A Response to “The Book of Eli”, pt. 2
Posted on 06 July 2010
This film, as I said before, seems to me just another instance of the American belief in the saving power of violence, particularly the violence we levy against ‘evil’ everywhere. 1 But leaving that aside, the message driving this film – a message I think authorially intended – is that humanity depends upon civilization, which in turn depends upon religion to hold itself together. Tellingly, a Emil Cioran quote serves as the epigraph to the script: and tells the tale: ‘A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed’.
Eli, the sole devout, has this god-given duty: to protect his treasure from the evil ones and the quasi-culture they would establish, and to surrender it trustfully to the right culture makers (with Malcolm Macdowell’s character, Lombardi, playing the role of librarian/leader of the new world-makers), who promise safety (remember Lombardi’s parting words to Solara) and freedom of religion (notice how the newly-printed KJV fits nicely in its spot on the shelf between the Tanakh and Koran) and thereby a ‘new birth of freedom’ for those who have survived the apocalyptic events.
As far as I can see, this film means to convince us that civilization can and will save the world, if only it makes the right use of religion. In other words, it is but another instantiation of the Enlightenment vision for European culture. It is deeply ironic that Denzel Washington, both as an African-American and a Christian, plays a role in which he finds himself entrusted with what Kipling hymned as the ‘white man’s burden’, a burden that has nothing to do with the cross.
The filmmakers apparently believe that (the) faith serves the world in just the way it serves Eli himself, providing both it and him with (nothing more than) the energy to carry through life with a sense of meaning, so that same energy can be transferred to the next generation and the human race can survive with more than the thinly civilized world that Carnegie intends. The film poses a (mindless and faithless) question: Which culture will win, in the end: the dictatorial culture sustained by violent oppression or the democratic one, held together and carried along by tolerance and the exchange of ideas?
While I do believe that religion, including the Christian faith, does serve a divinely-ordained culture-sustaining function, I do not agree that that is its reason for being. ‘Eli’ reduces (the) faith to an utterly this-worldly reality, completely de-eschatologizing it, so that we see a Christianity without real hope of a telos, without redemptive intervention from beyond the cause-effect realities of history, a Christianity-in-service-of-culture — and so no real participation in or imitation of Christ at all.
- I do, of course, believe in real evil. But I also believe that much of what we call evil is not, and so the scare quotes. ↩
1 Response to A Response to “The Book of Eli”, pt. 2
What do you mean by “much of what we call evil in not”? Just curious