After Strange Gods

By Kevin D. Williamson

Saturday, December 26, 2020

 

Lady Gaga; The Da Vinci Code; Rick Ross wearing a diamond rosary; The Young Pope; The Borgias; Christmas movies; Pulp Fiction; Dune; “Sexy nun” Halloween costumes; Halloween in general, and about half the horror movies you’ve ever seen; Madonna, if anybody remembers — It would be fair to describe contemporary trash culture as fixated on Christian images and iconography, the deep well to which it keeps returning, generation after generation, for reasons that should be obvious.

 

And, now, Handel’s Messiah. Sort of.

 

With the standing caveat that some things in our time truly are beyond the reach of satire, consider this account from the New York Times. “A ‘Messiah’ for the Multitudes, Freed From History’s Bonds,” reads the headline, which must have been written by someone who didn’t read the story, inasmuch as this version of the oratorio under discussion is, by the Times’s own account, deeply interested in history. (And “for the masses”? This is Baroque music: The masses will, being masses, ignore it entirely.) But these are excitable times, so, have some adjectives: “A polyglot, nonsectarian, gender-inclusive film from Canada remakes the Handel classic for today’s world,” reads the underline.

 

Coming to the report itself, by Dan Bilefsky, we read:

 

A gay Chinese-Canadian tenor struts through the streets of Vancouver, joyously proclaiming that “ev’ry valley shall be exalted” as the camera focuses in on his six-inch-high stiletto heels.

 

A Tunisian-Canadian mezzo-soprano reimagines Jesus as a Muslim woman in a head scarf.

 

In Yukon, an Indigenous singer praises the remote snow-covered landscape in Southern Tutchone, the language of her ancestors.

 

There is a good deal of cruelty in this. Imagine telling an accomplished tenor: “Never mind the music — what’s actually interesting about you is your sexual orientation, so we’re going to have you strut around in women’s shoes and reinforce the stereotype that gay men are not really men. You don’t by any chance speak Southern Tutchone, do you?”

 

It is inaccurate for the Times to describe this as “nonsectarian.” It is the work of a sect, and it is organized on sectarian lines. (Well-organized sectarianism is like well-organized government: You hardly know it’s there.) But at heart, this is cynical, cheap marketing at work — outrage bait. That kind of banal, épater le bourgeois sales ploy worked wonders for Madonna and Andres Serrano, and versions of it served Rosemary’s Baby and The Matrix well enough — perhaps this same stratagem can be of some use to a team of Canuck entrepreneurs hawking a film that in the normal course of events would be watched by, rounding to the significant figure, no one.

 

Many people will be offended by this, and many will complain. That is of almost no interest to anybody except the producers, who will profit thereby. A more interesting question is this: Why Messiah?

 

Wouldn’t it be even more multicultural and cutting-edge to create a gay Chinese-Canadian tenor-in-high-heels fantasia based on, say, the songs of Talal Maddah? Why not Cantonese opera performed in Ojibway? An all-transsexual tap-dancing Eid al-Fitr celebration?

 

Other than the likelihood that the last of these would get you murdered, the answer is: Nobody cares.

 

Here’s the thing: You can hijack medieval Catholic imagery for an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, but you can’t really repurpose an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race for anything of any lasting interest, because there isn’t really anything of substance to hold on to there. That’s why this only happens in one direction: You aren’t going to see a bunch of traditionalist Catholics looking to put a Tridentine spin on Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

 

The silly repurposing of Messiah in the service of cheap and illiterate identity politics —

 

“My reinterpretation of the ‘Messiah’ is about me feeling despised and rejected as a first-generation immigrant in Montreal,” she said. “Like me, Jesus felt wretched and despised. But by taking Jesus out of the equation and making it more personal, I have reclaimed the ‘Messiah’ as my own.”

 

— is not exactly, to use the fearful term, “cultural appropriation.” It is, instead, an illustration of the difference between high culture and its opposite, between art and novelty, between that which lasts and that which does not. We endure in flotsam: Can you recite 20 consecutive lines of poetry written by an American in the past 20 years, or name 20 living American poets of any consequence? There is a reason for that. Messiah, composed in 1741, is going on 300 years old. Is there a single musical work by a North American in our time that we expect to be so nearly universally recognizable in the year 2299?

 

Not that the year number 2299 makes any sense without the unacknowledged Anno Domini, which is what this is really about.

 

The vandalizing convention of our time is to divide history into Common Era (CE) and Before Common Era (BCE). But what is it that makes the era common? It is, of course, the Event that bisects time, memorialized around this season of the year and celebrated by such artists as George Frideric Handel, J.S. Bach, and other famous church organists. The charade of pretending that we are not organizing our dating conventions around the life of Jesus while continuing to organize our dating conventions around the life of Jesus is typical of our primitive, superstitious thinking: If we don’t acknowledge the thing, the thing ceases to exist. We could define the Common Era as beginning with the birth of Isaac Newton or Charles Darwin or Taylor Swift, about whose dates we have better information than we do about those of the embarrassing Messiah. We could use any of the traditional calendars of the world, though, if I understand correctly, the Mayan one has run its course.

 

But we don’t do that. We don’t do that for the same reason we don’t create campy, homosexualized, resentful, Muslim-immigrant-identity-politics remakes of the rich literature composed in Southern Tutchone. And we’re going to keep not doing that.

 

Partisans of the cultural tendency that defines itself in opposition to European Christian civilization broadly understood will, in all likelihood, continue to fail to produce a high culture equal to the achievements of that civilization, even as we moderns excel what we used to call Western Civilization in technology — theirs, Dante, ours, Twitter. It probably will be Christian scholars, a millennium or two hence and perhaps returned to the monastery, who write the definitive history of our high-tech barbarian civilization, poring over old photos of Whoopi Goldberg dressed as a nun and Ricky Gervais posed as Saint Sebastian.