A View of Heaven From Hollywood

The list of movies in which God serves as a co-star could fill a book. The genre is well-defined and the plots usually follow well-worn grooves. God is commonly portrayed as a favorite indulgent uncle rather than as creator and judge; it's hard, after all, to imagine George Burns meting out damnation to unrepentant sinners. And while the existence of heaven (if not hell) is usually assumed, the process of spiritual growth that qualifies one for admittance turns out to be nothing more than middle-class good manners.

But writer/director Michael Tolkin's newly released movie The Rapture eschews the gauzy pinks of the usual Hollywood treatment of these themes for what he describes as "theological film noir." Sharon (played by Mimi Rogers), a Los Angeles long-distance telephone operator, slakes her life's tedium with casual sexual encounters.

Then one day she overhears co-workers mysteriously but reverently talking about the "child" and the "pearl." These obviously religious terms resonate when two door-to-door evangelists attempt to convert her. Deeply depressed, Sharon makes a half-hearted suicide attempt, resulting precipitously in her acceptance of salvation.

Sharon tracks down Randy (David Duchovny), the one sexual partner for whom she had any feeling, and converts him to her ill-defined brand of fundamentalism. It is a faith that seems mostly doctrine-free; it is practiced at gatherings more suggestive of 12-step meetings than worship services.

A sudden six-year leap into the future reveals Sharon and her husband to have shaken off their licentious past for an archetypical middle-class present. But the family's suburban tranquility is shattered when Randy is gunned down by a former employee. Sharon soon thinks she hears God speaking directly to her; in response she abandons her home and drives with her daughter Mary (Kimberly Cullum) into the desert to await the rapture.

As weeks pass, though, the failure of the trumpets to sound begins to nibble at the edges of Sharon's faith. Her daughter Mary has a simpler solution. "Why don't we just die, Mommy, so we can be in heaven with Daddy?"

A dynamic of spreading doubt and growing frenzy drives Sharon to recreate Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. This time, however, God does not intervene. The act of killing Mary hardens Sharon's heart completely; no longer can she love a God who would allow her to kill her own daughter.

The rapture takes place while Sharon is in jail for Mary's murder. She is caught up in the air with her daughter. But, even at the actual moment of the second coming, Sharon cannot forgive God for the crime she was allowed to commit. "But Mommy," Mary warns her, "don't expect God to meet you halfway." Sharon is unmoved; she is left, stony-faced, in a sort of limbo as Mary ascends the rest of the way to heaven.

VIEWERS SEEKING FROM Tolkin's movie any sort of consistent portrayal of the rapture in evangelical popular culture would be better advised to curl up with a copy of Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth. Certainly, The Rapture has little in common with movies like Donald W. Thompson's A Thief in the Night, a dramatization of the rapture that has proselytism as its only goal--and as a result has seen its distribution limited to church groups and the like. By contrast, Tolkin, a self-described non-believer, is engaged in a thoroughly secular enterprise, which makes it unlikely he would follow any particular doctrinal route in telling his story.

However, those who live in the momentary expectation of the rapture usually subscribe to the broader movement labeled premillennialism as well. Indeed, Tolkin has said that he got the idea for the movie from seeing the words, "In Case of Rapture, This Car Will Be Driverless," on a bumper sticker; such an artifact serves as a membership badge for premillennialists of a certain type. Thus, one might have reason to expect Tolkin to develop his plot with some degree of historical accuracy.

In fact, Sharon practices a religion that seems alien to any recognizable version of American evangelical religion. The notion of a "child" channeling God's word to humanity, whatever its accuracy when Jesus was teaching in the synagogue, finds no parallel in a fundamentalist church in present-day Southern California.

And the concept of a secret "pearl" has no overriding symbolic importance for any Protestant sect. Jesus, to be sure, briefly and analogously employed pearls to describe the kingdom of heaven in the book of Matthew. But the pearl as a doctrinal cornerstone arises only in Mormonism. It may, therefore, be an oblique reference to Joseph Smith's revelation, The Pearl of Great Price, that Tolkin has folded into his version of premillennial fundamentalism. This notwithstanding, Sharon is no Mormon. In fact, her simultaneous devotion to evangelism and Gnosticism makes her a much better exemplar of the New Age movement than of Christianity.

None of this, though, seems to make The Rapture an example of the "anti-religious bigotry that thrives in Hollywood," as charged by PBS film critic Michael Medved. It is more likely that Tolkin tried to be fair but was simply too religiously illiterate to know any better.

Hollywood has historically been more successful in its portrayal of Roman Catholicism than Protestantism. The essence of Protestantism, perhaps because of its diversity, has been harder for movie makers to capture. But rarely has the attempt been less successful than in The Rapture. Tolkin took a morsel of premillennialism off the bumper of a car stalled in front of him on a Los Angeles freeway, stirred in a pinch of Mormonism, and then poured the mixture into a New Age mold.

There's nothing wrong with this sort of eclectic movie making, but it's a little like staging Gary Cooper's showdown in High Noon on the Champs- Elysees. There's no law against it, but the result is hardly faithful to the genre in which the audience thought the director was working.

David Hart Nelson was a lawyer and freelance writer living in Charlottesville, Virginia when this article appeared.

The Rapture. Directed by Michael Tolkin. Released by Fine Line Features. 1991.