The problem with religious movies is not swords and sandals – it's God

Should God be in movies? Aristotle thought not. In the Poetics, he laid down his famous injunction against deity-induced plot happenings. “The unraveling of the plot, no less than the complication, must arise out of the plot itself, it must not be brought about by the Deus ex Machina,” he wrote. “Within the action there must be nothing irrational.” Tragedy consisted of the spectacle “highly renowned and prosperous men” brought low by “some great error or frailty” and it has been one long, slow march down the social rankings ever since. Shakespeare’s lowest ranking tragic hero was a general (Othello). Leopold Bloom worked in advertising. Willy Loman in sales. “Who cares about the fifth Earl of Bathsdrop and Lady Higgenbottom and who killed Nigel Grinchgibbons?” railed Barton Fink. "The hopes and dreams of the common man are as noble as those of any king.” The great joke, of course, being that when Fink found himself next door to one such common man, he ran screaming from the room.

The Coens may have had the Hollywood of the 1940s in their satirical crosshairs, but their diagnosis of the messianic strain lurking within Hollywood populism still holds firm. “I refuse to send off to another world, as the first example of earth’s intelligence, a man who wants to go and set up a McDonalds franchise,” Paul Schrader is said to have told Steven Spielberg, during the making of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. “That’s exactly the guy I want to send!’ replied Spielberg, but his electrical plant worker and archaeologist heroes soon made way for cops, jocks, fighter pilots and robot assassins, some palaeo-botanists and presidents, roman generals and emperors. Finally a smattering of virgin births – the Matrix’s Neo, Anakin Skywalker – bequeathed us a generation of superheroes, all circling the earth like lonely gods, like Zack Snyder’s Superman, or else caught in a permanent loop of deus-ex-machina stand-offs from which human agency has been excluded altogether, one Transformer against another, ad infinitum, in excelsis deo, while the humans cower in the corner, the way they used to during dinosaur fights in the old Ray Harryhausen epics. Aristotle be damned. American cinema can't move for deus-ex-machinas at the moment.

It was thus only a matter of time before he put in an appearance. Not a big one: no burning bushes or parted seas. To Russell Crowe’s Noah, he appears as a series of dreams, one natural, one induced by psychotropic tea given him by Methusalah (Anthony Hopkins), in which Noah glimpses a drowned world, interspersed with glimpses of the forbidden fruit, all cut with a rhythm reminiscent of the drug sequences in Requiem for a Dream, or "the Tree of Life on Adderall," in the words of one critic. Glenn Beck tried to razz up his listeners by dubbing it "Babylonian Chainsaw Massacre" but the longed-for outrage from the religious right has been slow to emerge. Between The Last Temptation of Christ and The Passion of the Christ, the tenor of religious outrage in America has changed, less a matter of “Don’t desecrate my faith with graven images,” than “whatever you do, make sure the CGI looks good.”

Writing in Tablet, Liel Leibowitz complained, “To hear marketers, in Hollywood and beyond, tell it, a religious person is someone whose cultural horizon begins with Genesis and ends with Revelation, some sort of sniggering simpleton who grows suspicious unless his entertainment features swords, sandals and the heroes he’d read about in Sunday School.”

The problem with Biblical movies is not swords and sandals, necessarily. It’s God. He breaks every screenwriting rule in the book. He has no desire, no needs, no social life, no private life, no self-exploratory intellectual life to speak of; he’s all powerful and therefore in conflict only with man, and only then by means of a retroactive harrumphing rather than open conflict. He tells man to “be fertile and increase” only to discover, after the fact, that unchecked fertility was not what he had in mind; so he destroys the earth, only to discover that that, too, was not what he had in mind (“Never again will I doom the earth … ” 8:21).

A cross between the original Jewish mother and the world’s worst backseat driver, “again and again, he is displeased with man, but only seems to find through his anger exactly what pleases him,” writes Jack Miles in God: a Biography, a character profile of western literature’s most famous off-stage presence. “He is like a director whose actors never seem to get it right and who is, as a result, often angry but doesn't himself, always know what getting it right will be.” Ah, now we are getting somewhere. As a protagonist, God may make too recalcitrant, too reactive, alternating imperious silence with violent rage, but maybe that is because, like most actors all he really wants to do is direct? He shouldn’t be in movies. He should be making them.

"Every director has a God complex," James Cameron recently told MTV News, taking a rest from world-building in Avatars 2 and 3 to refresh a parallel that goes back to Jack Godard’s Contempt, in which Jack Palance’s movie producer tells Fritz Lang, “I like gods. I like them very much. I know exactly how they feel.” Lang replies, “Don't forget. The gods have not created man. Man has created gods,” a reminder of humility that goes unheard. Not for nothing did Cecil B DeMille himself provide the voice of God which Moses hears from the Burning Bush in his 1956 version of The Ten Commandments. With its thunder and smoke, earthquakes and unquenchable fires, Exodus has always been the book of the bible in which God does the most rummaging in the special effects cupboard. In DeMille’s remake, "the Commandments first appear as small whirling fireballs accompanied by the sound of rushing wind, and then quickly – building in size all the while – zip across the screen and collide with the blank tablets. Puff! The smoke clears and the tablet is transcribed."

So writes Paul Schrader, with glorious lack of amusement, in his book Transcendental Style in Film, in which he notes "motion pictures were not born in religious practice, but instead are a totally profane offspring of capitalism and technology. If a religious artist attempts to go back to his origins he will find only entrepreneurs and technocrats."

Schrader isolated two strains of religious filmmaking. On the one hand, there is the course of DeMille, in which the filmmaker uses the abundant means at cinema’s disposal – special effects, sets, stars, a 'cast of thousands' – in order to pay rivalrous tribute to God’s own production values, but ends up tipping into the redundant ornamentation of kitsch. The second course is that of the filmmaker who, recognizing the inherently material nature of the medium, renounces its over-abundance to pursue an aesthetic of scarcity, sparseness, abnegation. He quotes approvingly from Jacques Maritain’s Religion and Culture (1932) – "the sparse means" are the "proper means of the spirit" – and finds evidence of this Spartan aesthetic in the work of Yasujirō Ozu, Robert Bresson and Carl Dreyer. Certainly, one of the best things about Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ is that it was shot on a shoestring. The crowd hearing the sermon on the mount is no bigger than a football team – you can hear, see and hear every cough, every doubt. Jesus (Willem Dafoe) almost seems to be talking himself into belief. Better yet are the miracles – a tossed apple turning into a fully-grown tree, the shot held for a few seconds, then gone. The same with the cobra, the lion and the pillar of flame by which the Devil manifests himself to Jesus, all summoned and dismissed with one snip of the editor’s scissors, the most basic movie magic.

View image in fullscreen

What is most interesting about Aronofksy’s Noah is that it stands exactly at the intersection of these two traditions – between the blockbuster kitsch and art-house austerity. In place of a sultry Middle East, Aronofsky shoots against the black sands of Iceland in a parched, desiccated landscape that looks less pre-apocalyptic than post-apocalyptic. Like many post-punk imaginations, Aronofsky makes a fetish of impurity. This earth looks already destroyed, as indeed, in his telling it has been: by man. The word God is absent from this ecological retelling of the Biblical narrative; Noah instead talks throughout of the Creator and the earth is destroyed not for its unchecked fertility and murder rate but for the despoliation of its natural resources. The film’s boldest stroke, though, comes from a logical quibble with the book of Genesis: if God was asking Noah and his family to repopulate the earth, was he not demanding incest?

Aronofsky adds an adopted daughter, Ila, played by Emma Watson, to give them an out, but Noah remains convinced that God’s intention was to exterminate all of mankind for his sins, including him and his family; he grows homicidal on the Ark, and afterwards drinks himself into nightly oblivion, convinced he has failed. All this is perfectly in line with Aronofsky’s prevailing ethos of adamantine self-punishment, even as it usurps divine prerogative – Noah has almost become a deity unto himself, dispensing his own justice. He even steals one of God's best lines, “be fertile and multiply.” The irony is that if a self-recriminating protagonist, bent on oblivion, was what he was after, the Bible had one all along, maybe not as overtly self-destructive as Randy “the Ram” Robinson, or Nina in Black Swan, but a creative, just like them, a perfectionist driven by rage for the imperfections of his creation (“for I regret that I made them…” 6:7), and so annihilating it in what amounts to a massive fit of artistic pique. Aronofsky’s clearest aesthetic alter ego is entirely off-stage. A film about God? It would never work.