Constantine (spoilers)

I went to see the movie Constantine yesterday, the comic book adaptation that stars Keanu Reeves as an exorcist who once killed himelf and learned that the visions that plagued him were demons from Hell. The flick is a lot deeper than most comic book movies, the action a veneer for the deeper question, "Who then can be saved?" As I write about this, below, I have to talk about some of the film's details. If you like your films completely unspoiled, read no further.

The movie's necessarily bad Catholic theology got me thinking; a lot of marginally Christian (and particularly Catholic) folks often form ideas about their own belief from the stretched, convoluted, or downright wrong ideas that fiction conveys about religious beliefs (often as a Deus Ex Machina - necessary changes to a religion to prevent a story from otherwise breaking.) Constantine is one example. The Da Vinci Code is another, with its claim, among other things, that Christianity was essentially invented in Nicaea.

One of the biggest disservices these fictional stories do to Christian theology is to recast it as Manicheeism - a 4th century sect who believed Good and Evil were the equal and opposing forces that make up the universe. In Constantine's case, they all but come out and recite a Manichean creed; God and the angels have a territory (Heaven) that they are constrained from leaving, and Lucifer and his demons the same (although curiously, 'Lou' comes to Earth at the end of the film.) The only beings that can turn in an appearance from these realms are "half-breeds," half-human angels and demons who are never quite explained.

Needless to say, in traditional Christian theology, neither evil nor the devil are equal rivals or counterparts with goodness and God. Evil is defined as the absence of good, as the result of choice, and the devil is basically just a cast-out angel, the tempter of The Book of Job with the temperature amped up a notch, a figure who is in misery for his own choices, and whose misery would like company. He certainly represents no equal to God, the sole source of life, creation, and existence, and the goodness that permeates it.

The other thing the film does is misrepresent the church's stance on suicide. In one scene in the film, a woman whose sister jumped off a building is arguing with a priest about giving her sister a funeral, which the priest mercilessly declines to do, citing suicide as a mortal sin that has surely resulted in her going to hell. Constantine, as a one-time suicide attemptee is also hell bound by the same regulatory restraint. Only a redemptive act of pure selflessness would give him a hope of beating the rap, so to speak.

I don't know about other Christian denominations, but the Catholic Church does not think this way. The Cathechism states "We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives."

That may be the biggest disservice the film does; how many marginally Catholic filmgoers who may someday lose a relative or friend to suicide will not even approach the church for funeral rites because of films like this? It would be truly unfortunate for people to think they have no access to the church's compassion because of some misrepresented theology in a movie!