something i think about each time i watch zd, and a topic that i haven’t seen many people touch on, is the conversation of cal and his religion.
when we see him burning his bible, he mentions he went to sunday school, and he demonstrates he can still recite all of the new testament books; as someone that went to a religious school those ideologies are so easily indoctrinated in you and they leave roots deep in your mind that don’t just go away. especially at a young age, research shows children are most impressionable in their first 7-10 years of life. so this proposes the question: did cal feel any guilt or remorse for what he was doing? and i don’t mean for humanity, because a big part of cal’s character that the movie demonstrates is he doesn’t feel real, genuine human connection outside of andre, the persona he puts on at prom and with rachel is a front, it’s an act to him. (i also believe that rachel is representative of the small part of his religion he does hold on to, and how homosexuality is a sin. because she looks like andre, but she isn’t andre, she never will be. and that makes cal uncomfortable.) he sees zero day as sort of a twisted social experiment, he treats other’s lives as a game because they’re beneath him, but what is there to say about someone that’s always been above him; what is there to say about the God he was trained to love, to worship, to give himself up to because he is lesser than?
in their manifesto, cal says that him and andre will be more powerful than God, noticeably he doesn’t say that they’ll be Him, i believe because he was taught that no one could be God, no one could reach His level of divinity. andre corrects him, saying they’ll be God, while andre’s family is religious (jewish), it seems like andre wasn’t as conditioned into his religion and into religious spaces as cal was in adolescence, because it’s never mentioned. cal definitely has a distaste towards his religion, and he tells us this, but no matter how much you hate or how much you disconnect from that part of yourself, it’ll always be there deep down in the darkest parts of you, it’ll always be something you think about. cal burning his bible along with the crosses burning at the end of the movie to me seem like symbolism for cal’s hatred for that part of himself and his desire to fully sever from it, which you can only achieve in death. it also gives more reason to why he was so adamant on killing himself, why he knew his fate from the beginning, the act of suicide is notoriously a sin, cal doesn’t want to go to heaven, maybe because he doesn’t want the life everyone around him wished for him, maybe he feels like he doesn’t deserve to.
not to mention his name is cal, which is very similar to the biblical figure cain, and the same as the character cal trask who is a representation of cain, which means “acquired or possessed”, and his last name is gabriel, who is one of the few named archangels in the bible, and represents God’s strength. so his name quite literally means possessed/acquired God’s strength. it’s insane
just something i wish more people would explore about his character!!!
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