Some time in the mid to late 1980s—heck if I can remember exactly how old I was—I was alone in my RL parents' household, flipping through San Diego TV channels—one of the things I usually did in childhood when I had some time to myself. These were the days of broadcast TV when there was a small handful of VHF channels and an unpredictable array of UHF stations. It was probably on one of those UHF channels that I saw...well, this, or roughly this: a very pale tall man, with a long blonde wig and a beard styled to resemble typical (whıte) American magazine-cover depictions of Jesus Christ. And he was up on a Cross, with his arms thrown outward, and talking to himself. His voice rises to a crescendo of blessings as he speaks, and finally he yells in exultation: "TODAY IS MY WEDDING DAY!" and he hurls himself off the Cross towards the camera. Freeze frame! church bells! end scene!
And then, radiant and joyful, Jesus Christ gets married. His bride appears to be quite taken with him, and doesn't mind "J.C." saying absurd things during the ceremony like "some Catholics say I'm already married to the Virgin Mary!" while the priest stammers and stumbles through the ritual, a look of utter helplessness and despair on his face the entire time, as though God were preparing to incinerate him the moment the marriage was formalized.
And then I changed the channel. I didn't even learn the name of the movie, and anyway I didn't usually tune in to entire movies, unless I already knew what they were. All the same, the scene stuck in my mind for decades, and eventually I remembered enough details to locate the film: it's The Ruling Class, from 1972, a bleak satire based on a play about a minor English lord who fancies himself God and Jesus Christ all in one, until his relatives and a psychiatrist in their employ get their claws into him, thinking they can cure his delusions. And indeed J.C. does stop believing he's Jesus Christ, but he starts believing he's Jack the Ripper. And he still believes he's God, by the way.
This was my introduction to Peter O'Toole, as it turned out. I didn't know that's who it was. (Nor did I know that the timid priest was Alastair Sim.) O'Toole would become one of my favorite actors in later years of trawling through cinema, and I came to understand that The Ruling Class movie was his baby. He bought the rights to the play and took no acting salary for it; this was a true passion project. (See what I did there?) I wonder what O'Toole specifically saw in it. I have speculated that he himself felt like a martyr—to acting and movies. O'Toole kept acting until he dropped, racking up eight Academy Award nominations for acting and never claiming the prize. O'Toole was famously unhappy and tormented, given to alcoholism and destructive behaviors; one can easily guess that, when Jesus Christ / Jack are screaming in mental agony in The Ruling Class, Peter O'Toole was summoning up his own screaming, from the depths of his soul.
Maybe Jesus Christ was inevitable. Like, the abstract concept of Jesus Christ, or someone like him—maybe that was always bound to happen. The notion that gods could take human clothing was already abroad in human culture, so maybe it was inevitable that someone would eventually attempt to fuse this idea with monotheism, and thus claim the existence (even just hypothetically) of a being who is somehow the perfect intersection of humanity with the One True God. The Incarnation is such a straightforward and compelling concept that it seems almost pointless to argue about whether Jesus Christ was real or not: people want to believe in the possibility, and act on that belief. Christianity itself almost boils down solely to the proposition that the Incarnation once existed, and will exist again, and the only point to life is waiting for the Second Coming to happen, to mend a broken world.
And now it seems like this very simple and compelling belief might well mean the end of Earth.
~Χαρά