The Book of Eli, Genesis 14, and 21st Century Angst

Last night, I saw the Hughes Brothers’ new movie The Book of Eli.  It’s been getting mixed reviews, and I honestly did not expect to like it very much.

I loved it.  And now I desperately want to talk to people about it.

The problem is that the movie’s best kept secret (at least I didn’t know about it before I went in) is critical to the plot – which I have to talk about.

So if you’re one of those people who hates to have a movie “spoiled,” stop reading here, go see the movie, and come back.

OK.

This movie is set in a near-future apocalyptic world, in the southwestern United States.  We never find out exactly what has happened to the world.  Apparently, thirty-one years before the movie opens, there was a war that “ripped a hole in the sky,” whatever that means, unleashing a ton of deadly solar radiation on the world that burned everything and everybody who couldn’t take cover.  Many of the survivors are blinded.  Somehow, the radiation decreases until the present day, so that all people need to travel outdoors are some heavy-duty sunglasses.

Our main character is Eli, played by Denzel Washington, a grizzled middle-aged man slowly making a journey across the ruins of America, carrying with him a precious book that he reads from every day.  We quickly learn that he has almost supernatural fighting skills when he easily dispatches ten highwaymen early in the movie.

Early in the film, Eli comes to a town ruled by an oily, sadistic strongman named Carnegie, who sends out bands of illiterate bandits to bring him every book they can find, in the hope that one of them will turn out to be “the one.”

We quickly guess, of course, that the book Carnegie is searching for and the book Eli carries are one and the same.  And all this time in the theater, I was wondering, “Are they really going to do this?  I can’t believe they would do this.”

But sure enough.  When Carnegie suspects Eli is carrying a book, he tortures his blind lover to get her illiterate daughter, Solara, to tell him about the book. “All I saw was the symbol on the front!” she screams.

“What kind of symbol?” Carnegie demands.

Trembling, Solara holds up her fingers in the shape of a cross.

It turns out, Eli is on a mission from God.  After the Disaster, people blamed the war on Christianity, and burned every Bible they could find. (Does that mean a Christian fundamentalist rises to power in America and decides to nuke Russia?  Who knows.) One day, Eli hears a voice that tells him where to find the last Bible on earth.  The voice tells him to take the Bible west to find a safe place for it, and promises him protection on the way.

Carnegie does not believe in God and does not remember much about the Bible, only that it had the power to inspire people to acts of great devotion and violence.  Accordingly, he sees the Bible as a weapon, the tool he needs to consolidate his control and expand his empire beyond the single rundown town he controls, and he is obsessed with getting his hands on a copy.

Eli escapes the town, reluctantly bringing Solara along.  Carnegie gives chase.  I’ve given away the plot, but not the ending.  It’s both surprising and pitch-perfect.

As far as science fiction movie-making goes, two things make this movie great, in my opinion.  The first thing is its internal consistency.  It creates its own world, sets rules for its world, and then follows them.  When Eli comes to town, the men behind the counters in the first two establishments he visits demand that he hold out his hands to demonstrate that he is not “one of them.” Who are them?  Oh, you’ll find out.

The second thing is the visual style of the movie.  The filmmakers jump into the world they’ve created with relish.  Eli and Solara camp out in the fuel towers of abandoned nuclear reactors.  They walk through highways crowded with abandoned cars.  When they walk past the San Francisco bay, a giant freighter lies partially submerged in the distance.  Carnegie’s town is drawn like a classic Old West town.  There’s a lot of intense violence, but it’s the stylized, operatic sort found in 300 or Kill Bill. Throughout the movie, a slightly off-color lens dominates (as if we’re all looking through those radiation-proof sunglasses).  The darkened sky constantly roils with clouds, and in a key moment in the plot, a tiny, silent lightning bolt flashes in the distance.  It’s a cinematic sight to behold.

Theologically, you folks will have to tell me whether I’m way off, or pointing out the obvious, but I see this movie as a retelling of the story of Abram.  First comes the flood of destruction.   Then Carnegie and others like him try to build their own Towers of Babel – pale imitations of human civilization that highlight all the worst aspects of it.  Then the voice of God comes to one man, and entrusts him with the task of bringing his word to mankind once again.

“Yeah, except Abram didn’t have supernatural fighting abilities!” my friend argued to me after we left the theater.

Oh no?  How about the time Abram routed Kedorlaomer king of Elam, and the three kings with him, the established rulers of the Fertile Crescent, with a force of only 318 men? (Genesis 14).

Sociologically, I guess this movie shows that our culture’s appetite for end-of-the-world flicks has not abated with the end of the Cold War, or the fading of 9/11 in our collective memory.  I think this appetite stems from our awareness of trends in our world today that are both unprecedented and unsustainable.

In class the other day, I made a list of these trends:

-         Nuclear weapons and nuclear power.  We all congratulate ourselves on making it sixty-five years with only two nuclear attacks and one devastating nuclear accident.  Sixty-five years is only 1% of human history.  How much longer can we make it without catastrophe?

-         Advances in communication.  Never before in history has it been so easy for people to communicate, interpersonally and en masse.  This is unprecedented.  The side effects of it are hard to predict, but two that we’ve seen already are the erosion of authority (e.g.: “The New York Times?  Please.  Check out this article on PajamasMedia.”) and Islamist terrorists using the web to spread their ideology and inspire lone acts of terrorism (like Fort Hood).  In effect, the internet has created the ability to wage war without any central organization.

-         Climate change – who knows where that’s going?

-         We are running out of fossil fuels, with no alternatives that can sustain projected levels of use (except for the aforementioned nuclear power).

-         Our overuse of antibiotics in humans and animals, the doomsayers tell us, is bringing us steadily closer to the day when our antibiotics will no longer work at all.

-         Digital, digital, digital – more and more of our information is being stored in a medium that is inherently intangible and prone to obsolescence.  When historians look back on the digital age, what primary documents will they have to work with?

-         Computer technology is advancing exponentially.  The less sober experts tell us that, inevitably, computers will surpass the human brain in complexity and processing power, a moment they call “the singularity.” I’m skeptical, but where is computer technology going?  Where can it go?

-         The world population is approaching 7 billion people.  We didn’t even hit 1 billion people until 1800.  At the time of Christ, the world population was 200 million.  There are enough people alive today to act out whole millennia of human history.  According to one book I read last year, this surge in population is part of the reason that while empires used to walk all over other countries, today, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. can’t even manage to take down fifth-rate powers like Afghanistan and Iraq.  This, too, is unprecedented.

-         After the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama postulated that the “end of history” might be upon us, by which he meant we might be witnessing the triumph of liberal democracy as the sole political system.  Twenty years later, with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and a financial crisis that nearly brought capitalism to its knees, that’s looking more and more doubtful.  So, where will politics go now?

In general, history just seems to be moving faster all the time.  Who would be more comfortable – a person from 2,000 BC transplanted to 1 AD, or a person from 1910 transplanted to 2010?  Things are changing faster and faster.  That rate of change is not sustainable.  One way or another, it will come to an end.  How?  The possible answers, I submit, are what scare us, and make us shell out millions for movies like The Road and The Book of Eli.

So, those are my thoughts.  Thanks for wading through my existential 21st century angst.  I’d love to hear what you think.