Imitation of Christ - I

Imitation of Christ - I never liked any of the Matrix movies. They seemed to be soggy with pseudo-Buddhist platitudes, sort of like Jackie Chan with a huge dose of self-righteous wonkery thrown in.

But there's more, says Thomas Hibbs in National Review Online. The movies, he says, capstone a renaissance of Christian imagery in modern pop art.

Money quote:

The recent popularity of Star Wars, Harry Potter, and especially Lord of the Rings tells us much about the appetite of American audiences for grand mythic tales, with myth understood not in its derogatory sense but in the sense deployed by Lewis and Tolkien. The peculiar contribution of The Matrix was to focus on the dilemma of humanity or post-humanity in the age of machine intelligence. It began with a bold and crisp articulation of this dilemma. It could have ended as a powerful and compelling affirmation of the enduring vitality of classic myths. It could have sharpened our sense of the options: a debased, mechanized humanity, void of the aspirations characteristic of what is best and most noble in our traditions vs. a humanity that has recovered a sense of purpose, a sense of the goods for which we ought to be willing to fight and die for.

The Matrix ended no such way, of course. I'm waiting to if, and how, the final installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy abandons the message, after magnificent resurrection image in The Two Towers. This is Hollywood after all.

And yet if you'd have told me ten years ago, that, by 2002, the best movie of the year would feature a Resurrection scene paralelled on that of Christ's, and that the best album of the year would be solidly themed on faith, strength, hope, self-sacrifice and love, I'd have wondered if we were talking about the same show-biz and entertainment media.

I'm not nearly naive enough to assume that this indicates an interest in the subject of faith on the part of Hollywood (I fully expect the third part of the Rings trilogy to mangle Tolkein's original message beyond recognition - although I'll be as happy to be surprised as I was last year with Two Towers).

But while it doesn't mean Hollywood has discovered faith and socially-unifying myth for its own purposes, it might mean it's figured out the rest of the nation values them, anyway.

Posted by Mitch at November 11, 2003 07:09 AM