Redemptive Violence and Film – Through a Glass Darkly

This is the second entry in the “Redemptive Violence and Film” series between yours truly and Thomas. This is my first entry: “Terminator: The Eschaton.”

“I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war.” – Rev. 19:11

The summer blockbuster film Terminator Salvation follows the exploits of John Connor as he fights for the human disapora against Skynet, an artificial intelligence that seeks to obliterate humanity in favor of a world run by and for machines. It’s a bad movie, filled with ludicrous plot holes (Earth to machines: haven’t you seen Goldfinger and Austin Powers? Kill John Connor before letting him into your secret lair!), though the post-apocalyptic special effects are undeniably cool. Yet, with all its absurdities, something about Terminator Salvation nudges my Biblical-relevance-o’-meter. Is it Left Behind for our ironic post-industrial sensibilities?

I spent many hours in my youth listening to preachers who thought they had figured out the imagery of Revelation 19. They imagined the armies of the earth literally gathered on the plain of Armageddon (the Megiddo Pass) to confront Christ, the Rider on the White Horse, in physical battle. At the conclusion of this decisive battle, the “beast” and the “false prophet” who lead the rebellion against Christ are “thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur” (v. 20). The remaining combatants are “killed with the sword that came out of the mouth of the rider on the horse, and all the birds gorge[] themselves on their flesh” (v. 20-21). (These scenes are only available in the “Unrated Director’s Cut” version of the Bible. The Disney Family Bible skips right to the “no more tears” part).

Here is “redemptive violence” at its thickest. Only after this cleansing apocalypse — and the ensuing, mysterious millennial period and final outbreak of rebellion in Chapter 20 — do we reach the quiet shores of the New Jerusalem in chapter 21, in which God “will wipe every tear from [his people’s] eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (v. 4).

I will need to demur to the literalism of those “Summer Bible Conference” preachers who first introduced me to the starkly horrific elegance of the Bible’s apocalyptic literature. Precisely because the genre is apocalyptic, these images must be understood as images, impressionistic and sometimes nearly incomprehensible pictures of realities far deeper than their “literal” surface. Those preachers were correct, however, to note that the divine reckoning they represent, in which “kings, generals, and mighty men, [and] horses and their riders” are judged along with “all people, free and slave, small and great” (ch. 19, v. 18) by the blazing light and piercing truth of Christ, is a violent act.

So perhaps we can see John Connor as Christ figure, a Rider on a White Horse, expurgating the steel-cold machinations of sin, leading a remnant of humanity to its final salvation. I would like to say that this is so, except that Connor also embodies the trope of the tragically stoic hero, the man who must deny his humanity so that others can live. Maybe Connor is a kind of high Medieval Christ, staring distantly from an altar triptych with big, vacant eyes. Better yet, he might reflect a Nestorian duality, never truly entering into the price of his atoning violence. Either way, we, the movie audience, are invited to gaze at the spectacle of a mechanical ritual sacrifice without experiencing the expurgation of real blood, sweat and loss. “Terminator” ultimately offers us Salvation without kenosis. For the real thing, the Rider must win his White Horse by way of the Cross.

I’m starting a series with Thomas at Everyday Liturgy on “Redemptive Violence in Film.” Here is the first post, from Thomas:

In the critically acclaimed genre stalwart High Noon, Gary Cooper plays Will Kane, a town sheriff who learns of the release of a murderous, bloodthirsty villain named Frank Miller the same day he marries a Quaker woman and promises to retire his badge and lead a simple, peaceful life as a shopkeeper.

Conflicted about the release of Frank Miller, Kane decides to stop the horses, get back to town, and defeat Frank Miller once and for all.

But, in the years since Frank Miller went away to jail, the town so united by their victory over the ruthless criminal has now become a town more excited by money and good times than by justice, equity, and community. This is the world Kane has policed for so many years, and even though he is often told he doesn’t need to protect them, there is a new sheriff coming tomorrow, and it’d be best he just went away to avoid trouble Kane nonetheless stays to protect the town.

The town, so numb to guns and violence, wants no part in just another shooting. No one will join a posse to round up Miller again, so Kane decides to go it his own. This whole time, Grace Kelly’s wonderfully played Mrs. Kane, only a half hour after her wedding to this man, finds herself sitting in a hotel waiting for a train to take her to St. Louis and divorce (has to be a record). Mrs. Kane, as a Quaker, is a pacifist and cannot accept her new husband carrying around a gun, let alone being motivated to use it once more. She sits, perplexed and conflicted, in the hotel counting down the hours until the noon train.

[Spoiler Alert] Here in lies the myth of redemptive violence, when Kane must face down four armed men in the town center to defend his pride (now thoroughly hubris and self-deception). It is insane to protect a town that does not want you around, even more insane to make a rash decision that leads to your wife wanting a divorce after a half hour of marriage, and most insane to go against men four to one. And the myth is this: Kane wins. He shoots three of the men after the noon train comes in an elongated shootout that starts as his wife is leaving for St. Louis. She runs off the train thinking she will find her husband’s dead body, yet instead finds one of the villains. Her husband has killed. Instead of becoming infuriated and running back for the train, Mrs. Kane grabs a gun and shoots a villain in the back, giving her husband the chance he needs to finally defeat Frank Miller with a spree of bullets, sending him to his death.

Violence has brought peace, and the couple that was on the brink of divorce is united in the defeat of the forces that would have separated them, and they ride off into the sunset leaving the cowardly townspeople in their dust.

There is another way to read the end of this story, one that deconstructs the myth of redemptive violence. This myth says violence is the only way to assure peace. Unfortunately the peace the Kane’s find is one that is hollow and individualistic instead of uniting. Peace should be a uniting force, yet in the Western peace is not the salvation of a community as much as the use of violence as a will too power. The individual leaves only when they have exerted their will upon a place and exercised hubris as the only moral authority (watch Appaloosa, a movie that features the town’s laws being actually signed over to the hired guns).

Riding off into the sunset is a symbol of individualism at all costs, and the cost is community. There are a few movies, like The Magnificent Seven, where morality is not tied to economy but tied to justice, and the hired guns slowly become part of the peaceful community and the violence at the end of the film is defense, not mercenaries. One of the guns even stays behind and becomes incorporated into the community. The traditional western ethos is one of violence assures peace, and the approval of a Quaker going against her religion and a prideful man gunning down villians when he had no real legal authority or need to do so is a celebrated act. This act can be turned on its head though as the couple leaves the town immediately and sets off for the sunset. Violence is always an act of separation, and though violence has brought the Kanes together once more it separates them from the community. Peace, as any Quaker can tell you, is an act of unity and community. Peace brings unity, even if it enters the gray area of defense as in The Magnificent Seven. Redemptive violence is tragic because it only gives peace to one of the parties, and the other party is left dead or in ruins, as in war, revenge, and retaliation. The Kanes may look safe and sound and ready to enjoy their honeymoon, but they leave a town with four dead bodies and a broken moral compass, a town that on the outside looks a lot like what’s on their inside: persons who have compromised their integrity, religion, and morality for the sake of “peace.”

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