Movie Thing: Mad God
To begin with: I recommend the movie. Stop reading now if you intend to watch this and haven’t yet; this movie lets itself be freely interpreted, and my interpretations may make it more difficult to arrive at your own. I recommend it - if you like metaphorical stories, surrealism, or just plain weird stuff, stop reading now, and go watch it.
Okay.
No, I’m serious, go and watch it. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Alright, whatever. On with the movie.
Now, what is Mad God? It’s a hellish mostly stop-motion-animation landscape of caricatures of human nature and modern human society, with bizarre and wonderfully horrific imagery scattered throughout, and some of the strangest and yet most accurate criticisms of society I have encountered; I love in particular a scene in which two babies babble and rage over loudspeakers to an industrial hellscape, with a tension that at any moment the pitiful creatures inhabiting it will rise up to murder each other on the intermittantly angry babbling of the infants. My second favorite imagery is possibly that of the wireheads; entities which stimulate their brains with electricity, whose fecal matter is then forced down the throats of the society they stand atop.
I’m reasonably certain the entire film is fundamentally Gnostic, whatever the claims of the creator, and that the steampunk protagonist we begin with is something like Jesus, a fragment of the divine, who gradually loses his way in the cruelty of reality, represented by a slowly disintegrating map. The descent is a movement through both layers of abstractions / hypostases, and then, once something like the material world is reached, through time; in a sense the movie can be interpreted as the emanation, which experiences the real world in a very abstract way.
In this lens, the two babies sometimes-angry babbling referenced above is, basically, opposing political ideologies; the infantile nature of the babble is an interpretation of what our arguments would seem like, to such a supreme consciousness. The horrifying nature of industrial society portrayed in the movie is then the creator’s interpretation of what industrial society must look like from this same perspective.
Our Jesus-figure pauses, seeing a pathetic entity who seems to See; but ultimately is compelled to travel further downward, further into something simultaneously more, and less, abstract, to set up a suitcase, a bomb to destroy the entire horrifying structure of reality; it is one suitcase of many left there.
This concludes the first act, I think. In Gnostic terms, the suitcase is not there to destroy reality; but also, it is there to destroy reality. It is a clue, a source of Gnosis, a kind of enlightenment by which one may move beyond the material world (destroy it), and into something more divine. There are many clues already laying around; many bombs, which did not go off. But the Jesus-figure, who brings salvation to this horrifying reality in the form of a bomb, is captured and cruelly disassembled.
The disassembly, by two entities I’ll call Doctor and Nurse, gives rise to wealth, and knowledge; coins, jewels, and pages of a book, covered in gore, are ripped from the chest of the Jesus-figure; but we are no longer seeing the world from this figure’s perspective, but instead looking from the outside in, an observer, one of many, to the Jesus-figure’s torment and destruction; we are literally moved behind the curtain.
As with the pile of briefcases, we are shown myriad rooms in which other entities have been so disassembled. This is, I think, Science, which rips reality - divinity itself - apart looking for petty baubles and trinkets.
We’re introduced in the second act to what I identify as the Abrahamic god, the Demiurge, ruling over a group of things that look like our Jesus-figure; created after its image, perhaps. The Demiurge hides other gods under its desk; they do some of the work, but are unobserved by the steampunk archons. An Archon is selected, and sent on a quest - not the quest of the original, but different.
The Archon’s map is different from the Jesus-figure’s map; it appears to be made out of skin. This map, created of cruelty, survives the cruel world that the Archon descends into.
Now, I call the first figure the Jesus-figure; Gnostics might argue over whether the first figure, or the second, is the biblical Jesus. I’ll only note that from the Gnostic perspective, the first figure is the true messiah, and the second figure, a false (but still divine) messiah; we know it is a false messiah because it stops by the briefcases, to look at them - and continues on, passing by its purpose without even realizing it.
The second act is somewhat more straightforward, in that it is a less metaphorical journey by the Archon, and I mark the end of the second act as the point at which an infant is ripped from the true messiah’s chest, the final piece of its disassembly; meanwhile, the Archon, having traveled through an apocalyptic war, begins descending a long spiral. Travel in this movie being frequently metaphorical, and frequently having a component of time, I think this represents some kind of long emptiness after the war - and specifically I think this might be literally the silence of the post-apocalypse. It is empty and silent; there is no war, there is no cruelty. There’s nothing that matters at all; it is, if anything, worse, a crumbling spiral of material nothing; the Archon, having missed its purpose, continues into an empty future devoid of meaning or light. The infant is handed by Nurse to an entity I’ll call Death.
We part ways from the Archon, here, and switch to a third perspective; Death travels with the infant ripped from the chest of the true messiah, through a journey which juxtaposes beauty with the intermittant cries of the infant.
And then we are introduced to a new entity, which I will call Nature, who we meet by way of a male and female being, standing in the midst of piles of shit, fighting each other. Nature flips a switch that electrifies their heads; punishing them into returning to their task, of shoveling the piles of shit into other piles of shit. I kind of get the impression that the original intent of this sequence may have been for Nature to electrify their heads until they stopped fighting and started having sex, but maybe the final piece of this scene is a metaphor for exactly that.
Next Nature looks into a jar full of beauty alien ecosystem, and dumps worms in, as into an aquarium. Two entities, which I’ll call Mother and Daughter, start eating the worms. And then Nature releases a spiderlike entity, Predator, into the ecoystem; Mother flees, and Predator seizes Daughter and drags her back into its den, while Mother stares horrified after and two grasshoppers shrug and keep playing cards.
This sequence, I think, is about how Nature is, while capable of creating beauty, also terrible; it is not a utopian alternative to the industrial hellscapes full of entities indifferent to their own destruction. Nature is a body-horror-esque entity itself, dressed in such a manner as to evoke the image of the hag, or the witch, and covered in cancerous-looking growths reminiscient of moles.
Death arrives, bringing the infant, and knowing now the nature of Nature, we watch as the infant is destroyed under Nature’s supervision - giving birth first to beauty, a new universe entirely, then, ultimately, decay - the universe turns into exactly what surrounds them. Nature is the witch overseeing the strange alchemy by which divinity is turned into the ugliness that surrounds us; a corrupting force.
Death is, after all, the servant of Nature, who might also be called Evolution.
In this new corrupted universe, however, two anarchists in the midst of creating graffiti set off the bomb, and reality is unmade, and Nature itself ceases to matter, while the demiurge watches from above. The Archon has made no reappearance; its journey ended traveling the infinite spiral downward into darkness, having missed its purpose.
There are a few entities which are human, literal humans, as opposed to stop-motion figures. Doctor and Nurse, the entities which disassembled our messiah-figure, are played by human actors. The Demiurge, likewise, is a human actor. And the two anarchists. I -think- humans play the parts with agency; that is, everything that is not played by a human is a role, with no inherent agency of its own. The Doctor and Nurse are choosing to disassemble reality, to torture divinity into giving up its wealth and secrets. The Demiurge chooses to send an Archon down, to a purpose we never see. And the Anarchists, in their way, make choices, find Gnosis, and escape the material world.
There’s some nonlinearity. Possibly this is because the movie is not, in fact, a Gnostic metaphor, and is, in fact, just an assembly of nightmarish images with no particular structure or plot. In particular, the original steampunk protagonist, who I call the true messiah, brings a briefcase down into the nightmare; but the briefcase blows up in a universe created after all of that which is born out of alchemical destruction performed on a wailing infant ripped from the chest of the true messiah.
Certainly “This isn’t actually a gnostic metaphor” is compatible with the movie.
But there are bits and pieces of the movie that rhyme, to my eye, a little too well with gnostic ideas. I think time is just another abstraction that the divine entities can move through; Death certainly travels through something like geological time to deliver the infant to Nature, passing by backdrops of bacteria gradually evolving into complicated lifeforms.