Cinemorphosis

Tag: resurrection

  • Resurrecting the Narrative: Why Some Stories Won’t Die

    Resurrecting the Narrative: Why Some Stories Won’t Die

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère’s sly, genre-mutating novel, the narrator—an aging screenwriter with a history in French television and a grudge against his own irrelevance—ponders the cultural staying power of zombie stories. Zombies, after all, are the walking dead: viral, contagious, unsettlingly lifelike in their mindless hunger. While consulting on a TV show saturated with post-apocalyptic gore, Carrère’s narrator growls at younger writers, quits in a fog of midlife disdain, and watches from the sidelines as the series becomes a global phenomenon. Bitter and brooding, he studies the success with the sulky fascination of someone who just broke up with their ex and can’t stop checking their Instagram. “I stopped writing fiction long ago,” he mutters, “but I can recognize a powerful fictional device when I see it.”

    Carrère then executes a narrative judo move, flipping from zombie melodrama to the Apostle Paul in 50 A.D., an itinerant zealot-turned-mutation vector. Paul, in Carrère’s retelling, doesn’t just preach the resurrection of a crucified prophet—he unleashes a viral narrative that spreads through Corinth like spiritual malware. Paul doesn’t need a production team or a streaming platform. He has a loom, a message, and an uncanny ability to hijack human consciousness. As Carrère writes, belief in the resurrection becomes “the portent of something enormous, a mutation of humanity, both radical and invisible.” Early Christians, in this telling, are infected—mutants hidden in plain sight, walking among neighbors with a secret that rewires their sense of reality.

    Carrère’s language—mutation, contagion, infection—is no accident. He draws a direct line from Paul’s religious storytelling to the psychological mechanics behind marketing, ideology, and modern myth-making. Yuval Noah Harari makes a similar argument in Sapiens: civilization is held together not by laws or gods, but by collective fictions powerful enough to convince strangers to cooperate. Religion, like branding, spreads through the bloodstream of the culture until it feels like fact. Carrère takes this one step further: religion doesn’t just organize civilization—it haunts it, like a beautiful, persistent hallucination that refuses to die.

    Consider Madison Avenue’s version of salvation. I recall a 1990s Mercedes-Benz commercial where a man, lost and panicked in a shadowy forest, emerges onto a mountaintop. Above him, the stars align into the Mercedes logo. Transcendence is achieved. No need for Damascus Road—just a lease and decent credit. The brand has become a kind of secular gospel. No one cares that Mercedes flunks reliability scores; the emblem still gleams like a divine seal. In this light, Carrère’s Paul isn’t just a religious visionary—he’s the original brand strategist. His resurrection story had better legs than the competition. It caught on. It mutated. It endured. And Carrère, the self-professed unbeliever, is too entranced—and too honest—to dismiss it. Carrere’s novel The Kingdom is the story of a narrator marveling at how the world got infected by a story so powerful, it continues to raise the dead.

  • The Resurrection and Other Interruptions to My Nap

    The Resurrection and Other Interruptions to My Nap

    This Saturday afternoon, somewhere between my post-kettlebell stupor and the first REM cycle, I drifted into the odd liminal space where podcasts mingle with dreams. In my AirPods: Andrew Sullivan’s Dishcast, where the ever-Catholic provocateur was in conversation with Francis Collins, the brilliant scientist and evangelical convert who led the Human Genome Project and somehow still believes Jesus flew to Heaven in a flesh-and-spirit upgrade that sounds suspiciously like the beta version of a Marvel character.

    These two men—earnest, erudite, and disturbingly unbothered by the metaphysical gymnastics required—agreed that Jesus was no zombie. No, the risen Christ, they insisted, was something far more sophisticated: a being of glorified materiality, capable of munching on grilled fish one moment and defying the laws of gravity the next. As I lay there, blinking ceiling-ward in the warm afterglow of lactic acid and religious speculation, it hit me: I’m a doubter. Not an edgy nihilist, just your garden-variety agnostic with a decades-long lease agreement in my head, where Jesus and Paul have been living rent-free since I hit puberty.

    The part I can’t swallow—resurrection aside—is substitutionary atonement. The notion that a God supposedly defined by love could only be appeased by orchestrating a cosmic bloodletting reads less like theology and more like something out of a Bronze Age mafia drama. And yet, Sullivan and Collins weren’t foaming zealots—they were thoughtful, gracious, luminously intelligent men. Which led me, mid-nap, to remember Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, a fever dream of a novel in which the narrator interrogates Luke, the Gospel’s narrator, with a mix of admiration, suspicion, and barely-contained despair. It’s the story of someone trying to understand the story being told by someone who wasn’t sure they believed it either.

    Somewhere between guilt, caffeine, and the ache in my glutes, I sat up and thought: Maybe I should write a novel. Not about Jesus—he already has a publisher—but about me wrestling with Carrère, while Carrère wrestles with Luke, while Sullivan and Collins serenely eat fish with the risen Lord. It’s wildly ambitious, probably self-indulgent, and smells faintly of midlife crisis. But what’s faith—or doubt—if not the ultimate literary prompt?

  • Writing Is World-Building

    Writing Is World-Building

    The writer who seeks literary dominance can be called Manuscriptus Rex. He is a beast acutely aware of his own brokenness, a self-awareness that drags him into the depths of morbidity and despair. But mere recognition of his anguish isn’t enough—he must transcend it. Not through quiet introspection or self-acceptance, but through literary dominance. Writing isn’t just therapy; it’s conquest. His words are not gentle offerings but acts of aggression against the world, though he convinces himself otherwise. He’s not a tyrant—he’s a savior. He doesn’t crave attention—he has something urgent to say, something the world must hear.

    One of the most exalted members of the Manuscriptus Rex species? The Apostle Paul. His life reads like a high-stakes thriller—a battle-worn intellectual waging ideological war through the written word. If Hollywood ever needed a poster child for a writer with a messianic mission, Paul would be it. Ink-stained fingers, unshakable conviction, and a belief that his words would outlast empires—because, of course, they did.

    Thinking of Paul as a character in a movie reminds me of a similarly absurd but far less consequential scene from my own past: the time my high school bodybuilding buddy, Martino, and I were ensnared by the oldest bait-and-switch in history—free food and salvation. We had been lured to a Wednesday night church youth group by the promise of unlimited lasagna and Kool-Aid, a trap set by the twin seductions of carbs and sugar. The youth pastor, a bearded, bespectacled man with the unshakable enthusiasm of someone who truly believed he could sell eternal life like a used car, paced the room as he spun his gospel pitch. He wanted to know if we were ready to accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, as though an extra serving of garlic bread might tip us into theological certainty.

    Martino, a squat, blocky fellow with a neck so thick it could’ve moonlighted as a battering ram, sat politely through the sermon, nodding with the blank expression of a man deep in a carb coma. His eyebrows, heavy and brooding, looked as if they were preparing to stage a labor strike right there on his face. By the time we left, his stomach was full, but his soul remained stubbornly unmoved. Driving home, he grunted through a yawn, “Nice lasagna, but I don’t think I found Jesus in there.”

    Paul would’ve had a field day with Martino, hammering him with letters, debates, and fiery rebukes until he saw the light—or at least surrendered out of sheer exhaustion.

    “Eternal paradise? Eternal hell? If you want to win me over, show me the movie.” Without a flicker of humor, he added, “Jacques Cousteau and his film crew need to do a deep dive into heaven and hell and report back. Then maybe the pastor will have something worth talking about.”

    I couldn’t help but think of Jacques Cousteau and his team of underwater explorers filming their way through the afterlife when I was reading French novelist Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom. In typical Carrère fashion, he takes the early church and flips it into a bizarre TV production, with Saint Paul as the leading man, flexing his theological muscles for the cameras, while Luke, ever the dutiful biographer and behind-the-scenes producer, works overtime to keep Paul in the best possible light. It’s like watching Keeping Up with the Apostles, with Luke spinning Paul’s antics while fending off rival apostles who think ditching the Torah is a little too avant-garde. You can almost picture Luke yelling “Cut!” every time Paul’s dramatic speeches veer a little too close to heresy, scrambling to keep the script on track as the whole Jesus movement teeters on the edge of a theological reality show gone wrong.

    Carrère kicks off his novel with a nod to a TV show he worked on about people who had the inconvenient habit of dying and then popping back into life in a small town. He muses,  “I stopped writing fiction long ago, but I can recognize a powerful fictional device when I see it. And this was by far the most powerful one I’ed been offered in my career as a screenwriter.” In a world that’s often nasty, brutish, and short (thanks, Hobbes), the idea of reuniting with our dearly departed is practically irresistible. The implication? Any religion that dangles this tantalizing offer in front of us is going to beat out the competition—especially those dull creeds that don’t have a resurrection hook.

    As Carrère (who writes as the narrator and a version of himself) dives into production for Les Revenants (The Returned), he lets slip to the show’s directors that he’s also knee-deep in another project—a book about the early days of Christianity, circa 50 A.D. in Corinth. Just like the TV show’s fascination with life after death, his book is centered on a ragtag hero, Paul, a weak and afflicted guy who has the audacity to proclaim the resurrection of a prophet. But Paul doesn’t stop there. He’s selling resurrection like it’s the next big thing, a kind of spiritual VIP access, where believers in this prophet get to share in the resurrection perks. And guess what? This faith spreads like wildfire, catching on faster than the latest TikTok trend, and brings with it a personal transformation that Carrère dubs a “mutation.”

    Soon, this belief system grows so big it becomes mainstream. While Greek mythology gets relegated to the kiddie pool of fairy tales, Paul’s gospel of resurrection, virgin birth, sacrifice, and atonement becomes the intellectual equivalent of filet mignon—served up and taken seriously by the world’s smartest, most educated minds, who swallow it whole. It’s no longer quaint mythology—it’s doctrine. And everyone’s buying in.

    But Carrère doesn’t treat this religion as some ironic punchline. Nope, he’s serious, bordering on obsessive. His novel isn’t a parody of early Christianity; it’s a deep dive into how these early religious pioneers, especially Paul, wrestled to bring their story to life. In Carrère’s view, this whole endeavor is a lot like producing a TV show—grappling with messy production details, contending with rival storylines, and trying to make the narrative stick. His novel becomes a meditation on storytelling itself, especially the stories that linger in our minds, take root, and possess us—even as our faith wobbles on shaky ground. It’s about the narratives that survive the centuries, not because they’re quaint, but because they hit us where it counts.

    By the time Carrère loses his faith and slides into agnosticism, he’s still obsessed with the steadfast faith of others. Religion, he realizes, isn’t going anywhere—it’s hardwired into our brains like some sort of default app we can’t delete. We’re suckers for stories that explain the human condition, and like William James says in The Varieties of Religious Experience, we’ve all got our internal wiring that divides the “healthy-minded soul” from the “sick-minded soul.” Shame, guilt, penance—it’s all built into our psyche. And in moments of catharsis, we somehow manage to feel connected to our Maker, like a spiritual Wi-Fi signal we can only tap into when we’re having an existential meltdown.

    I couldn’t read The Kingdom without recognizing my own affliction: the belief that writing a novel isn’t just storytelling—it’s world-building, doctrine-crafting, the construction of a system so compelling that it hijacks minds and rewires belief. Carrère brilliantly lays out the blueprint for how a book mutates into a religion, how a narrative, if potent enough, doesn’t just entertain—it converts, indoctrinates, and dominates. And that’s when it hit me: my writing demon wasn’t interested in just producing a book. It wanted a Bible, something so monumental it would command devotion, establish authority, and secure my literary immortality. It wasn’t enough to write—I had to found a faith, recruit disciples, and stake my claim in the intellectual marketplace of salvation. Whether it was Paul pitching resurrection or me hammering away at my so-called masterpiece, the impulse was the same: create something too big to ignore, too transformative to discard, and too undeniable to fade into obscurity. And just like Paul, I was willing to burn through years, health, and sanity for the cause.