“Apocalypse Now” Small Group
For Lent — from February 25 (Ash Wednesday) to April 11 (Easter is the 12th)
All Saints United Methodist Church
Apocalypse Now Links:
Introduction
Part One - Volcano
Part Two - 28 Days Later
Part Three - Children of Men
Part Four - “The War of the Lamb”
Part Five - “Revelation”
Part Two — 28 Days Later
Showing at the All Saints UMC Ministry Center, 7 PM, Friday, March 6
CHANGE - THE FILM WILL BE SHOWN AT STEPHANIE AND JEFF NELSON’S HOUSE -contact me at stan@stangoff.com for directions
Directed by Danny Boyle
Produced by Andrew Macdonald
Written by Alex Garland
Starring Cillian Murphy (Jim), Naomie Harris (Selena), Megan Burns (Hannah), Christopher Eccleston (Major Henry West), and Brendan Gleeson (Frank)
[All quotes and images are employed under Title 17, “Fair Use” law, and no portion of this study is for profit.]
Notes on 28 Days Later
Note (1)
Something to think about
History is a process. One of the theologians we are using to study apocalyptic stories is John Howard Yoder.
The usual way we think of history is as a chronolog of facts and dates and names. So when we hear the word “history” in this section or later, we need to bear in mind that we are not talking about history in the usual way, but in the same way as John Howard Yoder; because that is how the word is being used here.
Yoder — in the same way as many theologians — sees history as the actual, located process of human existence, a process with which theology must struggle. The idea that human society has the freedom to sin (and its corresponding burden of responsibility) is not compatible with the idea that God moves us around like we’re a puppet show.
Yet theologians like Yoder — confident that God didn’t write us like a stage play — continue to insist that the process of human history is inextricable from the cosmic direction leading to a final, great attractor — telos is the Greek word. What Yoder’s point of view says about discipleship is that it is active, and that discipleship happens historically — in identifiable and unique times and places and forms.
Think for a moment about time.
We need to get philosophical for a second.
We can think of it as an unraveling universe — the terminal entropy idea. Or we can think of it in synonyms: past equals regrets, future equals anxieties. Or as emergent forms that enter and leave like ghosts — leaving no visible footprints.
One way that we can try (a heuristic device, again) is to plot time along one horizontal line, and form intersecting at any point along that line. The historical process is such that at any intersection there was or is a total form for the known universe. As far as we know, every instant along this time line is absolutely unique; yet the present never leaps over the past into something New. We are creatively unique, yet we are also all vestiges of a specific, located history (a process that includes past and present).
Existence is the Now — the totality of forms at the absolute present.
^FORMS
^
^ >>>>>>>> TIME >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
^
^
So time and history move together, and never apart. When people take a bird’s eye view of history as process they frequently find certain apparently stable forms that bind together chunks of time. We can identify something called the American Civil War. We have time brackets for something called The Enlightenment. Others will date something called the age of industrialism, the Han Dynasty… and so forth.
If we think of history as traveling in a kind of “trajectory,” we can also identify certain periods wherein some dramatic change actually alters that historical trajectory. The inertia of chronological time and chronological history is knocked off course by these transformative interruptions of what we can call — thanks to the Greeks again — kairos time. Kairos time irrevocably bends the trajectory of history. Kairos is also called “God’s time.”
These kairos shifts were recorded by people in the time of John of Patmos as marking the beginnings and ends of “ages.” Telos is the unfathomably distant point to which all things are being drawn.
The telos is further down the road than a mere age. Yoder says that the church is to be a community apart, an exemplary community, and a teleological community. Our particular connection to all other kairos periods is through our story, a story in which we believe and a story that takes place in a particular time and place… because it is the story of God crashing through infinity to become flesh.
In our own day, and in our own lives, we do not always record time chronologically. We record periods between events, whether it was “while Grandpa was alive,” or “during this administration,” or “when we still had the kitchen yellow.” This is closer to a kairos conception of time than a chronological one, because the events are more prominent than metered time.
In 28 Days Later, we reiterate that we are using the heuristic standpoint of the Ecology-Personhood-Culture Triangle. With the introduction of time as something to observe in unpacking these stories, we put that triad in motion. In discerning the historical process now (and by strong inference, in the past), we have to be aware of the ways in which the past was dramatically, almost inconceivably different. Then, and only then, we can begin to try and understand the how of that difference.
I have made many trips to Haiti. Anyone from the industrial metropolitan cultures of the US, Western Europe, and Japan that spends even a few days living with Haitian peasants, far from the road, has glimpsed the different-ness — the asymmetry of history’s contingent forms. We were together once (about 50 Haitian peasants and me), sharing the same actual social space. Yet, it constantly occurred to me as I looked around, our universes — in personhood, the experience of being an embodied individual — were very distant from one another in place and time. Their ecology, their culture, and the personhoods that derive from that ecology and culture, are not miniatures or embryos of us.
The modernist perception of historical time includes the myth of “progress.” This “progress” is seen as the telos of history (making it an idol!). Contained within this ideology of progress is the notion that Haitians — or whomever — are just “backward,” under-developed, a more adolescent form of the our very own very adult culture, inevitably — and with proper instruction from we adults — becoming like we are.
Not actually the case. Everything those Haitians do — the day-to-day actions that make them who they are — are completely different. Yet we co-exist in 2009 as part of the same Now. Not so the past. If we are to see into 1st Century Palestine, for example, we may have to find a Haiti now to remind us how far we live from the people we study in the past. Because both are peasant cultures. The ecology is different — way different — for us.
No particular central point here… just placing a few landmarks for later.
Quote from Sondra Higgins Matthaei, author of Making Disciples - Faith Formation in the Wesleyan Tradition:
Christian identity and vocation are shaped not only by God’s work in us and participation in our faith community but also by our culture and the events in the world in which we live. We are Christian in a particular place and a particular time. The way we see ourselves as Christian is affected by our cultural inheritance, including family of origin, the region or country of our birth, racial or ethnic identity, gender, class, and age. We are affected by the events of the world in which we live, especially those events that raise questions about what it means to be faithful disciples.
This was true in 100 AD, too.
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Note (2)
The opening scene of 28 Days Later is a montage of newsreels of the most horrific kind of mimetic violence. The newsreel montages of police riots, lynching, and other disturbingly realistic mayhem — we discover — are being broadcast on multiple television sets to captive chimps in some kind of lab… the plot leads us to suspect a bioweapons lab. The chimps’ biochemical reactions to the mimetic-violence images is used somehow to create an actual virus, to be named simply “Rage.”
The virus will soon escape the lab — as you have seen or will see — where it spreads in seconds from person to person, placing them in a total and irreversible state of vicious schizoid aggression. The episodic (mimetic) violence that was being portrayed in the newsreels of mob violence directed at the laboratory chimpanzees is no longer transitory. It’s a biological uber-bomb that hits humanity like a nuclear war.
28 Days Later is a quantum leap from Volcano, the idealized apocalyptic with the Hollywood conventions. 28 is a Girardian nightmare — mimetic violence transformed into an unstoppable biological epidemic.
Rene Girard is a Catholic theologian who calls the spirit of the accuser in a lynch mob a Satanic spirit. But in this leap from mimesis to biological catastrophe, we only get our first glimpse of the Satanic in the fact that the lab exists at all — that anyone would engineer such a thing as a lethal hyper-epidemic. Satanic in that such a real application of science would be an attempt to substitute our own sovereignty over that of God.
I think you can steer clear of most trouble by never (1) retaliating, (2) dominating, or (3) humiliating. The central message of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth was peace. Peace requires more than chanting peace. It implies a lot of do-s and don’t-s. The don’t-s are a good way to start. They are not easy just because they are don’t-s.
*
Note (3)
Our heuristic standpoint for the study is the relation between personhood — the experience of being an individual person, the culture — shared language, art, symbols, ideas, and cultural production (film is a cultural product), and ecology — the physical setting (of which we are ourselves a part) — different from “environment,” in that ecology attaches a special focus on relationships instead of “parts” of that physical reality.
The outbreak of the rage-virus smashes the story’s ecology by transforming most of the humans — with whom we cooperate to make our survival and our culture — into dangerous carriers of a terrifying, dehumanizing death. Biological catastrophe has wiped out the future of culture (art, law, institutions, markets, governance, everything). Left behind are a few survivors as the remaining carriers of a culture now rendered artifactual. The ecological basis for the old culture has been destroyed (by the scientific hubris of the culture that created the virus, and inadvertently by a subculture of militant resistance to it).
Look at this picture.
What is the culture? What is the ecology (especially the technology)? What is the personhood?
We, the audience, are now led through a journey with Jim — the film’s first protagonist. It is obvious that we are supposed to identify with Jim; and therefore that this is a male-produced film. .. think about it. The film also does a little gender-bending by giving us Selena, the female lead — and a black female lead at that. We will see these two exemplars — people who serve as examples of something — struggle with each other over the definition of personhood in their new and disorienting circumstances.
Exemplary characters are also called archetypes.
One of the several reasons 28 Days Later was recognized as more than a bloody zombie film (to which we could reduce it if we were being disingenuous) is that every performance by the actors in this film carries the intensity and authenticity of the characters in a way that allows us to identify with them, identify in an unstrained and unembarrassed way.
I want to start with Selena because her character is the one that undergoes the most significant change in personhood. Selena has a moral conversion.
Selena appears on the scene as a killer-savior, one of two unknown, masked rescuers of Jim. She fends off the infected with Molotov cocktails.
She is unmasked (literally and figuratively) by the story when they enter their little kiosk-refuge. She is a stern, non-nonsense countenance (as opposed to her colleague, Mark, who indulges grim humor as his way of coping with extremity). Selena is direct, methodical, and more than anything in charge — a natural leader, wielding a machete instead of a sword. This natural leadership is acknowledged by Mark — and Jim — in their unquestioning acquiescence to her tactical decisions. She has judgment — the cool, instrumental rationality of a military commander, or a scientist (she turns out to have been a scientist before the catastrophe — a chemist).
We are shocked by this icy instrumentality when Selena unhesitatingly slaughters Mark after he’s been bitten by one of the infected — perhaps the grisliest scene in the movie. At the same time, she looks out for Jim, protects and nurtures him (as when she treats his headache with sugar and painkillers). She becomes a kind of Joan of Arc archetype (no pun intended).
He archetype is simultaneously discerning and physical. But she walks on a tightrope — as any medieval theologian will tell you — over the abysmal sin of sins: despair, the true danger lurking within her warfighting practicality. The loss of hope.
Jim is the lead character in the film, and — as we said — the one that the audience is “attached” to for the journey through the story. But in revelatory stories, what is revealed is generally revealed in a moral dimension. There is an exemplary shift in some character’s moral compass, or — more importantly — that of the audience.
“Staying alive is as good as it gets,” she tells Jim. Selena’s philosophy for the new reality. Her leadership is based on the fact that in this radically changed world she has proven effective. But her telos has become stunted. It amounts to “staying alive,” a task so all-consumingly urgent in this dangerous new world that anything else is difficult to grasp. Selena is “modern,” in the sense that Selena is a utilitarian. She is, above all, effective.
Two separate quotes from Yoder here, one on “stories” and one on “effectiveness”:
Stories
When modern Christians approach the Old Testament with the question of war in mind, our attitude tends to be a legalistic one and the questions we ask tend to generalize. We ask, “Can a Christian who rejects all war reconcile his position with the Old Testament story?” If the generalization that “war is always contrary to the will of God” can be juxtaposed with the wars in the Old Testament, which are reported as having been according to the will of God, the generalization is destroyed.
This approach hides from us the realization that for the believing Israelite the Scriptures would not have been read with this kind of question in mind. Rather than reading with the modern question in mind, whether it confirms certain moral generalizations or not, the Israelite read it as his or her own story, as the account of his or her own past throwing light on who he or she was. A story may include a moral implication or presuppose moral judgments, but it does not necessarily begin at this point.
Effectiveness (Yoder writing on John of Patmos’ “Revelation” and “the meaningfulness of history”)
[T]he answer given to the question by a series of visions and their hymns is not the standard answer [to what makes history meaningful]. “The lamb that was slain is worthy to receive power!” John is here saying, not as an inscrutable paradox but as a meaningful affirmation, that the cross and not the sword, suffering and not brute power determines the meaning of history. The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience (13:10). The triumph of the right is not assured by the might that comes to the aid of the right, which is of course the justification of the use of violence and other kinds of power in every human conflict. The triumph of the right, although it is assured, is sure because of the power of resurrection and not because of any calculation of causes and effects, nor because of the inherently greater strength of the good guys.
Selena’s efficacy threatens to dehumanize her.
The plot progresses toward its own telos. Selena become enamored (in a big sister way) of the teenage Hannah and her charming working-class dad, Frank. In a key scene — significantly after a communal breaking of bread — Selena is walking with Jim and talking.
SELENA: You were thinking you’ll never read a book that hasn’t already been written; see a film that hasn’t already been shot.
JIM: Aw, that’s what you were thinking.
SELENA: What I was thinking was that I was wrong.
JIM: ‘Bout what?
SELENA: All this shit. It doesn’t really mean anything to Frank and Hannah, because they’ve got each other. I was wrong when I said that staying alive is as good as it gets.
JIM: Ya see, that’s what I was thinkin’. You stole my thought.
SELENA: (stopping to kiss his cheek) Sorry.
JIM: ‘S’alright. You can keep it.
This is Selena’s conversion moment. She abandons the instrumental self. She abandons the absoluteness of her utilitarianism. In observing the (exemplary) love of Frank and Hannah, Selena is herself “infected” by that love.
In an earlier scene, Frank calls the survivors to watch a group of vibrantly healthy horses cavorting around a riverside pasture. This scene is a divine-vision interruption in the scenes of horror. Frank blows the horses a kiss. The audience does so with him.
Stories often tell us how to be, how to feel. We participate in the story; and the story then participates in our lives. Culture shapes personhood.
Yoder calls Christian love a “foolish” love. It is not instrumental.
*
Note (4)
28 Days Later was critically well-received, and a surprise to many that the seemingly unlikely premise could be treated with an element of seriousness. There were masterful techniques on several accounts — the inspired editing, the edgy musical background, the excellent performances.
It is in looking at Jim’s character, however, that we will come to discover how the film managed to contradict itself. The contradiction is not apparent because it is a common contradiction about the issue of redemptive violence. In this contradiction, we will see something remarkably conventional and conservative at the center of the plot.
Jim is an Everyman — a bicycle courier, working class, and someone with church in his upbringing. When he begins to grasp what he’s awoken to (after being left unconscious and wasted in a hospital bed for days) is the post-infection dystopia of a quiet, empty London. Jim ends up where others have apparently come to die in the face of the disaster — church. When forced to club down an infected priest that attacks him there, he runs away, muttering, “I shouldna done that! Oh, I shouldna done that.” It reveals something to the audience who knows nothing about Jim yet. Jim has some enculturated ethical scruples.
Jim’s first revelation upon being rescued by Mark and Selena is that institutions (an anchoring aspect of culture) no longer exist… no church, no hospitals, no government, etc. Selena and Mark tell Jim there’s no government, to which Jim almost cries out, “Of course there’s a government! There’s always a government! Their in a bunker or plane somewhere!”
Jim has joined his new colleagues after a tectonic shift of their ecology– a biological catastrophe. Culture is destroyed — except for what remaining culture is “carried” by a handful of survivors. They are uprooted persons. Refugees.
Jim is shocked by Selena’s bloody dispatch of Mark after Mark is bitten by one of “the infected” (a term that counterposes them to humans… Jim insists on calling one of the dead “infected” by his name and states that he lived four doors away).
Selena rationalizes/explains her actions as she and Jim are walking back into the city.
SELENA: “If someone gets infected, you’ve got between ten and twenty seconds to kill them. It doesn’t matter… staying alive is as good as it gets.”
(Remember the “tempo task” from Part One?)
Jim disagrees with this thesis during a conversation with Selena at Frank and Hannah’s apartment, and Selena’s coming around to Jim’s way of thinking happens in her aforementioned conversion-scene.
So Jim is the film’s carrier of a charitable morality in the face of Selena’s military efficiency. The moral message is that love transcends the general encroachment of death brought about by the catastrophe.
The evil is the virus itself, even the creators of the virus. This charitable morality is asserted in the story at a point where the survivor band is facing only the consequences of evil (the zombified “infected” bear no moral responsibility). It is only when they meet Major Henry West and his small squad of surviving soldiers that they are confronted directly and actively by evil.
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Note (5)
Whether by intent or by cultural osmosis, one unusually controversial and revelatory theme occurs in this film… the military as a rape-culture.
For anyone wanting to explore this theme in a more systematic way, I have linked to Sex & War, a pdf book on this subject.
We are introduced to the soldiers as “saviors” when they gun down Frank, Hannah’s father, right before her eyes. Frank has been infected, and was going to die at any rate, but the scene is prescient in unraveling the earlier expectations of our protagonist band — that the soldiers represented safety.
When Selena first hears the military unit’s recording on the radio, she replies with skepticism. The radio recording promises that “the answer to infection is here. Salvation is here.” (interesting choice of words, no?) Selena notes, “There is no answer to infection. It’s pretty much done as much damage as it can do.” It’s Hannah who says, “If there are soldiers there, they could protect us.” Obviously, Hannah’s logic carries the day, because the next scene has the newly formed band-of-survivors setting out with a car to find the soldiers.
This is relevant for us, today, this idealization of the military; perhaps the most dangerous idealization of our time.
Enter Major Henry West (after Hannahs’ father is infected and killed). He is the embodiment of British military reassurance, the hope of the restoration of civilization and a stable culture (the beginning of a new age in the apocalyptic). In Major West’s first appearance in the flesh, after having debuted as a disembodied, drone-like radio voice, he greets survivors Jim, Selena, and Hannah with a crisp, chirpy hospitality that seems strange in the face of Hannah’s distress at having seen her father infected then shot to death minutes earlier. He banters cheerfully about hot water being the basis of civilized life.
A further foreshadowing of the debacle of this “salvation” is when the survivors watch their soldiers playing with Frank’s car — only a short time after Frank was killed — like drunken frat boys.
As the story reveals, Major West is quite insane, a man playing at self-deification. West predicates his social engineering project on female sexual slavery, and this relation of men over women forms the basis of male solidarity among the soldiers. This is a true phenomenon in the actual military; and it is pervasive. That’s what makes this aspect of the film both controversial and realistic.
The film’s attentiveness to the link between militarism and rape-culture is commendable in my view. But here is where I have to point out the most embarrassing thing about the film, and why it is deeply conservative.
The oppressive gendered power of the soldiers is called out by the film; they are beyond the moral pale because they were plotting to rape — by the most defensible legal definition. This is actually very easy to see, and the audience is very clear that this is rape about to happen, and we are at a point in our moral evolution where we have at least begun to see how blame-the-victim is an inappropriate response to rape. So the moral equation surrounding the soldiers is very clear to the audience. That, at least, is not controversial; while the representation of military as subject to rape-culture is certainly controversial (and important).
The evil of Major West is revealed, from his dinner-table reduction of the historical process to “people killing people,” of murder as a “state of normality,” to his concealment of the fact of their quarantine to his own subordinates. He has to destroy hope in order to make himself a creator of worlds. He is, in a word, a beast of the apocalyptic variety. A personification of evil.
West invites Jim to “join us” in the New Covenant of Captive Women — a distinctly male-to-male encounter. Jim demurs. West orders him put to death.
But then the film articulates a deeper oppressive cultural belief about gender — one so naturalized that we can hardly see it all around us — and that is the male being defined and differentiated by violence… in this case, what we call “redemptive violence.”
When you strip away the fine directing and editing, the fine acting, the fine writing, the great music, and the edgy social commentary, what you encounter is a damsel-in-distress narrative, in which some violent male essence is released onto the scene as God’s own juridical instrument.
The film’s attention to gender was, in the end, superficial and liberal, which is why I call it deeply conservative. (Classical liberalism contains both these minor polarities inside it.) Selena has to be converted to love (to become a complete female); and Jim has to be converted to violence (to become a complete male). And there is nothing more conventional these days than the sexual contract, the gendered acceptance of protection in exchange for obedience.
One man to protect one woman from all other men, which is at the root of the damsel-in-distress narrative, and remarkably literal in this film. That Jim doesn’t demand obedience, nor would Selena’s character accept the terms of this sexual contract, the circumstances wherein the male actualizes himself fully in an act of violence are the archetypical circumstances that our culture tells us to associate with male social power over women.
The liberal appeal to disembodied, abstracted notions of “equality” between men and women — clearly different than each other in more ways than one — leads the writers to simply make Selena a general — an honorary male, who is herself only actualized as she becomes “softer.” I’m not disrespecting Selena’s conversion; that’s what the movie got right. What is troublesome is the way this moral decision is embedded in some broader cultural assumptions that relate to the exact thing that Jesus renounces again and again: violence and domination.
So Selena’s conversion to love over instrumentality feminizes her; while Jim’s conversion from gentleness to raw violence (where he actually gouges out the eyes of an “enemy”) masculinizes him and that masculinization saves the day. Isn’t it interesting that the Gospels tell a story that moves in exactly the opposite direction. A devout Jewish construction worker, immersed in a culture on the brink of armed rebellion against occupier and its imperial surrogates, eschews the violence of armed resistance, and preaches for the conversion of all to service and unconditional love.
A bit on gender (and something called the “sexual contract”).
The broad cultural assumption is that since men and women are different, then men are entitled to demand obedience out of the situations emerging from that difference. The modernist (liberal) reply is that women and men are not really different; but they have to limit what they mean by this “equality” to a very legalistic universe. But we can acknowledge difference — and in easy community and mutuality between the sexes– if we constantly police ourselves in refusing to impose hierarchy on that difference.
For the record, I liked this film. That doesn’t mean (1) that I have been duped into supporting its gender conventions or (2) that liking the film means I can’t simultaneously have negative criticisms of it. That means that if you liked it, that doesn’t signify that you have been duped into supporting its gender conventions, nor does liking the film mean you can’t simultaneously have negative criticisms of it.
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Note (6)
A Yoder reflection on utilitarianism, unpredictability, and faith (from The Royal Priesthood, pages 123-125)
In other times and places, other accepted commonplaces would need to be combated; but for our present subject matter it will have to suffice to concentrate on what for the past two generations has called itself “realism,” a kind of creeping utilitarianism that does not quite avow the systematic narrowness of the utilitarian philosophical tradition but operates largely within its limits. It is assumed that we all share a common knowledge of what is possible and what is not, of what makes things happen, so that we know what kinds of power need to be applied at what points in the global social system to make events come out for the best. For some critics, this “realism” is to be challenged because it implicitly denies transcendence by accepting social science analyses, which themselves assume the world to be an enclosed system. For other critics, the shortcoming of “realism” is its failure to let both the analysis and the prescription be illuminated more normatively by revealed value standards. Both of these criticisms have some value, but for now it suffices to identify one internal limit of this kind of approach, namely its failure to be fully realistic, because it posits a degree of both actual analysis and ability to predict, to say nothing of ability to control, which are not, in fact, present in any important social conflict.
This is not simply a matter of ignorance due to the bluntness of our present tools of observation, analysis, and prediction, which could be one away with with greater refinement. It is rather an intrinsic limitation of the very nature of our self-understanding as social animals, like Heisenbergian uncertainty in the realm of small scale physics. We can never know with precision everything about a system that we ourselves are interfering with in the very process of trying to know about it; even more is this the case to the extent to which our trying to know about it includes trying to take charge of it…
…our choice of means sets its own ends, or the way the ends we set transform themselves in the course of our seeking to reach them. This is the least ideological of the reasons that lead political practitioners from Mohandas Gandhi to George Kennan to say that an ethic of means is the only globally responsible way to be honest with our stated ends. The kind of calculus that will sacrifice the legitimacy of immediate, manageable means for the greater value of projected ends that it hopes to produce is itself a denial of the limits of the human condition, however attractive that trade-off may seem in a given situation. The limits of our ability to trade means for ends is not thus a mere limitation in the accuracy of our present measurements but rather an intrinsic quality of all genuinely social decisions.
And more bluntly from Ivan Illich:
To hell with the future. It’s a man-eating idol.
That word again. Idolatry.
In differentiating church as “believing community, ” Yoder says, “Something structurally different is going on when the priority of the believing community is seen not as lordship but as servanthood, not as privilege but as pointer, not as achievement but as promise.”
Yoder was very critical of the the predominance of the cosmic Jesus that emerged from the process of “Constantinianization” of the church — the merger of church-institutional (ecclesial) power with the power of the state. Yoder insists that Jesus — an historical figure who lived in an actual time and place — is more than Savior; his life is meant to be exemplary. The Example of how we are to practice discipleship now in the world — “not as lordship but as servanthood, not as privilege but as pointer, not as achievement but as promise.”
There’s a lot to consider in this note, even though it’s short.
Q: How do you eat an elephant?
A: One bite at a time.
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Note (7)
We have talked about a triad, ecology-culture-personhood. These are, however, abstractions. What are we really looking at in the film among two groups — the surviving band, and the soldiers? What is it that we call the living, actual embodiment of social groups? Community.
Yoder says that communities are carriers of meaning.
In 28 Days Later, out of the ashes, two communities emerge; then one has to destroy the other in self defense.
What meaning does this film — this cultural product — carry about us, about how we see ourselves, and about how we “know?”
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HOMEWORK (optional)
(1) This is a terrifying movie for some, a very scary story. Think and-or write about whether we have forgotten that the story of Jesus — when its really studied — is intense and frightening.
Is there a difference in film between fear-and-violence and gratuitous-fear and gratuitous-violence?
How do we think about nonviolence as our mission in a world that still manifests terrifying violence without disengaging from the world?
How do we talk to kids about violence?
Can we shield them from the world?
We tell a scary story in Sunday School — a very scary one with corpses on crosses at a hill called The Skull.
What is our criteria for our kids with regard to “violence” in media? What do we and they need to understand about it to live in the world?
(2) Compare and contrast Volcano with 28 Days Later.
(3) Though 28 Days Later is an interesting, well-directed, well-acted, and very thought-provoking film — in addition to being frighteningly violent at times — its plot is resolved in a very standard way: male vengeance/rescue, or “redemptive violence.” The core message of Christ is nonviolence; yet we know from living in the world that this theme of redemption through violence is continually attractive to human beings, and very salable as a drama commodity. Make two lists:
(a) First List: all the film titles you can think of that qualify as a male revenge fantasy.
(b) Make a list of all the derogatory terms you can find for women, that are also used in phatic language by men to insult or challenge other men. Example: bitch, broad, sissy, ho, et al.
These lists correspond to a reality that is factored into nearly every woman’s life as fear… constant, if often sub-clinical, fear. In this film. Selena will be happy with Jim, no doubt, by film’s end. Jim protected her and rescued her out of love; and Jim will not become Selena’s oppressor. But how often is this the case in real life? How many women feel obliged to seek the lesser of evils in many (not only sexualized) relationships with men?
(3) In how many ways can one identify gendered themes (including some gender transgressions) in this film? Make a list.
(4) Write a bit about how the background music in this film enhanced and channeled your emotional participation of 28 Days Later.
(5) Think and-or write about this and other films or stories that are set in a catastrophe created by humans dabbling too much in the business of God… that is, scientific hubris. (I think immediately of Jurassic Park.)
Closing quote:
Why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?
-Luke 6:46
REMINDER: This is not a study that requires anything. The depth of participation is your choice. It can be an occasional pastime, or a a college course. It is also free to share with anyone and everyone; and it is not restricted — obviously — to Lent. Comments sections are also now open (but will be moderated, so comments will not go up immediately). CHANGE TWO with apologies — Comments are disabled here, and will all go to the Feral Scholar web site linked here. Click it on, and comment away. Again, apologies while I work out the glitches.
Posted by stan in Analysis