Losing My Religion

This is part of the Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Caroline over at Garbo Laughs and Andreas and Ashley over at Pussy Goes Grrr (who I've been neglecting to mention; please accept my apologies, guys. My bad.).

My local art house's series of microbudget indies continued on this Wednesday with The Wise Kids (2011, directed by Stephen Cone). As fate would have it, it's a queer-themed film. I love it when my local theater caters to my blogging needs. More to the point, I love it when they schedule movies that completely ambush me, as this film did. Going in, I thought it was mostly a coming of age film centered on one particular teenage boy in deeply religious South Carolina. What I wasn't expecting was a much broader ensemble that teased out many of the deeper problems of living an authentic life within the confines of American Christianity (and not just if you're gay). The whole coming to terms with being a gay Christian teen? Well, it's there, but it's not front and center and it manifestly refuses to unfold in the way an audience might expect it to. More interesting to me is the way the problem of sexuality challenges faith in the literal reading of The Bible as true. This also hit a deeply personal chord with me, but I'll come to that in due course.

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The Indifference of Wolves

There's a scene in The Grey (2012, directed by Joe Carnahan) that I like quite a bit. In it, Liam Neeson's character has a crisis of faith. The movie has established that Neeson's character, Ottway, is an atheist, and this particular scene tests the old maxim that there are no atheists in foxholes. In a moment of weakness, he prays for some kind of deliverance from his predicament--which, it should be noted, is really friggin' dire. When no divine intervention is forthcoming, he says, "Fuck it, I'll do it myself." This scene encapsulates the movie. The cosmos, this movie suggests, doesn't even know we exist. The wolves who are this movie's main antagonists don't care who is faithful and who is unbelieving, who is good or who is bad, who is an asshole or who is a loving family man. They know only the red of fang and claw and act accordingly.

There's another scene in this movie, too, that puts an exclamation point on this. It comes before Ottman's crisis of faith, when Diaz (Frank Grillo) finally comes to the realization that he can't go on. He chooses his place of dying, a place with a spectacular view of the mountains and forest of Alaska. It's a place of great beauty. But he winds up just as dead. The universe is a beautiful place; beauty is a meaning that we attach to it that has no relationship to its fundamental indifference to human beings.

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Are You Watching? Can You See?

I like movies that take a swing at the fences, movies that have ambition. Usually, this means that I like movies that examine the unbearable lightness of being human, but it also equates to an appetite for movies that examine humankind's place in the grand scheme of things. Some of my favorite movies--particularly those by Ingmar Bergman--examine humanity's relationship with god (or gods). The ones I like best are the ones about the downward spiral, whether that movie is Nightmare Alley or Unforgiven. Tales of the fall, if you will. This may seem a perverse appetite for an atheist, particularly one who is a pure existentialist, and you're probably right. I say all of this because it explains the impact that Chang-dong Lee's Secret Sunshine (2007) had on me. It takes a swing at the fences and it's a tale of the fall.

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