Monthly Archives: June 2014

Edge of Gospel

Last time I had fun reviewing two sci.fi. movies. This time it’s a sci.fi. and a fairy tale, Edge of Tomorrow and Maleficent. So, first a major spoiler alert, core plot details will be discussed! If you’ve not seen these movies and want to experience them first-hand read no further.

The sci.fi. genre always has freely imagined worlds, apt to show us something fresh about our human situation. But now fairy tales can get complete makeovers, and radically change their meaning. Abandoning their hallowed formats they too can become surprising mirrors of our condition. According to the argument of Virtually Christian–one I find confirmed over and over again–such imaginative movies may act as a kind of echo chamber and prism of subversive Christian possibilities. Especially the type of movie which pushes the envelope of intense violence and revenge is likely to flip into a one-eighty Christian mind-change (metanoia). Such a movie acts as a kind of Large Hadron Collider, smashing human particles into each other so hard they suddenly reveal entirely new human properties. Or–looked at another way–because our artistic matrix or seedbed is so infected with Jesus’ undoing of human violence, actual artistic creation will again and again show glimmers of this revelation. Movies become a spontaneous gospel distillation and public revelation, but outside formal doctrine or church.

Edge of Tomorrow is a cleverly crafted tale of a U.S. military officer, Major Cage, working in media relations, who suddenly finds himself drafted for a terrifying D-Day style assault on a French beachhead, against an Alien army of vicious spiderlike killing machines. He is almost immediately annihilated but then, in the key storyline, he wakes up directly to find himself back in the previous day and about to experience the nightmare all over again. He literally “dies daily” and it is this relentless succession of deaths and revivals which drives the plot both in events and meaning. He teams up with a famous veteran soldier, Sergeant Rita, to whom the same thing had happened previously. She explains to him that he has been infected with the blood of an “Alpha” Alien whom he killed just before being killed. As a result he shares the Alien capacity to reset time–whereby they are able to learn from what just happened and then go back and start over: in this way they can never be beaten. Tellingly the Aliens are called “Mimics,” and although the name is never explained it is tempting to interpret their ability to learn their enemies’ behavior, and then start over in time, as an endless loop of mimetic behavior. The Mimics continually reset in imitation of the enemy! Even so mimetic time is an endless repetition of the same-old-same-old.

Together Cage and Rita battle through a Sisyphean series of deaths and rebirths until they finally reach the “Omega” Alien, the neural core of the alien horde, the center where all the reset information is always telegraphed. Both Cage and Rita sacrifice themselves to destroy the Mimic bio-construct. However, in the process Cage is again infected with blood, and wakes up once more, but this time in the aftermath of the Mimics’ destruction.

As with all time-reset stories there are a few plot imponderables, but in a way they don’t matter. There is inevitably a sense of “resurrection!” The overriding sense of a radical interruption in mimetic time is what delivers the dramatic pay-off, and it works because there is an underlying Christ-motif validating such a break, one not achieved by military victory but by surrender of competitive violence itself. The Christ theme is signaled (in inverted form) in the “Alpha and Omega” language, and at one key moment of the narrative a  picture of Jesus as Sacred Heart remains in frame long enough to suggest itself thematically as a symbol of “dying for the other.” Moreover, if we compare the screenplay with the original Japanese illustrated novel (All You Need Is Kill ) there is a clear shift from sacrifice of the human other, to a self-surrender on the part of human first-persons, in order to break the cycle and bring about the qualitatively new. By virtue of this shift time itself is changed, no longer the repetition of the same-old-same-old, but given instead a sense of radical openness to a new, “resurrection” future. The very name of the movie calls attention to this shift in time. “Edge of Tomorrow” hints both at the never-ending mimetic conflict, but also at the in-breaking of a future that is genuinely new.

You might say that these gospel motifs are entirely superficial, grafted in simply to make the movie culturally familiar, and without structural significance. But this reflects a very prosaic, Augustianian view of secularity. In contrast, the overall Girardian argument is the culturally deconstructive power of the gospel, disclosing our violence and deeply pervading the saeculum. My intuition simply takes the argument one step further, claiming that the positive phenomenon of Christ’s nonviolence undergirds the disclosure, and is now continually emerging into view in and for itself.

Maleficent is just such a case of emergent symbolism (or re-symbolizing), not this time in terms of mind-bending science fiction, but by means of taking a familiar fairy-tale and overturning its most time-honored, satisfying tropes. Again the only credible cultural source for this astonishing turn is the gospel, in particular, the rehabilitation of the scapegoat. The eponymous Maleficent is the evil Fairy-Godmother of Sleeping Beauty  fame. She herself is the victim of betrayal and abandonment, and this provides the motive for her hatred and her casting of the evil spell on the king’s daughter. However, she feels obliged to keep an eye on the little baby until it comes of age, and little by little she is moved to compassion out of her own, fundamental “humanity.” She relents on her curse but she is not able to undo its exacting release clause. The delightful twist is to make the “true love’s kiss” come from Maleficent herself, rather than some callow boy-hero.

The fairy tale changes to become a story of conversion in the face of innocence (non-violence), an ultimate refusal to continue the cycle of victim-making. The larger-scale result is to bring the king’s realm of “greed and envy” into harmony with the fairy kingdom where apparently no violence is done. Riding on these traditional but reverse-engineered themes is a gospel-inspired narrative of compassion, forgiveness, and eschatological change. Once again “same-old” time is being shifted toward something beautiful and new.

The question then is, if our symbolic universe is being morphed frame by frame in this astonishing contemporary way, into a gospel-sans-writing, what is the response of the organizations that found themselves on the writing? Are they ahead of the curve, or behind it? How much time-bending surrender of violence is part of our Sunday screenplay?