Djelloul Marbrook

Movies and monotheism are strange bedfellows. It takes big-time hypocrisy to make their shotgun marriage work. As for advertising and monotheism, the word hypocrisy doesn’t cover that stretch.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me, except your favorite actors, most gorgeous models and boorish celebs. And as for graven images, well, I guess the models are a bit more graven than the actors, and plastic hadn’t been invented when the Ten Commandments were written.

Muslim fundamentalists have probably savored this conundrum more than their Christian counterparts. Hell, they don’t even want you to notice the girl in the street, much less worship her.

I’m not worried about the shotgun marriage of movies and monotheism. You can divorce a bad idea. It’s the hypocrisy it takes to insist no one concealed any guns at the wedding that worries me.

Paganism has always been such a compelling idea that monotheists have to commit periodic genocide to keep it under control, so it’s pretty clever of the film industry to have smuggled it in the back door on celluloid reels.

I don’t want to give the fundamentalists any ideas. But I’m not too worried about that either, because ideas and fundamentalism are fundamentally inimical. But if they care to get het up about something besides gay marriage, family values and the beauty of women, I recommend alcohol. It’s a helluva big killer, and I suspect it lurks between the lines of many of our laws, especially the ones that never stood a chance of working.

Look at any pagan culture’s pantheon and you’ll find updated versions in our media. How many Dianas and Artemises, how many Apollos and Hercules have you enjoyed while munching popcorn? How many nymphs, dryads and muses on the slick pages of magazines?

We’re as pagan as we’ve ever been, and at least some of the fiery breath we feel from the Muslim world derives from Muslims having always taken idolatry more seriously than Christians. They have their own bio-hazardous brands of hypocrisy, but savoring ours might help us understand theirs better.

A more desirable cultural ambience would be one in which we enjoy celebrities without idolizing them and ideas without canonizing them.

—DM