How would divinity communicate with mortals in the age of Artificial Intelligence? There is a scene in the Turkish series Kübra that brings to mind the burning bush with which God revealed himself to Moses in the Exodus, but it is only a moment, the one in which the protagonist is about to believe. The bush is now a message received through a mobile application. Who speaks to us through technology?
These are disbelieving times, however in recent months there has been the arrival of several series that deal with prophets, which is a way of treating religion and through it referring to faith, that confidence beyond doubt that now We invest in technology, but then why do we continue looking at the sky? What does the international success of The chosen tell us? A phenomenon that at first, when the first season of the series appeared in 2019, was considered purely North American, however, in recent years – the fourth season has just been released in theaters – its exhibition has spread to Netflix, Prime Video or Movistar Plus in our country. Yes, there is an audience for a (new) recreation of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and for a production that has been financed through crowdfunding, in fact, it is the audiovisual project that has achieved the greatest collective investment so far, despite the fact that The first filming coincided with the covid pandemic.
The idea came from Dallas Jenkins, an evangelical Christian who is also the director, and did not have any popular star, nor at the beginning with the support of any major platform. Based on the four Gospels, Jenkins has however placed emphasis on the characters who accompany Jesus, for whom their own plots have been created, for example, Mary Magdalene is an alcoholic and a victim of sexual assault, which allows us to give a a more current and also psychological vision of evangelical teachings and, let’s not fool ourselves, more Netflix to the product. At the moment, seven seasons are planned, thanks to this dimension of collateral narratives. A prominence that has also earned the producers criticism of a lack of fidelity to the evangelical story.
Other accusations have been that of supposedly being financed by Mormons – the production company Angel Studios is based in Utah; Various media also explained its rapid success by “the lack of Christian entertainment.” Is that so? A couple of years ago The New York Times summed it up this way: “a series that has attracted a fervent ecumenical fandom while remaining almost invisible to everyone else.”
The surprise has also come from the hand of a Turkish series, Kübra, whose success has led its production company to announce a second season, having just concluded the first. Directed by Durul Taylan and Yagmur Taylan, everything in it revolves around prophets and technology, two concepts that could seem antithetical, even more so in times of AI. The protagonist of the series, Gökhan Ahinolu, a former combatant who miraculously saved his life while his entire unit fell victim to a bombing, is religious, but without going overboard, works in a car workshop and has a girlfriend. The line of a life already on track is broken when he begins to receive messages from a mysterious identity, Kübra, through a relationship app. Kübra speaks with words that hint more than explain, but show that he knows a lot about the former soldier and, above all, about the future. Some of these messages are accompanied by phenomena mediated by technology, such as massive blackouts or sounds.
Who is Kübra? Is the world ready to receive a new prophet? How would we react? But is he a prophet? The possibility that the divinity chooses a mobile application to speak intersects with the protagonist’s new world, between rejection and adoration, but above all between the doubt about who he is and who is really speaking to him.
Another prophet and a messiah. There is a moment in the first chapters of The Messiah, by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, when a group of lost souls look to the sky waiting for the arrival of the extraterrestrials. The series does not go there, but rather constitutes a critique of religious fanaticism and the delusions to which it leads – and the control to which religious groups can subject their members. However, it links to another: Raël: the prophet of the extraterrestrials, a documentary that analyzes the figure of Marcel Vorilhon, who, still active we could say, gained a large group of followers, the Raelians, with his supposed abduction by aliens, the elohim, name taken from Hebrew. Because if it sounds like something, it is more plausible that it is true, even in times of AI.
