Religion and Science Fiction

James F. McGrath, McGrath

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781608998869
  9781498258272
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621890249
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Religious themes, concepts, imagery, and terminology have featured prominently in much recent science fiction. In the book you hold in your hands, scholars working in a range of disciplines (such as theology, literature, history, music, and anthropology) offer their perspectives on a variety of points at which religion and science fiction intersect. From Frankenstein, by way of Christian apocalyptic, to Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and much more, and from the United States to China and back again, the authors who contribute to this volume serve as guides in the exploration of religion and science fiction as a multifaceted, multidisciplinary, and multicultural phenomenon.

chapter 1

The Dark Dreamlife of Postmodern Theology

Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children,
and Alien Resurrection

Joyce Janca-Aji

The law of Nature is a spiritual law. It respects all life, for all life is equal. If we transgress it, the consequences will be dark and terrible.

—Chief Oren Lyons of the Iroquois

In his study about holy aliens and cyborg saviors, Anton Kozlovic argues that the majority of theological reflection on science fiction films has revolved around supporting the central claims of Christianity. However, the postmodern, postapocalyptic, postchristian and in some ways posthuman science fiction films of French directors Jean Jeunet and Marc Caro: Delicatessen (1991) and The City of Lost Children (1995), as well as Jeunet’s later direction of the fourth Alien movie, Alien Resurrection (1997), give the viewer—and the theologian—pause. Although replete with biblical personas, themes, and narratives, their fractured and conflicted presentations disallow refuge in orthodox, or even coherent, theological narratives.

In Delicatessen, set after some unnamed natural holocaust, the lives of the residents of an apartment building revolve around the “communion” sacrifice of an ex-circus performer/hired hand, Louison, whose words on forgiveness echo those of Christ. However, not only does the sacrificial lamb fail to die, he escapes by calling forth a deluge that carries away the hungry mob like the Pharaoh’s army. After the butcher who is called to perform the sacrifice of Louison (recalling Abraham and Issac) dies by his own hand, Louison and the butcher’s daughter are free to sit among the clouds playing music, claiming a tiny piece of heaven for themselves at the end of the world. In The City of Lost Children, a fanatic Christianesque cult kidnaps young children to sell to the misbegotten creations of a mad scientist, who hook them up to a great machine to steal their dreams of Christmas. This cannibalistic consumption of souls only ends when the amnesiac creator makes an apocalyptic return and One arrives to save the children. In Alien Resurrection, Ripley is cloned by military scientists in order to reproduce the alien that was gestating inside her chest. Now both human and alien, redeemer and destroyer, Christ and anti-Christ, Ripley must outwit “Father” to kill the precious alien she has brought into the world.

One way to interpret the theological aspects of these films is to see them as postmodern critiques of the religious, phallocentric, and scientific cultures and discourses of Western modernity. Each film intertwines patriarchal biblical codes with a denatured nature and aliens of multiple types, linking Christianity and modern science with ecological destruction, dystopias, and apocalypse; each serves as an illustration of Jameson’s definition of the postmodern condition: “what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.”1 While modernity tries to recreate a lost or mythical unity by constructing one linear totalitarian system after another to somehow encapsulate and express the whole of reality, deconstructive postmodernism, its other face, revels in a frantic undoing of modernism’s conceptual scaffolds. Like the grandmother in Delicatessen who simultaneously knits and unknits the same skein day and night, the postmodern mode of thinking denies closure and completion, emphasizing the process of existence instead of unattainable absolutes. In Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, this is performed in a ludic manner, playfully re-arranging and re-referencing codes, symbols, and images, past and future, nostalgia and dread, the real and the imagined, as if everything is part of a dark fairy tale or dream. Alien Resurrection, which is more typically sci-fi and nightmarish, achieves similar reworkings through its emphasis on the hybrid and the feminine.

However, these three films have more to offer than postmodern recombinations of fragments from old and, as the films suggest, clearly failing systems. The dark, gray, artificial spaces devoid of nature do not just suggest the end of the world, but also the beginning of a new and corrected one. Unlike the assertions of Derrida and Barthes that there is nothing outside the text and no way to overcome metaphysics, these films are of interest precisely because they suggest that there is indeed something beyond endless intertextual referencing which deserves further attention. Through the postmodern play in the retro and neo-noir science fictions of Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children and the deliberate blurring of categories of being in Alien Resurrection, the directors obliquely suggest an alternative to dangerous apocalyptic perspectives. By highlighting the role of nondual interdependence in human and nonhuman interactions, Jeunet and Caro propose a more holistic and integrative view of nature and existence, suggestive of chaos theory, postmodern animism, and most particularly, James Lovelock’s Gaia theory.

Delicatessen: “Chacun pour soi et Dieu pour tous”

The first image of the film is that of a blackened building standing among the bombed-out remains of a city cloaked in the permanent twilight of some postapocalyptic nightmare. The building, like the symbolic systems which led to this destruction, is a dead shell unlocatable in time and space (“Here or there, we are nowhere”). Nature, as the butcher tells the cab driver, is also dead and will never grow again. The grisly secret of the building is suggested by the menacing figure of the butcher in his bloody apron and the raspy echo of his cleaver being sharpened throughout the building. In the absence of all animal and plant life, the butcher’s system of hiring handymen to transform them into small packages of meat—distributed with the reverence of a priest offering communion—allows for the continuation of life after the death of nature through the very literal body and blood of a sacrificial lamb. Yet for all his priestly and fatherly authority in the building, the butcher does not ascribe religious meaning to his system which he sees as not only fate but an improvement on other systems of survival: out “there” they draw straws.

The inhabitants of the building are no more appealing. Working class brothers Robert and Roger Cube handcraft small gadgets that nostalgically mimic the mooing of cows. Mademoiselle Plusse earns her living by selling her “hams” and “sucklings” to the butcher. Immigrant Claude Tapioca lamely tries to support his family by peddling rat callers and bullshit detectors on the black market. Living in the basement, the frogman has transformed his apartment into a swamp, replete with the snails and frogs he affectionately names before he eats while listening to military marches. Upper class Aurore hears “voices” begging her in quasi-Christian terms to free herself from this fallen, filthy world—which her hyperrational ultra-French husband somehow never seems to hear. Julie Clapet, the vegetarian and extremely near-sighted daughter of the butcher, at once rejects and depends upon her father’s despotic system of food distribution. The wealth he gains from his enterprise, hoarded in large sacks of precious, irreplaceable lentils, buys her tea and biscuits. As Stephen Infantino describes it: “The postmodern/post apocalyptic being is a highly qualifiable situation, it has all come to this: a society . . . composed of rugbeating, nose-picking, snail-sucking, condom-patching, moo-making, people-eating survivalist slimeballs who would sooner trade Grandma for back rent than lose a single lentil.”2 As the frogman, who recalls the walrus of Alice in Wonderland, says before eating his pet snails: “Chacun pour soi et Dieu pour tous” (Everyone for himself and God for all).

In direct contrast to the social system of the predatory “surfacers” is an alternate and literally underground organization of Troglodytes: an egalitarian, vegetarian resistance group based on cooperation, solidarity, and sharing. Adopting a more amphibious existence, the Troglodytes can be seen as attempting to revert back to a premammalian, prehuman, and thus preEdenic world in the process of creation, unsullied by time, humanity, apocalypse and cannibalistic communion. However, as if to mock certain strains of New Age mysticism and green politics/spirituality, these men in wetsuits are ridiculously prepubescent in their idealism: from the secret handshake and the quasi-military discipline to their fear of being live prey, from their utter ineptitude in carrying out the plan to save Louison to the inability of a few of its members to discern the gender of a rather voluptuous woman.

The arrival of Louison, the latest handyman answering the ad, marks the beginning of the end of the butcher’s reign. Instead of the rule of “chacun pour soi” or more literally, “eat or be eaten,” Louison’s love for his former circus partner, the monkey Dr. Livingstone, and his forgiveness for the crowd that devoured the monkey after a show, inspire the necessary change of heart first in Julie and Mlle Plusse which allows them to rebel against the butcher. Paraphrasing Christ, Louison tells Julie: “No one is entirely evil. It is circumstance. Or they don’t realize what they’ve done wrong.”

Although it is tempting to read Louison as a figure of Christ at the Second Coming, the butcher as the anti-Christ in the abjectly fallen world who prepares for the arrival of Louison, the hapless handymen as communion hosts, the virginal, protective Julie as Mary, and Mlle Plusse as a repentant Magdalene, the postmodern emphasis on the performative renders any attempt at allegorization futile. Circus music plays as the opening credits of the film roll. The menace of the building, the site of such cannibalistic evil, is mitigated by almost stereotypical scenes from classic horror movies (shots of the building like those of Frankenstein’s castle, the residents breaking into Julie and Louison’s bathroom hideout like peasants storming the castle’s doors, and the frogman eating bugs like Dracula’s lackey). Louison arrives at the building wearing clown shoes; his only luggage consists of memorabilia from his act. His escape from the butcher depends on circus stunts, acrobatics, Chaplinesque slapstick, and even lion taming techniques with a television antenna. If he has a dual nature, it is not so much human and divine as human and monkey—which would account for his ability to remain “natural” and to demonstrate basic mammalian compassion. As such, the reiteration of Christ’s message of forgiveness can almost be seen as another remnant from a former reality, reconstituted and replayed, with just as much meaning as the gadgets that make sounds from extinct animals, or the endless series of cooking shows on television demonstrating the creation of dishes whose ingredients no longer exist. Indeed, the emphasis on the virtual nature of social reality (Louison is finally seen as human only after he appears on television) eliminates the possibility of taking any one particular narrative meaning seriously.

If viewers are asked to mistrust any overarching theological design, they are simultaneously invited to pay attention to the intricate series of interconnections, a kind of sympathetic magic which seems to suggest the existence of another kind of intelligence working behind the scenes. Although the film opens with the darkness of the building and landscape, there is also a light—without an identifiable source—which pours through the building like spirit streaming through dead matter. Behind the butcher sharpening his cleaver, the viewer is drawn toward and then into an illuminated vent pipe which connects, like the arterial labyrinth of a single organism, all parts of the building and suggests, quite literally, a light at the end of the tunnel. These early indications are reinforced by the series of coincidences throughout the film as if everyone were caught in a web of unseen connections and harmonies. For example, when the butcher and Mlle Plusse are having sex, the rhythmic squeak of the bed springs traveling through the air vents seemingly cause all the other activity in the building to keep time—Julie’s cello piece, the beating of a rug, the pumping of a bike tire, Louison painting the wall, Robert drilling holes and the grandmother knitting—until the butcher climaxes, the springs stop, Julie’s string breaks, and Louison falls over. A key dropped in a pipe somehow finds its way back to its owner’s bedside. A dream of Louison being killed by Dr. Livingstone results in his toy monkey falling over. Louison’s playing of a rusty saw strangely harmonizes with Julie’s playing of her cello.

These coincidences and harmonics, however, cannot be contrived or used against the unseen order which binds them. When Aurore’s voices convince her to kill herself, her suicide attempts, based on a series of causal relations, inevitably and comically fail. The ringing of the doorbell, which is supposed to engage the sewing machine and pull a piece of fabric to make a lamp fall into Aurore’s bath, stops just before she would be electrocuted. Furthermore, once the pattern of interconnectivity is established, these coincidences seem to be motivated toward a positive end, driving the plot to its happy conclusion. Julie accidentally brews a sleeping tea that keeps Louison safely drugged—and off the stairs where the butcher waits. After a dream premonition of Louison’s death, Julie unwraps some newspaper from a package in the refrigerator and stumbles upon an article on the Troglodytes which gives her the germ of her plan. Trying to escape the residents clamoring for their meat, Julie and Louison are forced into a bathroom—the only room which gives them a chance of escape. Through similar fortuitous circumstances, Louison and Julie are able to do away with their adversaries without causing them harm. The postman blows himself up trying to shoot Louison. When the butcher hurls Louison’s boomerang at him, this time it is the butcher’s head that is split in two. Aurore’s last suicide scheme fails, but she then inadvertently sets fire to the building and dies as a result.

After the complete undoing of the cannibalistic scheme through the death of the father (the butcher) and the destruction of the building (his kingdom), the end of the film suggests the possibility of a return to an edenic innocence. Completely submerged in the flooded bathroom just before they escape, Julie and Louison enjoy an idyllic moment as they kiss. The last scene finds them playing their unworldly harmonies on a rooftop among the clouds, in a kind of postmodern version of angels with harps in the afterlife of a fallen world.

The City of Lost Children: The Interior of the Dream

If Delicatessen is Jeunet’s foray into a possible postapocalyptic world, then The City of Lost Children is a study of evil from a postmodern perspective of childhood fantasies and fears. Yet despite the difference of focus, these two science fiction fantasies function as a diptych. Like its predecessor, The City of Lost Children relies on the same bleakness of landscape set in an imaginary retro postwar “France” and the same comic lightness of tone. The absence of nature, the denatured humans, and the undoing of an evil plot based on human consumption form the same contrast with circus motifs and the childlike innocence of the heroes.

The film begins with a child’s dream of a Christmas morning set in the forties: a mechanical tin soldier with a porcelain face clapping cymbals, a wintry window, Santa coming down the chimney. As the music and scene begin to warp menacingly, a second, third, and tenth Santa come down, filling the room, making the boy run for his teddy bear and aged Krank wake up screaming. Because of a flaw in his design, Krank suffers from a complete lack of all imaginative faculties, which causes him to age at an accelerating rate. To save himself from death by lack of dream, Krank rebelled against the mad scientist who created him and threw him in the sea. Once he established himself as the head of his creator’s floating lab, he begins, with the assistance of the other faulty creations (the dwarf Marthe, Irvin the migrained brain in an aquarium, and six narcoleptic clones) to...

Table of contents

• Religion and Science Fiction
• Contributors
• Introduction: Religion and Science Fiction
• Chapter 1. The Dark Dreamlife of Postmodern Theology
• Chapter 2. Sorcerers and Supermen
• Chapter 3. Star Trekking in China
• Chapter 4. Science Playing God
• Chapter 5. Looking Out for No. 1
• Chapter 6. Robots, Rights, and Religion
• Chapter 7. Angels, Echthroi, and Celestial Music in the Adolescent Science Fiction of Madeleine L’Engle
• Chapter 8. Uncovering Embedded Theology in Science Fiction Films
• Select Bibliography
• Index of Scripture
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects