Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist

Decades before dying while doing battle with the demon possessing Regan NacNeil in The Exorcist (1973), Rev. Lankester Merrin successfully extracts the same demon from a young man in Kenya. An African chief (or medicine man) tells Merrin at the end of Dominion: The Prequel to the Exorcist (2005) that he has made a rather bad enemy of the demon, which was not done with the priest. We know from The Exorcist that the demon will eventually kill the priest, but that is by no means the final word on a distinctively religious battle because in that domain, the human soul is eternal rather than necessarily tethered to a corporeal body. It is important, moreover, not to reduce religion to one of its aspects, or, even worse, to the stuff of any other domain, including the supernatural. Dominion reduces Christianity to one belief-claim and relies on supernaturalism to validate the religious phenomena in the film.

In the old church during at the film’s climatic event, Merrin incessantly repeats the identity of the Trinity to repulse and repel the demon from the young African man. Of itself, the very existence of the triune deity is abhorrent to the demon, likely because it, like Satan, is jealous of God’s pre-eminence and superiority. Even so, is repeating “Christ compels you” over and over sufficient for the demon to give up the possessed body? It seems realistic to assume that such an approach would reduce to a “No he doesn’t, yes he does, no he doesn’t” back-and-forth without a resolution. Adding potency, Merrin could preach the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels to the demon, which could be expected to reject in utter disgust the value of compassion as benevolentia universalis and especially to one’s detractors and even enemies. In addition to presenting the way into the kingdom of God to the demon, Merrin could try to convert the demon as a way of repulsing it enough to stop possessing the young man. Merrin could also point out that God is love, and what that means from a distinctly theological standpoint. For example, Merrin’s dialogue could include, “God is love—the sort that is self-emptying (i.e., agape) and this is superior to your puffed-up ego-pride by which you put yourself above Jesus’s voluntary sacrifice for us.” Besides being more distasteful than merely “Christ compels you” to the demon, the enhanced theological dialogue voiced by the priest would present the audience with a more substantive understanding of Jesus’s message in the Gospels than merely that he is the Son of God. Furthermore, that “Christ compels you” is coming from a “weak vessel” rather than from Christ himself means that the priest’s reliance on that line is not the best strategy for convincing the demon to give up the body. This is especially the case because Merrin had lost his faith and only recovered it because Rev. Francis had strongly asserted, “Satan is real.” If the basis of Francis’s declaration is not based in the religious domain—that is, is actually exogenous—then to the extent that Merrin follows suit, it is no surprise that the demon eventually—in The Exorcist—kills him.

Rev. Francis takes a long time to believe that the young African man is actually possessed. It is only when Francis sees the burn marks on the man’s forehead just after Francis has pressed a small crucifix on the man’s skin that that young priest believes that Satan is real. The religious faith of Rev. Merrin in God is in turn stimulated to return by Francis’s loud declaration, “Satan is real!” Whereas God as the Creator is like the condition for all that exists, and thus not an entity as we think of entities, Satan, and his demons are entities more easily recognized by the human mind. So it makes sense that faith in God could be derived from a declaration that Satan is real. The problem is that it is a supernatural empirical effect on young possessed man’s forehead that signifies and, even more troubling, validates the underlying religious phenomenon.

Even though such supernatural special-effects, including the fires that spontaneously start in the old church to provide lighting for Merrin and the demon, make for good cinema, the distinction between scientifically-valid empirical yet not-understood (and thus supernatural) happenings and religious phenomena is important. The supernatural is a subtype of natural science because the realm is empirical. Put another way, the supernatural can be thought of as being on the turf of science—just not (yet) explained. For the criteria and content of natural science to over-reach onto the domain of religion, even overriding the criteria innate to that domain, is to incur a category mistake. Basing the claim that Satan is real on burn-marks on a forehead treats empirical verification as determinative of the existence of a theological entity whose existence and basis transcends the empirical world rather than is based in it. This essence of religion renders it qualitatively different, and thus unique, from other, even closely related domains. Especially in a religion of the heart, such as Christianity, the validity of religious truth cannot rightfully come from seeing burn marks on someone’s forehead. Taking the latter as decisive gives a free hand to superstition.

Therefore, both Francis and Merrin depend on a non-religious marker to prove the existential reality of Satan, and, by extension, God. The meaning that God represents, which is theological love, which in turn is that which Satan rejects, is by implication not self-validating. This is deeply problematic from a religious standpoint. Depending on supernatural events or signs not only slights the distinctly theological meaning, but also remakes the theological into something else: the unexplained in natural science. The value of compassion being extending to rude people, for example, and even to detractors who disvalue rather than respect does not depend on unexplained observable phenomena. Either a person values agape love or not. Either such love is appreciated in one’s heart as being of great value, or as weakness. This judgment, rather than lines like, “Christ compels you,” captures what it means to internalize Jesus’s example and preachments in the Gospels. To a demon, those preachments may be more distasteful  than demands by a priest of Christ compelling obedience if the substance and essence of God is indeed love rather than domination to be served.

The Physician

In the 11^th century, Christians were not welcome in Persia, so in the film, The Physician (2013), Rob Cole, a Christian, pretends to be Jewish in order to travel from Western Europe to study at the medical school of Ibn Sina, a famous physician in Isfahan. He eventually reveals his religion as that of “the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” when he is on trial before the local imam. The Jews there doubtlessly feel used and betrayed. As interesting as interreligious controversy can be, I contend that the nature of Cole’s crime is more significant from the standpoint of religion itself. In short, the film illustrates what bad effects are likely to come from committing a category mistake with respect to religion and another domain. Whether conflating distinct domains or erasing the boundary between them, category mistakes had diminished the credibility of religion as being over-reaching by the time that the film was made. As for the matter of interreligious differences, the sheer pettiness by which the three Abrahamic religions that share the same deity have made mole hills into untraversable mountains is hardly worthy of attention, whereas that which makes religion as a domain of phenomena unique and thus distinct from other, even related domains, is in need of further work. The film could have done more in this regard.

Rob Cole’s crime is the desecration of a human corpse by dissecting it. It may be that dissection does not count as desecration because the study is done systematically and for the beneficial outcome of progress in medical science, but this argument is not even presented to the imam in the film. Even though the old man agreed to the procedure just before he died in Ibn Sina’s hospital (and medical school), and Cole’s purpose was to save lives by discovering human organs, the imam sentences not only Rob, but also Ibn Sina to be executed for having “violated Allah.” Presumably the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish deity is against progress in the science of medicine such that sickness is not so often a death-sentence. Holding to a dogma nonetheless demonstrates one of the fallibilities of the human mind when it enters the domain of religion. It is not as if Cole’s dissection and study would cause death and destruction—two things that are typically associated with evil. In fact, Rob, with Ibn’s assistance, which alone is an interesting role reversal, successfully operates on Shah Ala ad Daula, the king of Isfahan, using the knowledge obtained during the dissection of the corpse. That operation in turn enables the Shah to survive the next day, when his presence is needed as his army sets out to fight a radical Islam-only invading force to which the local imam is allied. That force is against the presence of the Jews in the city, and would certainly against the Shah pardoning Cole and Sina. In short, the Shah was too secular and tolerant for the imam and the related invading king.

The “religious” rationale for finding Cole in violation of Allah’s law should be treated as more problematic in the film. Cole, Sina, or even the Shah could engage with the imam during or after the “trial” on the validity in religious terms of the injunction against medical science advancing by study of human internal-organs, for what is scientific—and thus of that domain—is being claimed by the domain of religion. Hence it is assumed by everyone in the film except for the medical student and his teacher that religion can legitimately override medicine even in the domain of medicine.  I contend that this overreaching is invalid—it is akin to an invading army taking over a city—because religion’s coverage should fit within its borders. In other words, religion has primary jurisdiction over that which is distinctly religious. The overall domain of a religious deity holds sway within the religious domain, just like a king’s authority only extends throughout his kingdom even if he claims to be ruler of the world. Kings of other kingdoms could rightly object to the latter claim by insisting that another king’s authority extends only to the borders of that king’s realm. This does not invalidate the meaning of “ruler of the world” within that realm, just as “God is omnipresent and omnipotent” has meaning in the religious domain even though science and other domains, including metaphysics, psychology, and history, do not yield to the authority that is in the religious realm. Paradoxically, by overreaching, the credibility of that authority is diminished even within the religious domain. In the film, the validity of Cole’s dissection of a willing corpse is stronger than that of the religious decree against “desecrating” human corpses regardless of any benefits from it in other domains. The egocentric over-reaching of religion can be likened to a bully, who, once made transparent, is typically viewed as less than credible.

The gap between whether Cole (and Sina) should be applauded or punished is so large that they can be said to manifest from different social realities. Cole and Sina heal the Shah as a result of Cole’s dissection and his teaching thereof to a very enthusiastic Sina, yet the local imam ignores or dismisses the value of this progress and its benefit—perhaps not just for religious reasons as he is politically against the ruling Shah. Cole utterly dismisses the validity of the Imam’s ruling and sentencing on the basis of Cole and Sina having offended or violated Allah. Whereas Cole and Sina may have been religious, the narrow, and one-sided ruling makes sure that even if the two men survive, they would never be fully religious again. Running a hospital as a physician back in London at the end of the film, Rob Cole surely looks at religion itself more skeptically than he did before hearing the imam’s narrow ruling.

The upshot is that confining the authority and validity of religion to its own domain so it does not over-reach with the presumption of legitimately being able to overrule the innate authorities in other domains in those domains is a good thing. This does not mean that the distinctly religious belief that a deity is sovereign without limitation is rendered invalid in the religious domain. Likewise, claims that everything is political and religion is really just psychology (e.g., Freud) or a function of means of production (e.g., Marx) are valid only in the domains of psychology and economic philosophy, respectively. Religionists are not the only guilty party in terms of over-extending the authority of their domain onto others even over the authorities in those domains. Within a given domain, I contend that the substance and criteria of the domain is worthy of respect in itself rather than as a subsidiary of another domain’s substance and criteria. Disrespect in this respect may even contribute towards a mental habit that thwarts interreligious dialogue and peace. Even respect between people may be diminished.

In the film, Hope Gap (2019), Grace attempts to use the Roman Catholic Church’s religious injunction of legal divorce to undercut the validity of her separated husband’s request for a divorce. Edward’s request is unhinged from any reality, Grace insists (as if by even her faith she is omniscient with respect to realities). That she has been contemplating suicide suggests that she may be the person untethered from a viable reality. From the standpoint of a legal system of a country, the religious dictate of one party of a marital separation should not be allowed to overrule a law that permits divorce even if the counterparty (Edward) is religious. In the office of a lawyer, the substance and criteria of the law should prevail, just as the substance and criteria of distinctly religious meaning should prevail in the office of a priest, imam, minister, or rabbi. Those four functionaries have much more in common, being in and of the same domain, than they may realize. In fact, they could help each other to resist the power-aggrandizing temptation to overreach their religious authority in usurping the authority of authorities in other domains. Then the substance and unique criteria of the religious domain of human experience would be more respected. At the very least, humility and self-discipline—“coloring within the lines”—naturally earns respect.

Lest this critique be misconstrued as secular in nature, the upshot is that the stuff “within the lines” of the religious domain (i.e., distinctly religious phenomena, such as religious meaning that does not depend on history or science, as is not reducible to ethics or psychology) deserves to be uncovered from underneath the weeds that have hitherto been allowed to grow and even thrive from seeds that have drifted over from other gardens. In the film, the imam may not even understand what desecration means in a religious sense, and yet he is quick to interlard a religious belief as if it deserved to be decisive and thus hegemonic in the political and (related) jurisprudential domains. Similarly, I wonder whether people who deem themselves capable of accusing others of committing abominations as if the word itself warrants death know that the word only means “disliked by God.” This is distinct from “hated by God,” of which evil unequivocally qualifies. To be sure, in the religious domain, such activities that are disliked by the deity are not recommended, for the actual point is likely to obey God, but the commonly held dire connotations of the word as if dislike were equivalent to hate misses the mark and yet precisely such “making mole hills into mountains” has given rise to much suffering and harm historically. The sheer presumptuous of ignorance and what it feels entitled to, is, I suppose, hated rather than merely disliked from the perspective of the very condition of existence, or Creation, even when that condition or ultimacy is personified as a deity with divine attributes even if they anthropomorphic in appearance. Film has amazing potential as a medium through which such thoughts can be projected and put in dialogue with some depth and extent beyond what is typically done by filmmakers who want to hurry a plot as if skipping a stone quickly on the surface of a lake.

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).

The Exorcist

One of the most iconic films of the horror-film genre, The Exorcist (1973) focuses on the duality of good and evil that the film’s director, William Friedkin, maintained is in a constant struggle in all of us. The dialogue between the two priests performing the exorcism on the one side and the Devil possessing Regan on the other not only reveal the duality, but also the essence of evil itself. Once this essence is grasped, interesting questions can be asked that are distinctly theological, as distinct from modernity’s trope of evil portrayed in terms of, and even reduced to, supernatural movements of physical objects. The decadent materialist version of the theological domain stems from modernity’s bias in favor of materialism and empiricism. In other words, highlighting supernatural physics as being foremost in representing the religious realm is how secularity sidelines religion, rather than how religion itself is. The bias of modern society is very clear in the film as the “professionals” go through alternative explanations first from the field of medicine, privileging the somatic (physical) and then the psychological domains of medicine. In other words, the narrative establishes (or reflects) a hierarchy of three qualitatively different levels of descending validity: the somatic is primary, and only then the psychological, and, if the first two do not furnish an explanation, then, and only then, are we to turn to the theological as metaphysically (i.e., supernaturally) real primarily shown by physical objects defying the laws of physics. Science, rather than religion, is thus still in the driver’s seat. The bias in favor of materialism is in the assumption that only after feasible hypotheses from modern medicine are nullified can theological explanations be considered (as credible). In this way, the film reflects the hegemony of materialism that has taken hold since the Enlightenment, and the relegation of the theological as “magical” supernaturalism, as in a bed levitating of objects flying around Regan’s bedroom. The essence of evil is instead interior. If religion is a matter of the heart, then how could evil be otherwise?

In the film, the physicians searching for the cause of Regan’s bizarre behavior initially believe that a lesion in the girl’s frontal lobe is the cause. The two physicians are so preoccupied with a somatic (i.e., physical) cause that they ignore the mother’s account of the supernatural shaking of Regan’s bed. One of the physicians insists, “I don’t care about the bed!” The monopolization of the physical medically is here being ridiculed by the filmmaker, for it is ridiculous to ignore a bed whose jumping around so obviously surpasses the physical strength of a child. Secular modernity is being portrayed as defiant, even ideological in the very least in being narrow-minded and petulant and obstinate like a spoiled child.

When no lesion is found, the physicians recommend that a psychiatrist be consulted. Even then, the obvious indications of the involvement of a supernatural entity or force are dismissed. Implicitly, religion is reduced to psychology. It is as if Rudolf Otto’s text, The Idea of the Holy, could be reduced to Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo. In the film, the priest Karras is a pastoral counselor, and he is brought in precisely for his knowledge of psychology. So when the possibility of psychosis can be excluded and the psychiatrists recommend that a priest be consulted to perform an exorcism, Regan’s mother Chris brings in Karras. Bridging both worlds, he confronts his own lack of faith by admitting to himself that Regen really is possessed by a demon. The elder priest, Merrin, is firmly in the theological domain, and so he has no doubt that he is battling a supernatural being of pure evil.

We have finally reached the theological level, having dispelled medicine in its two major categories. Karras’ loss of faith is no more. Significantly, what ultimately convinces the guilt-ridden priest of the distinctly religious basis of Regan’s problem are not the shaking or levitating bed. Rather, Regan’s impossible interior knowledge is what convinces Karras that a being other than Regan exists in the possession. Only an entity other than Regan could know of Karras’ guilt regarding his recently deceased mother and be able to speak English in reverse as well as in Latin. These interior signs are more important to the theological domain than are the physical (i.e., materialism) manifestations of the bed levitating and objects flying around Regan’s bedroom. The latter titillating optical displays make good movie-viewing but are hardly in themselves evil, whereas tormenting a priest about his guilt is because evil is the opposite of love.

Nonetheless, Hollywood has focused on how and whether to depict the Devil empirically—as yet another object that can be seen. In the film, The Ninth Gate (1999), the presence of the Devil is shrouded in bright light, contradicting the commonly held notion that evil lies in darkness because it is absent from the light of God’s truth. The viewers never get to see the Devil. In Rosemary’s Baby (1968), the Devil is only visible in one scene, when the beast rapes Rosemary. As in The Ninth Gate, the essence of evil is not depicted; the interior life of the supernatural being is not revealed even though it is much closer to the essence of evil. Likewise, in Poltergeist (1982), the characters’ astonishment is at how the souls and the supernatural entity appear visually.

The Exorcist is an improvement on those films in that even though the Devil itself is not shown (except in an archeological sculpture), its mentality is clear from how it relates to the priests through the dialogue. The blinding white light depicted in The Ninth Gate, the animalistic look of the Devil in the rape scene in Rosemary’s Baby, and the levitating bed and flying objects in The Exorcist do not do justice to the theological realm; in fact, they are distractions. They reveal modernity’s warped caricature of religion in reducing it to carnival tricks. The science of medicine can easily be viewed as superior. The emphasis on the empirical is itself in line with the materialist orientation of modernity. In simpler terms, depicting the theological in terms of physical objects is in service to the preference for modern (empirical) science. I submit that the nature or essence of religion is not material or physical; rather, the essence can be found in sentiments like love and hate.

It is in the dialogue between the Devil and the priests that The Exorcist goes beyond the other films in depicting the nature of evil, and thus of the Devil. That the entity possessing Regan enjoys tormenting the two priests is much more important than what the Devil looks like, or that it makes Regan’s bed levitate.

Once presented with the Devil’s nature, movie-goers can come away from the movie thinking theologically on theology’s own terms rather than on those belonging and pertaining to a qualitatively different domain (e.g., the natural sciences). For example, viewers might consider whether the Devil’s mentality, as depicted in the film, could be loved. Here, a crucial distinction must be made to avoid a Satanist (i.e., pro-evil) misinterpretation.  For the two exorcist priests to love the entity possessing Regan, they would be ministering to the entity with the intention of saving the mentality from itself or else riding the entity of the sordid mentality. Support for the claim that evil can be ministered to exists in  the Christian Bible.

In the Gospels, Jesus says of the evil men responsible for having him crucified, Forgive them, for they know not what they do. Rather than approving or loving their evil mentality, he is forgiving them for having it. In publicly pronouncing his forgiveness, he is ministering even to them, and as a result it is possible, given free will, that even they could be saved from themselves (i.e., the evil mentality). What if Jesus were to minister to the Devil tempting him in the desert? Can an entity whose very essence is the mentality be the recipient of a loving, unconditional heart?

On the ministering side, agape, or selfless love, is unconditional, and for this to hold, an entity that is evil cannot be excluded even if it excludes itself. Even caritas, Augustine’s interpretation of Christian love (derived from Plato’s love of the eternal moral verities) that includes self-love albeit sublimated to having God as its object, is universal benevolence. Caritas seu benevolentia universalis, according to Augustine. A good will (benevolentia) is not universal (universalis) if even the most squalid entity is excluded as an object of the love qua benevolence.

On the Devil’s side, can such an entity be rid of its mentality? I submit that it can, and thus the evil mentality is not the essence of the entity. Because Lucifer falls from grace, the fallen angel (i.e. the Devil) was once without the cold mentality. Therefore, that mentality cannot be the Devil’s essence. The entity can be distinguished from, and thus rid of, its current mentality.  

In The Exorcist, imagine if the two priests were to pray for the Devil’s soul even as the entity enjoys tormenting the two men. Forgive it, for it knows not the love of God. This is the perspective that enables a ministering to rather than an acceptance or approval of the mentality. What if the priests were willing to sacrifice their lives to save the Devil and not just Regan? It seems that the battle against evil would be won by unconditional love, but would the battle metaphor even fit were the priests ministering to the Devil rather than merely getting it to leave by shouting at it?  This would not be to love the mentality as if it were something to be praised; rather, it would be to state that love can not only survive death for the faithful, but also reach into the cold darkness of deep space devoid of God’s presence.

A young Satanist once told me that he loves Satan. “Then God is present in you after all,” I replied, “because God is love.” Love can reach into places that are presumably beyond God, where hatred reigns. Of course, it is one thing for a Satanist to feel love, even though misdirected to an entity with an evil mentality, and quite another for that entity to let go of its all-consuming hatred, ultimately, of God. In the Gospels, not even the Crucifixion dislodges the entity’s mentality from Jesus’ antagonists.

In the television mini-series, Jesus of Nazareth (1977), several members of the Jewish hierarchy in Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin, show no remorse even while hearing Jesus quoting from the Hebrew scripture while suffocating on a cross. One of the members says, “Even now, while nailed to a cross, he quotes from scriptures. Even now.” What would it take for the official’s astonishment at the sincerity of Jesus’ selfless piety to trigger a recognition of the wrong that he had just committed against an innocent person whose piety is evinced even under such extreme duress? After the Crucifixion, a Roman centurion who tortured Jesus rebukes Zerah, a scribe of the Sanhedrin who had instigated Jesus’ arrest, for continuing his obsession against Jesus. Not even having Hebrew guards stationed at the tomb are enough, Zerah insists, because Jesus’ disciples could lie that Jesus has risen, so Roman guards are necessary. After listening to Zerah’s relentless conspiracy theory, the centurion remarks, “What sort of person are you, if I may ask? His death is not enough for you.” Theologically, the message is that intractable stubbornness can continue to hold up complicity in the suffering and death of Jesus. By implication, the Devil surely is not touched by Jesus’ vicarious sacrifice on behalf of others. However, if enough people use the Crucifixion in the narrative as a model and instantiate it in their own confrontations with evil in other people, perhaps it will lose its force even where it is strongest. In other words, perhaps if instead of fighting against evil, we minister to those whose mentality is evil, the very notion of battle will dissolve, and with it, evil too.

In the film Mary Magdalene (2018), Mary Magdalene refutes Peter’s conception of the Kingdom of God as awaiting the Second Coming for the people to rise and Jesus be crowned king so Roman rule would finally be vanquished. “Jesus never said he would be crowned king,” she tells the disciples. “The kingdom is here, now,” she explains in dispelling the disciples’ misinterpretation of Jesus’ preaching on the Kingdom. The disciples see no kingdom because the Roman occupation has not ended, but she insists that “it’s not something we can see with our eyes; it’s here, within us. All we need to do is let go of our anguish and resentment and we become like children, just as he said. The Kingdom cannot be built by conflict, not by opposition, not by destruction; [rather] it grows with us, with very act of love and care, with our forgiveness.” Apply this rendering of the Kingdom of God to Jesus’ commandment to love one’s enemies and we have a kingdom ultimately built by ministering to one’s enemies, including coming to their aid, and, in so doing, vanquish our own hatred. Our foremost enemy is the mentality of evil. A person letting go of one’s own anguish and resentment first means letting go of that interior mentality, which is a prerequisite to changing the world by loving one’s enemies. In actuality, coming to the aid of one’s enemies can dissipate one’s own interior mentality of evil and thus bring inner peace, so the causal relationship goes in both directions. A person does not have to be at peace in order to extend love to one’s external enemies by ministering to them and thus dissipating external conflict, but having let go of one’s own hatred certainly helps.

In the Exorcist, the Devil tortures the priest Karras by reminding him of his guilt about having consigned his mother to a nursing home. Karras resists the Devil’s manipulation rather than views it as an opportunity to let go of the anguish. He could say, You know, you’re right. I screwed up, but I’m only human and I’m sorry. I do love my mother. He could then let the anguish go. Furthermore, he could pivot to ministering to his enemy’s anguish in feeling rejected by God. That would surely unleash fury. How dare you minister to me! It is pertinent to ask, what if one (or both) of the priests were to sacrifice his life while ministering as loving the enemy? That would be to instantiate the model of the Crucifixion. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do” extends that model even to the benefit of enemies. Could even the Devil’s cold heart ignore that model being applied for the Devil itself? The answer, it seems to me, hinges on whether the Devil’s evil mentality is the Devil’s essence or merely an attribute; of the two, only the latter can be changed. I have in mind here Aristotle’s distinction between substance and accident. I submit that an entity of the sort that can have a mentality can be distinguished from a mentality because of free-will, which pertains to such an entity rather than to a mentality. If this is so pertaining to the Devil, then surely people who have an evil mentality can be ministered to from the standpoint of unconditional love as benevolentia universalis applies to one’s enemies.

The preceding thought experiment on whether the Devil can be saved from itself is distinctly theological. We aren’t thinking about Regan’s possession in terms of her bed violently jumping and levitating. In being valid in its own right and on its own terms, thinking distinctively theologically relegates and perhaps even defeats the secular primacy of the world of physical objects, and thus materialism. The audacious and derisive encroachment on religion even to the point of rendering it as something primarily physical, empirical, and material, rather than as interior to the human condition, is accordingly pushed back. The essence of religion can be investigated and discovered on its own terms and thus rendered more accurate and complete.

First Reformed

First Reformed (2017) contains fundamental ideas concerning the human condition and wrestles with the relationship between religion and politics.  Ideas play a significant role in the film, hence it can be used in support of the thesis that film is a viable medium in which to make philosophical (and theological) ideas transparent and derive dramatic tension from clashing ideas. In this film, the ideas that clash concern the role of religion in the political issue of climate change—or is that issue primarily religious?

Early in the film, Rev. Ernst Toffer counsels a despairing environmentalist, Michael. After listening to Michael provide a litany of scientific reasons for despair on climate change as inevitably leading to the unlivability of the species, Toffer acknowledges that “if Man’s accomplishments have brought us to the place where life as we know it may cease to exist in the near future,” such despair is new. In fact, if “humankind can’t overcome its immediate interests to ensure survival, then you’re right; the logical response is despair.” Nonetheless, Toffer proffers that wisdom is holding two contradictory truths—hope and despair—simultaneously; the holding of these truths simultaneously in the mind is life itself. Blackness—the sense that one’s life has no meaning—is something else. As for that, the reverend states that forgiveness and grace apply to us all. This leads Michael to ask, “Can God forgive us for what we have done to this world?” Rev. Toffer replies, “Who can know the mind of God? But we can choose the righteous life over evil.” The religious response to the despair over climate change rendering our species extinct (or at the very least very uncomfortable) is at the individual level: to lead a righteous life.

Righteous is predominately used in the religious domain; in the moral domain, good is used. It would sound strange to say that the righteous person should get into a political debate over pollution with an executive of a coal company even though prophets in the Torah confront kings over their abuse of power. But if no one can know the mind of God, at least concerning whether God is in favor of climate change, then it would presumably be impious (i.e. highly arrogant) of a person to urge coal company executives to reduce carbon emissions because that’s what God wants. The implication here is that climate change is a political issue, and that religious discourse should not encroach on the other domain.

Yet Rev. Toffer, in meeting in a diner with his senior pastor, Rev. Joel Jefffers, and Balq, an executive with an energy company, turns to the polluter and asks, “Will God forgive us for what we’re doing to his creation?” Balq dismisses the question as “loose talk.” Shifting to the political issue, Toffer tells both men what Michael had said: that a scientific consensus of 97% of relevant scientists provides a very solid basis on which to take climate change, and thus pollution, very seriously. Michael had also told Toffer that in 2010, the IPCC predicted that if nothing is done by 2015, environmental collapse would be irreversible. Nothing was done, Michael said in despair, at least as of 2017. Just as Michael claimed, people—including Barq here—have not been listening. Even worse, I submit, is when people not educated in natural science presume nonetheless that they as individuals have a legitimate veto or override over the scientists. Perhaps just as Yahweh uses a flood to clean the slate on mankind, so too God may be using climate change to expunge such an arrogant species.

Balq is arrogant in dismissing the scientific consensus and any knowledge Toffer may have (e.g., from Michael) by retorting, “It’s a complicated subject.” Toller shakes his head no. It is actually not complicated; just look at who benefits. Who profits? Perhaps Toller is implying that Balq’s presumed superiority in understanding the impact of industry on climate change boils down to a desire to continue profiting? For Balq then shorts, “Can we just keep politics out!” Claiming the turf for religion, Rev. Toller counterclaims, “This isn’t politics—what God wants.” But then Toffer has just slipped into his own trap. “Oh, you know the mind of God?” Balq asks. “You spoke to Him personally? He told you His plans for Earth?”

Toffer himself does not believe that politics and religion are mutually exclusive on this issue, and thus by implication in general. Speaking later in his senior pastor’s office, Toffer says, “The whole world is a manifestation of God’s holy presence [omnipresent]. The Church can lead, but if we say nothing? The U.S. Congress still denies climate change.” Referring back to Balq, Toffer adds, “We know who spoke for big business, but who spoke for God.” At that point, Rev. Jeffers pivots his chair so his back faces Toffer and says, “Creation waits in eager expectation of liberation from bondage.” In other words, don’t anger our major donor by getting involved; rather, wait for God to deal both with the planet and the polluters, assuming of course that big business hasn’t been a tool being used by God to applying judgement on an arrogant, conflict-ridden species. “So we should pollute so God can restore?,” Toffer asks, exacerbated. “We should sin so God can forgive?” Jeffers suggests that exterminating us may be part of God’s plan, to which Toffer almost jumps out of his chair. For 40 days and 40 nights it rained; maybe this time God has had it with the species.

From a religious standpoint, therefore, we mere mortals cannot know which side of the political debate is consistent with God. We could be inadvertently thwarting God’s plan by inventing carbon-absorption technology, for example, or the inventive spark may come from God and thus be in line with God’s plan. On this issue at least, religion should step back from entering the political domain. To seek to dominate it would be even more presumptuous. 

What then can a religious person do within the religious domain in which God is both the constraint and the hope? The only clue given in the film comes in Toffer’s advice to Michael to live a righteous life. Righteousness is lived out in conformity with God, rather than in presuming to know God’s mind and act outwardly based on that knowledge. Yet righteousness also includes acting as God's stewards of his creation on Earth. This point was not explicit in the film. Our species role as stewards involves doing what God would do. In the case of climate change: either it a case of us failing to do our job or climate change is part of God's plan and therefore arresting the trend lies beyond our normal custodial work. We typically  view climate change as our species' fault and further assume that we have failed as stewards. So we assume a religious rationale for political or business activism to cut carbon emissions. A CEO, for example, may apply Christian stewardship to his or her role as an ethical leader. 

Alternatively, from assuming an abject failure of righteous stewardship, we can see why God may have a plan that excludes our species such that climate change takes on the mythic role of the flood. Kierkegaard would say that we are left with these alternatives, whereas Hegal would urge us to find a higher synthesis. Such a synthesis, which resolves the contradiction in a higher unity, must fall short of knowing the mind of God because the synthesis comes from a finite mind. Divine revelation is of course another story. Absent that, we are not able to divine the divine mind, hence we are not able to know whether climate change is God's will or due to our failure as stewards to tend God's creation on Earth. Wisdom, Rev. Toffer says, is holding two conflicting ideas (hope and despair) in mind simultaneously. Absent divine revelation, our finite minds may are left in this case with the tension in the contradiction of hope and despair as life itself. In regard to the matter of religion claiming the upper hand in other domains such as politics, a higher synthesis is, I submit, possible even absent revelation. 

I submit that encroachment itself is unethical, and dominance in someone else's garden is especially so. It is problematic, therefore, that the boundary between the religious and political domains remains fraught with difficulty, as this may invite incursions. At the very least, that border ought to be respected, at least on the religious side; the political domain is fueled by the desire for expanding power, it being the essence of politics.

Screenwriting as Dramatic Sense-Making or Ideological Subterfuge?

Howard (p. 165) claims that the screenwriters of Witness (1985) were “wise enough not to attempt to coerce an answer out of the material, to make this an indictment or a thesis instead of an exploration. If they had the definite answer to force and violence in society, they shouldn’t [have made] a film but should [have gone] directly to the United Nations with it. What they have created is an exploration of a complex and troubling issue. Modern urban society isn’t depicted as all bad and the Amish aren’t all good; there are forms of force in both societies, just as there are admirable things about them both. While, in the end, one use of force triumphs over another, that can hardly be a universally applicable solution. Rather, what the filmmakers have done is to make the audience confront its own feelings about violence and the use of force, to see that it is complicated and there are no pat answers, but, most important, to explore how each of us feels about the various faces of force we come to know in the story.”

Analysis:

In the end, “one use of force triumphs over another,” but Howard claims that this choice does not represent an answer or thesis because the triumph of the force of community pressure (e.g., the Amish witnesses) over the force of violence “can hardly be a universally applicable solution.” I find this argument to be weak and even fallacious. As Howard admits, the film’s resolution is that the force of community “triumphs” over the force of violence. This is an answer to the question that asks which of the two types of force is more forceful. While certainly not everyone’s answer and not on the more general topic of “force and violence” in society, the “triumph” does represent the screenwriters’ answer to the question: which force is stronger: community norms or violence? At the very least, a point of view is expressed in the answer. It is implied, furthermore, that community norms should be valued over the violence of a hero (and certainly of a villain). Another implication is that a community should not be intimidated by threats of violence; silent witnesses have sufficient power to stop a villain from shooting even though he or she has the “monopoly of force”—or so we have been led to believe.

Should the film Witness have ended without an answer that can be taken as an ideological poiont-of-view? Had the screenwriters followed Howard’s advice, the audience would be left in the dark concerning whether the pressure of Amish witnesses resulted in the corrupt cop shooting Samuel or handing over the gun. The audience would be forced to remain agnostic concerning which of the two forces represented dramatically is inherently more powerful. Any ensuing exploration, as in discussing the theme at a coffee shop afterward, would suffer from a certain indeterminacy left by the film. More to the point, the audience could deservedly feel ripped off in not getting a full payoff through a resolution.

Rather than not expressing a view concerning which of the two types of force is (and ought to be) more powerful, the screenwriters were effective in proffering an “answer” or thesis because they had represented the contending theories fairly. “Modern urban society isn’t depicted as all bad and the Amish aren’t all good,” Howard writes. “There are forms of force in both societies, just as there are admirable things about them both.” Rather than being shoved down the audience’s throats, the answer or thesis provided as the resolution can thus be incorporated as one thesis amid the contending points represented throughout the film. The writers’ motive is not felt to be so much to preach as to explore the phenomenon and proffer one answer as if “and here’s what we think.”

“Preaching,” in contrast, occurs when a film is itself a one-sided view. The motive is to push one interpretation as the definitive answer. This is what Howard is reacting against, and with good reason. Nobody likes to be preached at. Ironically, “preaching” actually diminishes or detracts from a writer’s influence. In the field of business and society in business schools, for example, some of the writers are ideologues pushing an anti-corporate agenda. Their writing is not respected as academic scholarship outside of their own cadre.

Once I attended a conference at Harvard Business School on Amitai Etzioni’s socio-economic “theory.” The gurus at the “Mecca” of business academia told Etzioni that he was merely trashing the neo-classical economic paradigm without in its place proffering another theory. In spite of (and perhaps indicative of) the lack of academic content in what was in actuality an ideological thrashing of corporate capitalism, someone in attendance (presumably a professor from some university) stood up at his desk at one point and declared, “We should form a labor party!” as he pounded the desk with a clenched fist. I was stunned, but not really very surprised. So it goes when credibility has been compromised by “scholars” who are at their core advocates rather than explainers.

Screenwriters are also explainers in a way, as they explore a phenomenon of human experience by means of storytelling. According to Bill Johnson, storytelling is a process—one that “involves understanding the dramatic issue or idea at the heart of a story, and arranging a story’s elements to bring that issue to resolution in a way that offers the story’s audience a dramatic experience of fulfillment.” Johnson goes on to specify the relevant “unmet desires and needs we carry within our hearts” as being satisfied by “a sense of meaning and purpose” that can come through story. In other words, like a leader through vision, a storyteller can satisfy the basic human instinct for meaning by means of sense-making.

While an answer can surface during (or as a result of) an exploration of a dramatic idea, the point of the venture cannot be to prove a specific thesis. Besides the inherent multivaliancy of meaning being compromised by an overweening ideological agenda, the answer in a resolution should come out of the dramatic conflict, which is a working out of the dramatic idea, and therefore not predetermined a priori. In other words, a dramatic idea cannot be exhausted by a particular ideological agenda, so emphasizing the latter must result in the former being to a certain extent eclipsed. Furthermore, because characters take on lives of their own as they interact in the dramatic conflict, they cannot be pre-programmed or scripted. Hence, the resolution of that conflict cannot be known up front, though it can be foisted, artificially.

Therefore, the screenwriter’s motive going in should not be to prove or advocate an initial thesis. Rather, curiosity or interest in a question involving the human condition lies behind the exploration, which in turn gives each new ground its due even as the story works its way to a completion (yet on a continuing road). This is actually not far from what motivates a scholar and how one conducts a study (this is perhaps why professors tell so many stories as part of their lectures).

In both cases, the passion is (or should be) directed on a phenomenon rather than on the writer or scholar him- or herself. This is my “answer” or thesis in this particular instance; it was not my point in writing—nor could I have even known of the “answer” arrived at here when I started my ratiocinations above, for the ensuing reasoning led to it. Nor do I view my thesis as set in stone or definitive, for I am still curious about the topic, so it won’t be long until my thoughts again take flight, leaving my little thesis behind as though it had always been destined to live on the island of misfit toys. Similarly, a screenwriter’s attachment (and loyalty) is to the curious phenomenon at hand and to story itself as an explanatory, exploratory device, rather than to a thesis or “agenda.” Sporting an answer along the way need not eclipse the exploration; indeed, a good effort grounded in passion for the phenomenon is apt to spawn a thesis or two, which in turn can be viewed as an oasis. The really mature screenwriter will even view them as mirages! Indeed, is not a story, including its characters and their little spats, a mirage of sorts? The key is perhaps to hold this perspective and yet to be able to take one’s stories seriously enough—without preaching.

Sources:

David Howard and Edward Mabley, The Tools of Screenwriting: A Writer’s Guide to the Craft and Elements of a Screenplay. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).

Bill Johnson, Essays on the Craft of Dramatic Writing. http://home.teleport.com/~bjscript/index.htm  See also Charles Deemer, Screenwright: The Craft of Screenwriting (Xlibris, 1998), pp. 117-19.

Realive

In 2016, Robert McIntyre, a graduate of MIT, became the first person to freeze and then revive a mammalian brain—that of a white rabbit. “When thawed, the rabbit’s brain was found to have all of its synapse, cell membranes, and intracellular structures intact.”[1] The film, Realive, made that same year, is a fictional story about a man with terminal cancer who commits suicide to be frozen and revived when his illness could be cured. In the context of McIntyre’s scientific work, the film’s sci-fi demeanor belies the very real possibility that cryogenics could realistically alter fundamental assumptions about life and death even just later in the same century. What the film says about the life and death is timeless, however, in terms of philosophical value.

Diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer, Marc Jarvis opts for cryogenics. His body is to be frozen and revived when technology has advanced to the point of being able to reanimate him and cure the cancer. “I’d be able to live longer,” he blandly tells his friends, who are skeptical. For this to happen, he responds, “I guess I’d have to trust humanity.” He is referring to the advent of the necessary medical technology, rather than to the question of whether global climate change might extinguish the species in the meantime. This “sin of omission” by the screenwriter is particularly strange, given physicist Steven Hawkins’ prediction at the time that the species would have at most a century left on a habitable Earth.

In the story, living longer isn’t Marc’s actual goal, so he may well be indifferent to the plight of the species as he informs his friends of his decision to go with cryogenics. He does not commit suicide with the hope of being revived when he could be cured so he could live out the rest of his life.  As he tells Elizabeth, his nurse after he is revived 60 years later, in 2084, “Suicide was my way of fighting the arbitrariness of cancer.” Suicide, he tells her, was “the only way of avoiding the agony and the uncertainty of when death would finally arrive.” In retrospect, he says that being able to end his life at his choosing gave him the power to die peacefully. He had not really thought he could be reanimated; suicide, he tells Elizabeth, “gave me back control over my life.” He had accepted death; things were fine as they were. He accepted his experience of life as that which it had been, even though he was still young (roughly 30). The fear was gone, he tells Elizabeth more than 100 arduous days after having being revived. His fear of death is still gone, he informs her as he then asks her to help him commit suicide again. He has already died once. He is once again prepared to end his life. His final wish: “To be nothing again, to disappear, to finally rest in peace.” Why? To return to an after-life existence in heaven? Or out of a preference for not existing over the pain of living?

Just after being revived, he is enthusiastic. “I was going to die,” he tells the medical team in front of his bed. “I was going to disappear, forever, and I’m alive again. I’m alive!” But he quickly realizes that his “new life” comes with some rather serious drawbacks, medically speaking. At least for some weeks, his body seems permanently “on the verge of collapse.” He records the following for future posterity: “Life, what do we expect from it? Certainly not this fragility, this half-speed existence. We definitely don’t expect a medical history full of afflictions and minor defects, a propensity for phlegmbosis, numbness in the extremities, involuntary movements, loss of equilibrium, scaling of the skin, irritation of connective tissue, respiratory insufficiency, cardiac insufficiency, incontinence, impotence. You don’t expect so many limitations so soon.” His physician tells him that he could expect a life like people with chronic diseases or the elderly, and he would have to maintain at least periodic connection to a machine that keeps him alive. In erroneously assuming that these conditions would be permanent, both Marc and his physician dismiss the likelihood that medical science would continue to advance. 

To be sure, Marc’s medical team knew Marc would lose all of his memories, after which no medical science could bring them back. You expect at least to keep your memories, Marc narrates for posterity. “What if your memories were erased as well? What will become of me once my memories have faded?” Fortunately, a device exists in 2084 that can allow people to recover memories without actually remembering anything, but he dismisses it outright too. He could still draw on those stored memories mentally—hence indistinguishable from him really having the memories—and perhaps advancements in medical science could literally grow more “gray matter” such that Marc would someday begin to accumulate new memories. In short, the static nature in the assumptions made not only by Marc, but, more astonishingly, by his medical term in 2084 is astonishing, given their experiences with medical advancements.

At any rate, Naomi, Marc’s girlfriend before he died, had herself frozen in hopes of being together with her true love again someday. Elizabeth wants to assure Marc, “Someday you two will be able to be together again like you were before; it’s only a matter of time.” Here in Elizabeth we find the openness of a dynamic assumption; medical science should be regarded as a moving target!  Yet he isn’t buying it. He knows Naomi’s bodily condition is not good; the process of freezing had not gone well. “I don’t even want to imagine Naomi if she’s trapped in someone else’s body, someone else’s life,” he tells Elizabeth. “That’s your fear talking,” Elizabeth correctly tells him. In short, Marc has lost hope—faith in medical science and even in life itself. Accordingly, he wants to commit suicide again, and he wants Elizabeth to bracket her own hope and assist him.

The nineteenth-century European philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach, aptly describes Marc’s rationale for killing himself “for good” (i.e., without any hope of being reanimated again). “A man who kills himself does not take his life, it has already been taken from him. That is why he kills himself; he destroys only a semblance of himself; what he casts away is a mere shell whose kernel, whether by his fault or not, has long since been eaten away. But a healthy, normal life . . . is and should be man’s highest good, his supreme being.”[2] Marc expects a healthy, normal life; it is his god. Yet paradoxically death is not his enemy, for suicide is to him simply a preference for not existing over life without his god.

Life and death are of course the true characters in the fictional drama. Expectedly, religion is in the mix, though surprisingly only explicitly in a few instances in the film. The position taken in the film, through Marc as a witness—albeit fictional—is that life “is nothing more than a state of matter . . . there’s nothing transcendent or divine about it.” As such, life is merely biological. In fact, Marc opines that it is life that’s “scary, not death.” Life is “always on the verge of extinction.” A human life can quickly, and unexpectedly end without the person having any control over it. As for the soul, Marc figures it is maybe “the part that is lost when you freeze the meat and thaw it out again.” In short, the film adopts a materialist perspective. There is no after-life, other than revitalized, or unfrozen, life itself. In other words, being reanimated—not resurrected!—is the only after-life, or, more accurately, life after life. In between them: nothing. Not existing. How hard this is to apply to ourselves!

“Welcome back to life, Marc,” the physician says as Marc regains consciousness upon being revived. “Do you remember anything about the other side?” Is there an afterlife?, the physician wants to know. The first report of a possible “eye-witness” of heaven in human history is underwhelming: “Fear, dying, waking up,” Marc answers without a hint of excitement. Later, he makes it explicit: “Before I died, I thought there was nothing after death. Now I’m sure.” He is the only person alive immune from what Feuerbach describes as the fantasies of profligate human imagination. Marc records his (or the screenwriter’s) own thoughts as follows: “Why do we yearn so desperately for life after death? What is it that we want? Perhaps reward for our grief, or punishment for our sins. No, what we really expect to find is what we already know; what we once had and lost. If there was something, we would turn it into more of the same—the same chaos and the same beauty, the same reward for the same effort, the same tale by the same idiot. If there was something, it would probably be purgatory.” In other words, we construct, or hope for, an after-life looking all too familiar—human, all too human. The “most sensitive, most painful of man’s feelings of finiteness is the feeling or awareness that he will one day end, that he will die,” Feuerbach suggests.[3] All a person knows and experiences is premised on the ongoing—perceptually-seeming “ever” present—basis of existing, the end of which must surely be felt to be torrentially horrendous. A human’s “defense against death is the belief in immortality.”[4] People who think they know for a fact there is an afterlife might want to pause at word in italics. None of us know, which is why the screenwriter of the film has Marc’s physician ask.

The physician—a man of science!—is disappointed in Marc’s answer as it is well within the realm of biology. He wants for there to be a religious dimension so much that he over-reaches cognitively. In presenting Marc to the public (i.e., investors), for example, he refers to Marc as “the first person resurrected.” However, resurrection is a distinctively religious term that refers to a spiritual-physical body; Jesus’ resurrected body, for instance, goes through the door of the Upper Room and yet he is hungry so he asks for a fish! Clearly, more is going on here than reanimation or revitalization. Cryogenics does not even constitute the sort of miracle as Jesus performed in bringing Lazarus back to life, and yet Marc's physician refers to his successive cryogenic attempts, including Marc, as Lazarus!

In short, Marc’s (albeit fictional) body is not supernatural, and yet the physician uses terms suggestive of a religious miracle. In fact, he refers to Marc as the first resurrected man more than once in the film. It is as if man of science were driven instinctually to make what is human, divine. According to Feuerbach, “Man makes a god or divine being of what his life depends on only because to him his life is a divine being, a divine possession or thing.”[5] God is beneficent (because good), and thus of use to humans—hence petitions are made as a matter of course in many liturgies, but the underlying presupposition or basis of this belief in the divine attribute is that human life is itself of great worth (i.e., divine).

Therefore, Marc while still young and yet seemingly deprived of God’s beneficence has a knee-jerk reaction for his life to go on, albeit after some time of not existing. Alternatively, he could pin his hopes on heaven, yet he dismisses it even before he knows it to be a fantasy of the human imagination tinged with fear. Yet even in ostensibly wanting to live more, or again, it is to be on his terms.

According to Feuerbach, we are the gods—or, more accurately—our human ideals are our true gods—the potential of the species, which Feuerbach erroneously claimed is infinite. The danger in idolizing our ideals lies in settling for nothing less. Hence Marc acts rashly, I submit, in committing suicide again. His god is human, all too human. If Feuerbach was right, even the ostensibly religious deity is really just human life in its infinite potential. Yet the terrain of our experience is finite—our perception, feeling, and cognition only go so far. Even cryogenics in itself could merely extend a human life, rather than making human beings immortal.

 

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[1] Candace Sutton, “Human Bodies Frozen in Desert Facility Waiting for Science to Wake them Up,” News.com.au.

[2] Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 52.

[3] Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 33.

[4] Ibid., 34, italics added.

[5] Ibid., 52.