Don’t Look Up

The film, Don’t Look Up, is a most interesting film not only for how it relates science to political economy, but also in that images of wildlife—Nature, as it were—are interspersed throughout the movie, and it is Nature, rather than our circumscribed, petty, and yet economically successful species, that continues on after a large comet hits Earth and our species is wiped out. In fact, that impact-event in the movie cancels out the one that really happened 66 million years ago by returning dinosaurs to dominance. The last scene in the movie shows some of the political and economic elite waking up in their spaceship and landing on Earth more than 200,000 years in the future only to be eaten by dinosaurs that look "cute." two of those stupid people had been in charge both in the White House and in business before the comet hits, whereas the two principal astronomer-scientists who warn of the coming comet are repeatedly relegated and dismissed by the political and economic elite until the president realizes how she can use them politically—albeit just until the political winds turn again and comet-denial is more useful politically to the president. Does this sound familiar?

For a species to have reached such plenty economically as ordinary people could live better than medieval kings had in Europe and yet be so petty and reckless, essentially squandering what the species had built up, with indifference even to an upcoming cataclysmic event, is what the astronomer-protagonist in the film is left marveling at just before his life, along with those of friends and family sitting around his dinner table, is instantly ended. “We really tried,” he says. I suspect that climate-activists may be saying the same thing regarding the abject refusal of enough of our species and its power-brokers to take combatting carbon-emissions seriously enough.

“Most social life seems a conspiracy to discourage us from thinking” about “what, if anything, can we do about death—now, while we are still alive?”[1] Even so, “there is a rare type [of person] for whom death is present every moment, putting his grim question mark to every aspect of life, and that person cannot rest without some answers.”[2] So it is that in the Katha Upanishad, Nachiketa beseeches Yama, the king of death, to answer his burning question on whether there is an afterlife. “When a person dies, there arises this doubt: ‘He still exists,’ say some; ‘he does not,’ say others. I want you to teach me the truth. This is my third” wish.[3] Although the answer is beyond the reach of human cognition and perception, Yama reveals that the essence of a person, one’s essential self, or atman, survives the death of the body. Nachiketa’s undaunted urge to know the truth anyway points back to how much thoughts of death are part of life. That Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is based on the assumption that the instinct for self-preservation is primary in human beings is yet another indication of how important it is to us to put off our own death for as long as possible.

So it is a “red flag” in the film, an indictment on human nature, that so very few people are thinking about the prospect of their own death even though the two scientists and then even the U.S. president have announced on television that a comet is hurling through space, heading directly at Earth in what is known as an extinction event. Initially, two television hosts dismiss the two astronomers who had calculated that the comet would hit Earth and be of such magnitude that our species would go extinct; those journalists are more interested in the romantic life of a young singer. Not even the U.S. President, or her chief of staff, are much interested, at least until after the midterms, for their party could lose control of both chambers of Congress. It is only when the political calculation changes that the White House decides to make a public announcement. This prudence is short-lived, however, as the president calls for the space shuttle to abort its mission to bomb the comet into a new trajectory that would miss the planet. An Elon-Musk-type, new-age CEO of a cell-phone company has so much influence on the president, no doubt from having made donations to her campaign, that she heeds his direction to abort the in-progress space-shuttle mission to bomb the comet to divert it from hitting Earth, and instead send risky, untested drilling machines to land on the comet in order to blow it into pieces, which would then presumably fall harmlessly to the Pacific Ocean to be harvested by the U.S. navy so tech companies using computer chips could profit wildly. The CEO is a businessman, even though he angrily rebuffs the astronomy professor for pointing out, “You are a businessman,” who thus has absolutely no formal education in astrophysics and spacecraft technology upon which to make the judgment to abort the mission that would probably have diverted the comet. Instead, his idea is to send untested drillers to land on the comet to dig holes in which to place bombs so the comet would blow up into profitable chunks. The astronomy professor is correct when he calls out the cell-phone techie, but the president sides with the latter nonetheless.

Regarding just how pathetic the president, her immature chief of staff, and the techie businessman are, at the end of the movie, the professor turns down the president’s offer to join her, the businessman and other elite personalities on a spacecraft that returns to Earth when it is again habitable. You enjoy your (obnoxious) chief of staff; I’m all set here, he tells the finally contrite president by phone. Faced with an imminent extinction event, the level-headed astronomer makes the judgment that it is better to die with friends and family then go on living with superficial comet-deniers for whom already having a lot of power and wealth, respectively, is not enough, and other people are to be used in line with power-aggrandizement and higher profits.

Science fiction is an excellent genre for bringing up contemporary controversies without setting off alarm-bells and thus having one’s message blocked by the opposition. The allusions to President Trump and Hilary Clinton, and the tech titan Elon Musk are hardly subtle. That the film was released in 2021 means that the relationship between the president and the techie CEO are not based on the later relationship between President Trump and Elon Musk. Instead, the president character is, I submit, based on Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. The president in the film is engaged in “comet-denial” as a political slogan similar to how Trump was engaged in climate-change-denial during his first term, is a woman like Hilary Clinton in subsuming everything, even the destruction of the species, under political calculation, and easily forgetting to save her chief of staff in the end, perhaps as the Clintons left Brent Forster in their wake before Bill Clinton was president. The political-calculating, selfish president in the film is herself an indictment on American democracy, for presumably she was elected. At a certain point in the film, people need only look up to see the comet for themselves to realize that the U.S. president was lying. The comet in the movie, like climate change in our world, is real, and it is the political and economic elite that in both the film and real life drop the ball, even though the respective stakes are both huge. Of course, in both cases, the American people are to blame too.

It is strange, in watching the movie, how indifferent people generally are to even the possibility that they could die in a bit over six months. Even after Ivy League experts ironically favored by the White House confirm the calculations of the astronomy professor, the president decides to play political games rather than take the first possible opportunity to divert the comet. Then she decides to do the bidding of her techie billionaire donor and “turn lemons into lemonade” by recklessly (in terms of rocket technology) helping him to profit from the comet once it has been pulverized and felled to the ground. Lemonade cannot be made if the lemons are handled recklessly rather than rendered usable. Just before dies, the astronomy professor remarks on the species to his friends and family, “We had everything.” The implication is: and yet we blew it, because some powerful people in business and government wanted more. Even though the techie billionaire had developed a very advanced and financially lucrative cell phone, it is as if that man perceived himself as not having enough, and thus as needing more.

The desire for more is a good definition of greed. Even given declining marginal utility, there seems to be no base limit of wealth that is enough in terms of a person not risking even everything to profit more.  A rational person might realize that pushing the comet out of the way of Earth should be priority number 1, and that NASA and other space agencies around the world should be entrusted with that task, or else all current wealth could be lost, as you can’t spend it when you’re dead. It is as some powerful people in the business and political American elites dismissed even the 99.97% chance that the comet would smack into the Earth because greed and power-aggrandizement are instinctual urges that lie by distorting both cognition and perception. We “modern” humans may be so used to being so narrowly self-interested in accumulating money and power that we regard the indifference shown in the film to a catastrophic event to be surreal or even as too incredulous to even be believed in a film!

Even though the movie ramps up the explosive and sudden climax to keep viewers titillated in movie theatres, the same dynamic of indifference and denial applies as our species stews unabatedly in a hotter and hotter climate that one day may be very difficult or even impossible for our species to continue to live on Earth. This prospect having become realistic when the film was made, and definitely in June, 2025, when both parts of the E.U. and U.S. suffered from long heat-waves, should be enough to make resisting coal and other business interests and their captured politicians by making climate a high political and economic priority, but alas, too many people are like the people in the movie, who are taken in by the comet-deniers and profiteers, as if the masses of people were consisting of Nietzsche’s herd animals that are oblivious as they are being taken to the slaughter house. Presuming that we could just move to Mars or the Moon, and that we could even profit by doing so is the sort of thinking that does not work out in the movie, so the lesson is that it is reckless for us to deny climate-change and postpone cuts in fossil-fuel emissions under the assumption that we will be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat just in time when the time comes to pay the bill as species. To be sure, whereas the comet hitting Earth is a sudden event, the baleful effects of climate-change are gradual, yet accumulating, and thus human nature is less well-equipped to take immediate action rather than putting it off. Even so, the denial for partisan advantage and the proclivity of managers in companies to compartmentalize at the expense even potentially of the survival of the species even within a few generations are the same. Perhaps Nietzsche was correct in claiming that ideas are really instinctual urges, and reasoning is the tussling of contending urges—the most powerful of which reaches consciousness. Rather than being a check on passions, reason is itself a manifestation of instincts. The lesson of the film is that there is no guarantee that the instinctual urge that dominates others is in line with self-preservation and even the medium-term (and even short-term) survival of the species.

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1. Introduction to Katha Upanishad, in The Upanishads, trans. Eknath Easwaran (Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1987).
2. Ibid.
3. Katha Upanishad, 1.1.20, in The Upanishads, trans. Eknath Easwaran (Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1987).

Interstellar: Being in Love as a Black Hole

As difficult as it is to grasp the nature of a black hole and its all-consuming gravity, Interstellar (2014) also traces the powerful yet mysterious gravitational pull of human love, including that utterly unfathomable condition we know as “being in love.” We fall in love, which is an expression that presupposes gravity. Yet such all-consuming attachment may not even in principle have as its object our species itself. Even falling in love may be dangerous—just look at Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

“You have attachments, even without a family. I can promise you, the yearning to be with other people is powerful,” Cooper explains to Dr. Mann in the film to justify getting back to Earth as soon as possible. “That emotion is the foundation of what makes us human—not to be taken lightly,” the father of two adds. We are indeed social animals. Yet we don’t seem to be hard-wired to feel an attachment for our species itself, as demonstrated by humanity’s failure to keep global warming from potentially rendering our wise species, homo sapiens, extinct. In fact, the film pits the yearning to be with another person against the species’ very survival, suggesting that being in love is very powerful indeed as well as possibly ruinous to the species.

Brand’s yearning for a man she is in love with places her in a conflict of interest in giving her recommendation on which of two planets to visit. “Love is powerful, observable,” she says. Here on Earth, we know that being in love can lead people to make drastic life-choices that are irrational by any other calculus. A person in love may decide to suddenly walk away from years of work in a field without even a threat of regret in order to be with the other person in another city. A person whose love is unrequited may abruptly change a daily routine or even move to get some distance from the other person. In addition to hopefully being “cured” of being in love with him or her as soon as possible (though time usually takes it time as a thickener of sorts), ending the fierce, unrelenting pain of the rejection is also of high priority. The continued yearning without its object and the hurt from the rejection can be agonizing if the person loves deeply.

Brand describes being in love as being profound. “Maybe it’s some evidence, artifact of a higher dimension we can’t consciously perceive,” she explains to justify her planetary recommendation being consistent with seeing the man with whom she fell in love many years earlier. Love is the one thing we can perceive that transcends the dimensions of time and space. “I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen in a decade, who I know is probably dead,” she confesses. It is as if a worm-hole exists between the two souls, rendering their connection as immediate in spite of the oceans of space between them.

Drawing on Kant, I wonder whether being in love distorts both space and time in how they appear to us. The time spent with a beloved passes must quicker, at least initially, than does the time spent apart when the heart yearns to be at one with the other. The area where the beloved lives and works takes on a drastically different meaning and value, both in itself and relative to other places. This special “bump” may even be immune from the waning effects of time due to its own warp.

Finality, such as in the beloved cutting the person still in love off from any further contact and meaning it, is inherently at odds with the love’s innate ability to massage time and space. Particularly a person who falls deeply in love with another person has difficulty in finality at such depth. It is as if the constructed wall violates fate itself, if not the very nature of the love. Yet a person in love can be wrong in sensing fate being at work; the existential feeling in “falling head over heels” in love—that such loving comes out of one’s very core being—is not the sort of thing that a person can turn off (or on). 

To someone who has never been in love, all of this must seem like something in another galaxy. Even to a person who has fallen in love but is not presently in love with the person in love with him or her, it is easy to dismiss the other person’s condition as insignificant or even crazy. It can thus be easy to walk away without any guilt for what the other person is to go through emotionally.

“Maybe we should trust it even though we can’t understand it,” Bland says as she advocates going to the planet where her beloved may still be alive. But should we? If being in love distorts time and space by means of its relentless gravity, then is it wise for other people and the person in love to trust the emotion? He or she may be wrong about fate; the beloved may not be “the one” after all. Indeed, “the one” may actually be cruel, all too comfortable with finality.

Astonishingly, the person in love may still yearn for the underlying good in the other person even as the beloved is bent on inflicting so much hurt that he or she will never have to see the person again. A person in love willing to risk such rejection to work things out demonstrates just how much he or she values love above all else. It is also likely that a person willing to inflict a maximum pain to be rid of such a person forever demonstrates just how little he or she values love itself. Lest it be concluded that a black hole of sorts resides at his or her core being, falling in love may also be quite selfish. Faced with a powerful, relentless yearning for one person, a person in love is hardly unmoved by what he or she wants. Such love, as well as such hate, may not be trustworthy, and may even be dangerous. Perhaps our species would have evolved better had we the ability to fall in love with our species rather than individuals. 

Agora

Film has the potential to be so engrossing perceptually for the viewer-auditors that the medium can engage the human condition at a deep, unconscious level. At that level, the subconscious protects us in the games we so seriously play.  If done well, film-making crafts a coherent and complete story-world into which the voyageur can be temporarily lodged before returning to the ordinary world that now looks somehow different. The subtle perceptual change can result from part of the viewer’s subconscious having been made transparent, or realized, while in the film’s story-world. As concerns the religious domain, I contend that the medium has only touched the surface in holding a mirror up to ourselves. This is not to say that more anti-religion movies, such as Last Temptation of Christ, are the answer; neither are more palliative, apologist films, like The Ten Commandments and The Greatest Story Ever Told, the way to greater self-awareness for homo religiosis.  On account of their un-questioning, one-dimensionality (even when viewed with 3D glasses!), these films are more alike than their respective leitmotifs would suggest. Most importantly, none of these films raises penetrating questions that assume the validity of “the other side.” Agora does. The film evades easy categorization as anti-Christian or even anti-religion, and is thus able to effectively touch on the human condition beneath its denial and hypocrisies. My question here is how Agora transcends the predictable patina of reactionary films enough to widen our collective consciousness at the expense of hypocrisy and denial at the expense of the true spirit of religion. The key revolves around both subjecting religion (and particular religions) to critique and drawing on religion to supply an anchor. That is to say, religion is both truth and its antithesis.

Nietzsche advocates approaching truth itself as a problem rather than as something whose validity is held to be beyond question (i.e., sacred). Gandhi famously remarked that he used to think that truth (i.e., revelation, as in the Vedas) is God but came to realize that God is truth. To Gandhi, this meant that revelation contrary to non-violence is not of God. A film can subject truth itself as a problem (rather than as a conveniently partisan given) and enhance, thereby, human awareness of just what we are up to when we take ourselves as religious, whether in self (or group) identification or conduct. Once a film gets a grip on a truth and makes it a problem rather than a pallid backdrop, you can bet the river Styx in the human unconscious will be stirred, lapping over its banks as it tries to order its new-found energy gained from the antiseptic of unabashed sunlight.

Agora is based on historical events.[1] The director’s attention to visual accuracy, based in part on the ruins at Pompey, heightens the illusion of realism and the coherence of the story-world—both of which add to the credibility that is necessary to subject truth as a problem. Most importantly, the film holds off in taking sides in the religious disputes and related power-struggles, and thus avoids the pitfalls that go with an overwhelming partisan agenda. Moreover, the film tempers itself from becoming an outright anti-religious flick by highlighting hypocrisies from the vantage-point of “the other side” (i.e., religion) rather than the absence of religion in the human condition.

To be sure, the film will settle on the Christian patriarch Cyril as the antagonist—bent as he is on gaining power in cruel—and thus hypocritical—means. For once a person assumes the mantel of “the end justifies the means” to legitimate one’s dubious acts, the declining slope can be quite slippery indeed, and in a subtle way that can easily evade the person’s notice. Moreover, a bubble of pride can surround the denial rendering the hypocrisy all the more damning.

Lest it be concluded that the film finally reveals itself as an anti-Christian polemic, however, the film’s indictment is hardly straightforward.  Commenting on the film, Alejandro Amenabar, the director, distances his film from easy categorization by partisans as anti-Christian or anti-pagan by pointing out that the pagans were the first historically (as well as in the film) to lash out in violence.  “I really tried not to take anyone’s side,” Amenabar explains. “For most of the movie, you don’t know who is good and who is bad. This is because there are good people and bad people everywhere, among Christians, pagans, Jews.”[2] Agora is thus not as anti-Christian as it might seem in retrospect, and elements in that direction do not define what the film is ultimately about. The distance from overt religious partisanship gives the film the credibility necessary to take on, and thus make transparent, some of the important aspects of homo religiosis that are typically hidden (i.e., in society’s blind-spot).

 At the cusp of the ravaging conflict, Olympius, the pagan high-priest is incensed. Christians—including most notably their patriarch, Theophilus—are just outside the temple/library complex mocking statues of the gods, including most prominently the locally popular god, Serapis. Utterly unbecoming of the maturity typically expected in an elder official, Theon, a mathematician-philosopher and director of the library, backs up Olympius in answering that the insult must be answered (with violence).

Edward Gibbon describes Theophilus historically as “the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue, a bold, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood.”[3] In the film, the bishop stands before a crowd, making fun of a stone statue because it cannot move and talk (as if statues of Jesus could). That Theophilus and his successor, Cyril, presume to know the mind of their god is all the more astonishing, considering how childishly they behave as religious leaders. Later in the film (and historically), Cyril incites his protector monks into an anti-Jewish, anti-woman (via Paul’s letters), and anti-pagan frenzy, resulting in the clerics’ murder of Hypatia, an astronomer/mathematician who has the ear of Orestes, the Roman prefect. Historically, the monks skinned her alive. Fortunately, the director went with a sympathetic suffocation followed by the monks stoning her dead body. Love thy enemy is nowhere to be seen in the film, except perhaps when Hypatia frees Medorus, her Christian slave who had just almost raped her before stopping himself.

With their perspective lost or severely undermined even by high principles, the religious leaders on both sides illustrate what can happen when people take their respective religions too seriously. . Generally speaking, the warring religious parties presume they could not possibly be wrong in their chosen routes and how grave the insults are. It is as if any otherwise viable check or “escape value” is somehow circumvented in the human brain from acting a self-correction on the mind itself of a homo religiosis. Hence, religion in the hands of a human can be quite dangerous in that things once lit can easily get out of control without the parties involved having a clue.

Accordingly, the film approaches truth as understood by human beings as a problem rather than as sacred (i.e., beyond the reach of questioning). That is to say, the presumed infallibility and the related loss of perspective are to be made transparent by the film. Perspective and the related attitude of humility is the film’s anchor.

For example, after the first round of violence over the insults to the gods, the pagans are burrowed inside the massive temple-library complex and the Christians are outside, desperately wanting in to retaliate against the pagans and burn the library’s thousands of “pagan” texts. Mortally injured by one of his Christian slaves, Theon admits to his daughter, Hypatia that the insults against the gods did not have to be answered with violence after all. Looking at his injured co-religionists lying around him, he wonders aloud, “How could I have been so wrong?” Before the fight, he had been so certain that the insults must be answered, only to be left astonished at how utterly mistaken he had been. It seems as though religion in human hands is particularly susceptible to this sort of blindness, and rarely open to regaining perspective in a way that shows the person as Creature rather than Creator—as so very partial rather than whole. Put another way, Theon’s self-deprecating acknowledgement of having been so very foolish stands out in the film as a rarely invoked remedy for religious arrogance and presumptive knowledge. No such bar is presented in the domain of philosophy, with Hypatia continuously questioning her own thinking on the shape of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, and Orestes admitting when still one of her students, “Perhaps I’m just simple-minded.” Why is it that questioning and self-effacing recognition are so rarely pursued in religious matters?

The sheer rationalizing of bad behavior under Christian illustrates just how toxic homo religiosis can become. “I was forgiven, but now I can’t forgive,” Medorus admits to Ammonius, one of the fighting Nitrain monks, after Jews had attacked and killed a group of the monks. Answering him, Ammonius tries to assuage the younger man’s internal angst as if a recalibrating internal struggle were something to evade at all costs. “Jesus was a god, and only he can show such clemency.” That Jesus preaches forgive seven times seven and love your enemy to his followers rather than just for himself has somehow eluded the monk. Yet he is nonetheless confident enough in his own theological interpretation to assure the former slave, “God wants us here doing what we’re doing.” With such insight into the mind of God radiating out of mere mortals, truth itself scarcely has any room, and is barely even noticed, but in a lowly former slave and two pagan philosophers.

Religion itself is on trial in this film. That the standpoint assumed is religious rather than secular makes the indictment all the more credible and severe.  For example, Medorus’s recognition of his own lack of forgiveness and Theophilus’s reading of part of the Sermon of the Mount—blessed are those who thirst after righteousness—serve as anchors in the film from the Christian standpoint. The excesses in the name of the religion are thus to be measured not from outside in, but, rather, from what the religion could be were its adherents willing to pause, submit their chosen religious ideals and conduct to the rigors of self-questioning, and be willing to be wrong about what they presume they cannot be wrong about. In short, by subjecting themselves to the problem of truth (and themselves as virtual fonts thereof), the stringent hold of denial can, at least theoretically, be broken. However, the religious consciousness must be open to the realization of having gone awry under the cover of masked hypocrisy. Were the film to assume a wholly anti-religious attitude, the defenses of denial would easily gain the upper hand out of sheer defensiveness over impending doom (for the religion). So the religious basis of the film—established for example in Theon’s wonderment at his own stupidity concerning what the gods want as well as in Medorus’s admission of his refusal to forgive—is critical to religious truth being subjected to critique through the medium of the film.

Perhaps the film’s best contribution to expanding human consciousness of religiosity comes in exposing hypocrisies, lapsed judgment, and warped thinking.  For example, whether from a category mistake—treating knowledge as a substitute for (and thus threat to) divine revelation—or the faulty assumption that the presence of statues of deities in the library mean the scholarship must laud the gods and excoriate Christianity—the overzealous Christians ransack the library’s ancient scholarship.

Apparently, Theophilus had not gotten the memo. Many early Christian theologians interpreted the Biblical account of creation aided by Plato’s cosmology in the Timaeus.[4] More than two hundred years before Theophilus, Clement of Alexandria based his belief in the immortality of the soul on the Book of Psalms and Plato’s Republic on the final judgment.[5]  In fact, the second-century bishop of Alexandria argues, “Plato all but predicts the history of salvation.”[6] Justin Martyr comes even closer in linking Plato’s work to Christianity by seeing Socrates as a Christ-type and forerunner in being unjustly put to death in defense of Logos, or reason (Jesus being the preexistent Logos incarnate).[7] Similarly, Clement considered Homer’s Odysseus tied to the mast of a boat while passing the alluring Sirens as a foreshadowing of Jesus.[8] Clement read widely in classical Greek literature even as he considered himself as a faithful pupil of Jesus.[9] For all this drawing on “pagan” sources, Theophilus still felt the need to destroy the library in Alexandria, even if that meant acting contrary to what earlier Church fathers would have wanted.

In the film, the needed lens of perspective comes into play as the camera-shot pulls back from above to show the Christian monks clad in black robes scampering about like tiny ants running ancient scrolls to hastily-built fires. The true smallness of the species truly registers, however, only if the viewer recalls that each ant-like creature is presuming infallibly to know the mind of God.

Hypatia’s fixation on the stars also furnishes a benchmark for such, much needed, perspective. She allows herself to consider the possibility that the Earth is just one “wanderer” among others that revolve around the Sun. The panoramic camera-shots of Earth, moving slowly in, down to Alexandria and closer still to the library, show visually just how very small (and unimportant) our playpens truly are. We scamper around like ants in our daily lives, yet we presume nonetheless to act on behalf of our deities.

As “the instigators” were ensconced in the temple/library complex as the Christians waited pensively outside, an old man befitting Jung’s wisdom archetype pierces the grim veil of smoke and mirrors to see into the profound universe that surrounds us. Befitting the simplicity in the stars, the old man high up on a wall speaks of Aristarchus (c. 310-230 BCE), whose heliocentric model places the Earth and the other “wanderers,” or planets, as bodies orbiting the sun. Yet for all the beauty and easy of such heavenly simplicity, even Hypatia has trouble holding onto it, moving on to analyze elaborate alternative explanations that are—as Aristotle wrote of Plato’s system—“beautiful but false.”

Similar to Hume’s thesis in his Natural History of Religion that the human mind has trouble holding onto naked notions of divine simplicity, elaborations and divine contortions pervade through all the partisan warfare in the film as if inevitably, resulting in Christian monks stoning the dead body of innocent Hypatia. Even the sheer tolerance for such hypocrisy attests to just how presumptuous and self-serving we human beings can be in religious affairs even as we convince ourselves that we are acting on lofty principles.

During the fighting that ensues to “answer the insult” to the gods, one of Theon’s Christian slaves shouts over to the old man, “I’m a Christian!” Without any recognition whatsoever of the blatant contradiction, the slave attacks Theon by smashing his head with the butt of a sword. The sad implication is that Jesus had somehow failed, at least with respect to his preached message of turning the other cheek and loving enemies. It is as if the Christians would gladly nail even Jesus to the cross if he crossed them.

Indeed, in his audio commentary on the film, Amenabar says he views Hypatia as a Christ figure. The director says he has “a feeling that Hypatia, somehow, shared characteristics with Jesus. She had disciples, she would evoke feelings of brotherhood, she would preach tolerance, and eventually, and unjustly, due to political reasons, she was martyred and murdered.”[10] Actually, as in the case of Jesus, religious reasons were also in the mix.

In the film and historically, the Nitrian monks are supporters and enforcers, of Cycil’s anti-pagan message (e.g., that Hypatia is a witch). In the film, Hypatia puts herself out there by walking in public to her house. A small group of the monks corner her, and, quite ironically, take her to the bishop’s church in the library complex. Out of love for his pagan former master, Medorus, who earlier admits he does not know how to forgive, suffocates her while the other monks are out scrounging for stones. When they return, they stone Hypatia (presuming her to still be alive). The role of Hypatia as a Christ figure becomes very important to understanding the significance of the murder—and through it, the state of Christianity itself—both in the film and historically (she was actually skinned alive). In killing a Jesus figure, the blind monks effectively discredit their own faith without having a clue of having done so. Like light making its way to Earth from a distant star, the news of the fallen stars had not reached those stars themselves.

In conclusion, Amenabar effectively evaded a polemical film by keeping the viewers from being able to identify the antagonist early on.  Presumptuousness under the subterfuge of religion is the true culprit—the real antagonist. We are human, all too human, scampering around like ants in our “agendas,” and yet in spite of our smallness, and because of it, we presume to know the mind of God. We easily substitute “I know” for what is actually belief, and yet we presume that we cannot be wrong about what we think we know. Put another way, our religions may speak volumes more about us than anything transcending the limits of human cognition and perception and thus inherently ineffable. Interestingly, Hypatia was a neoplatonist in line with Plotinus, who had taught that ultimate reality is beyond the reach of the human mind. His writing anticipates Kant’s distinction between the noumenal (i.e., things in themselves) and phenomenal (i.e., appearance). We mere mortals seem to have an intractable difficulty staying put in the sand box of appearances instead of wandering around informing others of the truth, saying “I have the truth; you just have your opinion.” That truth eludes all of us somehow escapes our landscape of possibilities; we don’t even recognize the stench of our own hypocrisy, and yet we take it for granted that we know even the mind of God. Agora completes the circle, or ellipse, by showing us just how dangerous arrogance perched on stilts can be during a flood. By all rights, our innate sense of omniscience should be underwater, and yet it presumes virtual infallibility. Agora provides cognitive and visual perspective that can cut the stilts down to size and thus enable a more authentic homo religiosis to finally emerge from the dark miasma of empty pride.

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[1] According to the director, this “movie is very much based on true stories.” Alejandro Amenabar, Commentary on Agora.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: The Modern Library, n.d.), Vol. 2, p. 57.

[4] Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, 1985), p. 61.

[5] Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 5.14.

[6] Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries, p. 44.

[7] Ibid. See Justin Martyr, I Apology 5, 46; II Apology 10.

[8] Ibid., p. 42.

[9] Ibid., p. 38.

[10] Amenabar, Commentary.