PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1)*fair*, (2) good
FRYEAN MYTHOS: (1) *drama,* (2) adventure
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*
I’ve read more than a fair amount
about mythology, but I confess that I don’t have a lot of detailed information
about the Christian division sometimes called “angelology.” I do know that for moderns the Biblical figures of
Gabriel and Michael have become the most recognizable of the angelic host. In fiction of a non-religious stripe, these
two prominent servants of God are often opposed to one another in some way (as
they were not in the Bible). At times
they’re figures, as in the two movies I review here, in the character of
battling brothers in the Cain-and-Abel tradition.
LEGION, a horror-drama heavy with
action-elements, bears a structural similarity to John Ford’s archetypal
STAGECOACH, in that a disparate group of people are brought together at a
secluded outpost and forced to fight for their lives against an invading
horde. The trope has often been
re-imagined in terms of apocalyptic horror, with the defenders battling zombies
or demons, but in LEGION the marauders are angels sent by God when the creator
decides to wash his hands of his creation.
Freed of any compulsion to protect or succor mankind, LEGION’s angels
act precisely like their demon kindred, both in Biblical and extra-Biblical
sources, and start possessing humans—particularly the “weak-willed” in this
storyline—to use against their enemies.
Those particular enemies come
together at an isolated truck-stop restaurant out in the Mojave Desert. Most of these characters are forgettable
cannon-fodder for the action-scenes, with two exceptions: Charlie, a pregnant
waitress, and Jeep, the teenaged son of the restaurant’s owner, who dotes on
and protects Charlie even though she doesn’t reciprocate his feelings. This selfless feeling, and Charlie’s unborn
child, are the only things that can redeem humanity.
Shortly after the ensemble of
disparate characters receive their first visit from an "angels-in-demon's-guise,”
they meet Michael, who arrives with a trunkful of assault weapons and tells
them that they’re the only hope of humanity.
Michael himself was appointed to slay Charlie’s offspring, whose birth
in some unspecified way can prevent the apocalypse. He rebelled precisely because he admired
Jeep’s altruism, but apparently this rebellion cuts him off from any
supernatural powers, so that he can only help the humans with the use of
firearms. After the desperate defenders
repel several attacks from possessed humans, often with freaky demonic talents,
God finally sends down his “Big Gun,” the angel Gabriel.
Although the characters mouth all
the solemnities and incredulities one would expect of ordinary humans caught in
a holy shooting war, the script doesn’t delve into Christian mythology in any
meaningful way. It’s an interesting if
minor inversion to see angels acting like demons, and the film’s title almost
certainly references the connotation that the name “Legion” has for a demon in
Mark 5:9. In that passage, Jesus
exorcises a demon who seems to be a multifold entity, as it claims that ‘we are
many.” The angels in LEGION also act not
like defined personalities, but like an infestation that can only manifest
through victimizing human beings—though LEGION was probably less inspired by
the Bible than by NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.
The only angels who possess defined
personalities are Gabriel and Michael, who symbolically figure as,
respectively, the obedient and disobedient “sons” of God. LEGION’s script probably borrows this conceit
from Milton’s PARADISE LOST, in which the obedient angels agree to bow down
before mankind while the disobedient ones refuse and are so consigned to
hell. But LEGION necessarily reverses
the importance of being obedient, for at the eleventh hour Michael, after being
slain by Gabriel, rises from death and prevents his sibling from ending the
life of the “Christ-child-that-is-never-actually-called-a-Christ-child.” Moreover, Michael’s defiance succeeds in
getting God to change his mind, so that the Apocalypse is deferred once more.
Despite these myth-motifs, LEGION’s
script isn’t really interested in the tonality or resonance of Christian
myth. Rather, the film “worships” the
phenomenon of superior FX. One such
FX-scene shows the angel Gabriel spinning around to protect himself from
gunfire with his wings. On one hand, it’s
an enjoyable scene just in terms of kinetic excitement, but it’s also amusing
in that it puts me in mind of comic-book characters like Thor or Wonder Woman
using similar absurd devices to ward off bullets. I’d be the last to deride comic-book devices,
but I must admit that this sort of thing doesn’t lend itself to the sort of “high
seriousness” one might expect of a film dealing with the End of Days.
In contrast, GABRIEL—a film with a
much smaller budget but which manages to keep from looking cheap—succeeds just
where LEGION fails, in terms of conveying the emotional resonance of Christian
myth.
Guilt, pride, transgressive lust,
the loss of faith— all of these aspects of emotional conflict come to the fore
in GABRIEL, and they carry with them much of the dramatic impact one finds in
authentic Biblical stories, at least before they’re subjected to the bland and
righteous popularizations,
like this one.
GABRIEL has much of the
hyper-noirish look of the 1998 Alex Proyas film DARK CITY, as well as making use of the trope of a world
that is essentially a “copy” of an Earthlike-environment. But where DARK CITY accomplished
this through science-fictional devices, GABRIEL recasts the metaphysical idea
of “Purgatory”—the realm to which souls go when their fate’s not yet
decided—and makes this otherworld the site of yet another apocalyptic battle of
good and evil.
Purgatory, as noted above, looks
like nothing but a modern urban “city of dreadful night,” and it’s inhabited by
the souls of the not-yet-judged, who
think and act as if they were living humans.
But the souls of Purgatory have little to do in the story, which
revolves around an ongoing contest between the forces of God’s angels—called
“the Arcs”—and the forces of hell, “the Fallen”—another trope that strongly
resembles Proyas' DARK CITY. Angels and demons
both take on human form when they enter Purgatory, but they can work only minor
miracles (like spontaneous healing) and depend far more on human weapons,
especially guns. By common agreement
Heaven and Hell send their agents—though never more than seven at any given
time—to contend for possession of Purgatory.
The film begins as one of the
noblest angels, Gabriel, enters the contest.
He defeats his first few adversaries but soon learns that the city is
dominated by Sammael and his henchmen, whose favorite demonic vice seems to be
prostitution (a good choice given how frequently the topic appears in Biblical
texts). Most of Gabriel’s potential
allies have lost the will to fight, accepting the demons’ rule, or have gone
into hiding, such as one of Heaven’s most notable angels, the redoubtable
Michael. Gabriel decides that he can
only beat Sammael by whittling down his legion of supporters.
As I’m analyzing this film in terms
of its mythic tropes, I can’t avoid disclosing the very noirish Big Reveal at
the end: to wit, Gabnel finally learns that the real Sammael was killed some
time back, and that Michael—who is rebellious in a bad way this time—has taken
his place. In contrast to bland
Bible-stories, in which evil is no real threat to good, GABRIEL’s stifling
visuals insist on the prevalence of corruptive forces in the world. For those viewers attracted to plaster
saints, such an admission would probably be blasphemous. But in the world of GABRIEL, corruption is
the yin to the yang of redemption. It’s
an adventurous take on the usually constipated world of Christian metaphysics,
and deserves for that reason alone to be better known.
