Shusaku Endo, Jay Cocks, and Martin Scorsese, 2016
#4, 2016 Skandies
I don’t get a lot of email these days, but occasionally I do find messages in my inbox from people I’ve never heard of. Some of the messages are lovely. Some are odd. Last summer I got an email out of the blue asking, “What’s your take on the transnational terrorist cult QAnon?” I didn’t reply to that one. Like, what do you say to that? “You know, the more I learn about transnational terrorist cults, the more I don’t care for them”?
But I guess I can say this. I’ve probably told this story before, but one day, many years ago, I was hanging out in the chat room where I spent most of my twenties when one of the regulars, who made no secret of being a committed Christian, started marveling about some beliefs of the Mormons that he had just discovered. They think that an angel presented the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith on a set of golden plates, which he translated using “seer stones” called “Urim” and “Thummim”! They wear church-issued undergarments embroidered with esoteric symbols for spiritual protection! They believe God has a physical body and sits on a physical throne that is located near a star or planet called Kolob! But when he asked in disbelief whether the rest of us could believe how ridiculous this all was, one of the atheists among us (not me) replied, “No, but I feel the same way about every sect of Christianity, including yours.” The Christian was stunned. Whaaaaat? But my denomination is totally mainstream, while this stuff is nuts! “Mainstream” or not, the atheist replied, try to put yourself in the shoes of a non-believer and imagine someone telling you that someone who to all appearances was just some schizophrenic wandering around southwest Asia two thousand years ago was actually the son of God, the all-powerful creator of the universe who for some reason took a peculiar interest in southwest Asia, and simultaneously was God, and had taken human form in order to be tortured to death and thereby expiate the sins that every human had been born with because their original female ancestor had been flimflammed by a talking serpent and—
—so, anyway… jump ahead twenty years, swap out the Mormons and swap in QAnon, and my feelings are pretty much the same. Like, yeah, “child-molesting, adrenochrome-harvesting, Satanic cannibals, Tom Hanks chief among them, secretly run the world and only Donald Trump and John F. Kennedy Jr., who is actually still alive, can stop them” is indeed the sort of credo that should put people in straitjackets, but I would say the same about the beliefs and practices of those to whom this movie is dedicated. The film is set in seventeenth-century Japan, after the Tokugawa shogunate had begun to crack down on the attempts of Portuguese Jesuits to Christianize the islands. Two young priests, having heard rumors that their old teacher had become an apostate while serving as a missionary in Japan, head to what is today the Nagasaki prefecture in order to learn the truth for themselves. They discover that the elder priest had indeed renounced his faith, largely due to the authorities’ new policy: rather than executing the missionaries and giving them the martyrdom they crave, the authorities inflict atrocities upon Japanese converts and make the missionaries watch and listen, telling them that they need only step on a small relief sculpture of Jesus to make the suffering stop. What follows is nearly three hours of torture. As in, that’s what’s depicted on screen and that’s what sitting through this movie is like. Pattern 17 explains that while I can grudgingly find some interest in Christianity’s role in history, I have less than zero interest in Christian themes, and such themes lie at the heart of this movie. Its very title alludes to the main priest’s torment over why an all-powerful, all-benevolent God says nothing and does nothing as his believers are drowned, set on fire, hung upside down with their heads in underground pits to bleed out drop by drop. If your answer is “because he doesn’t exist”, then this is not a particularly interesting philosophical conundrum, and the film effectively reduces to this:
What makes Silence even worse is that its take on Christianity’s role in history is also atrocious. Again, the film is set in the period when the shogunate had decided that Christianity had to be eradicated from Japan, seeing the missionaries as a destabilizing force that would leave the country riddled with internal divisions and, soon, subjugated by European powers. Considering how European colonialism was operating all over the rest of the world, this seems like a pretty astute prediction! Nor is the tactic of leading with ideological warfare a thing of the past: we’ve seen it used to great effect just in the past few years, as Russian disinformation campaigns helped to install a buffoonish puppet with severe personality disorders in the White House, hoping to weaken the Western alliance of relatively democratic nations enough that it wouldn’t be able to effectively oppose any irridentist invasions or other geopolitical maneuvers the Putin regime might launch. Can we say that behind every last QAnon acolyte is a Russian bot? No, but that just goes to show that whether it’s QAnon or any other sort of revealed religion, the human brain does seem to be cripplingly vulnerable to this sort of neurological malware. As the main priest argues in Silence: despite the authorities’ contention that Christianity is not suited for Japan, all it took was for a handful of Jesuits to show up on Kyushu for the faith to spread through the islands like omicron through a red state—whereas it is taking a brutal suppression campaign for the shogunate to stamp it out. But an ideology’s ability to take hold in a society has no bearing on whether it is good for that society. Again, we’ve seen just recently the kind of harm disinformation can do, with anti-vaccine propaganda leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths. It is hard not to conclude that the shogunate was wise to drive this vanguard of European imperialism away from its shores—quite apart from the fact that to have millions of one’s people believing in falsehoods is inherently bad. Does that justify torture? Of course not! Obviously the Japanese authorities are not the heroes here, and Japan itself would become a notoriously cruel imperial power in its own right a few centuries down the line. But it is also not heroic to travel halfway around the world to destabilize a country by preaching insanity. Martin Scorsese very clearly thinks that it is. In confusing villainy with heroism, he has made the arthouse equivalent of Cool as Ice. But twice as long.
(As for what would constitute an effective and morally acceptable prophylaxis against this sort of disinformation—hell if I know. Yuval Noah Harari suggests in Sapiens that the success of Christianity is a legacy of humankind’s relatively recent rise to the top of the food chain—so recent that the architecture of our brains hasn’t caught up to it, and still has us programmed to be terrified of predators. Missionaries say, “You need to be saved,” it activates the neural circuitry that says, “You need to be safe,” and the result is that when the two priests in Silence wash ashore in Japan, they are beset by villagers weeping that they desperately need the priests to absolve their sins and thereby save them from hellfire. This strikes me as an interesting but not scientifically verifiable conjecture. However, it does seem to me to be of a piece with the notion that those societies that have become secular of their own accord, and not due to the suppression of religion, are those whose people have the greatest sense of well-being without it—not just wealth, but security along with it. Create a society that pairs freedom from want with freedom from fear, and people may be less susceptible to ideologies that offer a glimmer of hope—whether in the form of salvation or the Storm.)
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