the celebration of purity
Peter de Rome (screenplay and director) The
Second Coming / 1972
by Douglas Messerli
Peter de Rome’s 1972 film The Second Coming
actually has nothing at all to do with Jesus of Nazareth except through a wink
and a nod via William Butler Yeats’ great poem concerning the disaster of the
Christian world “fallen apart,” and a play on the pun of its title:
Turning and turning in
the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear
the falconer;
Things fall apart; the
centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed
upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide
is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of
innocence is drowned;
The best lack all
conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate
intensity.
They move forward, strolling past several tourist destinations,
including Buckingham Palace, where a man seems to be lurking behind a tree,
another purposely resting against the protective gate. They survey a nearby
sculpture and suddenly the foppish man again crosses their path, dropping a
paper as he passes which one of the men quickly picks up. The message reads:
“Casares.”
Suddenly one of them stares up into the sky, and when his purview
returns to ground level we realize we now in Paris, he without the other. We
spot the tour Eiffel and Arc de Triomphe, on the very top of
which of the latter a man stands, dressed in black, who waves at our friend to
join him. Once he has reached the top of the arc the man dressed in
black pants and a black turtleneck sweater joins him, just as suddenly walking
away, but leaving behind a programme, on the back which is written the words:
“Not Maria Casares dum-dum.”
The
actress Maria Casares, the daughter of the Republican Prime Minister of Spain
before Franco’s takeover, had a 16-year long affair with French author Albert
Camus. She played in a number of French theater dramas and performing in
several major motion pictures by Robert Bresson and Jean Cocteau before
returning to stage and playing in Corneille's Le Cid, Victor Hugo's Marie
Tudor and Marivaux' Le Triomphe de l'Amour (The Triumph of Love)
on Broadway. She, alas, has no role in our two gentlemen’s’ adventures.
What is also marked, however, in this
programme is a plane trip to Spain. And by the very next frame we see our
previously clueless man in a telephone booth calling up his friend to tell him
to meet him in Malaga on the Costa del sol, the capitol of the ancient
Andalusia. They both immediately catch planes to that city and meet up at the
airport. Now sharing a hotel in that beautiul city.
This ancient town, the birthplace of Andalusian nationalism, dates back
at least to Roman times, being the legendary spot where Julius Ceasar was cured
of his liver ailment by the village’s sulfuric waters. So we travel with the
man in the Mercedes to Casares, where we soon see our friends have also
traveled, they standing on hillside looking over into the amazing, white-washed
vista of the village. And once more, we are taken on a brief tourist tour of
the town.
We
now witness the second man of our couple, the one who did not travel to France,
briskly walking down the narrow, winding streets of Casares in search of some
further sign of his destination. From a distance he spots the gray-haired man
of the Mercedes who transverses the top of the T-shaped passageway toward which
he is moving. He runs after him, following him finally to a small doorway into
which he enters. Moving to the doorway himself, he pauses, as if debating
whether or not he wishes to enter.
Inside sit several men in a very dark room, some whose mouths seem to be
open with awe. On the way we perceive a crucifixion, the body completely nude.
But gradually, as our eyes become acclimated to the dark, we see the penis what
a appeared to be a wooden representation of the crucified Christ moving,
slowing becoming erect. It is a living being, his head moving back and forth,
his arms wincing in some pain. His chest shifts back and forth. We see nails
have been embedded in his open palms. His face looks upward toward the heavens.
Almost immediately, sperm begins to spurt in impossibly long ropes from
his cock, hitting his chest and even his face, an enormous overflowing of
semen. His face falls to the right side of his neck, blood dripping from his
mouth.
What we have just witnessed is, literally, a perverse act by a man who
is willing to be bound and symbolically crucified, finding such excitement in
the act of being painfully tied up, nailed, bound, and observed by a whole room
of men that he cums of his own mental volition, no friction, frottage, or even
human touch necessary for ejaculation. If one sees this figure as a kind of
Christ, it is most definitely a blasphemous one in the light of any
contemporary religious theological teachings of which I am aware. This might
truly be said to be—to the vast majority of society—precisely what Yeats meant
by stating “the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”
But here in the village of Casares, where the grand Moors lived beside
their ancient Roman and early Christian brethren, perhaps in this very room the
Third Century Christians with whom Flannery O’Connor attests sympathy coming
together like our two friends through a great deal of secrecy and cost to the
daily lives, met to celebrate with crude almost pagan like rituals to
substantiate their belief in the man who sacrificed his entire body—with all
the spirit, organs, and fluids therein—so that they might be saved. For them
there was no difference in their celebrations between the spirit and the flesh,
for if Christ was made holy as the son of God, becoming one with God himself,
his entire body was sacred, his flesh, hands, head, and feet; his organs,
heart, lungs, and liver; his fluids, blood, piss, and sperm were all equally
holy. What American artist
Andres Serrano (born of Honduran, and
Afro-Cuban parents) in his is photograph of a crucifix bathed in his urine
which he titled “Piss Christ” was expressing was similar, to my way of thinking,
to de Rome’s depiction here of a symbolically crucified Christ covered with his
own semen: the ancient roots of Christian ceremony and belief, the celebration
of Jesus of Nazareth as a man become holy through the miraculous rituals of
witnessing, prayer or awe, and faith.
And what these men have just witnessed, one must admit, is kind of
miracle so to speak. Given the narrow proscriptions of the rituals of our time,
of course, there is some humor in both Serrano’s and de Rome’s art, but
underlying it is a recognition that somewhere in these primitive
representations of early Christian ritual,
Surely some revelation is at
hand;
Surely the Second Coming is
at hand.
And perhaps some “rough beast, its hour come
round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Los Angeles, July 30, 20021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July
2021).
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