Wicked Cinema: Sex and Religion on Screen

2. Faith: Transgressing Gender and the Possibility of God

35 chaPteR two Faith tRanSgReSSing gendeR and the PoSSibility of god The horror, the horror. colonel walteR e. kuRtZ, APocAlyPSe now (1979) Many filMS diSPaRage oR call into queStion the rationality of faith and with that, the character of the believer. This chapter begins to explore the disjuncture between cinematic representations and the religious beliefs of more than four billion followers of the Abrahamic religions. These onscreen depictions of faith, or the lack thereof, reveal much about the ideological divide fueling the culture wars. There are scenes from Francis Ford Coppola’s antiwar film, Apocalypse Now, that have remained with me over the years. The most chilling one comes at the end when Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) meets a dying Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando).Willard, the once idealistic young officer, has endured the madness of war and confronts its embodiment in Kurtz, whose final cry, “the horror, the horror,” gives voice to a humanity awash with inhumanity and God nowhere to be found. Kurtz, in his exclamation, becomes the incarnation of the napalm strike in which Captain Kilgore (Robert Duvall) revels. I will never forget the 1972 Life cover photo of the naked Vietnamese girl running away from such a strike. She was screaming as the napalm jelly burned through her skin. Apocalypse Now echoed my fear that there is no redemption for the innocent lives sacrificed, no angel to trumpet some final justice. This film captured my growing cynicism about the human condition. 36 † Wicked Cinema Why a loving God allows the suffering of innocents is an issue that many believers struggle with over the course of their lives. As an adolescent, I wrestled with this theological conundrum. Negotiating the realities of growing up during the Cold War led me to reflect on the human capacity for the oppression of self and others. Not only was our involvement in Vietnam an exercise in inhumanity, but the U.S. Cold War strategy of M.A.D. (mutually assured destruction) was insane. I contemplated what humans do to one another—domestic violence, child abuse, torture, racism, and genocide. How could a loving deity not only allow bad things to happen to good people but also create human beings with such a capacity for evil? For me, the only way I would be able to believe in God was to have the faith that Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard contends is a leap: despite serious doubts, one accepts in a very personal commitment the truth of God.1 At the time, I was incapable of making that leap and became an agnostic. My personal crisis of faith reflects a cultural faith crisis that continues to challenge the West. It is within that crisis that cinema’s depictions of religion manifest. An initial examination of that faith and the historical events that have shaken it will provide a context for the film analyses of this chapter. faith In the introduction, I referred to Derrida’s notion of an elementary faith that functions as a foundation for community: we must be able to trust the word of others, whether in commerce or science; otherwise, there would be social chaos.2 However, the trust demanded by religious belief goes beyond what can be proven by the senses. It requires faith in an authority that is not visible. Judaism attests to a monotheism that purports a God who created the universe. Christianity’s Nicene Creed asserts not only the God’s existence but also a triune nature. Islam affirms the one God and proclaims Mohammed as his prophet.3 In effect, religious faith not only asserts this Divinity’s existence, despite the empirical lack of God’s physical presence, but also accepts the veracity of scripture as divine revelation. Religious scholar Donald S. Lopez Jr. notes how this type of faith separates the believer from the nonbeliever: “The very impossibility of verification [of God’s existence] has historically functioned as a means of establishing a community against ‘the world,’ hinting at the counterfac- 37 † Faith tual reality to which only the believers have access.”4 Thus, by the belief in things unseen—this faith in a counterfactual reality—the community of the faithful is set apart from the world. The religious community defines itself through its privileged access to truth, granted by its belief in God, and may very well see its own ethos as superior to the understanding and practices of the nonbelieving world...