Page - 118 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

118 | Jacob Given www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 117–120 pears on the lawn. The people force themselves into the house, and the movie quickly becomes nightmarish and violent. Fans seem less like admirers and more like cult members, building shrines to the poet inside the home and conducting orgiastic rituals. Inexplicably, the basement turns into a war zone. Bardem’s publisher (Kristen Wiig) executes prisoners six at a time and riot police clash with protesters. When Lawrence suddenly goes into labor, Bardem carries her up to his office, where she gives birth to their son. She falls asleep and Bardem hands the child over to the mob. They pass the urinating baby above their heads until its unsupported neck breaks. They then ritually cannibalize the child. Law- rence assaults the priestly figure officiating at the cannibalization with a glass shard and several surrounding people, lacerating the faces of some children. The crowd proceeds to brutalize Lawrence in what is surely the most memora- ble, if horrific, scene of the movie. Bardem rushes in and cradles his wife, saying that they have to find a way to forgive the mob. She hurries to the basement, breaks a gas line, drops a lighter, and incinerates the house. Bardem then car- ries her badly burned but somehow still living body, places it on the table and asks her for one last thing: her “love”. She consents, and he opens her chest to remove her heart, which takes the form of an ash-covered crystal. Upon placing the crystal on its decorative mount in his office, the house is restored and a new woman awakes in bed. The cycle continues. The absurdity of the film’s literal sense is amplified by its allegorical dimen- sion. The events that unfold in the house mimic stories of the Bible. Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer play the first humans, Adam and Eve. Their son commits the first murder, explaining the odd bloody orifice that forms in the floorboard (“And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand” [Gen. 4,11 ESV]). The increas- ingly chaotic funerary gathering represents the “increasing corruption on the earth” (Gen. 6,1–8 ESV), culminating in the burst water pipe, the Flood (Gen. 6–8). Jennifer Lawrence’s pregnancy represents the incarnation of God’s Son, Jesus, which provides the inspiration for God (Bardem) to compose his master- piece, the New Testament. The subsequent pandemonium parodies the history of the Christian West. The publisher’s role as executioner, for example, seems to stand in for fanatical violence committed in the name of religion: the Inquisi- tion, the Crusades, or some similar example. The birth of the child is the Nativ- ity, the child’s cannibalization is the Eucharist, and Lawrence’s brutalization is the disdain with which the Christian West has treated the earth/women. Finally, Mother (Nature, or perhaps Woman) has had enough and destroys the house with fire, echoing the biblical eschatological motif of the “day of the Lord” in which “the heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare” (2 Pet. 3,10 NIV). Of course, the film does not stop there. God asks one last thing of Nature,