I shy away from stories that throw “Grace” around too much. The name is too heavy with meaning, too easy a symbol, the concept too nebulous and contentious. The only time I’ve really loved its use was in Lord of the Rings. Obviously, Tolkien knew how to show his characters trying to earn grace (in subtle ways that you don’t have to see as you read) and then he showed them receiving unearned grace, and what that would actually look and feel like. The reason it works is that grace doesn’t feel like a gooey, light-filled, Hallmark-Christmas-movie miracle—it feels like having part of your hand bitten off while your best friend drags you out of lava.
I knew I was going to like Wake Up Dead Man, but I didn’t know I was going to love it. I didn’t know it was going to make me cry more than once—a thing I do not do—and I didn’t know that I was going to see it in the theater five times. I didn’t know that as the end of December loomed, I would consider it the most important film I’d seen in years.
I mentioned in my non-spoiler review that with Wake Up Dead Man, Rian Johnson really made two movies woven together. The first is one of the zippy, starry mystery films that have become semi-regular holiday outings for a lot of us—proof that movies for grownup can still exist. This time the mystery is gothic, and almost becomes horror for about ten minutes before Benoit Blanc steers everyone back to reality. I’ve seen some people say the mystery plot isn’t as strong this time out, but I think I disagree? This one just takes a few more viewings to reveal all of its clues. Now that the movie’s on Netflix, it’ll be interesting to see if people watch it on a loop a few times to catch everything.
I’m going to be talking about the second movie. The second movie is about storytelling, it’s a conversation between “faith” and “rationality”, and it’s about American Christianity, made by someone who used to be part of that world, and now isn’t, but wants to take it seriously.
The film is framed by storytelling. The first thing we see is Blanc reading Father Jud’s narrative, his story of The Good Friday Murder of Monsignor Jefferson Wicks. Blanc meets the flock through Jud’s eyes, through Jud’s retelling of the stories they told him—the stories they’ve been telling themselves about why they tolerate Wicks. When we finally see Jud and Blanc meet (40 minutes into the film) the two men debate storytelling, with Blanc saying that Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, in all of its architectural glory, “is shouting a story [I] do not believe” and that he wants a story he “can swallow without choking”. Jud listens to him, and doesn’t argue, but counters that maybe the story isn’t exactly a fairy tale, but asks of the symbols: “do they resonate with something deep inside us that’s profoundly true? Something we can’t access any other way, except storytelling?”
The story Johnson is telling is about faith. He layers in imagery, religious references, and metanarrative to gives us a movie with as many facets as the diamond that proves so important. I’ve seen a few people say that this is a “faith-based film” or even a Christian film—it isn’t. It’s also not an attack on faith or a deconstruction of it. I don’t think any of the people who have some sort of faith at the beginning lose it in the end—quite the opposite.
A caveat that in this essay I will talk about Jesus occasionally like he’s a real historical person who said the things attributed to him, and that a bunch of the things recorded in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament happened (that’s easier then typing “maybe” every time) and I’m working from the New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition, of the HB/NT because I think that’s the translation Fr. Jud and Msgr Wicks would use.
Let’s start with sex.
Name a piece of priest/nun media—Exorcist II, Fleabag, Nothing Sacred, The Rosary Murders, I Confess!, Sister Act, Benedetta, Priest, The Thornbirds, Stigmata, Keeping the Faith—whether it’s suspense or comedy or horror or drama, in most films and television shows, a priest’s job, their life, is defined by their vow of celibacy.
But in Wake Up Dead Man, Father Jud is never defined by that.
Note that I’m not talking about the marketing or the meta narrative: Josh O’Connor stars in the movie with Hot Priest Andrew Scott, he’s been considered an internet boyfriend since at least Challengers, plenty of people ran to A03 after watching this movie, and there are neck tattoos to contend with. But in the world of the film, there is not one mention of Jud’s sex life—no flirting, no “Father What-a-Waste”, no former lover mentioned, visited, or called. We don’t know if Jud’s queer or straight, if he was married in Syracuse and got divorced, if he broke up with a boyfriend in Buffalo to answer God’s call, if he was a himbo in Rochester before he saw the light.
Celibacy is not his stumbling block—anger is.
In a lot of movies and TV shows about priests, there will be a moment, or a season, when they’re so overwhelmed by sexual desire that they take up jogging, boxing, swimming—any sort of physical activity that will exhaust their bodies without breaking their vows. Here, Jud’s Chekov’s boxing gloves pay off when he attacks Samson’s punching bag—but it isn’t a “comic” moment of sexual frustration, but a moment when his anger toward Martha becomes so strong that he slaps her hand out of his face during an argument.
Should she be wagging her finger in his face? Absolutely not. But it was his violent temper that got him sent to Monsignor Wicks in the first place, it’s part of what’s made him such an easy target for framing, and he clearly still hasn’t learned to control it. It almost proves his undoing—he can all too easily fall into the lie that he murdered Samson, because the story he’s been telling himself since he was a teen is that he’s in constant battle with the hate in his heart.
The way sexuality does come into the story is through Wicks’ faux confessions.
Wicks presents himself as an obsessive, addicted masturbator and exploits Jud’s good faith because (a) he’s dealing with a younger man who might still be working the celibacy thing out for himself, (b) it implies a certain uncontrollable virility on Wicks’ part, and, (c) he knows his assistant pastor can’t do a fucking thing about it.
He knows Jud can’t talk to anyone else about what he’s saying because of the Seal of Confession. While excessive jerking off is a normal thing to confess, the detail Wicks goes into is clearly designed to embarrass a person who is, essentially, his junior coworker. Wicks turns the sacrament of confession into sexual harassment.
Wicks continues this emotional and sexual abuse until Jud finally pushes back, at which point the elder priest switches to physical abuse, knowing that once again he has Jud either way: Jud holds to his pacifism and lies on the ground and takes it, in which case Wick proves Jud’s “weakness” and wins, or Jud fights back, and even if he beats Wicks to a pulp, having betrayed his deepest beliefs, he allows Wicks to win even more.
Which brings us to why Jud is a white man.
Misogyny!
In the other two Benoit Blanc Mysteries, Blanc has helped a young woman of color who’s been wronged by powerful white people. Blanc is a famous handsome white man who’s been on The View, lives in an apartment in Manhattan, and drives a Mercedes. We’re not dealing with Lt. Columbo here. Blanc could move among the rich and powerful with no friction at all. But he’s also queer, the son of a Southern sheriff, with a mother who was extremely religious—and while Blanc says they were close in his childhood, the relationship seemingly soured. It’s pretty easy to sketch a portrait of a person who grew up Different In The South, expected to conform to a societal hierarchy and religious life that he didn’t agree with, noticing things other people didn’t notice, who eventually… moved to Manhattan to get away from all that. Who allies himself with more vulnerable people because he knows they need him.
On the surface Jud Duplenticy is a handsome white male priest. He would seem like a sharp break from the usual Rian Johnson Protagonist.
But one of the undercurrents of the film that rises and rises until it finally becomes the real point, is the horrific misogyny of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. It’s right there in the name—women are meant to endure. They keep their mouths shut, they do what they’re told, they endure whatever pain the men inflict on them. When they step out of line they’re branded “harlot whore” or “faithless” or “your father’s nightmare”.
The women we meet in this film have bought into this world. Martha’s whole personality revolves around being “the good one”—in contrast not to the only slightly younger Jefferson Wicks, her actual childhood peer, but with Jefferson’s fully adult mother, who was living her own life and shouldn’t have had to give a single flying fuck what a ten-year-old thought of her choices. Martha’s held on to her story about herself, even editing Prentice’s death and her final conversation with Grace to uphold the idea that she’s morally pure. She tells the story of the Harlot Whore not with sorrow or regret or hope for the woman’s peace in death or any of that, but with glee. Relish. (And her memory of Grace’s final act, all washed in red light and sweat, makes it pretty fucking clear where she thinks Grace is now.) Martha is Wicks’ right-hand person. She takes care of all the chores a wife would, seems not to have any real relationship with the other women of the parish, she also calls Nat’s ex a “harpy” in the same monologue where she calls Nat “weak”. (She also has a relationship with Samson despite, seemingly, not being married, so I guess it’s not harlot-whoring if it’s with the church groundskeeper?)
Vera Draven goes along with her dad’s orders to raise Cy, and seemingly doesn’t even manage to exert enough influence to turn him away from the manosphere—and in the end gets called a “hag” when she finally stands up for herself. Simone holds her nose and sits through Wicks’ version of Mass, and watches other young women like herself storm out, clutching the chance he can heal her.
And Jud? Well, Jud’s a woman. Kind of. Since Johnson set his story in a Catholic parish, he had to have a male protagonist to have a little priest. But Jud is empathetic, caring, emotional, welcoming. When he meets people he asks them about themselves, and really listens. We learn, because Jud tells us, that he’s a formerly unhoused recovering addict with a murder in his past. (The mention of murder is the one time Nat and Lee show any interest in him.) He could hide all of it, he could edit it, but he confesses it openly to his parishioners in good faith, to set an example. In the world of the film—the world of Wicks and his followers—Jud’s emotional bravery makes him soft, a “simpering child from Albany”, who doesn’t have the strength to fight for his faith against a world full of wolves. To them his confession is a weakness they can exploit, his empathy a crack in his armor.
It even carries through into the murder plot. In Martha’s dark(er) reimaging of the crucifixion and resurrection, it’s Jud who witnesses the death. And when the second part of the plan unfolds, and the tomb cracks open, a man impersonating a gardener is the first to greet the risen “Wicks”—a shadow of what happened last time.
And who’s the second one on the scene? The new Magdalene?
Father Jud of course.
Names! (And Titles, But Mostly Names.)
Johnson also tells his story through names—given names, titles, and what people choose to call each other.
On the most obvious level: Samson has shaggy hair, and is really incredibly strong. (He’s a little like a kinder, gentler Wicks, actually, which says more about Martha than I want to think about right now.) He’s also a recovering addict, he also boxes, at least with a punching bag, and he’s able to knock former professional Father Jud out with one punch.
Martha’s also a pretty obvious one: the famous Martha of the New Testament is the sister of Mary (not Mother-of-Jesus Mary, Not Magdalene Mary, but a secret, third Mary) and Lazarus, and she initially appears in The Gospel of Luke, Chapter 10. Martha and Mary offer hospitality to Jesus, and while Martha bustles around preparing food and cleaning, Mary sits with Jesus and listens to him speak. Martha finally snaps and asks Jesus to tell her sister to help with the housework, but he replies: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” Our Martha has dedicated her life to the minutiae of the parish: the filing, the cleaning, the gossip, the telling and re-telling of Prentice’s Death, the telling and re-telling of the Story of the Harlot Whore. But has she ever actually studied a single freaking word of the religion she supposedly subscribes to?
Like I said, I tend not to like the use of Grace. But Grace Wicks’ father, Prentice, chose to become a priest after he was widowed despite having an enormous family fortune and a kid. It implies a certain level of devotion, and explains why he’d give his daughter such a significant name. It’s also clear that he’s a fanatical tyrant who oppresses and gaslights his daughter until she has a psychotic break and dies from an aneurysm. Grace does what she can to act against her name, and the story others tell about her inspires the better people of the parish to pity, until the words “that poor girl” pass from character to character like a bead through fingers. Her story is what saves Martha’s soul in the end. When the church is renamed, it’s partly in her honor, in order to rewrite The Tale of The Harlot Whore. But she never gets to tell her own story—her short desperate life is refracted through everyone else’s telling.
The name Monsignor Jefferson Wicks is apparently a riff on a character in a Pynchon novel, but it’s his title, Monsignor, that’s really important. He insists on being called his title by everyone, even Jud, never Father—also a title, sure, but a far more friendly and familial one. Monsignor Wicks = OFFICIAL TITLE + LAST NAME, at all times, even after his death. The only two who break that are Martha, who calls him Jefferson right before he’s about to die (because she’s one of the two people who know he’s about to die) and Blanc, who refers to him as “Monsignor Jalapeño, I don’t care!” in one of my favorite moments in the whole movie.
Father Jud, meanwhile, is always Father Jud: friendly, familial title, + first name.
Except once.
Blanc, turning up at a church to meet a murder suspect and suss him out, catches that murder suspect crying, partly from fatigue and fear, but mostly because their brief conversation about faith “made [him] feel like a priest again”—I think we can assume it’s the first time he’s felt that way in about eight months.
And Blanc, faced with this vulnerability from someone he doesn’t even know yet, calls him “son.” We already know that Jud’s been on his own, at times living on the street, since he was 17. Benoit doesn’t know that—he hasn’t asked Jud to write the letter yet. How long has it been since Jud heard anyone call him “son” with concern or affection? How long has it been since anyone acted like they cared about him at all?
Finally to get into that last important thing about names, I’m gonna have to talk about Jesus Christ. Bear with me.
Or actually hang on. I need to be clear: When I studied Religion, I focused primarily on American Religious History, which mean a lot of reading about the real-life versions of people like Jefferson Wicks (often) and Jud Duplenticy (goddamn do I wish we had more of those) but I did all of my work in English. Everything I’m trying to parse out in the following paragraphs, I’m doing through translation, and this is also an extremely stripped-down history, I’m leaving a lot of nuance and context on the table to get to a point.
[deep breath]
“Jesus Christ”, as a name, evolved over a couple of centuries, and four different languages, from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to English.
“Jesus” is the anglicization of “Iesus”, which is the Latin version of “Iēsous”, which is the Greek version of the Hebrew name “Yeshua”. Yeshua is an alternate version of the name Yehoshua. Both mean “he who rescue/saves”, and both were pretty popular names during the Second Temple period of Judaism (516 BCE to 70 CE). “Jesus” never caught on as a common children’s name in English, but the modern anglicization of Yehoshua is “Joshua.” As for Christ, that’s the Latin version of the Greek “Khristos”—there are two versions of Khristos, one a given name, and one a title. The title Khristos means “anointed one”, and was used to translate the Hebrew word “mashiach” or “messiah” into Greek. The Latinized spelling, with a “Ch” instead of a “Kh”, gradually became standard in English-speaking countries. So “Jesus Christ”, the common way of talking about this person in English, is a mashup of Latinized Hebrew first name, “Yeshua” (“he who rescues/saves”), and a Latinized Greek title “Christos” (“the Anointed One”). The first word is a given, familiar name, the second word a formal title. Basically: “Josh, the Anointed One”.
Throughout Wake Up Dead Man, when Father Jud talks about his religion, he doesn’t use the word God or Lord too often, but tends to say Christ. Christ, specifically. He’s not referring to a nondenominational monotheism. (Given who he is, I think he’d be a delightful member of an interfaith council, but he also knows what he is, and he doesn’t hide it.) Even knowing I was walking into a priest movie, I was startled by how much Jud used that particular title in a mainstream, non-faith-based film, because in our current climate it’s actively weird to hear it used by someone who doesn’t want to electrocute me into being straight, or deport brown people for no reason. But what caught my attention, even more, was when Jud didn’t use that title.
When Jud talks about his sense of divinity with other people, he uses “Christ” almost exclusively. That’s how he experienced a sense of salvation and forgiveness after he hit rock bottom. But when he’s at the end of his rope, desperate and alone and sure that he’s about to be arrested for a murder he can’t prove he didn’t do—and, maybe worse, reckoning with the fact that he’s happy Wicks has met with a violent death—what happens? He walks into his empty church and collapses on the floor in front of the blank spot on the wall that used to hold a crucifix. And when he speaks to that empty space, he doesn’t say “Christ”, he says “Jesus.”
This is vulnerability. Intimacy. A way of speaking with this person that I’m guessing only happens when he’s alone. This is exactly how this character would speak in this situation. It’s a perfect, shining detail in a beautiful script, and it’s also the first time the movie made me cry.
The visual language Johnson developed with cinematographer Steve Yedlin also comes through here. I won’t spend much time unpacking the use of light: warm light often falls on Jud when he’s reaching out to people; colder light or even darkness and shadow envelope Wicks; Blanc, meanwhile, is often lit by firelight, single lamps, and finally by a blast of sunlight—his search for truth is lit by human handiwork, and when so fine a brain has a Damascus Thing it lights up the whole fucking room.
But I need to stay in this scene for a little longer.
Lights, Cameras, Angles
When Jud collapses to pray, at dawn, on Easter Sunday, we’re not perched comfortably behind a God’s Eye camera, looking down at him and his empty church from a distance. We’re not at crucifix height, looking down at a believer prostrate at our feet. We’re not even in the pews, the congregation watching like the theater audience they used to be.
Nope, we’re on the fucking ground with him. We’re directly in front of him, crying on the ground. We can’t look away from his anguish. There is no distance between us at all.
And then the door opens, and Blanc pops his head in and yodels “Hellooo?” and the light of the sun pours in with him. It’s a hilarious puncturing of the scene, and the script seesaws back and forth between humor and raw emotion for the rest of the Blanc and Jud’s meet-cute/spiritual wrestling match.
Josh O’Connor, who is quite tall, is vulnerable, covered in grime and tears, and looks almost fetal compared to the striking unruffled Daniel Craig, who strolls up the nave in the first of several impeccably tailored suits.
We stay with Jud, we see him wipe his eyes and get up, when Blanc asks if he’s “open” we see the nanosecond of Jud wishing he could say “No”, could tell Blanc to go away, and be alone with his misery. We see him gather himself and say “Always.” (Man, my own belief system may be ever-shifting lava, but I sure as shit believe in the acting of Josh O’Connor.) Jud pulls himself together for the guest and says “It’s hard to be in here and not feel His Presence.”
By this point we know that Jud’s time here has been bad. We’ve seen parishioners ostracize and gaslight him, we’ve heard the nightmarish Tale of the Harlot Whore, we’ve seen Wicks psychologically torment him and even physically attack him. After all that, is he saying it’s “hard” because he doesn’t feel God’s love, in his moment of extreme need? Or is he saying that he does still feel God’s presence, even after everything? (I think it’s the second thing, but I enjoy the ambiguity.) It would be understandable for Jud to feel despair in this moment, but this is still the opening line that he offers to a stranger, whose own beliefs he doesn’t know—he extends a welcome that will be read as an invitation to worship by a believer, even if he’s using it as a quiet barb against himself.
This leads directly into the first religious debate between the two of them, which is also a conversation about storytelling. Jud doesn’t know it, but he’s being analyzed by the keen mind of Benoit Blanc, Gentleman Sleuth, but along the way the two challenge each other. If Blanc was expecting Jud to get offended or hurt by his anti-religion monologue, well, Jud only came to religion himself after a life of hardship. He would never judge someone for their lack of belief. And if Jud thought that he was speaking to a polite Southerner who would “go along to get along”, well—Blanc is not that. Jud gently tries to create pathways for his visitor to open up about his family if he wants to, and Blanc analyses Jud’s appearance and demeanor until he’s pretty sure the young man’s innocent. What’s great, what makes this movie great, is that by the end of their conversation they both like and respect each other so much that they’re happy to give each other space to be.
From then on, when Blanc says things he think might offend Jud, he apologizes to Jud, because he doesn’t want to hurt him, not because he ever wavers in his atheism. When Jud pushes back on Blanc he never turns smug, or says that Blanc the heretic simply can’t understand the mysteries of faith, or any of that bullshit—he tries to help him understand because he wants his new friend to understand him.
(Speaking, parenthetically, as a person who’s been on both sides of this conversation at various points in their life: THIS IS SO GOOD I LOVE THIS MOVIE SO MUCH.)
Religious Imagery Jamboree!
Johnson tells a lot of his story through riffs on religious imagery, and there’s a LOT here, but I’ll just touch on a couple of my favorites.
The Devil/Wolf imagery—seeding the idea of the “World is a Wolf” during Jud’s hearing, only to have Nikolai’s weird horned-wolf-head lamp fixture become a murder weapon used both against the Bad Sheperd that is Wicks and the Good Sheperd that is Jud, was just… fun.
One of the first acts we see at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude is somebody literally whitewashing a tomb. Later, Jud says that if Wicks’ parishioners can’t confess their deepest sins to him, then “This whole place is a whitewashed tomb!” For anyone who doesn’t know what that phrase means, in Matthew, Chapter 23, Jesus refers to rule-obsessed scribes and Pharisees as “like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth.” The context being that there isn’t much point in performing holiness if you’re not doing the work to be a good person. Who cares if you’re polite to people if every thought you have about them is dripping with acid? Who cares if you bring cookies to the church bake sale if you gossip about everyone else in the congregation? Who cares if you confess to Monsignor Wicks faithfully every Sunday, if you only tell him half-truths because you fear his retribution?
And of course, in the literal sense, the Wicks family tomb houses the proof of Prentice’s hatred for his own daughter, and then the evidence of Martha’s murder plot—a giant whitewashed metaphor made reality.
And speaking of religious riffing, the film’s entire plot hinges on an attempt at a sloppy rewrite of Easter—the thing that brings Blanc onboard in the first place, as presumably he’s intrigued by the idea of picking a fake miracle apart even before he meets Father Jud and realizes the boy needs saving.
Martha’s attempt at a manufactured, neat, camera-friendly miracle is the thing that lures Blanc to town. On top of all the other problems with it, Martha’s plan is a bad story. It’s a derivative echo of a way more interesting original. Instead of Jesus rising from the dead, she gives us a fake Wicks. The side wound is created with a tacky devil-wolf knife, not a Centurion’s spear. The gardener at the tomb is a counterfeit gardener. There’s only an accidental Magdalene, because in Martha’s worldview there’s no role for independent women, and no redemption for “harlots”. (Here’s my usual caveat both that Magdalene wasn’t a harlot, canonically speaking, and that harloting is A-OK.) As she says, Jud was “most certainly not” supposed to be there to play the role of the First Witness. But see, the interesting thing about the OG miracle of the Resurrection is that Jesus was a poor person, part of an oppressed minority, who prioritized love, practiced radical compassion, and refused to resort to violence—the idea that that guy came back from the dead, and beat the relentless machine of the Roman Empire? That’s surprising! It’s emotionally satisfying! It makes sense, dramaturgically.
(OK I mean, technically he “beat” the Roman Empire a few hundred years later when the Emperor adopted his followers’ symbol, credited a military victory to that symbol, and declared the followers’ religion official—at which point those followers, who had been oppressed for hundred of years in his name, started oppressing the shit out of everyone who didn’t agree with them. But let’s sidebar all that.)
Martha’s story doesn’t have any of the startling cosmic justice of the original story. Wicks is rich white man, a symbol of the overwhelming power of Catholic hierarchy, an agent of the conservative thread of that denomination that occupies a whole bunch of seats of power in religious and secular spheres at this moment. He’s a bully who threatens and betrays everyone, physically attacks at least one person, emotionally oppresses and subjugates his followers. There’s no twist to him once again beating the system and regaining the control he lost for like three days while he was dead. It’s boring! Like when a rich person says they’re gonna buy an election and then they successfully buy that election—where’s the drama?
The thing that feels more like that OG miracle? Blanc shows up in Jud’s church just as Jud asks for help.
But again, the film is very careful to leave room for rationality and the Holy Spirit. We don’t know where Blanc was coming from when he came to Chimney Rock. We know that Detective Elliot (yay!) gave Chief Geraldine Blanc’s number, and that she must have called him about the case at some point on Good Friday or Holy Saturday. We know that he checked in with her, and then found Jud at his church, somehow waltzing in exactly at the moment the young priest broke down and asked for help. Was this a case of Blanc taking a case, packing a trunk of impeccable suits, booking a tasteful Chimney Rock B’n’B, and then getting lucky with the traffic as he left his and Phillip’s place in Manhattan for Upstate New York? (I mean, that’s its own kind of miracle.) Or was this divine intervention nudging a bureaucratic domino two days earlier so that the tormented priest would finally get some help on Easter?
Blanc knows it’s the first thing, I suspect Jud believes it’s the second, and one of the many things I love about the film is that it leaves that there for the audience to make up their own minds.
But I think my very favorite bit of religious symbolism was L’Eveil Apple itself. (Sure, the idea of Prentice swallowing a diamond, and said diamond somehow not coming to light during an autopsy, is a little much—but the symbolism!) The Apple stood in for the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and is seen in Christianity as a sign of humanity’s disobedience, the end of the innocence of Eden, and the inception point of humanity’s ability to sin. A few thousand years later, the Garden of Eden gets a rewrite in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus chooses of his own free will to be arrested and executed by the state, which, in Christianity’s worldview, erases the sin of Eden, and allows humans a path back to immortality.
In Johnson’s version, that apple is transformed into the ultimate symbol of Mid-Twentieth-Century capitalism—a giant, multi-faceted diamond in a Fabergé box. This diamond, this symbol of hatred and misogyny and doom, lies in the heart of the whitewashed tomb for decades before finally being unearthed in the midst of a murder plot. But Father Jud, having gone through his own personal Garden of Gethsemane and come out the other side, transforms that apple into Jesus’ heart. I… might have teared up.
The biggest meta narrative happening here is that Rian Johnson wanted to use a murder mystery to talk about Modern American Christianity.
I clocked that Rian Johnson had a complicated history with religion while I was watching The Brothers Bloom the first time—something in the vibe made me sit up. I’m interested in people with complicated religious histories because of my own shit, but more so, because I’ve been studying the intersection of religion and pop culture in the United States, somewhat seriously, since the early 2000s. (A fun time to get in the game! Ha! Ha!) There are various movements that have been trying to turn this country into an autocratic theocracy since the early 1980s, and they’ve… just about succeeded, now. And I mostly don’t think we’re going to be able to stop it, and I think we’re probably fucked, and I think that’s why this movie is landing like a punch in the moments it doesn’t feel like an embrace.
Someone who has been dealing with his stuff in a quiet way in his films just walked into the coliseum and grabbed the lion by its friend-shaped ears.
But Let’s Get Back To Grace
And I’ve seen a few people say that the religious tyrant aspect of the film is a little on-the-nose, but I say, as long as there are people who are right now trying to remake the Catholic Church in their own facile images, why not have a fucking movie about it.
I used to spend a lot of time at a place called Family Christian Bookstore. I went there to keep an eye on trends (and buy Veggietales merch—and I want to be very clear here that the Phil Vischer-era of Veggietales is not part of the problem) and it was impossible not to notice that, on top of the ironclad gender roles, there was a weird undercurrent of anger and fear. Lots of Biblical action figures of David and Goliath and Daniel in the Lion’s Den, shelf upon shelf of Left Behind books and their spinoffs promising all the trials and tribulations of the End Times, and the one I’ve thought about most often in the years since: the Full Armor of God.
Like a lot of stuff that gives me pause, this image may have come from noted self-insert fanfic writer Saint Paul in The Letter to the Ephesians, though there are doubts about his authorship. Two thousand years after people used metaphorical imagery to make themselves feel brave in the face of torture and death, parents who were part of the largest, most powerful religion in their country were buying plastic armor so their children could cosplay subjugation.
This was the story the fastest-growing religious movement in the U.S. was telling itself—a tale of fighting oppression with violence. An overwhelmingly white, middle-class-and-up group of people, who had every societal advantage at their back, were telling themselves that they were under siege, and that they had to fight until their enraged, all-powerful God sent his son back to kick some ass.
I mention this because Johnson has Wicks use that line about wearing the Armor of God and being “ready to fight the world until my last breath”. Wicks talks about being a “warrior” and about fighting the world outside his parish. Wicks’ self-appointed, hacky St. John, Lee Ross, sitting beneath a painting of the crucified, dying Christ, explicitly says that the church needs “warriors” like Wicks because: “We’re fighting an existential war here, where the end justifies the means. The church doesn’t need some pussy who’s gonna lie down and take it—we need a warrior. And I believe that God chose Monsignor Wicks to be His warrior. So you and your son have my sword”.
(Which, the temptation to get a back tattoo of that scene rendered as like a comics panel…)
All I can think about is how, for over 30 years kids have been raised with this particular version of Christianity, this weird American stew of oppression and martyrdom and dominance and lust for power over the secular world and promises of retribution. And a number of those people have risen to positions of great power in this country over the last decade, and, of every film I’ve seen in the last few years—and I watch a lot of movies—Wake Up Dead Man is the one that seems to be dealing with this reality in the most helpful way.
There have been a few films over the last few years that have tried to deal with our current religious moment, however obliquely. Silence, A Hidden Life, Conclave, First Reformed, even The Phoenician Scheme. And while I love all of those films, one of the reasons Wake Up Dead Man knocked me out so much is that it isn’t the story of a beleaguered Christian fighting oppression/modernity/capitalism/whatever—it’s a beleaguered Christian fighting the rotten elements of his own church, with a significant assist from a queer atheist detective and a Jewish sheriff. We’re with Jud, but we’re also with Blanc. And while there are some terrible people in this movie, their terribleness comes from somewhere. You can see why they’re acting the way they do, and have sympathy for them—but also, you know, everyone in this movie is an adult, well past the age of reason, and they should know how to act. One of my favorite things is the way, right up to Martha’s final confession, Jud is gently pushing all of them to accept their own failings and deal with them so they can atone and actually be better, more fulfilled people. (Martha’s correct: He’s really good at his job.)
Father Jud’s arguments for faith are well-reasoned, beautifully stated, obviously thought-through. He’s spent years thinking about his past, his conversion, his relationship to his faith—not just feeling it. He’s not a rube or a bumpkin or a smug bastard who thinks he’s found The Truth. He’s found his Truth, and he wants to share it with people, but only with their enthusiastic consent. But, while Jud is great, and right about a lot of things, he also isn’t perfect. Rather than being martyred by a tyrannical government, he allows his own past remorse, his isolation at Chimney Rock, and, to be fair, extreme fatigue, to push him into a sense of self-martyrdom to the point that he turns himself in for a crime he didn’t commit—twice!—rather than give Blanc like half an hour to think through some stuff and figure who-actually-done-it.
Blanc has a “Damascus Thing”, yes, but his Damascus Thing is him admitting that Father Jud’s forgiving, redemptive path will work better, in this one case, than Blanc’s own customary summation. Allowing Martha to make her confession kills a bunch of doves with one stone:
- on the earthly plane, Sheriff Geraldine hears Martha’s confession and Father Jud is finally off the hook;
- Martha looks back on the story she’s told herself, the consequences it wrought, and finally has a good, supportive spiritual experience with a caring pastor;
- which, according to her faith, allows her to truly atone and at least have a shot at one of the lower rungs of Purgatory instead of where she was headed;
- it allows Blanc to conclude a difficult case with an act of true friendship toward a young man whom he doesn’t always understand, but whom he’s clearly come to love;
- Jud fulfills his role as a priest again, in a mirror to his conversation with Louise, except in this instance he’s having to do the slightly more difficult work of pushing Martha to acknowledge her foul treatment of Grace, and after nine months in the wilderness, he brings a member of his own flock back to God.
Wicks would say that Jud’s theology is to “go along to get along” with the modern world. But in the end, we see just how much he’s misunderstood the younger priest. Jud could have heard Martha’s confession and, knowing by then that she only had minutes to live, granted her absolution immediately. Instead, he pushes her to remember her behavior toward Grace, he waits until she’s finally repeated the film’s own rosary of “that poor girl”—then, and only then, he recites the prayer of absolution to reconcile her to her God. Just under the wire.
This is where I think the film flies up my list past all the other “religion movies” as a path forward for people of good faith.
But there’s also the phone call with Louise.
A story that gets tossed about with regards to Rian Johnson is that he subverts the genres he works in. At a talk I attended, he said that working within a genre creates “…a known chessboard between you and the audience. You both know the rules, and when you break them, it becomes a dialogue”. Some people love this; some people use words like “destroyed my childhood”. Here the subversion comes in the dead center of the movie, and blindsides us.
It starts as a very typical comedy moment: Protagonist in a hurry (for a very good, plot-relevant reason) runs up against the brick wall of a person who, for whatever reason, refuses to match their urgency. We’ve all seen versions of this, and whatever the Kafka-esque or Brazilian or Zootopian situation, our sympathy is supposed to lie with the protagonist. The slow voice on the other end of the line becomes our enemy. Every time I’ve seen Wake Up Dead Man in the theater, the first lines of Bridget Everett’s dialogue brought a cascade of laughter as people recognized the trope.
But then Johnson has to go and make the voice on the other end of the line a person.
We hear her helping Jud, and, let’s be clear, she’s patient with him. She has no way of knowing why this information is so important, she’s offering to help in the best way she can, and trying to make polite small talk with someone she doesn’t know. She’s also, crucially, the first Chimney Rock resident to congratulate Jud on his gig at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, and the first to openly chastise Wicks, calling him “not a nice man”. She also, crucially says that she’s still “sorry he—yikes!—died?” and tells Jud that she’s sorry for his loss. She’s trying to be kind to Jud. Meanwhile, he’s the one being rude, cutting her off and talking over her until she finally says “excuse me”, which was the bit when Josh O’Connor’s politely pained expression and Daniel Craig’s ever-more-furrowed brow got the biggest laughs.
And then just as he’s about to hang up, Louise asks if the priest can do something for her. He has the phone most of the way off his ear at this point. In another movie he might have already hung up. But he refocuses and asks what she needs. And when she asks him to pray for her, in every theater I’ve been in, all giggles, all laughter, all of it, stopped. I’ve heard gasps, I’ve heard “aww”s—but in every theater you could feel the audience responding by sitting up straighter.
They probably weren’t expecting this. I certainly wasn’t.
As Jud leaves to speak with Louise, we stay with Blanc, then we cut to Blanc, clearly later enough that it’s gotten dark. When Blanc goes into the rectory’s firelit living room, Jud is only just then praying with Louise—the thing she asked him to do in the first place—presumably because he’s been listening to her talk about her mother, and illness, and grief, for a while.
(Yes, this is the other other bit when I cried. I’m not even mad about it.)
Louise has shown Father Jud grace by being patient with him despite his rudeness, and, in a metaphysical sense, by reaching out to him and trusting him to hear her. He is allowing grace into their conversation by stepping away from his own needs to be present for her.
It’s a weird job, being a religious figure. Really what you are, if you’re good at it, is a conduit for a sense of divinity that anyone can have access to. And if you wear a particular uniform, you’re on call all the time. This is something Johnson thought about a bit as he researched the film, and it’s this detail that I think really brings his movie to life. If someone’s wrestling with religious trauma? You’re walking through the cereal aisle and they see your collar, and you might be the target of their (completely justifiable) anger and pain. Someone has a sick child, a recently dead parent, an impending test result? You might have just gone out for a coffee, but now you’re holding that person’s hand, and trying to tug on the sleeve of an Unknowable Omniscience. And the real part of the job is that you don’t ever let the person you’re helping know how much this weighs on you. You take your own pain to a fellow priest, who takes it to their own fellow priest, etc. etc. all the way up to the guy who hears the confessions of the Pope. What this scene shows (possibly better than any film since Diary of a Country Priest) is that Jud is a priest because he loves this part of the job.
Blanc of course doesn’t see that. He’s focused on his own vocation, and, in another important element—Blanc is wrong about Jud’s faith. His read on it is actually shallow, and more informed by his own past experiences than by listening to Jud. (Even then, Jud explains Damascus, thinking he has to, but of course Blanc already knows what a Road to Damascus Thing is, as a story—he just doesn’t think it was a miracle.) It takes Jud yelling “God loves me when I’m guilty” in his face, and, finally, his determination to confess “of [my] own free will or it won’t mean anything” to finally push Blanc past his own prejudices, to see that whether he agrees or not, Jud’s faith doesn’t mean he’s hiding from life’s harsher truths, just that he’s processing them in a different way.
This is why Wake Up Dead Man is actually important. It allows enough space for that phone call to play out the way it should. It allows for Jud to address Jesus the way he would, and to talk about Christ’s love even if it makes people uncomfortable, in the same film where Blanc declares God a fiction. It allows us to see just how filled with rage and pain Wicks and his followers are—but it doesn’t let them off the hook because of trauma. It shows the importance of actual remorse and repentance, the need to draw a line in the sand with people who think the Empire were the good guys, the need to create space for both devout Catholics and those who worship at the altar of the rational. To be able to end with a scene where the believer and the proud heretic share a hug, but one can offer a good faith invitation to Mass, and the other can cheerfully reply with “there’s nothing I’d rather not do” and they still love each other. Where the concept of grace can be explored in both the deeply religious and the utterly secular sense, and no one has to check their brain or their soul at the door.