Unless I’m really concentrating on the music I’m listening to, lyrics mostly just fly by me. But after listening to “In the House of Stone and Light” (#8) approximately eleventy billion times I started to wonder if the house in question was maybe a church? Churches are made of stone, or a lot of them are, and the light here would be the divine/spiritual light. Had I been unwittingly indoctrinating myself?
I also happened to stumble upon an internet article that reasoned Harvey (#6) as a Christian parable. This kinda makes sense if you squint — Harvey is an invisible friend who accompanies the protagonist around and makes him seem nuts, but for Elwood P. Down, having Harvey in his life also makes him an uncommon wellspring of kindness.
The combination of these seeded the thought that in the eyes of readers I may have been sneaking an agenda into what was seemingly just a captivating and highly anticipated weekly newsletter advocating the joys of cinema. I flashed back on a conversational snippet from my days of hanging with jaded music journalists: “The Simpsons is so Christian, it’s disgusting.”
After venturing beyond the first page of internet search results, I was relieved to find that no, Harvey — neither stage play nor film — is widely considered a Christian parable. And Martin Page confirms that “In the House of Stone and Light” was not a covert Christian pop anthem of the 90s:
“House of Stone and Light” was influenced a great deal by going to the Grand Canyon. The Indians there called the canyon The House of Stone and Light, and I saw that, really, as a reference to my own body and my own soul. I saw the house as my body and building something inside yourself to be strong.
I guess you could also interpret this as Page carrying a vast emptiness inside him.
I got to thinking about why this was a relief. I’m always surprised when guests are surprised that there’s a Bible in my bookshelf. There’s also a Quran, plenty of Nietzsche, and a little book the Scientologists give out (not Dianetics, which they charge for). But I always figured that everyone has, or at least had, an unread Bible sitting somewhere. And everyone has once or twice flipped through it and thought, hmm this book of Ecclesiastes sounds interesting… maybe one day I’ll read some of this… just out of healthy objective interest… maybe I’ll become a person who has read the Old Testament… like Nick Cave…
Like you, I am yet to read more than the table of contents of the Bible. But I remember being surprised — shocked even — to learn that the page count of Old and New Testament are far from evenly split. Not even close!
Part II — the basis of the world’s largest religion and inspiration for countless wars, sacrifices, and Texas legislature — is more like an epilogue. Jesus is a character who first appears in the post-credits scene.
While I hold a healthy agnosticism on the existence of any kind of supreme intelligence, if there was a real person named Jesus born in zero AD, I don’t believe this person was the demigod son of such, or a performer of miracles who rose from the dead. He was likely a very charismatic guy — a rockstar rabbi — who inspired a sizeable following, caused a ruckus, and was maybe even crucified by the Romans (if the Romans did in fact crucify people, which is debatable). I think in the following decades/centuries the Gospels fused this person with a buffet selection of the pre-existing saviour-figure mythologies (Osiris, Dionysus, Krishna, etc.) as a focus-group targeted religion for the masses. *ducks to avoid blue-sky lightning*
But I am intrigued by the historical Jesus, specifically because there’s so much we can’t know about him. Did he exist? We have an account of his birth, and his final few years — but was everything in between cut for dramatic effect? For a man who changed the world, why is there no record of him outside of Christian sources?
Also, I’m intrigued with the effect this mythology has had on shaping the world. Even for those who do not believe, how different would our lives be if instead of Jesus, we had elevated Odin? Or is there something inherent to human beings about the saviour-figure mythology?1
Maybe my Jesus preoccupation is just because I’ve been recently saddled with a mentally deranged neighbour who insists that he is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. (He’s a violent and aggressive drug addict, so he’s probably not.)
The films I’m watching this week…
Bad Lieutenant
(Abel Ferrara, 1992)
I suspect that more people have seen Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans than this film. The two have no relation except for the title (which Herzog battled against from the start) but the thing about the title/s is how the two uses of “bad” manifest so differently — despite both being about misbehaving police lieutenants, in Herzog’s film, Nicholas Cage’s Lieutenant is bad in a way that could be synonymous with naughty, like in Bad Teacher or Terrible Bosses, a character who requires reprimanding, someone you shake your head at, whereas here Harvey Keitel’s character is bad in a much more fundamental sense, more in the ethical and even theological sense of good and bad. Not someone wilfully evil, a person whose sins cause them torment, a person who wants to be good, but is perhaps corrupted beyond redemption.
From the pic, there’s a clear Christ metaphor at play, but it’s the cameo that will knock you down.
This also initiates a trip down Abel Ferrara’s filmography I’ve wanted to take for a while.
The Last Temptation of Christ
(Martin Scorsese, 1988)
Again Harvey Keitel in a Jesus-adjacent role, in a film that Abel Ferrara says he’s watched “a thousand times”. As a kid I’d see the VHS box at the video store and wonder what Willem Dafoe thought before accepting the role…
“Jesus… Yeah I’m pretty sure I have the essence of Jesus in me.”
This was right after Platoon (1986), so I guess?
Now I’m curious where this film sits in culture — I remember it being a sacrilegious VHS, then, in the wake of The Passion of the Christ (2004), becoming something of an over-earnest DVD, but does it still hold its provocative power in the nothing-means-anything streaming era?
The Gospel According to St. Matthew
(Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964)
An Italian neorealist retelling with nonprofessional actors, shot around small towns of southern Italy, with all dialogue taken from the Bible, by a filmmaker who was an atheist, homosexual and Marxist. If I’d read more than the Bible TOC I could say whether Matthew’s Gospel is one of the good ones, instead I’m taking my cues from Ferrara and Scorsese, who both cite this as major inspiration.
Serendipity of course becomes meaningless in a static text, or rather it just becomes dramatic irony, but it was only after writing about my beliefs above that I found this from Pasolini:
If I had reconstructed Christ's history as it actually was, I would not have made a religious film, since I am not a believer. I do not think Christ was God's son. […] I wanted to make the history of Christ plus two thousand years of Christian storytelling about the life of Christ, since it is the two thousands years of Christian history that have mythologized this biography, one that as such would have been virtually insignificant otherwise. My film is the life of Christ after two thousands years of stories on the life of Christ.
As with Pasolini, while I might be a nonbeliever, I still find that two-thousand-year mythology important, even integral, to what makes us who we are now.
Free to view on YouTube.
That which remains in mind…
The way Nicholas Roeg pushes film language in Walkabout (#8) using almost free-association while retaining a firm dramatic structure.
If they shot different versions (more/less risqué) of the mechanical horse scene in Career Opportunities (#8) to see what the MPAA would let them get away with, and if so, how many?
If you noticed the way the characters in Paris, Texas (#7) start out red and become green?
Was I the last to get that the song at the end of Gladiator (2000) is pretty much Lisa Gerrard channelling This Mortal Coil?
What is more inscrutable: that the majority of audiences actually liked Tenet, or the plot of Tenet?
These postmodern IFC T-shirts promoting female voices in film and why no one wanted to wear Tilda Swinton?
Since the dawning of agrarian society, the death and rebirth of the sun (the life-giving light) from winter to summer has been a literal form of saviour, with the three bright stars of Orion’s belt (three kings) following Sirius (the star in the East) to the point to where the new sun will be born on winter solstice.