This is Jim Sinclair, at the time going by Toby. They are a neuter, asexual and intersex enban, and a seminal autism activist. They have been an educator on transneutral nonbinary identity, non-binary transition, the anti binarist position and intersex issues for decades. This is an interview with them from the 1980s, talking about their experience as a non-binary/genderqueer person at a time where the community was just coming together.
"In a 1997 introduction to the Intersex Society of North America, Sinclair wrote, "I remain openly and proudly neuter, both physically and socially."
Nonbinary people have always existed, and will always exist. Happy Trans History Week! 💛🤍💜🖤
"I DID NOT CHOOSE TO EXIST. FINDING THAT I EXIST, I DETERMINE THAT IT'S A GOOD THING THAT I EXIST; I LIKE WHO I AM. WHY SHOULD I TRY TO BE ANYONE ELSE?"
okay not to be a cunt but something i hate about reading queer romcom novels is that so many of them have a part where the characters all but turn to the camera and explain their Good Respectful Politics. like it’s not even that i disagree it’s that i’m suddenly in the middle of an instagram infographic. do you guys know what i mean
Damascus: The Impossible Gospel of Wake Up Dead Man
So when I posted my non-spoiler review of Wake Up Dead Man, I said I would come back at some point and do a review with ALL the spoilers where we can talk about the whole plot. I think I may wind up doing more than one; but at any rate, behind the cut tag there are going to be spoilers in this. For everything. SPOILERS. FOR EVERYTHING.
Mainly, this is going to be about the religious dimension of this movie. Rian Johnson is not Catholic; he grew up Protestant, something he talks about in this interview with Sojourners. He admits in this interview that one of the reasons he chose to set the story in a Catholic church rather than a Protestant one was aesthetic. "Honestly, most of the churches I actually grew up going to look like Pottery Barns," he says; but "there is nothing cooler-looking than Catholicism. Growing up as a Protestant, there was always an exotic nature to the Catholic Church."
So, that seems kind of shallow; but the reason for that aesthetic difference runs pretty deep and has a lot to do with the history of the genre Johnson is working in. So this is not going to be me, as someone who did grow up Catholic, busting on Johnson for being inaccurate. This is me being genuinely interested in the friction created by Johnson's use of a Catholic setting to work through his Protestant experience--and, in the end, what that does to prepare us for what's happening to Benoit Blanc in that GIF I led with.
As Rian Johnson well knows, mystery novels are all about de-mystification. It's always the detective's job to take something that seems unknowable and turn it into a logical explanation. Reason conquers superstition; the unknown becomes the transparent; impenetrable mysteries become mere puzzles.
At the same time, the mystery novel has always had a conflicted relationship with its Gothic roots. Despite our insistence on a rational and entirely explicable universe, there is always a sense of letdown at the end when we finally get all of our answers. While we celebrate the intellectual effort required to create the puzzle, we mourn, a little bit, the loss of the magical, the marvelous, the sinister and the supernatural. The solution makes us miss--just a little bit--the mystery.
John Dickson Carr's novel The Hollow Man (published in the US as The Three Coffins) addresses this sense of loss at some length in that lecture about locked-room mysteries that Blanc summarizes for Father Jud and Geraldine. That lecture starts, kind of amazingly, with Carr's detective, Gideon Fell, acknowledging that he and all the people he's speaking to are characters in a book and they may as well just admit it. Fell goes on to complain about the fact that readers are never satisfied with the solutions to locked-room mysteries. As with magician acts, he laments, people go into them knowing that the magic is just an illusion; but when you show them how the trick was done, they're mad about it. People won't allow themselves to believe in magic, but they still want the thrill of it. The writer of the locked room mystery has to deal with that same conflict between the desire to know and the desire to be amazed. Wake Up Dead Man dramatizes this conflict instead of trying to ignore it. Father Jud is a priest; Benoit Blanc is a detective. A lot of this film is about the tension between those two roles and how they overcome it. In the end, we can see that they're interdependent. The priest can't do his job unless the detective can keep him out of jail. And the detective needs the priest to help him understand why his job really matters.
So here's the thing. I absolutely buy Father Jud as a Catholic priest. He is very recognizable to me as a kind of avatar of the aspects of Catholicism that I always connected with the most: love, mercy, compassion, grace, humility, forgiveness, service to the poor and the afflicted. Institutionally, Catholicism and Communism were sworn enemies; but doctrinally there is a lot of overlap, something that expressed itself in the liberation theology of the Latin American Church during the mid-20th century. I look at him and I feel like I know exactly what mass in his church would be like, the only doubt being whether the singature hymn would be "Here I Am, Lord" or "On Eagle's Wings."
Everything about Monsignor Wickes, on the other hand, makes much more sense for an evangelical Protestant. There are Catholic priests whose theology is just as bad and whose effects on people's lives are just as toxic. But part of the Catholic Church's problem is the hierarchy's uncritical belief in its own authority and assumption of the faithful's obedience to it. A toxic Catholic priest, in the pulpit, doesn't go out there screaming and sweating and trying to rouse everyone's passions. He doesn't need to exert himself personally; the institution will produce the obedience he desires.
The whole backstory with Prentiss is also much more consistent with Protestant churches. Because Catholic priests take vows of celibacy (and in spite of the fact that they often break them), being a Catholic priest is not a job that can be handed down from father to son--or grandson. Wickes is, despite the generation gap, essentially a preacher's son--and that explains a lot about his personality. It becomes clear, right before the murder, that Wickes has never really wanted this job and has always hated doing it--something which makes sense for a kid who was raised to take over his father's family concern. But a Catholic church is not a family concern. It's part of a diocese which is part of a global organization with many layers of hierarchy, and decisions about who's going to preach in it next are made neither by the current priest nor by the parishioners. Indeed, that's the only reason Father Jud gets to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude in the first place: because the diocese sends him and Wickes doesn't have the authority to refuse him. But go back to Prentiss's generation and the pretense that this is a Catholic church really starts to break down. The script explains that Prentiss was married and had already fathered Grace before he became a priest; but that doesn't explain how Prentiss can have "founded" a parish which has been around at least since the nineteenth century, or why the diocese allowed him to build that gigantic tomb for himself and his descendants on church property, or allow Prentiss to appoint his grandson as his successor.
So. The whole storyline with Prentiss, Grace, and Eve's Apple is really about a Protestant church; Monsignor Wickes is basically an evangelical pastor in priest's clothing. This is what I mean by this being an impossible Gospel. Wickes, as a Catholic priest, is kind of impossible. HIs whole backstory is also kind of impossible. But that impossibility produces some interesting possibilities.
The main reason that Catholic churches are "cooler-looking" than Protestant ones has to do with disagreements over the relationship between the material and the spiritual. One of the defining features of Catholic doctrine is the insistence on transubstantiation--the idea that during the consecration, the host actually becomes the body and blood of Christ. Despite the fact that none of its physical properties change, it still somehow becomes the actual body of Christ. The whole idea of the sacraments is that they are physical actions performed by humans in which God (usually understood to be in the form of the Holy Spirit) actually participates. The idea that the divine can inhere in the material is also what informs the Catholic aesthetic that horror directors and mystery writers alike are still strongly drawn to: the statues, the crucifix with Christ actually on it (as opposed to just the cross), the stained glass windows, the candles, the vestments, the incense, all of that is based on the idea that sensory, embodied experience can be a means of encountering the divine.
This is an idea still really matters to me, and to which I still cling in many ways. The institutional church has, of course, warped this idea through its animus toward sexuality and the misogyny that arose from that. But for some strains of Protestantism, rejecting Catholicism meant rejecting the idea that you could reach the spiritual through the material. So "low church" Protestants--the ones who wanted to distance themselves as much as possible from the Catholic Church--turned against all this ornamentation as idolatrous; all of these statues and other representations were not bringing people to God, but rather diverting the attention and devotion that SHOULD be God's onto worthless material objects. Which eventually, after many twists and turns, leads to the Pottery Barn aesthetic of which Rian Johnson complains.
And here is the thing that I find fascinating but don't know how to read yet: from an aesthetic point of view, in the backstory, Prentiss's whole Eve's Apple plan turns Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude from a Catholic church into a Protestant one.
By turning his fortune into a diamond and creating the whole treasure hunt plot, Prentiss motivates Grace to ransack the church, tearing up or smashing everything that could conceivably conceal a diamond. This kind of rampage is something that went on all the time in England during its Protestant reformation, when churches that had once been Catholic but would henceforth be Protestant were ransacked and the art inside them either stolen or smashed. The effect of her search is to strip the place down to the stone walls; not even the crucifix survives.
Monsignor Wickes, instead of trying to refurbish the church after Grace's death, decides to leave it bare. This fits in with the whole theme of people clinging to hatred/anger/resentment instead of allowing themselves to understand and forgive. But it's also Wickes deciding that lack and starkness and deprivation suit his "ministry" better.
And one of the things this means is that from a sensory point of view, Christ is no longer in that church. There's no crucifix; there's no cross; just the shadow where one used to be. Wickes's religion in the end is neither Catholic nor Protestant. It is instead what Christianity becomes when you remove Christ from it.
Anyway. This has already gone on too long so I'm going to wrap up by pointing out something about that final scene in the church that I only noticed on rewatch:
After hilariously interrupting Father Jud's confession with the organ, Blanc has trouble getting the 'flock' to settle down and listen to him. They continue trying to get Father Jud to incriminate himself to them until Blanc, in desperation, charges up to the pulpit and starts yelling from it. This, as he must have known it would, activates everyone's conditioning and we are shown how, one by one, they shut up and sit down. Blanc has stepped into Wickes's place and assumed Wickes's role, complete with his rhetoric about guilt and wickedness. He's using the same machinery Wickes used to establish his own authority and get compliance from the people he wants to control. If he stays there and does his standard Poirot-style denouement, he's just going to reinforce that hierarchical distance between himself and the people he's preaching to. He'll become the new patriarch--and materialism will become the new cult.
But instead, he looks at Martha and he realizes that she's already felt remorse and punished herself for it. And at that point he gets out of the pulpit and comes down to the level of the altar. And it's only after he gives up his authority--after saying "I cannot solve this case"--that the light shines on him. The light doesn't prompt his revelation; it just confirms it. And then he sits down on the steps, putting himself on a level with the rest of the congregation. He's realized that he was doing the same thing Wickes always did--making everything about himself, putting himself Christ's place, using the place around him to aggrandize his own power--and that he can't go on doing it. And all of that's down to what Father Jud has taught him.
So...this is the first thing I've seen in a long time that has made me want to post about any of this stuff. Like most Americans I am primarily exhausted by religion now--especially by the hideous version of Christianity that has ascended along with its adherents to surround Trump's throne. So I appreciate all the genre stuff and will probably soon have more to say about that. But I also appreciate that the film ends with Father Jud finally getting to replace that crucifix--and to put Eve and her apple at the heart of it. We're going to need so much renewal once this hideous catastrophe of a presidential administration is over. I'm glad someone is out there trying to imagine it in terms that go beyond party and ideology.
