The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (16 page)

ARTS

When a comparatively simple, straightforward mathematical expression turns out to correspond to aspects of the natural world . . . believe me, almost every scientist who’s experienced that feels the same kind of reverence and awe that we bring to great art and great music.

—C
ARL
S
AGAN

Chapter 30
An Atheist at the Movies

D
AVID
B
ADDIEL AND
A
RVIND
E
THAN
D
AVID

Cinema covers the waterfront of humanity. That’s what you would think. Over the course of its century or so of life, cinema seems to have given us films covering every genre and subject matter imaginable, and had every possible type of hero. Slum-dwelling millionaires and Australian Scots warriors both get to display personal courage in the service of love; Chinese adulterers and gay cowboys are united in the battle against their own desires. Geriatrics are as free to get naked, fly into space, and fall in love as are teenagers—who also get to re-create Austen and Shakespeare and have under
age sex, often at the same time. Pigs can learn how to be dogs; dogs come home; dinosaurs come to life and seek meaning in Los Angeles; and aliens train for the Tour de France while blowing up the White House.

In all this glorious diversity, however, there’s one theme, and one class of protagonist, that seems to be strikingly absent from the canon. Given the title of this book, and indeed this chapter, we think you can probably guess what it is. You try: name three movies with explicitly atheist protagonists or themes. Not documentaries or TV programs, but proper, popcorn-accompanied, multiplex-playing movies. Take a minute, put the book down, and have a go.

No, seriously: put the book down. Think about it.

Now—how many did you come up with? You see our problem. The problem is they don’t exist. Seriously: there are barely any dramatic feature movies that have an explicitly atheistic hero or theme.

So few, in fact, that even the Atheist Film Festival (http://atheist filmfestival.org), after running an Internet-wide competition for suggestions, has only been able to settle on three titles:
The Root of All Evil
and
Deliver Us from All Evil
(both of which are documentaries, a genre in which there is an honorable lineage of atheist work, most recently joined by Bill Maher’s
Religulous
) and
The Life of Brian
, which, while a fantastic flick and a brilliant satire of institutionalized religion, is not even slightly atheistic—it’s just a very naughty boy.

Looking further afield, one can find a few examples of movies that are at least based on work that is explicitly atheistic in its concerns. The 1992 sci-fi film
Contact
, based on a novel by America’s late
“atheist in chief,” the scientist Carl Sagan, certainly has an atheistic protagonist in the feisty astronomer Ellie (Jodie Foster), determined to prove that the only thing in the heavens are little green men.

The movie proceeds, however, to sell out her character, the book, and its author (who died of cancer before the film was completed, and who remained resolutely and courageously atheistic even on his deathbed) by giving Ellie a pseudo-religious moment of conversion at its climax. What in the book is a complex, but still shocking, mathematically rooted revelation of our holistic interconnectedness is in the film reduced to a hammy moment where a kindly father-figure alien appears from the sky sprouting platitudes. This allows the story’s religious spokesman, the evangelically h
orny Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), to proclaim victory over his erstwhile atheist bedmate, and middle American cinema-goers a victory over scientific reason.

An even more blatant neutering is given to the film adaptation of Philip Pullman’s novel
The Golden Compass
—the first of his brilliant and subversive young adult trilogy,
His Dark Materials
. The books were controversial bestsellers because of their explicitly anti-God and anti-religious subtext, taking
Paradise Lost
and retelling it to young people through the lens of fantasy-adventure. The vapid film adaptation ripped out the subtext, leaving a story in which events unfolded for no reason and without import. The kids weren’t fooled and stayed away in droves, causing the film t
o fail and ultimately bring down the studio behind it. Truly, we atheists are a vengeful god.

Other titles that crop up in lists of atheistic films stand up little better when subjected to analysis. Bergman’s
The Seventh Seal
pops up a lot on atheistic film fave lists, but while that movie definitely plays with ideas of faith and metaphysics, it does so within an explicitly theistic framework.

Horror movies are often thrown up as potential candidates, but while many of them—
The Exorcist
,
The Omen
, and
The Wicker Man
, to take the classics—are on some level anti-religious, they also by definition explicitly accept God’s existence, since you can’t believe in the Devil if you don’t accept his Father. These films use the idea that earth is the battleground ’twixt heaven and hell as an excuse for bloody mutilation and creative carnage, with all the profitable titillation that brings in for the theaters. This strategy also explains, even more so, the success of
The Passion of the Christ
.

What are we left with, then? What about those perennial Christmas movies of doubters and unbelievers? Surely Scrooge in
A Christmas Carol
is an atheist hero; “Bah, humbug!” is hardly a statement of belief. Or how about James Stewart in
It’s a Wonderful Life
, wishing to end it all, hoping for the peace of oblivion, not everlasting salvation? In both films, though, supernatural god-agencies, angels and ghosts, intervene to
show the doubters the error of their ways, and the films end in an explicitly God-fearing world. Bah humbug indeed.

About the only mainstream film that we could think of with an integral atheist hero and message at its core is the dramatization of the Scopes monkey trial,
Inherit the Wind
. Brilliant though this film is, and with its hero’s explicitly atheistic point of view, it is more akin to a documentary—being a fairly careful re-creation of the events of that landmark trial—than a true fictitious piece of cinematic myth.

Also, it’s like fifty years old and no one alive has heard of it, still less seen it.

At this point in our survey, the two of us, filmmakers and storytellers of atheistic persuasion, were beginning to get a little concerned. One of the key functions, perhaps the prime function, of cinema is to create myths of meaning; to allow people of all castes and creeds, backgrounds and persuasions, to see themselves as they might be, to feel not alone, to see metaphors of their own life and ways of being, to have their worldviews challenged and expanded.

The great progression in mainstream filmmaking over the past twenty years is that it has become more diverse—that it now fulfills this function for a greater multiplicity of audiences. The glorious diversity we describe in our opening paragraph mainly describes films made since the late nineties, which is when Hollywood, anticipating the shifting economic centers of the world, started to cater to emergent audiences. Now more people than ever before get to see themselves writ large on the silver screen, get to think of themselves as heroes in their own narrative; and understan
d that there are versions of themselves that are worthy of greatness, dragon slaying, and sex appeal.

This is a good thing, and it has been a long time coming. The rise of Indian and Chinese cinema, the Oscars to Denzel and Halle, the casual multiethnic makeup of TV shows like
House
and
Lost
, all those awards and plaudits that encourage men as straight as Sean Bean and Tom Hanks to play gay, and the fact that Will Smith is the biggest film star in the universe—these are all happy parts of this happy trend.

But why in all this have the atheists been left unrepresented? Where can we look for our myths, our stories, and our worldviews? Is it really as it appears, that in cinema we are the final frontier—and if so, why?

It seems to us that there are two reasons for this absence of atheist movies: one boring and prosaic, the other more interesting and perhaps more profound. Neither is going to change anytime soon, though.

The dull reason is that movies are mass market entertainments, while atheism remains a niche. With the average budget of a studio movie now in excess of $70 million, plus another $30 million in marketing costs, Hollywood isn’t making movies for niche audiences. They are making them for the mob. And the mob globally—particularly in the world’
s biggest movie market, the United States, and in its fastest-growing ones, Asia and Latin America—is a religious one.

Good people, for sure, but as a mob, the same people who make it unthinkable that America could have an atheist for president (it became a landmark moment for atheists as well as black people when President Obama in his inaugural address included a reference to “non-believers”) make it equally unthinkable that Disney is going to drop $100 million on a product with a core message that will ostracize and offend its biggest audiences.

It is this boring and inconvenient truth that has led the film adaptation of
Paradise Lost
to stall, that led
Contact
and
The Golden Compass
to have their atheistic, subversive hearts ripped out, and why
The Passion of the Christ
was the sensational success it was. It’s a market thing, an externality to the creative process of storytelling—a constraint that for mainstream, big-budget movies is unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon.

More interesting, however, is the second reason, the internal, storytelling reason that no great atheistic movies have come down through the ages, not even smaller independently financed ones. Core to all religions are the principles of good storytelling. And core to all great stories are a religious moment.

All the religions have at their heart eternal, mythic stories of death and rebirth; of fathers and sons; of creation and destruction; of hope and despair, persecution and deliverance. They satisfy the most primal urges and needs of mankind’s collective unconscious: the need for meaning and the need for relief from the fear of death. And those same needs are the ones that drive our need to tell and hear stories.

Religions exist, survive, and continue to flourish even in an era of abundance and science for one profound and irreducible reason: because they are the stories we need. As such, they are by definition the best, most resonant, and most powerful stories ever told. Thor and Odin, Hercules and Zeus, Adam and Eve, Shiva and Radha, Buddha sitting under the tree, Noah and the ark, even Joseph Smith and the astronaut angel in his back garden—damn good yarns, each and every one of them, and they influence us all, whether we believe in them or not.

And so this influence seeps into our celluloid tales. Like it or not, they inhabit our psyches, and they are the tropes and metaphors we reach for when trying to satisfy an audience. Even those of us for whom the old stories of religion are diminished in significance because we don’t believe in their literal truth find ourselves somehow serving a categorical imperative of cinema to renew those stories, to supply new tellings of archetypical religious myths. The stories, somehow, will out.

This is not a new thought. Jung wrote of it first and best when he said, “You can take away a man’s gods, but only to g
ive him others in return.” Storytellers of all stripes—from shamans and prophets, via mythologists like Joseph Campbell, to film directors and screenwriters; from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to Stephen, George, and Stanley—have understood this.

This demand that story fulfill metaphysical needs is manifest not only in the big decisions of what stories you tell but also of the small ones of how you tell them. The burning bush in
The Ten Commandments
is a cinematic antecedent to the floating plastic bag in
American Beauty
; Patrick Swayze’s phantasmagorical sculptures in
Ghost
have their beginnings in the gospel story of the Holy Spirit taking over the tongues of the apostles; Buffy’s ascent to heaven after she sacrifices herself to save her sister Dawn owes much to Joan of Arc; and Superman’s descent to Earth from Krypton on a rocke
t ship made by his father, Jor-El, owes a lot to another mythological father who bequeathed his only son to save us.

These moments of supernatural epiphany, of pathetic fallacy, of cosmic intervention make for good cinema. And it is why, no matter how atheistic the creators might be, religious metaphors and imagery continue to pervade our work.

The same principle works in reverse: if religion has the best stories, it is because narrative, classically, requires a transformational moment, an epiphany, to function in the three-act structure beloved of film writers, and that epiphany tends to be moral in nature—from bad to good, or in a more modern system, from blindness to self-awareness or whatever—and that transformation may always need to have a religious quality. Love, the most common theme of the movies, tends to be found (normally by someone who up to that point has not believed in it) round about the end of the second act, in a
moment more than a little reminiscent of the clouds breaking and a sonorous voice speaking out of the sun.

We found this ourselves in our current film,
The Infidel
, which started its life as a comedy with a message about the evils of the intolerance fostered by most religions. We didn’t think when we started work on it that an atheist writer and producer, working with this premise, would make something that hinted at a belief in God. But the movie has gradually morphed, despite our best atheistic intentions, to include a key moment of divine inspiration and road-to-Damascus conversion. While it might not serve our didactic purpose, we cannot help but admit that it serves the needs of the film. Aga
in, Jung got there first: “God approaches man in the form of symbols.” What a smug know-it-all. (Jung, not God. Actually, the two of them can both step off.)

So, faced with the dual pressures of the religious film-going mass market and the internal traitor in our own storytelling psy
ches, what is a pair of atheist filmmakers to do? Is it even possible to come up with a mainstream, entertaining movie that deals with atheist themes, yet remains accessible and emotionally satisfying?