by John Shade Vick
Considering the attention that my negative review on Forbes of Ridley
Scott’s Prometheus has garnered, it is clear that this film – regardless of its
silliness as a story – has proven worthy of heady debate on multiple levels.
In the last couple of days, another article has also gained
quite a bit of attention. It is an extremely well-written, well-reasoned
treatise on the symbolism contained in the film, written by a guy called
Cavalorn. There’s a fair amount of pablum in it about psychically activated black goo, but beyond that he points out numerous
details within the film suggesting that the story’s alien characters – the
Engineers – are connected to Earth’s religious and specifically Judeo-Christian
past as well as the mythical Greek Titan that lends the film his name.
Cavalorn’s theory is that the Engineers who occupied the
temple discovered by the human scientists on planet LV-223 became upset with
earthlings 2,000 years ago, but were prevented from cleaning our clocks when
they became victims of an industrial accident involving those jars of black goo
they had lying around on the floor of their ship. The ultimate assertion is
that Jesus Christ himself was an Engineer, and when we killed him, we signed
our own cosmic death warrant.
Despite a comment from Scott saying that actually calling it
Christ would be “too on the nose” (and a 9-foot tall albino Jesus wasn’t quite
what the Good Book described), I absolutely believe that this is what the
filmmakers were going for. I believe it because this has become screenwriter Damon
Lindelof’s shtick, whether he likes it or not (http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1687203/prometheus-sequel.jhtml).
Lindelof now seems to be shifting the blame for Prometheus in Scott’s direction,
but his writing for the ABC series LOST was rife with spiritual themes and philosophical
strangeness from the very beginning, and as the series went on, it became the
primary reason for its continued success. Every new image, character or
happening on the show sent rabid fans searching for answers in their libraries,
in the hope of uncovering the One Theory that explains everything. Whole
websites were constructed for the collection and dissemination of LOST-related
data, every obscure detail potentially holding the key to the series, and for
everything that happened, there was some guy, somewhere, who could say,
“Actually, what Locke said to Jack is mirrored right here in the Talmud. See?
It’s brilliant!”
Even worse was when the writers pulled in scientific theory
and then blew it off. As we all know, not only were the scientific questions
raised in the final seasons of LOST not dealt with, but neither was the
spiritual soup made of pieces of virtually every belief system in human
history. It all ended in a church with stained glass on another plane of
existence. Or something.
Scott, Lindelof and Jon Spaihts are clearly intelligent
people who know a lot of interesting things about a lot of interesting stuff.
And, finding clues to a greater meaning in a story can be fascinating and great
fun. But, for symbolism to have any real meaning, it has to make sense. It has
to serve the story, and it has to come organically. The shotgun-symbolism of
LOST, where countless bits of disparate philosophical ideas were blasted onto
the canvas and allowed to mean everything or nothing, depending on the
knowledge base of the viewer, is not storytelling. You can take the worst Eddie
Murphy movie and load it with potent religious symbolism, and it’s still going
to suck. Why? Because, it’s still a dumb Eddie Murphy movie injected with
potent religious symbolism. The symbolism is irrelevant if there isn’t a
good plot or well-drawn characters to carry the themes through.