Chuck Klosterman On Film And Television (11 page)

This is ultimately what I like about the Born-Again Lifestyle: Even though I see fundamentalist Christians as wild-eyed maniacs, I respect their verve. They are probably the only people openly fighting against America’s insipid Oprah Culture—the pervasive belief system that insists everyone’s perspective is valid and that no one can be judged. As far as I can tell, most people I know are like me; most of the people I know are bad people (or they’re good people, but they consciously choose to do bad things). We
deserve
to be judged.

I realize that liberals and libertarians and Michael Stipe are always quick to quote the Bible when you say something like that, and they’ll tell you, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” And that’s a solid retort for just about anything, really. But the thing with born agains is that they
want
to be judged. They can’t fucking wait. That’s why they’re cool.

As I just mentioned, Rayford Steele loses his young son in
Left Behind
’s Rapture. As it turns out, every young child in this book vanishes, including infants in the process of being born. This is to indicate that they are “innocents” and have done no wrong. And oddly, this was the aspect of
Left Behind
I found most distasteful.

First of all, it kind of contradicts the book’s premise, since we are constantly told that the ONLY way to get into heaven is to accept Christ, which no four-year-old (much less a four-
month
-old) could possibly comprehend. Granted, this is mostly a technicality, and I’m sure it’s intentional (for most exclusivist born-again groups, the technicalities are everything; the technicalities are what save you). But my larger issue is philosophical: Why do we assume all children are inherently innocent? Innocent of what? I mean, any grammar school teacher will tell you that “kids can be cruel” on the playground; the average third-grader will gleefully walk up to a six-year-old with hydrocephalus and ask, “What’s wrong with you, Big Head?” And that third-grader knows what he’s doing is evil. He knows it’s hurtful. Little boys torture cats and cute little girls humiliate fat little girls, and they know it’s wrong. They do it
because
it’s wrong. Sometimes I think children are the worst people alive. And even if they’re not—even if some smiling toddler is as pure as Evian—it’s only a matter of time. He’ll eventually become the fifty-year-old car salesman who we’ll all assume is morally bankrupt until he proves otherwise.

As far as I can tell, the nicest thing you can say about children is that they haven’t done anything terrible
yet
.

So let’s get to the core question in
Left Behind
: If the Rapture happened tonight, who gets called up to the Big Show? Judging from the text, the answer is “No one I know, and probably no one who would read this essay.”
Left Behind
is pretty clear about this, and the authors go to great lengths to illustrate how many of the people passed over by God are fair, moral, and—for the most part—more heroic than prototypical humans. This is a direct reflection of the primary audience for hard-core Christian literature; one assumes those readers would typically possess those same characteristics and simply need a little literary push to become “higher” Christians.

The best example in
Left Behind
is Rayford Steele, the person with whom we’re evidently supposed to “relate.” Buck Williams is the star and the catalyst (especially in the film version), but his main purpose is to move the plot along and provide the conflict. It’s through Rayford that we are supposed to understand the novel’s theme and experience. The theme is that you’re good, but being good is not enough; the experience is that you cannot be saved until you allow yourself to surrender to faith, even though that’s not really how it works for Rayford.

On the very first page of
Left Behind,
we learn that Rayford has a bad marriage, and it’s because his wife had developed an “obsession” with religion. We also learn that—twelve years prior—Rayford drunkenly kissed another woman at the company Christmas party and has never really forgiven himself. However, that guilt does not stop him from secretly lusting after the aforementioned Hattie Durham, even though he never actually touches her (interestingly enough, Rayford and Hattie do have a physical relationship in the film version of
Left Behind,
presumably because director Victor Sarin didn’t think moviegoers would buy the whole Jimmy Carter “I’ve lusted in my heart” sentiment).

Suffice it to say that Rayford would generally be described as a very decent person in the secular universe, which is how most
Left Behind
readers would likely view themselves. However, he can’t see the espoused “larger truth,” which is that there is only a future for those who take the Kierkegaardian leap and believe everything the Bible states (and as literally as possible).

Rayford can’t do this until his life is destroyed, so his conversion isn’t all that remarkable (it actually seems like the most reasonable decision, considering the circumstances). In many ways, this is the book’s most glaring flaw: It demands blind faith from the reader, but it illustrates faith as a response to terror. And since
Left Behind
isn’t a metaphor—it presents itself as a fictionalized account of what
will
happen, according to the Book of Revelation—the justification for embracing Jesus mostly seems like a scare tactic. It’s not a sophisticated reason for believing in God.

Of course, that’s also the point: There is no sophisticated reason for believing in anything supernatural, so it really comes down to believing you’re right. This is another example of how born agains are cool—you’d think they’d be humble, but they’ve got to be amazingly cocksure. And once you’ve crossed over, you don’t even have to try to be nice; according to the born-again exemplar, your goodness will be a natural extension of your salvation. Caring about orphans and helping the homeless will come as naturally as having sex with coworkers and stealing office supplies. If you consciously do good works out of obligation, you’ll never get into heaven; however, if you make God your proverbial copilot, doing good works will just become an unconscious part of your life.

I guess that’s probably the moment where I just stop accepting all this born-again bullshit, no matter how hard I try to remain open-minded. Though I obviously have no proof of this, the one aspect of life that seems clear to me is that good people do whatever they believe is the right thing to do. Being virtuous is hard, not easy. The idea of doing good things simply because you’re good seems like a zero-sum game; I’m not even sure if those actions would still qualify as “good,” since they’d merely be a function of normal behavior. Regardless of what kind of god you believe in—a loving god, a vengeful god, a capricious god, a snooty beret-wearing French god, whatever—one has to assume that you can’t be penalized for doing the things you believe to be truly righteous and just. Certainly, this creates some pretty glaring problems: Hitler may have thought he was serving God. Stalin may have thought he was serving God (or something vaguely similar). I’m certain Osama bin Laden was
positive
he was serving God. It’s not hard to fathom that all of those maniacs were certain that what they were doing was right. Meanwhile, I
constantly
do things that I
know
are wrong; they’re not on the same scale as incinerating Jews or blowing up skyscrapers, but my motivations might be worse. I have looked directly into the eyes of a woman I loved and told her lies for no reason, except that those lies would allow me to continue having sex with another woman I cared about less. This act did not kill 20 million Russian peasants, but it might be more “diabolical” in a literal sense. If I died and found out I was going to hell and Stalin was in heaven, I would note the irony, but I really couldn’t complain. I don’t make the fucking rules.

Just to cover all my doomed bases, I watched a few other apocalyptic movies after
Left Behind
: I rented
The Omega Code
and revisited
The Rapture
. The latter film—a 1991 movie starring Mimi Rogers—was a polarizing attempt to make the end of the world into a conventionally entertaining film, and I still think it’s among the decade’s more interesting movies (at least for its first seventy-five minutes).
The Rapture
opens with Rogers as a bored sex addict, and it ends with her dragging her child into the desert to wait for God’s wrath. Part of the reason so many critics like this film is because writer/director Michael Tolkin “goes all the way” and resists the temptation to end the film with an unclear conclusion. That’s commendable, but I wonder what the response would have been if Rogers didn’t question God at the very end; her character essentially wants to know why God plays with people like pawns and created a totally fucked world when making a utopia would have been just as easy (and though I realize these are not exactly the most profound of existential questions, it’s hard to deny that they’re not the most important ones, either).

Within the scope of mainstream filmmaking—it was released on the same day as the Joe Pesci vehicle
The Super
—
The Rapture
clearly seems like a religious movie. But it’s really not, because it doesn’t have a religious point of view. When push comes to shove, Tolkin’s script adopts a staunchly humanistic take: The Mimi Rogers character asks God why his universe doesn’t make sense. Like most people, she thinks life should be a democracy and that God should behave like an altruistic politician who acts in our best interests. You hear this all the time; critics of organized religion constantly say things like, “There is no way a just God would send a man like Gandhi to hell simply because he’s not a Christian.” Well, why not? I’m certainly pulling for Gandhi’s eternal salvation, but there’s no reason to believe there’s a logic to the afterlife selection process. It
might
be logical, and it
might
be arbitrary; in a way, it would be more logical if it was
totally
arbitrary. But the idea of questioning God’s motives will always be a fiercely American thing to do; it’s almost patriotic to get in God’s face. I’m pretty sure a lot of my friends would love the opportunity to vote against God in a run-off election. Even I’d be curious to see who the other candidate might be (probably Harry Browne).

In contrast, 1999’s
The Omega Code
is much like
Left Behind
in that it doesn’t really offer any options besides buying into the whole born-again credit union. Since both stories are so dogged about the Book of Revelation, they share lots of plot points (i.e., two Israeli prophets screaming about the Second Coming, the construction of a church on The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, a miracle agricultural product that will end world hunger, etc.). The main difference is that
The Omega Code
has ties with Michael Drosnin’s
The Bible Code,
arguably the goofiest book I’ve ever purchased in a lesbian bookstore. Drosnin’s book claims the Torah is actually a three-dimensional crossword puzzle that predicted (among other things) the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin; more importantly, it allows computer specialists to learn just about anything—the date of the coming nuclear war (2006), the coming California earthquake (2010), and the best Rush album (
2112
). I have no idea why I bought this book (or why it was assumed to be of specific interest to lesbians), but it forms the narrative thread for
The Omega Code,
a movie that was actually less watchable than
Left Behind
. Surprisingly,
The Omega Code
earned about three times as much as
Left Behind
($12.6 million to $4.2 million), even though it was made with a much smaller budget ($8 million and $17.4 million, respectively).

I’m not sure why
The Omega Code
made more at the box office than
Left Behind
; it’s kind of like trying to deduce why
Armageddon
grossed more than
Deep Impact
. But the most plausible explanation is that
Left Behind
tried a marketing gamble that failed: It was released on video before it was released in theaters. At the end of the VHS version of
Left Behind,
there is a “special message” from Kirk Cameron. Kirk appears to be standing in the Amazon rain forest while explaining why the movie went to Blockbuster before it went to theaters. “You are part of a very select group,” Cameron tells us, “and that group makes up less than one percent of the country… [but] what about the other 99 percent of the country?” The scheme by
Left Behind
’s production company (an organization that calls itself Cloud 10) was to have every core reader of
Left Behind
see the film in their living room in the winter of 1999 and then instruct each person to demand it be played theatrically in every city in America when it was officially released on February 2, 2000. “We need you to literally tell everyone you know,” Kirk stressed in his video message.

I was working as the film critic for the
Akron Beacon Journal
in early 2000, and—all during January—I kept getting phone calls from strangers, telling me I needed to write a story about some upcoming movie that I had never heard of; I’ve now come to realize that these were
Left Behind
people. I can’t recall if the film ever opened in Akron or not. Regardless, there is a part of me that would like to see this as an example of how
Left Behind
is different from other kinds of entertainment. Its audience truly felt it had a social and spiritual import that far exceeded everything else that opened that same weekend (such as Freddie Prinze Jr.’s
Head Over Heels
). And I’m sure that some of the people who called me that January truly did believe that a Kirk Cameron flick could save the world, and that it was their vocation to make sure all the sinners in suburban Ohio became aware of its existence.

However, I can’t ignore my sinking suspicion that the makers of this movie merely assumed their best hope for commercial success was to manipulate the very people who never needed a movie or a book to learn how to love Jesus. They took people who wanted to rescue my soul and turned them into publicists. Which makes me think the people at Cloud 10 are probably a few tiers below Stalin, too.