Wicked Cinema: Sex and Religion on Screen

Daniel S. Cutrara takes the reader on an exploration of the transgressions of the spirit/body dualism so prevalent in Western religious traditions. He analyzes eight films from the 1980s to the 1990s to show how a culture war between religion and science manifests in cinematic culture. He suggests that this manifestation typically privileges the scientific and/or secular understanding of sexuality while providing an image of religious devotion and/or institutions as oppressive and dangerous for the believer. He also claims that the way that these films “Other” religion and religious people is similar to the way earlier films “Othered” homosexuality and sexual “deviants.”

Cutrara defines the culture war as a battle between perspectives on religion and sexuality. On one side are those who hold an “extremist” view of religion that restricts sexuality to the limits of heterosexual marriage in a patriarchal context. On the other side are those “progressives” who celebrate the opening up of sexual freedoms in the twentieth century to allow for the normalization of homosexuality and non-marital sexuality. This culture war, as described by Cutrara, also includes a dispute between the religious authority of institutions and the spiritual freedoms of individuals.

The first two films discussed are Crimes and Misdemeanors (Allen, 1989) and The Circle (Panahi, 2000). These two films, says Cutrara, put God on trial in two separate religious contexts (American Judaism and Iranian Islam) to ultimately show the ineffectiveness, inhumaneness, or absence of God. Crimes and Misdemeanors does this through showing the lack of consequence for immoral behaviour leading the protagonist to conclude God must not exist. The Circle shows the oppressive Iranian regime and its abuses of women as a way to demonstrate the way that God, or at least the Iranian Muslim understanding of God, is corrupt and dangerous. In both of these films women are punished for their sex and sexuality, either by the absent God or the religious institution.

The second set of films, Breaking the Waves (von Trier, 1996) and The Closed Doors (Hetata, 1999), demonstrate the dangers of religious fanaticism tied to sexual desire and/or deviance. Cutrara describes the protagonist in Breaking the Waves as a member of a strict Scottish Calvinist community that requires her to obey her husband. When her husband asks her to have sex with other men she complies to the point of accepting sexual assault, rape, and eventual murder as her religious duty to her husband. The Closed Doors tells the story of an adolescent Egyptian boy who, after becoming involved with a radical Islamic sect, kills his mother due to her sexual indiscretions (an honour killing). In both cases, Cutrara argues that religious believers are portrayed as mentally ill and their religious beliefs as dangerous. For Cutrara, these films are not anomalies but part of a pattern of filmic representations that do not show any of the beneficial elements of belief.

In the third pair of films, Cutrara shifts to the representation of the religious leader. Here he explores Agnes of God (Jewison, 1985) and Priest (Bird, 1994). Both of these films feature Catholic religious leaders, a nun and a priest, who transgress the laws of celibacy and, in the case of the priest, sexual orientation. Both also represent a sexual attraction to God/Jesus. Cutrara argues that these films represent the religious limits to sexuality as problematic and the cultural acceptances of wider sexual behaviour as more positive, leading the viewer to see the conflict the protagonists face as a needless problem that is solely at the feet of the oppressive religious rule.

The final two films are The Last Temptation of Christ (Scorsese, 1988) and Dogma (Smith, 1999). In his analysis of these films, Cutrara focuses on the representation of the divine figures, who envy the human experience, particularly that of sexuality. Both these films are made by Catholics interrogating their own religious institution and belief. However, they preference the experience of sexuality as desirable rather than...