shifted away from an expressivistic aesthetic toward a more restrained aesthetic, and he has shifted from a story about revenge toward stories about self-sacrifice.  I would like to suggest that there is a link between these two shifts.  And that link is von Trier’s conversion to Roman Catholicism.

It is hard to know how seriously to take von Trier’s Catholicism.  Sometimes it seems to be merely an aesthetic pose.  But since it is von Trier’s aesthetic that is at issue here, perhaps it doesn’t matter whether his religion is sincere.  In any case, von Trier fairly explicitly sets up his recent heroines as Christ-figures who suffer self-sacrificially for the salvation of others.

What does this have to do with forsaking expressivism in favor of the rules of “dogma”?  Von Trier has learned that it is not all about himself.  When life is about the expression of self, then you can only respond to an attack on yourself with a counter attack.  But when you acknowledges that there is a good order to the world which you did not create but which you must work within, then you can trust your principles and not feel the need to force others to fit into your own will.  You can accept the suffering caused by others and sacrifice your own self in the hope that others may be redeemed.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:5-8)

Christ’s death was not just any death, but a crucifixion.  The cross was a symbol of “shame” (Hebrews 12:2) and a “curse” (Galatians 3:13).  That’s why it was considered “foolishness” and “weakness” (1 Corinthians 1:23) to worship a crucified God, the ultimate oxymoron.

The shamefulness of the Cross has important theological implications.  As theologian Damien Casey explains in an essay available online,

the cross was a sign of ignominy. It was not a symbol commonly used by the early Christians, because for them its associations were all too clear. Theologically, the death of Jesus is God’s highest self-divestment or kenosis. It is here that the definite Christian revelation of God is to be found; in life and death of Jesus, his renunciation of mastery and identification with servitude, the poor and the oppressed and all those we treat like shit.

Its clear implication is that the concept of divine sovereignty as divine mastery over the world must be abandoned. God’s place is with the abject every bit as much as it is on the high altar of the cathedral. Yes, the crucifix as a triumphant symbol is a delicious irony in keeping with the spirit of the gospels. But that irony is lost when we forget its strong association with both ignominy and abjection. Then it merely becomes a sign of domination. In denying negation in God, classical Christian thought obscured one of its most profound insights into suffering. To speak to questions of suffering and injustice Christian thought must uncover its suppressed elements and acknowledge that its symbols, like the divine, cannot be mastered.

If the Cross is a symbol of God’s grace and love, it is so because it shows depth of humiliation which God was willing to endure for us.  If the Cross is a symbol of the victory of God over sin and death, it is the paradoxical Christian victory that comes through defeat, the kind of victory in which persecution is a blessing (Matthew 5:10) and even a cause for joy (James 1:2).

The Cross is the victory of a holy love that cannot be overcome by evil but which “overcomes evil with good” (Romans 12:21).  This overcoming does not happen by a show of strength and power.  It happens by the weakness of turning the other cheek (Matt. 5:39).  No evil we humans do to God can make God stop loving us, no suffering we inflict on God can make God stop doing good to us.  In fact the more we sin, the greater God’s grace is shown to be (Romans 5:20), the stronger we resist God, the more God’s weakness absorbs our resistance in love.  God’s love for us is invincible (Romans 8:38-39) that the more we hate God, the more God’s love is revealed (Romans 5:8).

If all this is true, then doesn’t this mean that it is impossible to desecrate a cross?  You can trample a cross in the mud, throw it in the garbage, or flush it down the toilet, but if the cross is already a symbol of shame, humiliation, and weakness – if the holiness of the Cross lies precisely in the self-empyting love of God for God’s enemies (Romans 5:10) – then all attacking the Cross can succeed in doing is to make the holy weakness of the Cross more powerfully present.

As a symbol, the Cross is so powerful that it cannot be denied or destroyed by its enemies.  Attacking a cross has roughly the same symbolic effect as shooting a gun-control activist.

Not all religious symbols work this way, of course.  The enemies of Islam can desecrate a Qur’an by throwing it in a toilet or burning it. But the enemies of Christianity can’t desecrate a cross.  All they can do is show that the Cross was right all along: this is the way humans treat God.

Perhaps the Cross can, however, be desecrated by its alleged friends – betrayed by a kiss, as it were (Luke 22:48).  If the Cross can be abused at all, then surely the only way to abuse the Cross is for a Christian to distort the crucifixion into a symbol of hatred.  When someone who should know better turns his or her back on God, refusing to love others the way we have been loved (1 John 4:19), this might – if anything can – bring shame to the Cross so as to “crucify again the son of God” (Hebrews 6:6).

For example, if an artist immersed a plastic crucifix souvenir in a jar of his own urine, this couldn’t possibly desecrate the Cross. (Not even if he also had ants crawl over it.)   Assuming a piece of junk-plastic could be relevantly sacred in the first place, and assuming that immersing something in urine has the same rhetorical effect as pissing on it, and assuming that the artist’s resulting photograph of the crucifix weren’t beautiful thereby problematizing the claim that he intended to mock the Cross – indeed even assuming for the sake of argument that the artist did intend to mock the Cross – it does not follow that the artist succeeded in mocking the Cross.  On the contrary, if the Cross is a symbol of shame and humiliation, then pissing on a cross can only enhance its symbolism, regardless of the artist’s intention.

In our culture, one cannot write the letters S-T-O-P on a red octagon and have mean “Don’t stop here”.  The symbol has an objective meaning, and no single subjective intention can change that.  If you want your sign to mean “Don’t stop here”, then you need use another set of symbols.  Likewise, the Cross has an objective meaning that a jar of urine can’t change.  If you intend to mock the Cross, that’s the last way you should do it.

A better way to mock the Cross would be to call yourself a Christian and then use violence against art gallery guards and to destroy someone’s private property in the name of Christ.  You might think you were standing up for Christ’s honor – already a confusion since the Cross is a symbol of shame not honor – but all you would really succeed in doing is to turn the artwork into a symbol of the artist’s suffering and persecution.  Where it had once been a beautiful image that led viewers into a meditation on the Incarnation, you would have transformed the artwork into a symbol of hatred and persecution of the arts in the name of Christ. (Especially if you also, inexplicably, destroy a non-offensive photo of a nun praying.)

But in all this, perhaps even still Christ would be victorious in his weakness.  If the Cross is a symbol of shame and humiliation, if it shows us Christ’s identification with human brokenness and suffering, then perhaps we should see the Cross wherever we see suffering in the world (Matthew 25:45).  If this is right, then not even Christian use of the Cross as a symbol of hatred can desecrate the Cross.  Christ died for all those who suffer the results of sin, even those who suffer at the hands of Christians.

Even turning an allegedly blasphemous artwork into a symbol of persecution does not destroy the power of the Cross.  It simply allows us to see Christ in the suffering of the persecuted artist.  You can’t desecrate a cross even if you try.  And Lord knows we try.  Christ have mercy.