Page - 35 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

A 2013 Wired exposé on Carruth contains this insight into his religious background: “For a while, his parents belonged to a progressive, hippie-ish community called the Lord’s Chapel. The congregants met in a high school gym or at potluck dinners, where they sometimes spoke in tongues.”53 Could this Pentecostal upbringing and interest in religious phenomena inform the spirit-laden near-miraculous moments of Upstream Color? The narrative of an omniscient deity (the Sampler) orchestrating the spiritual destiny and health of in- dividuals only to be overcome and killed by those individuals – this all suggests that Upstream Color could be described as a pneumatological “death of God” film, or a “middle spirit” of remaining beyond trauma’s aftermath.54 As time and narrative in- creasingly blur over the film’s running time, the hovering Spirit over the (upstream) waters heals the victims of religious trauma, even as those very victims put to death the religious institution and metaphysical god of theodicy. This is not an atheistic but an anatheistic film – it is about life with god after god is dead.55 Like its inspira- tion Walden, this sci-fi parable invokes a spiritual awakening, inviting the audience to “live deliberately” with an awareness of the transcendent gift that is everyday human existence. Post-Secular Parables As of this writing, Carruth has directed only Primer and Upstream Color; two fol- low-up film projects, A Topiary and The Modern Ocean, remain unrealized. During the writing of this article, the website to Carruth’s film production company, ERBP Film, suddenly closed down and became inaccessible. In an October 2019 interview, Carruth stated that he is retiring from filmmaking to focus on other projects and charity work.56 Yet even if Carruth produced only these two films, his art should be recognized as part of the “post-secular constellation” emerging in contemporary cinema.57 This post-secular aesthetic could be described as an in-between space between the secular and the religious, realism and expressionism, immanence and transcendence; it is where Carruth’s cinema resides. Post-secular cinema invites us into an open space of liminality, wager, and possibility; such motion pictures allow us visions of our subjective link to the “real world” even as they upend and expand our beliefs and imaginations, showing us both our world and other possible worlds, 53 Rafferty 2013. 54 Rambo 2010. 55 Kearney 2011. 56 Pape 2019. 57 Bradatan/Ungureanu 2014. 34 | Joel Mayward www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 17–36