Michael Tolkin, 1991
#16 of 28 in the 20th century series
In 1992, film critics swooned over The Player, which was hailed as a return to form for director Robert Altman, of whom I had not heard but who had apparently been a big name in the ’70s. A few reviews put in a good word for screenwriter Michael Tolkin, and mentioned that he had not only written but also directed a movie of his own the previous year, The Rapture. Eventually I got around to renting that, and when it was over, I was mystified: how was this not the movie that had set all the critics buzzing? The answer to that is pretty obvious, though. The Player was not only a movie about movies, always a favorite topic of that crowd, but also a gentle satire, with just enough bite to make viewers feel edgy for liking it without actually upsetting any applecarts. The Rapture, on the other hand, is a frontal attack on millenarian Christianity.
spoilers starthere
The movie has a classic three-act structure. We first meet the protagonist, Sharon, at her job answering directory assistance calls: eight hours in a cube farm asking “What city please?” every fifteen seconds. In the evenings, she and her gray-templed fuck-buddy go to bars and find couples to pick up for mini-orgies. But Sharon wants something more, and a cascade of events points her quest in a specific direction. First, she overhears some co‑workers whispering about “the pearl” and “the boy”; next, some missionaries appear at her door to spread the gospel and, when questioned by Sharon, hesitatingly confirm that “the boy” is a new prophet; then, a woman she and her swinger friend pick up turns out to have a tattoo taking up her entire back that centers on a giant pearl held in a hand emerging from a cloud above a hooded figure blowing a horn. Sharon begins to feel the need to clean up her life, dream of this pearl, and be saved, but is initially rebuffed by the evangelicals at work; only when she hits rock bottom, holding a gun to her head while drunk in a motel room before chickening out, does the pearl finally appear to her.
This signals the beginning of the second act, as Sharon, serenely happy, almost in a trance, declares to everyone she encounters that she has turned her life over to The Lord Jesus Christ. This includes her swinger friend, who says that she needs to be deprogrammed; Randy, one of her hookups who she’s continued to see, who says that he can fill the emptiness she feels with real love rather than imagined love; and, in a darkly amusing scene, the people who call directory assistance. This leads her boss to gently scold her—and also invite her to meet the boy, a kindergarten-aged child who whispers snippets of the Book of Revelation and prophesies that the world will end in five or six years. Cut to six years later. Sharon and Randy, both of them now born-agains, are married with a daughter, who doesn’t go to school, because what would be the point when she is just going to ascend bodily to heaven any day now? Instead, they instill her with the knowledge that they consider more relevant, such as that “in heaven, there’s Jesus and Baby Jesus together, and Baby Jesus has the special job of looking out for all the children.” Then, disaster strikes: a disgruntled employee at Randy’s company goes on a shooting rampage, killing everyone, Randy included. But Sharon sees an image of Randy in the desert, and concludes that the Rapture is near and that she must take her daughter to the Mojave so that their family can be reunited in heaven. And… nothing happens, other than the two of them running out of food, going weeks without a bath, and attracting the attention of local law enforcement. Sharon’s daughter spends day after day pleading with her that she just wants to see her daddy and Baby Jesus, and that, if Sharon really believed in God and the Bible and heaven, she would trust that that there’s an easier way to get there than waiting around in the desert for the end of days: “Why do we have to stay here and hang around and wait for God? Come on, Mom, let’s die!” Sharon growls that she’s going to give God one last chance. And then another last chance. Could this delay be a test? And if so, is it a test of her willingness to wait, or her willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice? Waiting, so far, has not borne fruit. And her daughter, living off of donated candy bars, alternates between apocalyptic nightmares and sniffly challenges: “You said we’d give God one more chance! And if we didn’t get the Rapture, that we could die! Thats what you said! You promised! Don’t you believe in God? Don’t you love God? Then why can’t we just go to God? Go now. Now!”
Sharon insists that she does believe in God. So she shoots her daughter in the head. Which brings us to the final act, as Sharon, now consumed by hatred for a god that would make her do this, is taken to jail—only for the bars to fall apart at the sound of celestial trumpets. The Rapture has come, just as laid out in the Book of Revelation, four horsemen of the apocalypse and all. And the stripe of Christianity that Sharon has adopted, which has turned out to be true, does not hold that morality matters. All that matters is accepting the faith. Someone could rape, torture, and murder a thousand children, and as long as he declares his love for God in the last instant before the electric chair switch is thrown, he’s off to spend eternity in paradise. Sharon and the local lawman find themselves at the bank of a celestial river, with heaven before them, and Sharon’s daughter waiting with instructions on how to get there: just say you love God. The lawman does, and is transported to his reward.
Sharon chooses hell.
And… I think Contact has the best opening of any movie I’ve ever seen, and The Rapture may well have the best ending. Sharon in the gathering dark as hell closes in around her, her daughter asking, “Do you know how long you have to stay here? How long?” as she disappears, and the way Sharon answers, “Forever”… it’s been nearly thirty years since I saw this movie, and probably not a week has gone by that I haven’t thought about that scene.
According to my list of evaluative patterns, I shouldn’t be dusting off the high numbers to rate this movie. We can let it off the hook for Pattern 17, because while the film is about Christianity, it’s a view from the outside rather than the inside. But The Rapture egregiously violates Pattern 18, “Don’t speak the subtext!” Pretty much everything this movie has to say is explicitly articulated by one or more of the characters. For instance: a one-minute snippet of Sharon’s working day is more than enough for us to connect the dots. This repetitive drudgery would hollow a person out after a single shift, and Sharon does it day after day. But the dehumanizing nature of most labor is not just an unfortunate drawback of our economic system; to a great extent, it is the point of it. Sure, having big swaths of the population working beyond reasonable limits to swell the pool of goods and services is a nice bonus, but the main thing all this grueling labor produces is an army of worn-out, damaged people looking for some kind of salve. For the capitalist class, that would ideally mean buying lots of consumer products, licit or not. But not everyone will take that route. Some will turn to the opiate of the masses. However, The Rapture seems not to trust that we will follow these trains of thought ourselves. So it actually has a character spell it out—in this case, Randy. “Sharon, don’t you understand what’s going on? The world’s a disaster. We have no power to make it better. You hate your job, you hate your life, but you want to feel special. And instead of letting me do that, you’re rushing off to something that’s not even there.” This is not an isolated case. Nearly every scene has characters spelling out what we should be thinking about.
But in this case, that’s actually fine! This may be an instance of story as rhetoric, but there’s a place for that. And it’s not just a case of preaching to the choir (no pun intended). Back in the day, this movie got me thinking along lines I hadn’t ever really considered. I grew up in Orange County in the 1980s, surrounded by evangelicals whose kids were my classmates. When I saw The Rapture in the early ’90s, I was an old hand at debating the existence of God and the truth of Christianity in particular. (As I have mentioned in past articles, the nerdy fundie kids in their “Warrior for Christ” T‑shirts were convinced that Pascal’s Wager was an unanswerable argument.) What I had never encountered was the proposition that, even stipulating that fundamentalist Christianity is true in every detail, it is still deeply wrong. One of my teaching stops had a popular “Bible as Literature” class for seniors, which I sat in on a few times; the teacher said that he was not a believer and that this was not a religion class, but that the Bible could still be studied as a literary masterpiece, offering the story of Abraham and Isaac as one example. I did take a religion class in college, and one day we had a guest speaker with a similar spiel: his religious sympathies lay more with Zen than with the Judeo-Christian tradition, he said, but he had been so moved by the wisdom of the Book of Job that he wrote his own translation. But The Rapture doesn’t take the cautious “oh, I don’t take this literally but there’s still a lot in here to respect” approach. It takes the Abraham and Job stories head‑on. To make a hero of someone who would follow instructions to murder his child in order to demonstrate that his obedience was absolute? To posit a God who would have Satan kill a man’s children and destroy his health with an agonizing disease as part of a wager, and to make a hero of someone who would accept this as God’s will? And then to have God thunder to the man’s friends that he is too powerful to be questioned, and reward the man for his submission with new children, because of course children are interchangeable and anyway his new daughters are prettier? This is evil, The Rapture contends, and it makes a tragic hero of the woman who will say so.
It seems pretty transparent that these myths are vehicles for social control. There’s no need for those at the top of the pyramid to subdue a restive underclass if it can be kept in line through ideology. Accept any amount of suffering without complaint! Do absolutely anything God says without question! (We’ll interpret what God says.) But as much as this conjures up an image of a cabal of clerics sitting around a table writing these stories and saying “heh heh heh” like the criminals in the 2015 Lyttle Lytton Contest, there is no cabal. Ideology spreads according to its own rules. One of those rules is that perhaps the most effective way for ideology to take root is through identity formation. There’s a reason that Sharon starts to question her faith when, after weeks in the desert, the Rapture fails to arrive—and a reason that, when reality fails to coincide with what she’s been taught, her daughter never questions her own faith, and relentlessly pushes Sharon to stay with the flock. Sharon consciously adopted her religion as an attempt to relieve the misery of her existence. She can abandon it, and go back to who she was before. But her daughter has never been anyone but “millenarian Christian child”. For her to abandon her religion would not only mean rejecting the parents she loves and relies on, but would leave a huge blank where “this is me” is supposed to go. If the world had not ended, she might have grown up to be an otherwise perfectly intelligent person who nevertheless continued to believe that Jesus and Baby Jesus would be simultaneously waiting to greet her in heaven like in a 1950s DC comic. And even if Sharon’s own fundamentalist phase had only lasted a few years, through her daughter she might have brought generations of fundamentalists into the world, more of them in each generation than in the last, the chain only breaking when family bonds were weak enough for some children to want to forge new identities in which the religion of their upbringing no longer played a part. The bright side of bad parenting!
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