Page - 106 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

106 | Alexander D. Ornella www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 99–122 put an end to his career aspirations, and Bach’s motet starts playing. While the music still plays, the film cuts to Adam sitting on a park bench, with his earplugs in, listening to the very music we hear and smoking a cigarette. With Bach’s motet still playing, yet another cut takes us to see Adam from behind while the homeless man Colin swears and kicks beer cans around, apparently angry at something. Prompted by Colin, Adam takes the earplugs out and the music fades. Music here serves as a leveling factor between Robert, Adam, and Colin, bridging differences and connecting their masculinities. Despite their differenc- es in social and ecclesial status, they all share the struggle of having to negotiate different masculinities (and the expectations thereof). The diegetic sound we tune into when Adam plugs in his earphones connects Adam with the audience and other characters in the show, and serves to connect different scenes. The music we hear is Adam’s music, suggesting that while he might not be perfect, he still might be the one that holds the community together just as the music connects us with Adam and several scenes within the show (though every so often Adam needs his wife to motivate and support him in being the anchor for his parish community). In contrast to Adam’s acting as an anchor for the community, the careerist Archdeacon Robert seems to be only interested in exerting the power and au- thority invested in him and pursuing his own career. Yet, his male (clerical) iden- tity is not as settled as it might seem either. He struggles with the institution’s perceptions of gay relationships, which get in the way of his career ambitions. We only learn of Robert’s sexual orientation late in the show, when Adam and Nigel, the closeted gay lay reader in St Saviour’s, catch Robert and his partner shopping for a new bed. The situation is quite awkward, and we can assume that Robert has to negotiate his private/personal/sexual life with his institu- tion’s perception of an appropriate clerical and episcopal masculinity, that he struggles to fit in. Even if Robert is not the most likeable character, the filmic staging of the scene and the acting of all the characters on screen show him struggling with the very power he shares in and exerts over others. As such, he has to negotiate idealized and normalized notions of an episcopal masculinity as either heterosexual or celibate in an almost dichotomous fashion. The element of food is a further vital ingredient in portraying and expressing the relationship between different masculinities in Rev. (2010–2014), in particu- lar Adam’s and Robert’s. In his study on food and sex in biblical texts, Kenneth Stone argues that “food and sex both play a central role in the social exchanges and symbolic associations by which male characters establish and manipulate their relations to one another”.28 In the beginning of the series, whenever the 28 Stone 2005, 83; cf. Nixon 2008.