Hollywood is pagan. It always has been. Sodom, Babylon, Hollywood, Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, Miami… the historical geography of sin is well known, in part because the very concept of the city is, since Babel, a challenge to heaven. But when the film mecca began to exploit the historiography of the ancient Mediterranean with multicolored tunics and Styrofoam columns, it found that its peplums were a perfect model for putting the Bible in pictures, just swapping Cleopatra for Delilah or Sephora And in pious countries, as is the case, Jewish redemptions and other legends were reserved to make these meatless days less recollected and more voluptuous. The biblical films were a combination of joy and sacredness ideal for circumventing the norm, a translation into the dark room of the chickpeas with cod and without pork that during the week of the passion fed the world to the demon of our flesh. But that’s over.
Cinemas no longer premiere biblical passages, which does not prevent streaming platforms from honoring such a venerable tradition of veneration. Filmin, undoubtedly the company that best exploits its catalog through “temporary exhibitions” -reorganizations of the collection in accordance with discourses related to the immediate -, has arranged two specific itineraries for Holy Week: in Sants classics bring together the usual calvary seasons, from Jesus Christ Superstar to La historia más grande jamás contada from La última tentación de Cristo a Espartacus, interspersed with other less conventional lives of saints, such as The Name of the Rose, Seven Brides for Seven brothers or, of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Much more interesting is that, taking advantage of the premiere on the platform of the formidable and elusive Teresa by Paula Ortiz and Juan Mayorga, they propose a collection called Les religioses, in which alongside premieres such as Mamacruz, by Patricia Ortega , every conceivable heterodoxy appears, from Ida, by Pawe? Pawlikowski; in Habemus Papam by Nanni Moretti; passing through Camino, by Javier Fesser; Benedetta, by Paul Verhoeven or the classic Dies Irae and The Passion of Joan of Arc by Carl T. Dreyer.
Meanwhile, in the halls, the week of the passion runs along very different paths, not without ecstasy or ordeals, but with recollection and contrition. On the one hand, the Christian version of D.H. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom continues to spread its aegis, which Frank Herbert took into deep space by novelizing the British colonial fury in the desert and the genesis of the Arab nationalism under the title Dune, which the fashionable Canadian, Denis Villeneuve, has turned into a luxurious diptych to the glory of the majestic grandeur of the digital peplum. Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) is the messianic Lawrence of interstellar Arabia in this classic “aristocrat redeems and empowers the natives” cycle.
For those nostalgic for stories of prayers, resurrections and tearful devotions like a Seville arrow, Ghostbusters is back, the once-comedy and now sentimental New Year’s mass sponsored by the orphan Jason Reitman, although this time it’s Gil Kenan, a specialist in syrups and other resuscitations, who takes the controls of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire The boomer generation has another opportunity to reconnect with childhood and lick their wounds on toast days of Santa Teresa
The relationship of both with religious myths is obvious and, on the other hand, they recreate the fanciful and saving vocation of every religious legend, so that they are a perfect substitute for the Golgothas that we used to struggle with. And even if today it is entering a clear creative and financial decline in the movie theaters, the poster of the gangs of superheroes lives on in the platform premieres – Avengers: Endgame collapsed the box office at the cost of leaving both the comic book universe like the capabilities of Disney/Marvel producer Kevin Feige–, irrefutable proof that the culture of the West is more Greco-Roman than Judeo-Christian: the obvious correlate of today’s superhero pantheon is the mythology of classical antiquity, and the journey of genre, started by Zack Snyder in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, an opera that contested the presumed monotheistic moral solidity of the Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) towards the mundane ambiguity of Greco-Roman polytheism, with heroes poisoned by imperfections and doubts, like a heterogeneous competition of conflicting gods and monsters who are both and neither at the same time, and who barely compel or rule us. Like in that Rome.
The gods of the new equinox weeks only know how to be trivial or tribal, that is to say, everyday – as all the Marvel and DC universes have been for years – or monstrous – untamed beasts that are more demons than gods, it is in other words, they are more reverse than verse. And of the latter, the two most iconic arrive in cinemas, lacking exemplary value, but not sacramental: virtuous alliance of King Kong (romantic myth inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels) and Godzilla (Japanese icon resulting from trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Godzilla y Kong: El nuevo imperio second installment of this joint venture between the myths of the West and the East forced by the markets, opens with the patent subtext of the colossal scale of the new challenges and their emancipation from the national borders of the our worries: they are pandemic and warming, the contemporary ordeals. The discourse is not new and it already appeared recorded by the old cartographers on the yellowish parchment maps: “There are dragons beyond”.
