Did you hear about the country so addled by ancient dogma that its film distributors wouldn't release a movie about Charles Darwin? You may ask: Where is this backwards, unenlightened place? Iran? North Korea? Turkey? Saudi Arabia? It would be nice to know, so we can remember not to expect too much from whatever country it is. All I can say is I'm glad I live here in the United States of America, where...oh.
Creation, a British historical drama directed by Jon Amiel, stars Paul Bettany as Darwin and Jennifer Connelly as his wife, Emma. It's based on the book Annie's Box, written by Darwin's great-great-grandson Randal Keynes, and deals chiefly with Darwin's grief at the death of his daughter. The film opened the Toronto Film Festival last Thursday, and had its British premiere yesterday. According to The Telegraph, it "has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia." But no American distributor will touch Creation, because it might upset people who think the world was created in six days by a big man in the sky.
The film was produced by Jeremy Thomas, the Academy Award-winning producer of Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, and other morsels of tempting Oscar bait such as David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch and Crash. Thomas told the Telegraph's Anita Singh:
"That's what we're up against. In 2009. It's amazing. The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the U.S., and it's because of what the film is about. People have been saying this is the best film they've seen all year, yet nobody in the U.S. has picked it up. It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America. There's still a great belief that He made the world in six days. It's quite difficult for we in the U.K. to imagine religion in America. We live in a country which is no longer so religious. But in the U.S., outside of New York and L.A., religion rules. Charles Darwin is, I suppose, the hero of the film. But we tried to make the film in a very even-handed way. Darwin wasn't saying 'kill all religion,' he never said such a thing, but he is a totem for people."
He certainly is. The unintentionally hilarious movieguide.org ("a ministry of The Christian Film and Television Commission, founded by Dr. Ted Baehr, to redeem the media [by] providing reviews from a biblical perspective") blames Darwin for "atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering" and calls the theory of evolution "half-baked." (As opposed to their careful scientific conclusion that God made Adam and then made Eve from Adam's rib and then a talking snake persuaded Eve to eat a magic apple. That's convincing.)
Oh well. Movieguide.org vows to "bring God's light to an industry with much darkness," but apparently it's not helping them see very clearly. The site's news headlines are enough to tell you what kind of relationship these people have with reality: "Obama Appoints Radical Sodomite Activist to Major School Post." "Obama Officially Endorses Homofascist Indoctrination and Oppression." "A Godless Marriage Is Worse Than a Loveless One." And that's the news!
As usual, the outrage of the religious right is uninformed. It turns out Creation is not a rebuke to religion; it focuses mainly on Darwin's family tragedy. Evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson, blogging for the New York Times, writes that Creation "is not a didactic film: its main aim is not the public understanding of Darwin’s ideas, but a portrait of a bereaved man and his family." Ray Bennett, in his Hollywood Reporter review, writes, "It would be a great shame if those with religious convictions spurned the film out of hand as they will find it even-handed and wise." Variety: "This handsome historical piece...isn't about science vs. faith so much as that well-worn dramatic hook, the loss of a child." Screen Daily's review even suggests that the film avoids controversy to its detriment: "In asserting the domestic over all else, Creation may have backed the wrong horse."
But don't expect any of this to matter to the same people who decried The Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus Christ Superstar, Dogma, The Da Vinci Code, and Religulous. They didn't see any of those films either. (But they flocked to The Passion of the Christ -- not only one of the worst films in recent memory, but ironically, the bloodiest, goriest, sickest thing I've ever seen in the mainstream cinema.) The Hollywood Reporter's Ray Bennett writes that Creation "will do well with grown-up audiences across the board." Maybe so. But in marketing entertainment to much of America, Hollywood is not dealing with grown-ups. It's dealing with people who literally believe in fairy tales.
It's dealing with people like Elizabeth Prata, who writes a blog "chronicling the End of Days," and recently sounded off on the Creation controversy. At least Prata has good design sense: She's chosen black text on a dark gray background. The problem is, if you really squint, you can still read what she's saying:
"Darwin said: 'I had gradually come...to see that the Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos or the beliefs of any barbarian.' How did it happen that a man who was raised Christian and attended seminary, lost his faith so completely that he ended up proposing a theory that would do more to encourage apostasy and faithlessness than any other concept in the history of the world?"
Well, he realized that he was an intelligent human being who had been behaving irresponsibly. And so, as all responsible people must, he chose reason and reality over the willful ignorance of religious dogma. But it will not surprise you to hear that Prata has her own answer, and that it's pants-wettingly silly:
"Like the strangler fig, satan takes a tentative hold and then if not immediately swept away, he moves his tentacles in and winds slowly around."
Ready to continue? Elizabeth Prata is. Responding to Creation producer Jeremy Thomas's comments to the Telegraph, she writes:
"It is the time of apostasy in a world that embraces a 'theory' instead of the facts of God; that America is 'too religious' (as if there is any such thing); the notion that the world has outgrown God and we must become modern. That, after all, it IS 2009."
Unfortunately, not all the world has outgrown God. Humanity's great progress remains hampered by benighted pockets of primitive thought. That's why Prata can use a phrase like "the facts of God" without blinking. She can even deny that it's possible to be "too religious," in an age when people of faith crash airplanes into skyscrapers to appease their gods. Every now and then, she almost makes a point:
"Apostasy is a falling away from the truth. Here is some truth: Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species. There was a reason Darwin did not title it On the Origin of Life. Science can't explain how life began on this earth."
Right! In other words, people can't explain how life began on this earth! We just don't know! What a wonderful thing that she has accepted this! Now, having finally shed the yoke of religious certitude, I guess she...oh.
"But bible believers know: God created the world and everything in it in 6 days. An even better truth are the words: 'Hebrews 12:2 - Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.'
"The second you take your eyes off Him, a clarion bell goes off in hell, and satan sends his demons to swoop at you with the strangler fig seed to plant in your mind. Beware, it comes slowly and stealthily, until pretty soon you are so choked with lies you decide that we are descended from monkeys instead of Children of God."
Who, exactly, is "choked with lies?" The person who finds certainty in what has been proven through scientific and historical inquiry, or the person who finds certainty in a compendium of ancient myths? The person who perceives existential threats in climate change, nuclear proliferation, and the health care crisis, or the person who thinks Satan is trying to plant figs in his mind? Who is so opposed to thought, so closed to ideas, as to believe that all is lost "the second you take your eyes off Him?"
This would all be a lot funnier if the problem were not so widespread in the United States. A Gallup poll in February found that only 39% of Americans "believe in" the theory of evolution. (Twenty-five percent do not, and 36% have no opinion either way.) Unsurprisingly, attachment to religious mythology is far less epidemic among the educated; 21% of Americans with a high school diploma "or less" believe in evolution, compared with 53% of college graduates and 74% of postgraduates. Ignorance of Darwin's theory is more common in young people and churchgoers than in adults.
Whether Creation finds a U.S. distributor is ultimately a very small matter. But attached to this story is an issue of unequalled importance. America is being strangled, not by the Satanic fig Elizabeth Prata fears, but by the refusal of too many Americans to think critically, to distinguish between fantasy and reality. If you honestly believe that a man went up a mountain and came back with stone tablets from God, or saved the world by putting two of each animal on a boat, or died "for your sins" and is on his way back, then it must be very easy to believe that Iraq was in on 9/11, that President Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya, and that health care reform is a socialist takeover.
