"Revelations": God-Awful TV

Before I watched Revelations last night, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to clear my mind of all preconceptions. I said a prayer. Lord, I said, maybe this six-part television event wont be so bad. Maybe the NBC network executives behind it arent just trying to capitalize on the conservative Christian conquest of America. Maybe they set out to make a really good mini-series, and succeeded. And maybe it will open my eyes to the signs that were living in the Final Days and that Jesus and the Antichrist are now walking the earth somewhere, gearing up to unleash colossal destruction. That would be nice. Amen.

Despite this mental and spiritual preparation, I was guffawing mere seconds into the show. A teenage girl is about to go to school when her father stops her in the kitchen to ask about the tattoo on her bare midriff. She explains that its fake and he orders her to wash it off or cover it up. Jesus, she mutters under her breath. Just for that, youre going to church Sunday! yells the father in a mild southern accent. These are his last words to her, as stiffer punishment awaits the girl. Running off to school, she gets struck by lightning, twice, and winds up brain-dead in a Florida hospital, kept alive by machines.     

Oh, but before all that happens, a huge shadow of the cross appears on a mountain in Mexico. As the masses gather below, the outline of Jesus head turns and looks down on them. There to catch it on film is Sister Josepha, a nun who is bankrolled by a fundamentalist to travel the world documenting signs of the End Times.

As I noted yesterday, evangelical leader Richard Land, who praised the series at length, criticized it for taking the typical little Hollywood cheap shots at conservative Christians. The man is imagining things. All the people of faith come off as completely sane, earnest, salt-of-the-earth folks, while the show portrays professors, scientists, doctors, and skeptics as thickheaded nincompoops. It was as offensive as it was unintentionally hilarious.

Take the comatose girl who, as a priest explains, is technically dead, thats how [the doctors] are justifying unplugging her to harvest her organs. Although the girl has no brain activity, she starts quoting the Book of Revelationin Latin. Her mouth and head move, her body twitches, her hands flail, and she starts drawing pictures. And not just any pictures, but archaic symbols from Galileos time! And how does the medical staff at the hospital react? Do they conduct extensive medical exams? Do they postpone ending her life? Do they, for that matter, show even the slightest curiosity about this medical freak of nature? Nah. As soon as the brain-dead girl stops spouting Latin they step up their efforts to snatch her kidneys. (No wonder Sister Josepha calls scientists devils advocates and claims to sense an adversarial atmosphere at the hospital.)

But the doctors dont try to kill the girl without offering some explanation for why she flops like a salmon and draws 16th-century doodles. They claim her spasms are seizures related to her injuries and they insist that Sister Josepha must have drawn the pictures. And the Latin scripture quoting? Get this: The doctors say lightning shot the girls fillings into her brain, where they pick up electrical signals and radio frequenciestransmitted from Vatican City, I presume. Im not sure how these radio signals turned into speech uttered by the girl, but the doctors didnt dwell on the point, so its probably not that important anyway.

Back to Richard Land. In one scene at the hospital, a doctor remarks that the handling of patients in a persistent vegetative state is an unfortunate area of debate, adding that right-to-lifers would claim consciousness and brain waves on a night crawler. Land characterized the comment as conservative Christian-bashing at its Hollywood best. Given the overall bleak portrayal of the medical establishment, however, I thought the remark was more likely meant to demonize doctors. If, that is, it was intended to bash anyone.

Virtually every scene and character in this show is laugh-out-loud absurd. The Antichrist is a cult leader who killed the daughter of Dr. Richard Massey (Bill Pullman), so he could use her heart in a satanic ritual (which Sister Josepha likens to the doctors pulling the plug on the brain-dead girl). The Antichrist can control airplane turbulence, and he can adjust his heart rate up and down quickly to fool polygraph machines. And though his heart beats, he doesnt have any blood, or at least he never bleeds, and in one scene he cuts off a finger to prove it. The Antichrist is in jail for the murder of Masseys daughter, but hes as pleased as a pig in poop to be there. These are my people, he says, in an evil, two-pack-a-day voice, and this is my parish, where I will preach the word of my Lord.  

Dr. Massey is a dope, we are to realize, and his daughters nickname for him, Donkey, suits him well. He is a Harvard astrophysicist who believes in the existence of ozone holes but not the existence of God. Hes an astrophysicist, yes, but hes also written a book on the Bible that gives naturalistic explanations for supernatural accounts. At a book signing, he tells the audience:

Like all biblical tales, the 10 plagues of Moses time easily yield to scientific explanation. In the Book of Exodus, the river was turned into blood. Plagues of frogs, bugs, boils, and death of the first-bornwhat we have here is a volcanic eruption, putting mud into the river, which drove the frogs to the land where they rotted in the sun, which drew the bugs by the billions, and they carried the typhus and boils. And that swept death to the first-born, the eldest children, whose exposure was the greatest because they were the ones who labored in the fields. Pausing, he adds with a smile, Thats science.

In other words, Dr. Massey shares the fundamentalists belief that the Bible was meant to be read as factual history, and he uses science to dismiss the supernatural stuff. Bill Pullman should receive an Emmy just for delivering that speech with a straight face.

By the end of the first installment of Revelations, Dr. Massey seems to be on the verge of faith. He goes to the Florida hospital because Sister Josepha insists that the brain-dead girl is channeling his deceased daughter. He confronts Sister Josepha, telling her shes deluded. Then the girls heart stops. Doctors and nurses fly into the room like vultures, preparing to take her organs. Dr. Massey stands next to the girl, whose hand suddenly grabs his. Her heart starts again, and Dr. Masseys face turns into a mask of awe and belief.

Two words: holy shit.    

PS: If you missed it, recent SoMA contributor Teresa Blythe wrote a wonderful essay on Revelations for Beliefnet. She explores how producers use creepy religion to intensify television dramas, and she makes the point, no doubt lost on many viewers of Revelations, that frightful images were placed in Scripture passages by writers who were familiar with the rhetorical use of poetic, metaphorical language in sacred texts, never dreaming that anyone in the future would ever take these images literally.

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