Saved! (2004), Left Behind (2000)

(Unknown state, possibly Maryland, possibly California; contemporary)
(Jerusalem, London, Chicago, New York City; ’the near future’)
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A miss match of ’religious’ films I’d been putting off seeing provided my entertainment for the night. They also provide a good jumping off point for a not as yet fully developed meditation on Christian beliefs, particularly those of Evangelicals.

Saved! director/writer Brian Dannelly clearly had a not-so-great Christian school experience, and while this may have been bad for him, its good for us as we get to see this unconventional film offering which was inspired there-by. The basic plot of Saved! Concerns Mary (Jena Malone) a young born-again women and the events surrounding her senior year at a Christian High School. Mary has been a Christian since she was about three years old, shortly after the death of her father. Raised by her committed, but not entirely free from earthly desires mother (played by the always welcome Mary-Louise Parker) Mary seems to have the perfect Christian life. She has her best friend the perky yet domineering Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore) and ‘the perfect Christian boyfriend’ Dean (The 4400’s Chad Faust).

Towards the end of summer Dean confides to Mary that he thinks he might be gay. Concerned to correct what to her understanding is an obvious defect, and acting on a perceived vision of Jesus (actually the result of being saved from drowning by a bearded pool worker after sustaining a bump on the head), Mary has sex with Dean. And of course, she gets pregnant.
The rest of the feature is a tribute to Christian hypocrisy, as the well-meaning and sincere Mary confronts the disillusioning hypocrisies of her fellow Christians, which while apparently also sincere and well-meaning (at least to a degree), are also mean. Obviously this central observation does not hold universal and is a trifle simplistic (there are some mean atheists out there as well), but Dannelly is trying to make a point with some humor and I’d say he largely succeeds. If fault can be found in the ideological focus of Dannelly’s dramatics, where all the character’s problems can be traced back to some aspect of Christian life and belief (though admittedly less so with the Cassandra character), room for praise can be found in a generally sympathetic treatment of all involved. Even the arch-hypocrite Hillary Fay, finds a kind of redemption in the end, in which we come to understand her unrealistic strivings for perfection in her self and others, come from misunderstood belief, and having once been a fat and (presumably ostracized) child. Speaking of Mandy Moore I do have to say that I find it rather neat that the actress/singer stared in both this critical spoof of Evangelical youth, and one of the favorite films of that same demographic, the syrupy but oddly effecting A Walk to Remember (Ask me and I’ll tell you how that movie is a sort of sex fantasy for libido repressed Christian teen).

There are sub-plots aplenty in Saved! The most interesting of which is probably the romance between Hillary Fay’s partly paralyzed brother Roland (Macauly Culkin) and the schools one Jew, and constant target of attempted conversions, Cassandra (Eva Amurri). Present throughout all storylines remains the damage done by Christianity in peoples lives. This critique, present through the whole film, is eventually preached directly at the audience during a confront between the very pregnant Mary (and an assortment of allies, including both her gay, and her straight boyfriends) and the schools principle (who incidentally is cheating on his wife with Mary’s mother). Here we learn that standards imposed by others are often difficult if not entirely unattainable for those on whom they are afflicted, and that we should all let everyone be who they are and not impose own interpretation of a collection of ancient texts upon them. One can still be a Christian we are informed, but it should only be in watered-down, vague, God loves everybody, get along kind of way (also a kind of forced interpretation of text).

This interpretation of the proper mode of Christianity holds considerably less water (pardon the pun) in the world of Left Behind. Don’t believe me, well just ask that poor pastor in the film, who was left behind because while he believed in the Christ’s truth, he didn’t know Christ’s truth, or was it the other way around? Anyway suffice it to say it really is a narrow road to salvation in the minds of author’s Jenkins and LaHaye, whose series of intrigue laden novels based on a particular evangelical interpretation of the Book of Revelation, have sold millions, and represent the beliefs of still millions more. In one scene a TV screen displays a number of estimated ’missing’ and its less then 200 million. Now while it is made plainly clear to us that the American children are lifted up to meet Jesus in the sky, along with what seemingly few adults who have managed to get themselves saved, the number given seems far from adequate to represent the worlds youth, I suppose many a Muslim child was just unlucky. Let’s hope that either they or I have got our numbers wrong on this one, or else this is a particularly disgusting belief.

Left Behind was made in a month for around 17 million dollars. Now it shows this a little in its look, but not overpoweringly so. The script is cliché ridden, from the media informant shoot before he can get important information to our hero reporter (notably born-again actor Kirk Cameron), to Brad Johnson and Chelsea Noble rehashing the Dean Martin/ Jean Seberg plot from Airport while on an international flight,… also Kirk‘s mentor is killed by a car bomb. However there is some genuine excitement to be had (not much but some), mostly in the form of the palpable tension in the days immediately following the rapture, and Gordon Currie’s Nicolae Carpathia showing he could prove to be a fun villain. In fact Currie’s performance really is the most fun to watch in the film, if a trifle hammy in conception.

The thing that really gets me about the movie though is the near total Biblical illiteracy of those left behind. Should such an event as the rapture here portrayed occur, and say I was left behind (my Mormonism and doubting proclivities having presumably bard me from the Evangelical Heaven), it would take me all of sixty-seconds to figure out what had happened and issue a pretty desperate prayer to Jesus. But then according to this movie I should have known better, and so should have the Jews, homosexuals and skeptics of Dannelly’s Saved!

I’m not completely immune to an understanding and even appreciation of certain aspects of an Evangelical world-view and theology, but I’m also quite libertarian in (and maybe only in) my approach to the exercise of free will. I believe God gave us free will, he also gave us a complicated world, and the deity of the New Testament (I’m gonna leave the Old Testament out of this) doesn’t strike my as a kind of sadist who really delights in torture. I include both the social torture that we can inflict on each other, as demonstrated by Dannelly, and also the apocalypticism on which all to many of the religiously minded seem to get off.

Listen I’m a Mormon, and I try to be a believing one, but certain characterizations of God, common in all sorts of religions, strike me as unbecoming a supreme being. From all that I’ve been able to observe and try to understand, I’m pretty sure that homosexuality, at least in most cases, is not a choice of the individual so identifying. In fact it’s a ticket to a harder life then they might otherwise have, so in this I give sympathy. Should such matters need to be sorted out in the eternity’s, I’m sure they will be, but for us now in mortality, its incumbent upon we who identify as Christians (as well as all people) to be decent to our fellow human beings. Please go and preach, and exhort unto repentance if you feel so inclined, it may well be that I’ve become to lax in this, but don’t try and force others to behave to a certain code. Who was it who said that morality by force ceases to be morality at all? Well I believe him.

As for the ’end times’ or more broadly the role God plays on the inflection with which we are bereft in this life, I tend to favor the reading of Rabbi Harold Kushner: ‘God dose not send these things upon us, only helps us through them.’ I could be wrong about all these things, and very likely my religious outlook will continue to grow and develop over time. But the constant that I try to hold onto in faith is that of simple decency. A mankind who learns an oft overlooked lesson from the story of the Virgin Mary and doesn’t try to stigmatize the pregnant teen, and a God who doesn’t need a big light show of destruction to satisfy ego and welcome in a pre-ordained triumph through human suffering, but rather one who will tend us through all our storms, even if agency means some of use go through hell to make it to the other side. These are my convictions, admittedly expressed through the light haze of writing at 12:30 in the morning, but there they are non-the-less. In both Saved! And Left Behind we see examples of the best and worse of Christian thought and behavior, and lets hope that both can serve as modern texts containing something worth learning from. But don’t my word for it, you can study them yourself.