CDXXXVIII – Revisiting Jesus Christ Superstar

I am watching as I write this Jesus Christ Superstar. This musical is by no means an orthodox film, yet it holds a dear place in my heart because I often joke that it was my first catechesis, before I became Catholic in 2018. Besides that, I do enjoy the music, too.

When I watched it before, I viewed it’s presentation of Judas as tragic—he took a practical view and he had some legitimate philosophical questions: he thought they should devote every resource to serving the poor and winning a political fight.

Now, I see Judas as a blind curmudgeon. He completely misses the point of Christ as a spiritual king, one a mission that transcends politics.

One thing this movie did for me was it taught me some of the main events of Christs life without requiring me to read the Bible. Whenever we talk about Christ throwing the moneychangers out of the temple, I think of the scene from this movie. On watching it again I see the skeleton and even some of the inaccuracies that stuck in my head until they were corrected as a Catholic.

In one part Jesus says everyone can attain the kingdom, a kind of universalism. I never pondered whether universalism was true, but I did ponder how I would know the difference between being “saved” and being “damned”.

Another error is that the film largely treats Jesus as being only a man, which is heresy. Absent his divinity, the whole thing doesn’t make much sense. He comes off in the film as kind of a jerk, someone who has gnostic wisdom and he can’t tell you. The movie actually spends very little time on the gospel message. A lot of effort is on Judas as a foil to Christ, and on Pontius Pilate.

I remember being very disturbed over the treatment of Pontius Pilate. He tried to wash his hands, he did everything he could to avoid crucifying Christ. This is actually true, and yet Pilate still succumbed to the will of the Mob. He tried to pass the buck but ended up securing the outcome.

A travesty of catechesis is when they recreate the last supper and Jesus says “for all you care, this could be my body (…) and this could be my blood”. Then Jesus goes on a rant about whether he will be remembered. Again—the starting assumption of this musical is that Jesus was a man and not God incarnate.

This movie also made me wonder as a kid what would happen if Judas hadn’t betrayed him, or whether Judas had any other options. This goes back to my argument that life is on rails—God knows our hearts, and is capable of both knowing the outcome of free choice while experiencing incarnate reality as a temporal man. It could only have gone one way, there are no alternate realities.

You see though how Judas presents a problem to young impressionable minds like mine. How do I know I am not following the same path as Judas? The song “Damned for all time” hits a little harder—I am trying my best, so “just don’t say I’m damned for all time!” Again—how would I know? How would I recognize that I am on the right side of Jesus?

Their presentation of the Passion is problematic. I think they didn’t know how to present it–because to them, Christ was just a man, it popped their brains so they put it in, but it is clear that they don’t really know what it’s for. They don’t understand why Jesus died, or why he HAD to die. That’s a theme that comes up often–you can think of this musical as Andrew Lloyd Weber publicly wrangling with the facts of the gospel, and feeling the dissonance with what he actually believes. This is highlighted by the ecumenical song and dance number featuring an angelic (!!) Judas asking if Jesus is with Buddha or Mohammed in the afterlife that immediately precedes the passion.

This has been a bit of a stream of consciousness while I watched the movie again.

AMDG

CCCLXXXVIII – Connecting Three Disconnected Films

November 5th, 2022

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Am I a good man?

I’ve been reflecting on this after watching three movies. Code 8, The Foreigner, and All Quiet On the Western Front. There’s no real common theme between the three, mostly just three movies that caught my interest while I am waiting before the wedding. But the thought that they gave me was this question–am I a good man?

The question itself has a long history in my life. Before I understood religion, it was a source of existential dread. Because if I wanted to answer “Yes” then my next question was “why”–and why a man is good is harder to answer without resting on something concrete.

These movies prompted the question for a couple reasons. Let me start by describing the movies briefly. To hell with spoilers.

Code 8 is set in a world with people with superpowers, and the world discriminates against them. A day laborer with a terminally ill mother joins up with a drug lord to make some money to pay for medical bills. The protagonist meets a cast of characters and things naturally go awry in a plot-driving fashion. In the end, they do one last mission and everything goes wrong, and nobody gets what they want. The hero’s mother dies, the friend loses the object of ambitions, and only the tertiary character who chose not to do anything evil to attain something ostensibly good gets what they want. This movie is essentially an extended parable in “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

The Foreigner is about a humble restauranteur from China who lost his family escaping the Vietnam war, and he loses his only daughter to a bombing by the IRA. He goes on a mission of revenge, trying to track down the people responsible for killing his daughter. In the end he finds the bombers, kills them, and returns to his restaurant.

All Quiet on the Western Front is about World War 1 and is an anti-war parable which accomplishes its aim by being as brutal and gritty as possible. Everybody dies.

This is something of a nihilistic trio of movies. Death, pursuit of a terminal, personal goal, trying ones darndest to do the right thing.

So why does this make me ask myself if I am a good man? I don’t know exactly–a fair amount of memento mori. A fair amount of “what am I doing with my life”. In Code 8 and The Foreigner, the protagonists had special skills that helped them work towards their mission. In Western Front, they had no special skills and received their education in the purgatorial grinder of trench warfare. Is being good a skill, or is being good a purgatorial grinder? If it is a skill, do I want to be “good” at being good? If it is a purgatorial grinder, have I been through enough to be able to call myself a veteran of being “good”?

Jackie Chan–the protagonist in The Foreigner–once explained why he thinks he is so relatable and popular as a movie star is because he actually gets hit. He’s not a superman, he suffers in his movies. I watched for that in The Foreigner. Every fist fight he was in, he took a hit–if not first, then early. Nothing was easy or given to him. It made him likeable because we could root for him not just because he was the good guy, but because there was a chance he might not win. This strikes me as an example of humility. He doesn’t think of himself as so good he can’t get hit–he thinks of himself as being so good he ought to be hit more.

[…]Wondering if being good means I won’t suffer, or if it means I ought to suffer more. If I am suffering, is it because I am a bad man or because I am a good man who is persevering?

Is a good man a man who does the right thing every time, or is a good man who tries every time to do the right thing?

More food for thought than anything.[…]

I will chalk this somewhat existentialist contemplation to holy horror–[…]

Blessed be the name of the Lord.

AMDG

CCCXXII – Sunshine On Democracy

I watched a movie recently called “Sunshine“. I had watched it before, many years ago, […]. Obviously since then I have changed a lot and so I was primed to notice some key moments that perhaps they hoped would go unnoticed.

If you have not seen the movie, here’s the quick premise: The sun is dying and humanity mined all of the fissile material on earth to launch towards the sun and detonate it, and so reignite the sun. The crew is riding on a ship called the Icarus II, the Icarus I lost contact and their fate is unknown. There are 7 specialists as the crew on each ship.

There are two votes that happen in this movie–two demonstrations of democracy in action. I will share the parables and then we can break them down.

The first vote happens when the crew discovers the location of the Icarus I. The “antagonist” opposes diverting the mission to see if they can help the Icarus I. The psychologist on the mission believes that using the resources aboard the Icarus I–including the undelivered payload–could be helpful. The antagonist says “Let’s vote!” but the psychologist says “This is not a democracy–we are a bunch of astronauts and scientists, we are going to make the best decision available to us.” Rather than consult data and begin weighing options, the decision is handed to the Physicist (the protagonist) to make unilaterally.

The second vote happens in the middle of the third act, the visit to Icarus I has gone horribly wrong and several people have died as a consequence. The crew member whose hapless error caused a death is on a suicide watch. Their mistake also caused the burning of the Oxygen-generating eco lab, so oxygen is now a limited resource. The same antagonist from earlier proposes killing the suicide-risk member of the crew–but proposes the other crew vote on it and demands a unanimous decision. Three of the four people vote in favor, except for one, the pilot, who opposes. The antagonist decides to kill the crew member anyway, despite not receiving the unanimous vote he requested.

What the heck is going on?

In the first case, a vote is proposed, but they declare “no need” because of their intellectual pedigree, and allow one member of the crew to decide unilaterally. In the second case, a vote is proposed, and they demand consent, but in the face of opposition one member of the crew decides unilaterally. In both instances, the resulting decision was unilateral and indifferent to other viewpoints.

The first situation falls to scientism, the religious-like belief that the intelligent and scientific form a priestly class. This is why the decision was handed to the Physicist-Astronaut–the ultimate priest of scientism. In the film, the decision ultimately came down to a utilitarian one: two bombs is better than one, lets see if we can get a second payload to deliver to the sun. There was no gnostic, hidden wisdom–it was a numbers game. The democratic choice may have considered other points of view, irrelevant data. A truly scientific approach would have spent more time on analysis and running scenarios. Both of these represent an abdication on the part of the captain to authoritatively rule his crew. The decision, and it’s consequences, ought to have rested with him. The first vote represents the abdication of a kingly sovereign to the masses, and the masses make bad decisions under a pretense of legitimacy they invented for themselves.

The second situation falls to tyrannical utilitarianism. It is tyrannical because it did not follow the rules it set for itself. It is utilitarian because it weighed the value of a human life, which they did not have the authority to do. The one opponent–the conservative–voted no, and when told that her vote didn’t matter, simply shrugged and said “find some kindness” when you murder the crewmate. Conservatives and right liberals do that a lot. They vote, and when told their vote was meaningless, they shrug and say “please abuse us nicely”. Rules and procedures exist for a reason, and if the Captain had been alive he at least would have had some semblance of authority and legitimacy to add to the proceedings. The captain is one of the people who died in the blunder after the first vote, so he was not present. It is telling that the King died when the people took control.

There’s a lot more I could read into this, but I thought it was interesting. It’s a good movie in it’s own right, and there’s lots of little symbolisms that I hadn’t noticed on previous watch throughs. I hope you watch it, and if you can’t take your traditionalist-reactionary hats off, let me know what you think of my analysis of democracy from the movie.

AMDG