The Prodigal Cinephile

Like the previous director/screenwriter collaboration between Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, 28 Years Later ends with an abrupt tonal shift, and just as Sunshine‘s Pinbacker plotline makes me think of the music video for The Prodigy’s “Firestarter,” the more recent film immediately put me in mind of another turn-of-the-millennium alternative touchstone. But whereas in “Jesus of Suburbia” the protagonist of Green Day’s magnum opus American Idiot “read the graffiti in the bathroom stall, like the holy scriptures of the shopping mall,” the first encounters Alfie Williams’s Spike has with his St. Jimmy are far more sinister:

Which makes sense considering that Jack O’Connell’s Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal is no mere devil on the shoulder like Green Day’s creation, but instead fancies himself the actual Antichrist:

Spike’s journey through the first 28 Years Later movie and its sequel The Bone Temple contains many other echoes of American Idiot: “Holiday / Boulevard of Broken Dreams” starts with rain “comin’ down like an Armageddon flame,” “Give Me Novacaine / She’s a Rebel” describes the relationship between Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) and Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) perfectly, and “Extraordinary Girl / Letterbomb” anticipates the conclusion of a trilogy we sadly may never get by asking, “where will all the martyrs go when the virus cures itself?” Furthermore, while there’s no perfect analog for the album’s split personality subplot, Whatsername character, or St. Jimmy’s figurative suicide in “Homecoming,” the war for Spike’s soul that Kelson wages with Crystal serves much the same function.

I admit that you have to squint a bit to see all this, but the movies resonate even more clearly with one of my favorite books, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. Both narratives are set in motion by an apocalypse, and while Leibowitz differs from 28 Years Later in that we don’t open on its nuclear holocaust, the latter’s title card ushers us into a world very similar to the one presented in the novel’s opening line, which Cass Sunstein described as “amazing” last March in this Substack post about it: “Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice’s Lenten fast in the desert.”

Sunstein also applauds the next line, which I think provides an even better sense of the book’s spirit: “Never before had Brother Francis actually seen a pilgrim with girded loins, but that this one was the bona fide article he was convinced as soon as he had recovered from the spine-chilling effect of the pilgrim’s advent on the far horizon, as a wiggling iota of black caught in a shimmering haze of heat.”

Which evokes this landscape shot:

And the exchange which follows it between Spike and a shipwrecked Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding) about the “Alphas” who have emerged as the leaders of the de facto tribes that many of the “infected” who haunt the British mainland have organized themselves into:

ERIK: Why do they get so huge? The bärsärk?

SPIKE: Well, Sam says on some the infection kinda works like steroids.

ERIK: Yeah?

SPIKE: I mean, I don’t know what steroids are, but I’m guessing that’s what turns them Alpha.

Like Brother Francis, who believes “Fallout” is the name of an actual demon which he visualizes as “half-salamander, because, according to tradition, the thing was born in the Flame Deluge,” Spike has grown up speaking a language that contains countless words for things completely alien to him. Sunstein’s interest in Leibowitz is grounded in the order of monks that Brother Francis belongs to, whose mission is to preserve as many remnants of a lost civilization, which they call Memorabilia, as possible. The reason Sunstein feels an affinity for them reminds me quite a bit of my own purpose in maintaining this blog:

In North America and Europe, a lot of people (particularly academics, I think) see themselves a bit like Miller’s monks did: as socially marginal, perhaps, but as maintaining certain documents and truths, or perhaps as moving identifiable projects forward, even if there is not a lot of interest in those projects. I speculate that some philosophers and some literature professors see themselves in that way; so, I speculate, do some historians.

They might have substantive ideas. They might focus on certain historical figures. They might prize certain methods. They might care about genres. They might focus on events, periods, and documents to which no one seems to be paying attention.

One of the many haunting features of Miller’s great book is that it casts light on why many people, engaged in work that is now widely ignored, are intensely committed to that work, and have high hopes for its future.

It also reminds me of Dr. Kelson, architect of the second 28 Years Later film’s titular bone temple.

When Spike asks what it is, Kelson replies:

KELSON: I’ve been waiting almost 30 years for someone to ask that question. I often thought I would die here alone . . . of age or starvation or violence . . . never having had the chance to reply. Do you know the words “memento mori”?

SPIKE: No.

KELSON: It’s Latin. Ironically, it’s a dead language. (LAUGHS) It means “remember death.”

The Bone Temple deepens Dr. Kelson’s connection to Brother Francis and his fellow monks by introducing him straining to remember the lyrics to Duran Duran’s “Girls on Film” as he drags an addition to the temple to its new home:

He is revealed to be a keeper of classical learning as well as pop culture in the next scene when he says to Samson, whom he has drugged, “I named you for your size and strength and hair […] although right now I feel more like Androcles removing thorns from the lion’s paw.”

This is followed in due time by a trip to the bunker beneath the temple where Kelson sleeps, which resembles what I imagine the scriptorium of Brother Francis’s abbey might have looked like:

Especially when we’re invited back inside about 40 minutes later as Kelson pursues a hunch about the nature of the Rage Virus:

Other moments echo the first part of Leibowitz, “Fiat Homo,” which is set 600 years after the Flame Deluge: the bows Spike and his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) use to protect themselves are reminiscent of the arrow that ultimately kills Brother Francis, for instance, and Samson’s favorite snack echoes the cry of “Eat! Eat! Eat!” that accompanies his fall:

Meanwhile, the way Samson’s killing of a deer in the first 28 Years Later is depicted as being almost like a ritual:

And the red light the scene is bathed in made me think of the fireside passage in Part II of Leibowitz, “Fiat Lux,” in which Thon Taddeo Pfardentrott asks “Mad Bear” Hongan Os, chief of the Plains nomads, why his people drink no water:

“Who knows what the gods drink?” mumbled Mad Bear. “It is said that water is for cattle and farmers, that milk is for children and blood for men. Should it be otherwise?”

The insane one was not insulted. He studied the chief for a moment with searching gray eyes, then nodded at one of his fellows. “That ‘water for the cattle’ explains it,” he said. “The everlasting drought out here. A herdsman people would conserve what little water there is for the animals. I was wondering if they backed it by a religious taboo.”

The most important connection is to Part III, “Fiat Voluntas Tua,” though, which is set 1800 years after the Flame Deluge when the nations of earth have inexplicably (considering they know from experience exactly what will happen) brought themselves once more to the brink of nuclear war. Michael Alan Bennett argues in an article for The English Journal called “The Theme of Responsibility in Miller’s ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz'” that the book’s major theme “concerns the question of individual responsibility,” and that “Miller’s conclusion is that if nuclear holocaust occurs, the fault will lie with each individual who did nothing to prevent it.” This plays out most directly in the final chapters in the form of a debate between Abbot Jethrah Zerchi and Doctor Cors, a medic with the Green Star Relief Station where “hopeless cases” are encouraged to go to be put out of their misery. “It’s certainly better than letting them die horribly, by degrees,” argues Cors, to which Zerchi replies:

Is it? Better for whom? The street cleaners? Better to have your living corpses walk to a central disposal station while they can still walk? Less public spectacle? Less horror lying around? Less disorder? A few million corpses lying around might start a rebellion against those responsible. That’s what you and the government mean by better, isn’t it.

“The doctor is innocent of this charge,” is Bennett’s verdict, “but the government is not.” By the same logic, Dr. Kelson is absolved of administering a shot to Spike’s mother Isla (Jodie Comer), who is dying of cancer: as Cors defends his work to Zerchi, “what I meant by better was ‘more merciful.'” Meanwhile, Abbot Zerchi is obviously in no way directly responsible for the world ending a second time the same way as the first, but Bennett argues that Miller does consider him indirectly responsible:

As a monk, isolated in his monastery from the concerns of the world, he is symbolic of all those who are unconcerned, those who drop out, those who despair. Thus, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a novel of and for our time. In an age when the individual man feels ever further removed from the decisions of government which affect us all, Canticle reaffirms an old value. Says Miller: “I am my brother’s keeper!”

Dr. Kelson, whom I called an “orange-skinned anti-Trump” earlier this year on Letterboxd, starts off 28 Years Later like Zerchi, set off from the chaos around him by his bunker, a moat, and the iodine “prophylactic” he paints himself with to hold the Rage Virus at bay. When Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal shows up at the end of The Bone Temple, he is tempted to make the same deal with the devil as Thon Taddeo. Per Bennett, when that “well-meaning but hypocritical scientist” is confronted by evil, he “merely closes his eyes.” Kelson does him one better by dressing up as Old Nick to lend credence to Crystal’s claim that he has an unholy mandate to continue his “infernal mission”:

But he finds his courage when he realizes that Spike has been impressed into Crystal’s gang and adds one more command even though he knows it will likely spell his doom. “I require a sacrifice,” he says:

“You know that in order for God’s only son to ascend and take his place by his father’s side, Christ was first required to be crucified,” he tells Crystal. “You are my only son, Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy. I am your God. I require the same.” This unsurprisingly gets him a knife in the belly:

But the damage has already been done, and Crystal meets the same fate as the poor soul whose flesh he scrawled his name into in the previous film:

The Bone Temple is more optimistic than A Canticle for Leibowitz because while the latter also ends with Abbot Zerchi taking personal responsibility for what Bennett calls “the destiny of men,” by then it’s too late. American Idiot is somewhere in between, and that (plus the fact that it is great to run to) is why I love it. The album concludes with Jesus of Suburbia, having turned his back on both the nihilism of St. Jimmy and the revolution sung by Whatsername, reminiscing about the latter. “And in the darkest night,” he sings on the album’s final track, “If my memory serves me right/I’ll never turn back time/Forgetting you, but not the time.” The Genius annotation for these lyrics optimistically suggests they mean Jesus “doesn’t regret living his life on the streets, using it as a learning experience,” but of course this assumes that he’s going to do something with the knowledge he has gained. The same goes for Spike, whose story, at least for now, has also ended before we get to see what he does with everything Kelson taught him.

Cass Sunstein’s Leibowitz post appeals to me because I am proud of the way this “widely ignored” blog has kept its “focus on events, periods, and documents to which no one seems to be paying attention” for nearly a decade, but the 28 Years Later movies are a reminder that this isn’t enough. You could criticize American Idiot for not offering any answers or celebrate it as a cynically realistic takedown of all my fellow former protest punks for whom “growing up” meant abandoning activism. But I prefer to see it as a challenge: in a world perpetually mired in political crisis, it’s not enough to “Remember . . . whatever”–the question is, are you doing your part to use everything you learned to make things better?