Harold Camping’s Rapture flopped, but Michael Tolkin’s didn’t.
While the media and Internet posters had fun with Camping, Tolkin’s 1991 movie, “The Rapture” was thought-provoking. It left viewers arguing, not laughing.
In “The Rapture” a young woman named Sharon (played by Mimi Rogers) spends monotonous days working as a telephone operator and cruises L.A. by night looking for casual sex. The emptiness of her life wears on her. After a series of coincidences and dreams, she embraces Jesus Christ as her Savior. She marries Randy (David Duchovny), a man she met on one of her nightly cruises, who also becomes a born-again Christian. Four years pass, and they now have a little girl, Mary. Her husband works, Sharon is a stay-at-home Mom, and life is good.
Then her husband is murdered. At first Sharon shrugs off her grief – it’s all part of God’s plan.
“Will we see Daddy again?” Mary asks her mom.
“Yes … when God takes us to heaven,” Sharon replies.
At church, a child known only as The Boy, has the gift of prophecy and has been receiving messages about the Rapture.
“God wants you for His special purpose,” he tells Sharon. He quotes from the Book of Revelation: “And the woman fled into the desert where she had a place prepared for her by God.”
Like one of Camping’s followers, Sharon walks away from her home, packing lightly for herself and daughter.
In the desert, surrounded by eerie Joshua trees with their human-like arms, Sharon and Mary pitch a tent. The days go by, the weeks go by. Their food runs out, and then their water. Mary wonders when God will come.
“I miss my Daddy. … Mommy, I want to go to heaven. … Mom, I’m hungry.”
In her sleep, Mary cries out in a trance. “Mom, you have to make up your mind, now!”
Sharon drives her daughter to a burned hill, and together on their knees, they pray.
“If God loves us, He’ll understand,” says Sharon, just before she kills her daughter to send her to heaven.
The mother doesn’t kill herself. Suicides can’t get into heaven, she tells a deputy sheriff.
“You can get into heaven if somebody else kills you but not if you kill yourself. Life is some kind of punishment, isn’t it?”
She can’t love God anymore. “He broke His promise. He let me kill my little girl.”
In jail, Sharon’s cellmate has found God and preaches to her: “You have to trust completely in God. He’ll forgive all your sins.”
Sharon replies: “Who forgives God?”
If you don’t want to know how the movie ends, stop reading (or rent the movie or buy Tolkin’s book, “Three Screenplays.”)
At the end, Tolkin doesn’t wimp out.
In jail the Rapture hits, with all its Biblical references, including the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (although this movie has religion, it’s lean on special effects).
The bars fall from Sharon’s jail cell. Surrounded by darkness, she looks out, sees her daughter and calls to her, walks towards her, but the child is just out of reach.
“You have to love God,” Mary tells her.
“I love you, Mary.”
“That isn’t enough,” the girl says. “Tell God you love him.”
Sharon refuses. She does not love God. Heaven starts to close.
“Do you know how long you have to stay here?” Mary asks before fading away.
The mother stands alone and stares into the darkness: “Forever.”
When I saw Tolkin’s movie at a San Bernardino, Calif., theater several people walked out in the middle. When it was over, a woman yelled, “He doesn’t get it!”
It’s easy to poke fun at people like that, or at folks who bought into Camping’s Rapture. Among the thousands who followed Camping, there were no doubt some so desperate that, had it been 1978 and Jim Jones offered them a seat at the table in Jonestown, they would’ve taken it. And, yes, they would have drunk the Kool-Aid. We use that expression in jest now, forgetting that 909 men, women and children really did drink the Kool-Aid.
The “believers” more deserving of our contempt are the political leaders and candidates who love to endorse God and religion in trade for votes. How many of them are really closet atheists?
“Pretty much every President we have had for the last 100 years believed in Christ,” wrote Oregon47-20, a poster on OregonLive.com, probably in response to all the jokes aimed at Christians over the weekend.
President Obama might complain about bitter Americans who “cling to guns or religion” when he doesn’t think he’s going to be quoted. But he, and anyone else running for his office, would never be honest about the power they really worship.
How would U.S. political leaders really conduct their lives if they honestly thought there would be payback in an afterlife?
— Pamela Fitzsimmons
Closet atheists, I agree. Something worse is a leader who thinks he’s talking to God, like Bush did. Hasn’t Palin been talking to God? Somebody talking to God thinks they can do no wrong.
I graduated from Central Catholic, a good school compared to what else we’ve got in Portland. I don’t remember believing the Catholic propaganda. I got in trouble for joking about Mother Teresa and the Exorcist, another movie about religion. Never heard of the Rapture flick.
Considering that Mother Teresa did, indeed, undergo an exorcism I can see why your Catholic teachers didn’t think that was funny.
When the news of Mother Teresa’s exorcism was made public, the paper I worked for ran it on Page 1 (under the fold as I recall) after much discussion. I just did a little research on the Internet to refresh my memory. Supposedly Mother Teresa was having trouble sleeping while she was in the hospital, and a priest thought an exorcism would do the trick. She slept like a baby after that, so I guess it did.
Supposedly this will not hurt her chances for sainthood. The nun who took her place was quoted as saying that Mother “has passed to eternal life, where she is very, very powerful.” Considering that she died in 1997, and the only thing has changed in Calcutta since then is its name (now Kolkata), I guess she’s using her power for something besides the destitute.
Personally, I think she went for an exorcism to hedge her bets in the afterlife.
Pamela
The Rapture is a strange and compelling movie and Tolkin did get his licks in during his screenwriting heyday.
Hitchen’s on M. Teresa is good.
As a watery Protestant myself, I tried to ignore the recent coverage of the fringe raputrist. However, what little I did let in was filled w/the shabby snark I expected. It captured, I thought, the Obamist mentality of secular superiority pretty nicely, that warm feeling of unwarrented superiority shared among an in group.
The subject also puts me in mind of those riffs on the Christian fish symbol that you see on autos. Why make a point of mocking someone’s humble yet sacred symbology? The first version w/the fish with little feet was clever for 45 seconds. Then, they heaped the mockery on for those too stupid to catch the original (sharks, Darwin, etc).
This sort of thing is not only an affront that smacks of intolerance, but absolutely no “progessive” would make a similar gesture towards the Muslims. He wouldn’t do it out of physical cowardice in the first place and out of PCness in the second. As for Portland Budhists, well…one namaste merits a smiling Allah uh Akbar.
Total agreement, ll. I moved here 12 years ago and learned to be quiet about my Southern Baptist roots … even though I stopped being a regular at church many moons ago. Your comment about the fish symbol I hadn’t considered before.
He was too busy reading the paper to aid us.
One of my favorite cartoons is from “Mother Goose & Grimm” by Mike Peters. It shows a man sitting in a chair, reading a newspaper and thinking, “I wonder why God doesn’t change the way things are?”
Behind him on a table is a frowning fish in a goldfish bowl, thinking “I wonder why God doesn’t change my water bowl?”