USA, 1991
"Here lives the incantation of matter
A language forever.
Like a flame burning away the darkness
Life is flesh on bone convulsing above the ground."
The opening scene of E. Elias Merhige's "Begotten" plays like a home video of the Enuma Elish. A deity sits on a throne, stabbing himself in the belly with a knife. The blood flow, while gruesome, isn't particularly liberal, and it takes a long time for him to die. From the mess emerges a fully grown woman, who (in a scene as as literal as anything from the Elish) proceeds to (yes) masturbate the corpse and (that's right) manually insert the semen into her vagina (most the action is obscured by the grainy, high-constrast black and white photography). Later, we see the woman obviously pregnant, standing by a coffin. Still later we see her offspring, a grown man convulsing violently on the ground.
A user's comment at the Internet Movie Database asks whether "Begotten" is "profound cinematic brilliance or pretentious arthouse trash." When it comes to experimental cinema, even cinephiles allow for little middle ground between the extremes of genius and junk. They want to be stimulated right out of their seats, or the film isn't worth their while. Such a lack of patience would never withstand a viewing of "Begotten," because the film is anything but perfect, and anything but bad.
There are rare moments when, for an instant, I think I can fathom why Susan Sontag called "Begotten" "one of the ten most important films of modern times"...and then I wake up and realize her assessment is insane (I have never seen the rest of her list, nor, to my knowledge, has anyone else). She praises it too much; others trash it too much. In their eagerness to decide whether "Begotten" is great or garbage, few viewers will recognize that it's a good avant-garde film, and that it's as possible for a good (not great) avant-garde film to exist as for a good (not great) conventional film to exist. I don't know why we expect only greatness from this genre. The few reviews I've read of "Begotten" all agree that on one thing: "this movie isn't 'Eraserhead.'" Fine. But what is it?
If we are to believe the credits, the deity is "God killing Himself," the woman is "Mother Earth," and the offspring is "Son of Earth." I prefer to ignore the credits and examine the images. If the suicide is God, he is not the Biblical God in any conventional way we understand Him. His like is found in the pagan Creation texts of the Middle East, or the writings of the Gnostics. If the woman is Mother Earth, she exists apart from our conventional understanding of Nature, a force that remains both intact and powerful even as she is ravished. "Son of Earth" is a strange hybrid of his father and mother - he exists in the world with his mother, yet seems to be little more than a manifestation of his father's own self-destruction. At the same time, he doesn't exactly harm himself. He is, instead, harmed by others.
These are the conclusions I reach based solely on my plain reading of the film. Many claim "Begotten" to be a parable of Biblical Creation, but I see only destruction and reproduction. The notion of creation in destruction is uniquely pagan, nowhere to be found in the Hebrew Scriptures. If God, as the Hebrews understood Him, is anywhere in this film, it is in the thunder, the lightning, and the angry aerial forces that loom so far above the earth. When the Son of Earth is beaten and killed by the Earth's inhabitants, these forces react with fury typical of the Hebrew Deity.
What makes "Begotten" so interesting for the Christian viewer is its separation from the Biblical text, which is achieved without expending Christian connotation. What is revealed instead is the pagan footing on which Christianity stands - not to say Christianity endorses paganism, or completely refutes it. Christ is "Lord of the All" just as he is "King of the Jews."
To many this may sound blasphemous. I prefer to think of it in terms of Christ's universality. Many of the images in "Begotten" are ubiquitous throughout the world's religions, including Christianity but exempting ancient Judaism. Just as Luke's Gospel traces Christ's lineage back to Adam, and implicitly teaches that the New Covenant extends to all humankind, so "Begotten" brings Christ forth, not from a Biblical worldview, but from a pagan worldview. This is the story of Christ much as the early Greek and pagan Christians would have seen it. If the film gives us a sense of both strangeness and familiarity, it is because Christianity did the same to its earliest adherents. "Begotten," more than anything, reiterates both the Otherness and Sameness of the Christian faith.
Christ belongs to all mankind, though many claim him as their own. The earliest Jewish Christians attempted to claim him for Judaism. The Romans wanted him, and were so disheartened when he proved willing to walk among the Barbarians that St. Augustine had to write an entire book explaining why Christianity wasn't a complete hoax. The Europeans wanted him, and willingly spread his words throughout the nations, but only within the contexts that they themselves understood. Those contexts have continually shifted, the message and its meaning continually reinterpreted - the only thing that remains constant is the insistence of mainstream Christendom that Christ belongs to them.
"Begotten" presents us with the story of Christ's death and resurrection, freed from context. The vantage point is pagan, yes - but no real context is provided. There is no doctrinal shading, no scripture references, no philosophic slant. There is nothing but image, pure and brutal.
The film's brutality is intense. There is the first scene, already described. After the Son of Earth is introduced, he is discovered by a group of...humans, insofar as I can tell. They proceed to beat him viciously. When his mother attempts to intervene, she is raped. The beating sequence is long, painful, and repetitive. Many find the repetition to lessen the sequence's impact - I do not.
Films about Christ are praised when they provide a realistically violent portrayal of the crucifixion (Mel Gibson's upcoming "Passion," unseen by me, has received such praise). No one would praise "Begotten" for its violence, perhaps because it is much harder to watch. Yet I find its impact to be greater than any other filmic crucifixion. We have a real sense of the Son of Earth's frailty, his innocence, and his vulnerability - all attributes Christ possessed, rarely shown in representations. The images in "Begotten" hearken to the violent images Isaiah gives us, in those passages describing the Son of Man.
And what of that bizarre opening scene, when the woman impregnates herself with the seed of a dead deity? This is one of the pagan images quietly appropriated into Christianity. We have, after all, the notion of a Virgin Birth, and therefore a spiritual conception - think of the strange, nonphysical intercourse that must occur to bring the Son of Man to Earth. These are ideas we contemplate safely in vague symbols and abstractions. "Begotten" gives us images, whether we want them or not.
For more on "Begotten," read Jonathan Rosenbaum's wonderful synopsis from the Chicago Reader.
