“Wake Up Dead Man,” a movie by Rian Johnson and “It Was Only an Accident,” a movie by Jafar Panahi

We are just back from the Boston area, where we walked where some of my ancestors walked, explored places we had long heard about but never visited, had thanksgiving dinner with friends, and attended the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). 

The AAR-SBL meetings present each year an informal survey of the state of the disciplines for Religion and Biblical Studies. Attended by thousands of scholars, with more than a hundred sections meeting at any given time and in each section several scholars reading their papers, it’s a feast of the latest scholarly work, good or not. For me, writing this blog, it suggests new perspectives, corrections for work I’ve done in the past, books I need to read, ideas I need to consider, and more. I’ll come of those in future posts.

In the meanwhile, I continue to work on retrieving theology. Or, at least, suggesting areas of theology that require retrieval, even if my efforts fall short. Lately, I’ve thinking about evil. Although many of us come from a Calvinist background with its emphasis on “total depravity,” it seems to me that evil is often slighted in the story we tell. The Bible has an altogether more compelling and more frightening story about evil, one that has been buried in Christian theology. In these times, we need to be telling that story. I’ll come to that story, I hope, in the next few days in a post I intend to call “Retrieving (a True) Theology of Evil.”

But first, movies, two of them, one I saw yesterday as I write this, and the other just before we left for Boston. The first (the one I saw yesterday) is the latest installment in the “Knives Out” franchise, directed by Rian Johnson and starring, as in the others, the former James Bond, Daniel Craig, in the delicious role of Benoit Blanc (Ben-waa Blanc, heavy on the fake southern accent), a private detective who helps the police solve murder mysteries. 

These movies do not, at first viewing, appear to be serious. And yet, in their own way, they are. What’s more, they appear still to be finding their way, not so set in a formula that the character of Benoit Blanc cannot be nuanced and developed. In the first movie, the eponymous “Knives Out,” we meet Blanc for the first time seated at a piano while a couple of hapless police detectives interview the suspects. At each suspected lie, Blanc hits a key on the piano. We wonder, as we are meant to do, who is that man and what’s he up to? His name tells us that we are not meant entirely to know. We suspect a troubled past. 

The movies feature large casts with famous actors in roles they are invited to play as broadly as possible. No subtle roles here. Each movie has a satirical target. The first movie skewers the entitled rich. The homicidal family at the center of the movie lives off the wealth of their patriarch, an author of bestsellers (played by Christopher Plummer). The second, “Glass Onion,” pillories the tech bros, especially Elon Musk. In the light of what has transpired since, are there any lines as perfect as these directed towards the Musk-like character Miles Bron (played by Edward Norton): “You see,” says Blanc, “I expected complexity! I expected intelligence! I expected a puzzle, a game, but that is not what any of this is!”

For the latest movie, the third in the series, the satirical target is a strain of conversative Christianity that worships power instead of Christ. Think a Catholic version of Mark Driscoll. The central character, brilliantly played by Josh O’Connor, is Father Jud Duplenticy. He has a past. He’s been a boxer. As we learn later in the movie, he has killed a man in the ring. His temper still gets the best of him. As we discover in the movie, he also has a fine understanding of the gospel. As a penance for his failure to control his temper and way to redeem himself, he’s assigned to an upstate New York parish, Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude.

Perpetual Fortitude is failing. Its pastor, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), is an angry man, verbally abusive, theologically right of J.D. Vance (though not far right). He preaches newcomers out of the church. His message is that the church needs warriors. “Our church,” he says from the pulpit, “is assailed by wicked modernity.” It’s time “to take back the ground we’ve lost.” He thunders against the world outside the church. He hates the wicked with a fine hatred.

At Perpetual Fortitude, Wicks has gathered a coterie of lost souls, people who both need him and fear him. Soon he ends up dead. The mystery of his murder gathers from there, with the young priest, Jud Duplenticy, a prime suspect (along with the others). The roles are well played in the typical Knives Out over-the-top style. I’ll leave it there so as not to spoil it for you.

Except to say this: the soul of the movie has to do with a kind of integrity: do you do what you do out of self-righteousness and anger or out of love and compassion? Johnson tangles up these themes with questions about faith and faithfulness. Jesus figures large in all this. The crucifix has been torn off the front wall of the church, but the presence of the crucified lord is everywhere, including in the ending. As is the story of Paul’s conversion on the Damascus Road. I’ll leave you to ponder the theology of the movie. Johnson’s is not simplistic Hollywood pap. I can promise that in doing so you will have a good time.

Which brings me to the second movie. The setting could not be more distant. Not a Catholic parish in upstate New York but present-day Iran. It’s the latest effort by the esteemed Iranian director, Jafar Panahi (see here for my review of an earlier Panahi movie, “No Bears”). 

As in the case of other Panahi movies, “It Was Just an Accident” (French Un Simple Accident), was shot in secret. Panahi has been banned from making movies in Iran. The movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or. In a surprise, Panahi and several of the cast members appeared on stage at Canne to receive the award.

For all that they are different, the tone of “It Was Just an Accident” is not far from Rian Johnson’s “Wake Up Dead Man.” Like Johnson, Panahi presents his characters with a loving and knowing wink. They can’t seem to get entirely out of the way of themselves. They are fully and delightfully human.

“Accident” opens in a car on a dark road somewhere in Iran. In the car are the driver, a man who seems worried about the drive, his wife, and their daughter. Along the way, they accidently hit a dog, damaging the car. They stop for repairs at a garage where the owner seems at first reluctant to help. When he agrees to do so, he asks the man to fetch a toolbox from an area deep in the building. As the man walks back to get the toolbox, you hear the thump, thump, thump of a prosthetic leg. Hidden from view another man, Vahid, also hears. We discover that the sound is the sound of his torturer walking the prison where Vahid, blindfolded, was imprisoned. But is it him? Eghbal. “Peg leg,” as they called him. Vahid is sure it is—for the moment.

The next day, as the man takes the car to the city for repairs, Vahid follows in a van. He waits for the man to walk towards his van, seizes him, ties him up, stuffs him in the van, and drives into the desert, where, in a scene strongly reminiscent of Waiting for Godot, he digs a grave, intending to bury him alive. But is the man in fact Eghbal? He says he is not.  Vahid is sure; he’s not sure. He reluctantly pulls the man out of the grave he has dug for him, puts him in a box in the back of the van, and drives off to consult with another survivor of Eghbal’s torture. And then another, and another, until the van is filled with a contentious company of survivors, some sure the man is Eghbal; others not. Or, better, some sure at any given moment that it’s Eghbal, and others not sure, and at the next moment those who were not sure only a moment ago now sure they have their man, and those who were once sure, no longer sure that they do. 

I’ll leave it there so as not to spoil the movie. Trust me, the movie is full of surprises. But beyond the suspense of the movie, the theme is much like Johnson’s “Wake Up Dead Man,” cast in different circumstances. Call it the integrity of survival. In the face of evil, can those who survive remain true to the principles that led them to be tortured in the first place? Must the response to violence be violence? Or is such violence itself a defeat?

Across the two movies, one from Trump-era America and the other from Iran, one from a nation steeped in Christianity, the other from a nation steeped in Islam, the questions are the same: what does it mean to be human? And equally, what does it mean to be divine? Does divinity require violence for violence, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? What in some theologies passes for justice? Or is divinity, and thus humanity, of a different cloth? 

It’s these questions Jesus answered paradoxically by commanding his disciples to love their enemies and saying of such love that it makes us children of God (Matthew 5:43-45). Does such love work? Is it even possible? The answer, it would appear, from both Johnson and Panahi is a qualified yes. Each movie in its own way speaks to the culture from which it came. The message is the same: evil will only be truly overcome when we refuse to return evil for evil. True human life is to be found not in war but in embrace of each other. 

Clay