Review - Midnight Mass (2021)
I tried recommending Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass to a friend yesterday. His response, after I told him vampires were involved, that I had lost him at horror. It’s funny, how we like to lump things into genres, to pre-judge things based on categorization. I am guilty of it too, from time to time. I would say horror is my favourite genre of film, but if I have to pick what’s next, I would rarely select a biopic, for example. Nonetheless, I think horror might be a secondary genre to what this show is.
Christian mythology is almost a term of abuse in the modern world I inhabit. Most people I know are not religious. Secular is how I was raised and it is a way of being that I view as being opposed to what I might term ‘orthodox zealotry.’ Basically, the taking of the Bible as a literal historical account is ‘the norm,’ if one identifies as religious. But as Joseph Campbell once put it,
“Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.”
Midnight Mass is a mythological attempt to reconcile these two opposing views, that of the atheist and the theist, to find something human and transcendent within the muck of religious tradition and the existential questions that lead us to seek them out in the first place. It is done in a masterful way, a slow build up of circumstance and strange miracles and occurrences that reach a fever pitch. It all ends with a wonderful bang.
The vampire, as a metaphor, can be seen as a clinging to the life of the body. In itself, it represents a lack of faith in reality - in death - as being anything but a horrendous, God-awful thing. In my view, the reason that the vampire is so effective in this movie is that it gives a backdrop for the people of the sleepy little village of Crockett Island, is that it brings to the fore all of the shadows that hide beneath our veneers of propriety. It is the shadow of the psyche manifest, almost like a ‘bad trip’ come to life.
The most obvious example of this is Bev Keane, the ‘officious intermeddler,’ as legal language would describe her. She is the lady who does all the ‘right’ things, is the priest’s number one helper, and yet is harbouring so much judgment and self-righteousness it is clear that there is no one more deluded about the nature of God in the entire community than her. She gets right on board with the vampire, as her unexamined shadow finds a perfect way of manifesting with the help of the creature of the night.
The vampire itself doesn’t say a word. It has great leathery wings and, though Father Paul, his first ‘convert,’ does mention that the creature is speaking with him, he is mostly a mute animal. He calls it an angel, and in a metaphorical sense, he is absolutely right. He is the avenging angel, come to quite metaphorically burn out the rot at the heart of the small community of Crockett Island.
Flanagan has plenty to say about the various assumptions that we make about death while we cling to life. Riley, the prodigal son who comes home from prison after serving his sentence for drunkenly killing a woman with his car, finds that his experience has robbed him of any faith. In spite of studying all of the religious traditions of the world while he is inside, he believes that there is nothing. Every night he is haunted by the corpse of the girl that he killed. He tells Erin, his confidant in a town that shuns him, that he as lost all faith, in spite of having been a good little altar boy as a child. Erin, at least halfway through the show, is a bog-standard ‘good Christian,’ who believes in the ‘standard’ literal interpretation of Heaven. She thinks that she’ll be reunited with the ‘body-based’ version of all of her loved ones, that the trappings of their identity and egos will be in this ‘good place’ where none of the evil of the world can touch.
The true climax of the story might seem at first blush to be all of the people who were not swayed by the promise of everlasting life from the vampire, the ones who decided to burn the whole place down and force all of the ghouls to face the sunrise. But to me, that is not really it. The real triumph is Erin’s experience of enlightenment, the recollection of her true self as she lies dying. This is foreshadowed by the priest himself, when he talks about how Good Friday was indeed a good thing, how the death of Jesus, though it seemed to be this moment of great suffering, was a triumph. But he was reading it literally. In her final moments, Erin sees the metaphor for what it is… and gives us all a taste.
A truly wonderful mini-series, and definitely worth a watch.