It\u2019s been a few days since my last post, and there isn\u2019t much to say on the news front right now \u2014 apart from the fact that Cars<\/a><\/i>, despite playing on more screens than any Pixar movie ever<\/a>, is the first Pixar<\/a> cartoon to have a smaller opening weekend<\/a> in wide release than the Pixar cartoon that immediately preceded it (and indeed, depending on the final numbers that are due tomorrow, the film may turn out to have Pixar\u2019s smallest opening weekend since Toy Story 2<\/i> came out way back in 1999) \u2014 but I did want to link to the following items, which \u201canalyze\u201d certain films and TV shows more than \u201creview\u201d them. I\u2019ll quote some salient bits, but by all means, read the full-length articles at the links provided.<\/span><\/p>\n 1.<\/a> Gabriel McKee at TheRevealer.org<\/a> comments on The Omen<\/a><\/i>, Left Behind<\/a><\/i> and \u201cChristian cultural terrorism\u201d:<\/p>\n But despite its spiritual themes, The Omen<\/i> has a distinctly secular approach to religious ideas. Screenwriter David Seltzer has stated that he had never read the Bible before writing the screenplay, and it shows. The film repeatedly paraphrases Revelation, but never directly quotes it. Indeed, the infant Beast himself is the only element of John\u2019s apocalypse that appears in the film. The Final Conflict<\/i> eschews the canon altogether, inventing a book of the Bible \u2014 complete with faux-King James linguistic flourishes and an \u201cit shall come to pass\u201d \u2014 to contain its plot-driving prophecy. The Omen<\/i> gives us an Antichrist with no doctrinal or scriptural strings attached, diffusing from the complexities of apocalyptic spirituality a single element, a sinister figure who is evil in the broadest sense.<\/p>\n Nowhere is this secular approach to Biblical prophecy more clear than in The Final Conflict<\/i>. Damien, all-grown-up, is the head of Thorn Industries, a multinational corporation that has a stranglehold on the world\u2019s economy and food supply. In the film\u2019s climactic scene, Damien is betrayed and stabbed by a former lover, dying as the Second Coming occurs. The moment is somewhat anticlimactic, giving us a ghostly image of Jesus, a musical flourish, and a lighting cue \u2014 a far cry from the universal transformation in the closing chapters of Revelation. Jesus\u2019 return occurs in secret, in the isolated ruins of a church, and we are left with the sense that not much has changed beyond the ouster of a sinister CEO. With the Antichrist out of the way, the world can get back to business as usual. The Omen<\/i>\u2019s Jesus brings not final judgment, but a return to the status quo.<\/p>\n The key Christian element missing from The Omen<\/i> films is the presence of Christians. Aside from a handful of histrionic priests and scheming monks who become fodder for the films\u2019 grand guignol death sequences, there\u2019s nary a believer to be found. Early in the first film, Father Brennan, a priest who knows of Damien\u2019s true origins, tells the boy\u2019s father that he must \u201caccept the Lord Jesus, drink His blood.\u201d But Thorn ignores this advice, and doesn\u2019t set foot inside a church until he attempts to kill Damien on consecrated ground in the film\u2019s climax. As The Omen<\/i> films would have it, all Christians are Catholics, all Catholics are clergy, and none of them can stop the Antichrist. The heroes, by contrast, are secularists, right up to the woman who finally kills Damien.<\/p>\n Richard Donner, the director of the first Omen<\/i> film, sheds some interesting light on this conundrum with his non-supernatural interpretation of the story. Damien, he says, is not evil, and the deaths around him are coincidental. But the misguided faith of priests like Father Brennan lead Thorn, otherwise a rational man, to believe that his son must die. The movie, in this light, becomes a warning about the dangers of religious mania. The absence of Christians in the film underscores this statement about the dangers that radical faith can pose for secular society.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n FWIW, I recently listened to Donner\u2019s commentary on the DVD<\/a> for the original Omen<\/i>, and I have to say I don\u2019t quite buy his take on the story \u2014 he throws in too many seemingly \u201cobjective\u201d elements that Thorn and Father Brennan are not<\/i> aware of, and thus could not<\/i> be incorporating into their mania. And I do think there comes a point where the coincidences stack up so high that there would almost certainly have to be something more going on \u2026<\/p>\n 2.<\/a> A monk I know recently lent me the first season of the new version of Battlestar Galactica<\/a><\/i>, and I have to say it grew on me. I don\u2019t watch live TV all that much, so I\u2019m waiting for a chance to see the second season<\/a> on DVD \u2014 but in the meantime, Seth Perry\u2019s comments at Martin Marty\u2019s Sightings<\/a><\/i> pique my interest:<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t until the recent closing episodes of the second season that the show began to really round out the religious feature of its universe. The prophecy-heavy plotline on the human side seems to have played itself out for now, and the inevitability of those prophecies appears more explicitly in question. Similarly, events that Six had predicted did not turn out as she had foreseen. The most artful development, in my view, took the form of something that accompanies religion everywhere, but which had been missing from Cylon society: skepticism. First seen masquerading as a priest of the human religion, a model of Cylon appears who does not believe: \u201cSupernatural divinities are the primitive\u2019s answer for why the sun goes down at night.\u201d Better yet, he makes it clear that his own skepticism is as unverifiable as the faith of the other Cylons: \u201cAt least that\u2019s what we\u2019ve been telling the others for years. Can\u2019t really prove it one way or the other, of course.\u201d<\/p>\n Now we\u2019re talking. Galactica<\/i> has been deservedly lauded for providing a novel setting for the playing out of real-life political, social, and moral issues, which is what the best science fiction always does. With the clear infusion of questions of faith<\/i> into its theological trappings, the show can explore the way religion works in the real world \u2014 as a series of stops and starts, buoyed by faith and beset with doubt, among an assortment of individuals who believe different things to different degrees.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 3.<\/a> Kirsten A. Powers at The American Prospect<\/a><\/i> critiques the documentary Jesus Camp<\/a><\/i> for portraying one extremist segment of evangelicalism as though it somehow represented the whole:<\/p>\n Statistics about the spectacular number of \u201cevangelicals\u201d in the United States are ominously flashed onscreen throughout the movie, implicitly suggesting that Becky and her assembled camp are giving us a peek into the inner workings of the \u201cevangelical movement.\u201d But it might be worth questioning the conventional wisdom that the 100 million Americans who call themselves evangelicals all march to the same beat. Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and James Dobson have a vested interest in presenting this group as a conservative monolith under their exclusive and unquestioned control. And while there is no denying the electoral power of the Religious Right, Democrats should not assume that all, or even a majority, of evangelicals naturally hew to the Republican line.<\/p>\n While it\u2019s never disclosed in the movie, Jesus Camp<\/i> is in fact a Pentecostal<\/a> camp, which puts it far to the right theologically and politically, even within the evangelical movement. The directors explained that they didn\u2019t want to confuse audiences by disclosing this and instead referred to the camp only as \u201cevangelical.\u201d Unfortunately, they unwittingly added to the enormous confusion that people like Jim Wallis, author of God\u2019s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn\u2019t Get It<\/i>, has been trying to clear up for years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n