Your Film Professor

(This is the fourth entry in an ongoing series; see my posts on The Creation of the Humanoids, Billy Jack, Lost Horizon and Dead Poets Society for my previous entries.)

Surprisingly, this Biblical story of “Sodom and Gomorrah” hasn’t been done that much in film. Its most prominent adaptation was during the heyday of Biblical/sword and sandal films, the 1962 international production, directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Stewart Granger. Out of curiosity, I just recently screened the film and it did the usual sanitizing and romanticizing of Biblical stories of the time, the result being a pretty forgettable film. In contradistinction to past Biblical stories — especially Old Testament Biblical stories — I think a really interesting revisionist film could be made of this seeming sordid tale. I say “seeming” because it seems to me that instead of just dittoing Biblical stories, it might be interesting to go against type and invert some of these stories, reveal the other side of the story so to speak. I mean, when we really think about some of these Biblical stories, they really are painfully archaic and in the case of Old Testament Biblical stories, grotesque and overly sordid. A prominent recent illustration of a somewhat revisionist Biblical story is Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. I’m a huge fan of Aronofsky but I have to say that I was SO disappointed in Noah, another Biblical tale that could have been revised in a similar (progressive) way, revealing a sadistic and monstrous God who wipes out all of humanity (via a flood), including children. (I’ve kind of forgiven Aronofsky a little bit because of his make-up film Mother! a really interesting film, which I will write on at some point.)

In terms of “Sodom and Gomorrah,” think about some of what happens, God annihilating both cities, again, including the children apparently, destroying the cities because there were no “good” people but only “sinners,” which is punctuated by the denizens of the cities trying to “know” (have sex with) three male angels who have come to visit Lot, their mission to find just ten “good” people. In terms of what an inversion of “Sodom and Gomorrah” might look like, think of what seems (at least as projected on this infamous story if not what is literally portrayed in the story, e.g., there is some dispute about the translation of this story) to be the case with the people of these notorious “Biblical” cities (there is apparently no evidence that these cities actually existed), “sinful” people who participated in perversions and deviant sexuality, especially in terms of homosexuality. The inversion of this, though, would take the point of view of the residents of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and show them to just being their “natural” selfs, determining their sexual way of being in whatever way they choose. In this context, then, God doesn’t destroy evil “sinners” but destroys good people not adhering to God’s interpretation of what “good” is. The metaphorical value of such a position is profound, not only in terms of rejecting some of these archaic and cruel stories but in terms of rejecting a whole self-destructive way of being, e.g., a patriarchal, phallocentric, authoritarian, heteronormative, Christian morality, punitive way of being. And I’m not necessarily saying that my view here is anti-God but rather anti-Biblical or perhaps even anti-Old Testament version of God!