The Resurrection in SuperStar

The question of the resurrection in Jesus Christ, Superstar seems straightforward. To put it bluntly, there isn't one.

Well, maybe the empty cross at the very end (with the shepherd and his goats walking in front of it) is supposed to be symbolic of a resurrection. But it's a stretch to argue that the empty cross is an empty tomb.

But what is Judas doing, descending from heaven on a cross, dressed in white and spangles, and singing the last rousing number? How should we interpret this?

Is it the resurrection of Judas?

Is it the reception of Judas into heaven?

Or, . . .

Jesus Christ, Superstar

On the face of it, Jesus Christ, Superstar (1972) is a Passion Play. It depicts only the last week of Jesus' life, from his triumphal entry into Jerusalem on a donkey to his crucifixion. But given how different this film is from every previous Jesus film, even from every previous filming of a Biblical story, we should beware the notion that this is a simple depiction of the Passion.

When you think about Superstar, it is clear that it is a love story. The three main characters are Jesus, Mary and Judas. From the start, Mary looks after Jesus, cares for him, anoints him, and watches over his sleep. She sings about not knowing how to love him. When Judas attacks Jesus, she defends Jesus. As Jesus is led away and it is clear that Jesus’ tale will not have a happy ending for Mary’s love, she sings him a good-bye song, “Could we start again.”

Judas plays an interesting role in the film. He is the first to sing, talking about his close relationship to Jesus and how he is worried that Jesus’ actions are going to bring destruction down on the movement. From that point onwards, he acts more like a jilted lover than a worried deputy. He attacks Jesus for not seeing what is happening. He attacks Mary for anointing Jesus and then attacks Jesus for letting Mary close to him. When he receives Jesus’ disapproval, he retreats to the back of the disciples group, casting longing looks in Jesus’ direction.

Fast forward to the end. Judas’ last song before he hangs himself begins, “I don’t know how to love him,”—a reprise of Mary’s song. His last sung words before his death are about Jesus, “Does he love me, does he love me too? Does he care for me?” Clearly, the words of a lover.

It is possible even to see the three main figures as a love triangle. As Mary moves closer to Jesus, Judas is pushed out and acts with jealousy. Of Jesus’ first three stints singing, two of them are defending Mary against Judas’ verbal attacks.

Melito of Sardis and The Ten Commandments (1956)

In the book’s chapter about The Ten Commandments, we drew upon the Pilgrims’ use of typology exegesis that presented the Jews’ Exodus and crossing of the Re(e)d Sea as a type for the Pilgrims’ own anti-typal action of crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

The Pilgrims were not the first to use typological interpretation on the Old Testament. Indeed, typology was used by some of the earliest Christian writers. Melito of Sardis and other writers were already using typology in their exegeses of the Jewish Scriptures in the second century. Indeed, Melito’s Paschal Homily (=”Sermon on the Passover”) makes extensive use of typology. Moreover, it seems that The Ten Commandments made use of the interpretation found in that work. (While the film’s introduction explicitly cites its use of Jewish sources for authority, it also drew from Christian sources.)

Whereas the Pilgrims’ emphasized the Jews’ journey through water and into the wilderness, Melito’s typological interpretation emphasizes the final plague, in which God killed all the first-born sons of the Egyptians. Melito’s characterization of the killing is picked up by the film. His physical description of the “darkness” that moves across Egypt and kills the firstborn as they come into contact with it (##22-27) becomes Ten Commandments’ mode of representing the way this wide-scale killing was accomplished. Other descriptions, such the angel of Death or even Exodus’ reference to God Himself, are not used.

Melito also makes a big point concerning the blood of the sacrificial lamb (in Melito’s terminology, “lamb” is stated in the singular) that was placed on the lintel of each Jew’s doorway to differentiate them from the Egyptians. (See Exodus 12.) Melito argues that the sacrifice of the lamb is the type which foreshadows Jesus own anti-typal death on the cross (##30-33). Just as the lamb died to save the Israelites from death, so Jesus died to save all people from death as sinners. More profoundly, Jesus suffers as the Passover sacrifice; Melito links the two through a Greek pun indicating that the verb meaning “to celebrate the Passover” echoes the verb “to suffer” (##46-47). Christ suffered for the peoples’ salvation as the lamb suffered for the Jews’ deliverance.

The Ten Commandments picks up on this link between Jesus and the Passover and transforms Moses into a Christ figure. Before Moses can lead the Israelites from Egypt, he is arrested, tried, and bound to a cross-bar, which he carries to the execution of his sentence in a manner that renders his body into a cross. Banished into the desert wilderness, the film emphasizes how Moses suffers and is purified. In this way he is prepared, suffering in a Christ-like manner, to lead his people to salvation from slavery.

The Films of Christmas

Tis the season for Christmas movies! And after two weeks at number one, this year's big feature is "Four Christmases," a film full of in-law jokes, incompatible relatives, barfing babies and lots of (attempts at) humor.

Last year, the big Christmas hit was "Fred Clause," while the year before that it was "The Santa Clause 3." All three are comedies. None of them feature anything about the religious story of Christmas, namely, the birth of Jesus, Christianity's savior. Indeed, with a single exception, there have been no major release films or general audience TV features focusing on the religious story of Christmas for nearly half a century. The exception is 2006's "The Nativity Story," which had only modest box office success.

Most Christmas films and TV shows are comedies. Some feature Santa, the North Pole and its inhabitants: "The Santa Clause," "Elf," "Earnest Saves Christmas," "Olive, the Other Reindeer," and of course, the 1966 Burl Ives TV special, "Rudolf, the Red-Nosed Reindeer." We learn details of North Pole operations, and laugh at Santa, the elves and the reindeer.

Other comedies feature the interactions among families or a small group of people: "The Christmas Carol," "The Grinch who Stole Christmas," and even "White Christmas." We laugh at the antics of family members and friends (and enemies), and in doing so, laugh at ourselves.

Both kinds of films emphasize laughing. A good Christmas film is about comedy, gaiety, and light-heartedness. It's about having fun, but not above poking fun. It involves "laughing at" someone as much as "laughing with" someone.

If that is the case, no wonder films about the birth of Jesus are unpopular. The Christmas story of Jesus' birth is a serious matter. It is not a humorous tale or one for poking fun. It certainly is not for laughing at the baby Jesus. The Monty Python film, "Life of Brian," may be able to pull off a sight-gag about the infant Brian being whacked by his "Mum," but showing Mary slapping the baby Jesus would never work. Poking fun at this mother and child could only be seen as insulting.

So it clear that a successful Christmas Jesus Comedy cannot be made, but why not a serious film about Jesus' nativity? After all, that is the reason for the season. Surely, since Christmas is the most popular time of the annual Christian calendar and since most Americans claim to be Christians, a film about Jesus' birth should be a hit.

One reason is the altered meaning of the word "holiday," which comes from "Holy Day." A Holy Day is a day for performing religious activity, whether worship, fasting, contemplation or prayer. We have lost that concept and exchanged it for a more festive one. A "holiday" for us is time off work, time for celebrating, relaxing, getting together with friends and family, for having a good time and laughing. A serious film about the true meaning of Christmas does not fit with that.

Another reason that serious Christmas films about the Nativity do not work is that Americans compartmentalize their lives. They, I mean "we," mentally assign particular kinds of activities to particular places and at particular times. Religion is for church, usually on Sundays or Christmas Eve; it does not take place in the mall or the movie theater. When people want to think seriously about the sacred Christmas story, they are more likely to attend church or read and meditate about it on their own (this is the era of private religion after all). Few Americans would want to go to a noisy movie theater and watch a film while surrounded by the smells of popcorn and stale soda pop.

Such compartmentalizing is not new, it lies in the very notion of a Holy Day which can only be holy in contrast to the ordinary and everyday. In today's world, Christians have developed a new sense of the holy, one that keeps the holy out of the marketplace and out of the movie house and in the more private spaces of home and church.

Indiana Jones and the Power of God?

[Warning: Contains spoilers]

Indiana Jones the adventurer-archaeologist is back in the new film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Once again, he is on the trail of a powerful religious object, this time a crystal skull worshipped by a South American tribe. The film is set in the 1950s and Indy is opposed by a Russian scientist and her army henchmen who use violence, kidnapping, and murder to get possession of the skull.

With the skull as the central attraction, the film actually constitutes a meditation about the nature of belief, particularly belief in god, or in this case, gods. The Indians believe the skull is a sacred object, made holy as a symbol of divine beings worthy of their worship. The Russians see the skull solely as an object of power; they do not believe in the existence of any gods, but see the object as a source of knowledge and mental powers, which they can use for world domination. Indiana Jones portrays the scientific skeptic; he does not believe in magic, gods, or religion. To him, the skull is important because the Indians considered it important. It should be shared with all humanity by being displayed in a museum and studied.

Once the chase is on, Indy and the Russians head deep into the South American jungle, discovering ruins like those of the Mayans. Upon reaching the temple’s inner sanctum, they discover that the crystal skull is the actual skull of a space alien. When they place the skull on a headless alien skeleton, power is triggered. The skeleton reanimates, along with the nearby alien skeletons, the Russian scientist receives the psychic knowledge she desires, and then, as in the earlier films, Jones and his friends run for their lives.

The film’s climax indicates the Russians’ belief was correct. There were no gods. Instead, there were only space aliens. The Indians had mistaken the aliens for gods, and the aliens had taken advantage of that error. Jones’ skepticism was also mistaken, for the skull had power; not that of magic, but of the advanced technology of a star-traveling people.

The notion that the gods were actually space aliens visiting earth is not new. In the late 1960s and 1970s, this idea was popularized by Erich von Daniken, whose book Chariots of the Gods? sold millions of copies around the world. In this and later writings, he propounded the notion that the technology of the ancient world was given by visiting space aliens. Whether it was the building of the pyramids, Ezekiel’s vision of the heavenly chariots, the statues on Easter Island, or Babylonian stories of heavenly travel, Von Daniken sees them as evidence of visiting aliens.

But Von Daniken’s favorite body of evidence are the Mayan, Incan, and other Central and South American sites of massive temples and pyramids. From the Mexican site of Palenque, Von Daniken identifies a pictorial carving of a human sacrifice on an altar as a spaceman sitting in a space capsule. A picture of a priest in an elaborate headdress becomes for him an astronaut with a space helmet.

So this new Indiana Jones’ film taps into Von Daniken’s ideas, even the fascination with South American ruins, and identifies gods as space aliens. Gods are not divine, supernatural beings, but flesh-and-blood creatures (or rather flesh-and-crystal-skull beings) with advanced technology. It suggests we poor superstitious humans have mistaken technology for divinity.

This message stands in sharp contrast to the three previous Indiana Jones’ films. In them, the powerful sacred object reinforces the presence and potency of the divine. At the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Ark of the Covenant’s power is revealed as that of God. The closing scenes of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom show that the village’s stone lingam still brings Shiva’s blessing to the village, and the cup of the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade remains imbued with the power of Jesus’ blood. And in each film, Indy the skeptic is shown to be the only one who understands and respects the object’s divine power and the divinity responsible for it, even though he does not believe in them.

Study Guide available (in draft form!)

We have been working on the study guide for our book Film and Religion: An Introduction for several months. To actually finish it, we brought on board Den'ja Pommerane to help formulate insightful and useful questions. The last draft is now available by clicking on the link in the left column. When Abingdon makes the final version available, we will link to that instead. You will also be able to access it from Abingdonpress.com

The Davinci Code

Paul Flesher and Bob Torry

The movie of The DaVinci Code is jam-packed with religion, real and imagined. It belongs to the genre of mystery, perhaps even detective mystery, and since the “detective” is a specialist in religious symbolism, all the clues are linked to religion. There is a wealth of books, articles, and web-sites identifying the symbolism and debating its meaning. The film lacks some of the book’s details and simplifies the plot in several ways, but it still has more than enough images to satisfy the most ardent “symbologist.”

In our view, the multiplicity of symbols distracts from the film’s central issue. Simply stated, the film asks whether religious truth, particularly “original truth,” can be passed down through the centuries without being lost or distorted. There are many obstacles in the way of successful transmission: failure of memory, misunderstanding, poor teaching or poor learning in the transmission from one generation to another, personality differences, (re)interpretation, etc. If this were not sufficient, The Davinci Code posits the existence of a group of clerics called the Council who actively work to suppress the truth, and is murdering those who know it—namely, the leaders of the Priory of Sion.

To cut to the chase—or rather, to the end of the chase—there is an originary truth that has survived from the beginning up to now. This is the bloodline of Jesus, which began through his marriage to Mary Magdalene and his impregnation of her. The film offers this not just as an unverified fact, but supports it with the suggestion of centuries of documentation and the preservation of Mary’s body now hidden beneath the Louvre’s pyramid.

The meaning of this truth is less clear. As Langdon’s questions to his lecture’s audience makes clear, symbols can have multiple meanings. Just because a swastika or an image of a baby at a breast has one particular meaning to us now, does not mean that those symbols have always had those meanings or even that our understanding of the meaning is presently universal. The preservation of Jesus’ bloodline is a symbol, which for the film is true, but there is no meaning attached to that symbol. Indeed, Langdon tells Sophie that it means whatever she chooses.

Despite the film’s silence about the explicit meaning of this original truth, the hidden events revealed in the narrative show that the film is intimately concerned with a the truth of one particular modern anxiety, not just truth in general. That anxiety concerns the role of women in Christianity, in the church. The Women’s Movement in the USA is less than half a century old. During that time, many Protestant churches have made significant strides in bringing women into leadership roles. The Episcopal Church USA appointed its first female Presiding Bishop this year. These advances remain controversial. The English Anglican church has yet to appoint its first female bishop and many Anglican communions still reject the notion of women as priests. They are not alone. During this same half-century, the Catholic Church has explicitly hardened its stance against the ordination of women—with the Pope invoking his Infallibility in doing so.

The film’s inclusion of Mary Magdalene as one of Jesus’ disciples as well as his wife, its reference to the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, its emphasis on the sexuality of Jesus implying that he participated in the religious ecstasy of the union of male and female leads to the conclusion that the origins of Christianity were more gender inclusive than subsequent centuries supposed. Jesus intended the church, in the film’s fictive presentation, to treat men and women as equals. Perhaps women should even have the leadership role; this is certainly suggested by the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the fact that the heir Sophie is female rather than male. Thus the film aims to quiet the modern anxiety about the place of women in the church by positing that women played a large role at the time of Christianity’s origins, a role which had been forgotten by all but a few.