Midnight Mass (part five)

Part 5: Better Angels of Our Nature

The final scene has the vampires standing on the eastern shore, singing Nearer My God to Thee and begging forgiveness as they stare at the horizon. Off to the side from the others, Pruitt and Mildred pray sadly over the body of their daughter; they tried to resuscitate her with some extra vampire blood as she lay dying, but she spat it out.

A little up the shoreline, Hassan and Ali pray their own prayers, bowing toward Mecca (conveniently also to the east). Their love as a parent and child repaired after all the damage they did to it - praying to their own God, for once unmolested by the Christians. Ali will burn to death come sunrise. Hassan will finish bleeding to death at around the same time.

Ali has to spend his final hour tortured by guilt for turning on his father and joining his soon-to-be murderers. But...he was just a kid. He didn't choose to be put in that situation.

Hassan owed it to his son, to spend these last moments with him. To stop him from being all alone when he dies. They've forgiven each other. But I don't know if either of them will die having forgiven themselves.

Beverly Keane tries to face death with the same poise and dignity as the others. In the last minutes before sunrise though, her facade breaks and she futiley tries to bury herself in the sand to wait out the coming day. Crying tears, not for the others, but for herself.

We never quite found out what her deal was. A sociopath, almost certainly. Congenital or otherwise. But...did she ever actually think she believed in her religion? How consciously cynical was she, all along?

...

While "crazy church lady" is a bit of a cliche (both for Stephen King, and in general) I do think Beverly's gender is important. She could never be the church father, only his manager. We don't know why she's single (though we can guess), but the failure to be a wife and mother, within her ideological framework...well, it makes sense that she cared more about making other people's lots worse than making her own better. If she was just normally corrupt and sociopathic, she'd have disappeared after embezzling that money, instead of blowing it on a rec center that she gets no more use out of than anyone else.

Something about this combination of traits makes me think "repressed lesbian." Or perhaps even "repressed transman." Not a certainty. Just...a vibe.

There was more to her than that. I'm not sure what all, exactly, but more. Regardless, she dies in the sunlight just like the others.

...

In their boat in the channel, the last two human residents of Crockett Island - both teenagers, its final generation - watch as the sunlight falls on the shore. The fires burning across the island are joined by more flames, scintillating and golden, that light up across the beach.

A few minutes ago, they saw a wounded, ragged-winged pillar man taking flight from the island, just barely staying aloft. Now, in the wake of the sunrise, a sprinkle of ash falls on them from somewhere above, and Leeza realizes she can no longer feel her legs. The magic show is over, and she has to deal with the fact that she will always be paraplegic.

After all, why should she have gotten a miracle when the girl Riley ran his car into didn't?

...

So, that's the show. On a technical level, pretty solid. Writing-wise, similar. There were some bloat issues, with overcooked dialogue that could have easily been trimmed down, and there were a couple of places in the final two episodes where the rules of vampirism got wonky even with the explanations eventually given. But those are pretty minor issues compared to the mountain of things the show does right.

Midnight Mass is a work with a lot to say. About politics. About community. About generations. I think most of what it's saying on those topics should be pretty clear from my review up to this point. Its depiction of mad reactionaries led by charlatans into burning down the city with themselves in it is absolutely a work of our times and about our times. Watching Leeza realize she'll have to live without her legs at the very end, my first thought was "foreign manufacturing is here to stay, the coal isn't coming back, and America was never all that great."

Also very, very relevant is that this story has a greater-scope monster that got away with it entirely. Those two children, floating in the rowboat after their parents were driven insane and their town burned, on lifeless waters that their families once fished. The oil barges are still sailing on those waters, though. They'll still be doing so no matter what ends up happening to the last two Crockett Island survivors. The townsfolk burned themselves out, and took all their innocent neighbours and children with them, but the oil company just keeps on rolling over all their corpses. Really, what even is the little bat-winged dude compared to the oil firm? A mosquito-sized monster, perched on the flank of a towering dragon.

The wheels of fascism only turn because the engine of capital is pushing them.

As for what the show is saying about religion, well...there's been some controversy over that. Is "Midnight Mass" antireligious generally? Antichristian specifically? Or just anti-fanaticism, and critical of corrupt religious institutions? A lot of people around the net seem to have weighed in on this. To weigh in on it myself...

I'd say the show is antireligious broadly, yes. And more specifically antichristian, also yes. The more interesting question, though is how antireligious and antichristian it is, because there are some critical nuances in here.

In one of the earlier posts, I talked about how Dracula-flavored vampires are opposite-Jesus in some respects, but copycat-Jesus in others. This show does something similar itself, subverting or demonizing Christian theology on one hand, while respectfully homaging it on the other.

The entire final third of the show is propped up by a series of salvific self-sacrifices. In at least two cases (Annie Flynn and Erin Greene's), the sacrifice literally took the form of giving blood to save other people. These sacrifices are effective. There's no subversion or undermining of them.

Likewise, the final prayer scene, on the beach, isn't filmed in a way to make you contemptuous of the islanders or their religion. Quite the opposite, the cinematography forces you to feel respect and sympathy for them, and for at least parts of their beliefs, even after all they've done. Some of the characters - most notably Mildred - remain devoutly Catholic all the way through without ever being so much as tempted by the cult of the vampire. Erin has a sort of conversion to atheism during her death scene, but most of the other good guys don't.

The key to this, I think, lays in the nature of the "angel." The most important theme is reason, or lack thereof.

Suffering and sacrifice aren't good. They're necessary sometimes, not for any spiritual or philosophical reason, but because of specific situations that require specific, costly solutions. They're also a consequence of weakness and lack of power. Riley went sunbathing in order to prove that vampires were real so that Erin could do something about it; if he could just beam the knowledge into her head, he'd have done that and gone on living. Annie slit her throat so that Bev and her posse would be distracted drinking her blood for a few minutes while the others ran; if she could conjure a lake of blood ex nihilo, she'd have done that and kept on living. Erin let the monster keep draining her so that she could clip its wings and ensure its destruction come dawn; if she could disintegrate it with her eye lasers, she'd have done that and kept on living. It is because of circumstances that killing yourself can, potentially be a great act of love. Not because of the death, or the suffering, but because of the circumstances.

There is something good in Christian doctrine here. Aspiring to be a person who'd be willing to do that if the circumstances required it is laudable. It's just...you should also hope you never actually wind up in those circumstances.

The pillarman serves as a foil to them by embodying the lack of reason. It doesn't remember why it does what it does. The cultists follow its lead (or more accurately, project meaning onto it) without knowing why it does these things. The actions, the motions, the rituals, are happening without reason and without context.

Is this aspect of the creature meant to represent religion as a whole, or just a certain failure state of religion? I'm not sure, to be honest. I could be persuaded either way. Granted, I didn't get the impression that the pillarman was a very nice person even back when its mind was all there and its actions would have had context, so there's also that.

As for Christianity specifically rather than religion generally, well.

...

I'm an outsider to Christianity, and I have some cultural baggage predisposing me against it, so take this part with a massive grain of salt. Maybe this is just bigotry on my part, I'm open to that possibility. Unlike the last time I made a caveat like this, I'm not relaying critiques from Christians or ex-Christians. This is all me, so I'm opening myself up to whatever excoriation it merits.

Theodicy is a big problem for Judaism and Islam, but it's a bigger one for Christianity. In the Tanach and Koran, you can question any number of God's decisions when it comes to interacting with humans. In the New Testament though, the biggest eyebrow-raiser comes when God is interacting with himself. Who is Jesus being sacrificed to? Why does God need to offer a sacrifice in order to change the way the afterlife works?

Speaking personally, I'm able to understand most religious narratives I've encountered *as stories.* I might not like them, I might not agree with their messages, but I can understand them. The Jesus story is an exception. I just don't get it. I've read apologetics and explanations, but none of them helped. If you removed any one of God's three O's, the story would work for me, but Christianity is pretty adamant about all three of them.

Except...there is one other way that I can make it make sense. If I grant the premise that suffering and sacrifice are inherently good things, then I can see the story working with a triple-O God. Then I can understand it.

The vampire-church I talked about three posts ago is a memeplex specific to the underbelly of Roman Catholicism, with its particular arrangement of rituals and organizations. A big chunk of the perverse logic behind it, though, is very, very easy to arrive at with just the scriptures.

I think the show agrees with me about this. Starting the entire series off with the Christian problem of evil and then - within that framework - tackling the potential virtue of sacrifice? Unless you're doing apologetics, there's no way to engage with that subject matter and not see this.

...

So, yes. I think the show is criticising Christianity's fundamentals and not just its fundamentalists. In that sense, it is anti-Christian.

However, it's also giving praises along with the criticisms. It sees a lot of good in Christianity, and in Catholicism specifically. I can't overstate how important it is that Midnight Mass' final episodes take the martyr concept, dignify it, and play it straight over and over again in a way that forces the audience to feel awe and reverence for the martyred characters. You should be a person who would mount the cross and give their blood to save everyone, if you had to. There's a positive interpretation to be gleaned, despite the problems.

Likewise, the glimpses we get of what the island looked like before the oil spill, when it was a thriving community that also happened to be very religious, are mostly positive. Pruitt was always a slimeball, and Bev was always corrupt, but things worked well enough. People were generally happy, and the church's centrality in their lives was part of that happy status quo. It was only an outside catalyst that caused things to start really going bad.

Midnight Mass' overall attitude toward religion, I think, isn't that of a prosecutor, but of a critic. Breaking it down and pointing out both the good and the bad. It might be giving Christianity an overall negative-leaning review, but it's not panning it.

It's also important, I think, that however critical the story might be of beliefs, it treats believers with empathy and respect all the way through. The show makes you like almost everyone, even when they're going full Wicker Man. Even madman and liar Father Pruitt had good intentions, even if they were also self-serving. You even hate the pillarman itself once you realize it isn't all there.

The only person it really wants you to hate is Bev Keane. And she's the one named character in the entire show who may not have ever believed at all.