Daylight Saving

Well, I watched Watchmen last night, at the local multiplex. It’s now Sunday morning and maybe I should be at church. Apart from my whole life’s journey which has broken away from attendance at any particular denomination, this movie would make me want to stay in bed and stare at the ceiling on the first morning of Daylight Saving.

Of course if I never saw the movie it would not have this effect, and that would be one way of dealing with the situation. The monks at Mount Athos or the Grand Chartreuse did not see Watchmen, neither did many church attenders who went to All Saints or Living Word this morning, if they made it up in time. Prayer and religion go on regardless of what’s playing on the widescreens. But do they?

In an attention-grabbing bit of dialogue in the movie (at least for me) Dr. Manhattan is told people think he is a god, because of his cosmic powers to reconfigure matter any way he wants. He says, “I am not a god, and I don’t think there is a god. If there is, he’s nothing like me.” He got that right, but that’s where the issue is left, and in the meantime truly terrifying consequences unfold on the earth because there is no divinity to stop human violence. The movie might be called metaphysically nihilist, but anthropologically it is anything but nihilist. The D.C. Comics series on which the movie is based, of the same name, and to which the movie is faithful, is seeking desperately for a solution to the human horror of violence, even as it plunges deeper and deeper into the void of butchery, war, murder. Without spoiling (!) it for anyone—but I really do think all those who want to take the gospel seriously should go see this tomorrow and find out for themselves—I can say the movie heads down the fast-lane to a wham-bam sacrificial ending which at the same time is fully exposed and revealed for the chronic and hopeless falsehood that it is. What is great about Watchmen is that it refuses to pull out of the nose-dive, in some cornbread Hollywood denial, once it gets you gripping the sides of your cinema seat in anticipation.

Which brings me back to church. Unlike Dr. Manhattan—who incidentally, because of his own original reconfiguration at the small particle level of his being, takes on a Zen-like persona in the face of all violence and catastrophe—I do think there is a god, and that god is passionately concerned with the human “cultifact” of violence (like artifact but the production of culture through violence). There are other movies which are sensitive to the gospel theme of God's recreative nonviolence and suggest it artistically in the midst of all the mayhem they put on screen. Watchmen will have none of it. Written in the 80’s by Alan Moore it gives an alternative vision of recent history, retelling the story of the Nixon era as if the U.S. won the Vietnam war, and then of the Cold War, ramping it up to a terrifying crisis. All this has an unsettling effect of some sort of “déjà vu,” even though it didn’t exactly happen! It’s as if the same stuff is being played out over and over, regardless of the surface appearance of history. In which cast there is this massive crisis of human violence, and really there are no anthropological solutions on the horizon.

So, I ask, what was the message preached at All Saints or Divine Word this morning? Was there anything there about Jesus’ re-creation of the human? Would it even be possible to broach that conversation, given all the presuppositions of those places? I don’t think so. That’s why I just lay in bed in the dim light, thinking about that movie last night.

Tony