One of the best possible uses of a lousy movie comes from enjoying the tangents your brain makes to avoid smothering boredom. The Australian existential slasher movie, Lost Things, has all the intellectual overkill and execution underwhelm of a D+ student art film.  Essentially Groundhog Day meets Friday the 13th, the movie centers around horny teens caught in a loop of repeating their last day on Earth that starts over once they realize that they’ve already been murdered. As I said, the movie itself was less interesting to me than the idea that, beneath the surface coherence of our belief systems (e.g., Christian, Muslim, etc.), we adopt passively syncretic worldviews.  Watching Lost Things, I started to think about that fact that, despite all our culture’s putative religious fundamentalism, some people have an uncanny ability to incorporate beliefs seemingly at odds with their core values.

Of course Christianity is famous for this, borrowing traditions while burying cultures.  The Catholic Church was particularly adept at the brutal barter, slaughtering local gods but doling out a few Saints in exchange.  We have Easter eggs, Christmas trees, and an erroneous birthday for baby Jesus in part because, in absorbing paganism, Christianity kept a few of the nicer dresses for special occasions.    

It’s interesting to watch these cobbled beliefs play out on television.  Jennifer Love Hewitt talks to the dearly departed on Ghost Whisperer, a popular series in which she sorts out the problem-ridden world of the dead, where petty souls skulk around Starbucks waiting for supernatural waifs to listen to their bitching.  This dovetails nicely with The Medium where Patricia Arquette receives corpse communiqués in her dreams from people pissed off the police can’t solve their murders.  The only untapped entertainment angle would have to be a show about the backstabbing, sexually charged adolescents who party and betray each other in purgatory.  

If these dramatizations aren’t enough to quench your desire to shoot the breeze with the undead, then there’s always Jonathon Edwards whose carnie-in-chinos routine allows audience members to believe that relatives from the other side, speaking in muffled voices, have nothing to offer other than clichés and treasure map hints about sacked-away valuables.

I’m amused by this because, for a culture with so many religious purists, this seems to be an odd assortment of views to hold simultaneously.  Where in the ideology of heaven and hell are ghosts?  Why do these spirits skid past their life deadline only to fret and obsess over the details of the past?  Can the afterlife be this boring?  When did we start stealing from Buddhism so shamelessly?  Part of my sarcastic tone comes from living in Texas, where people with absolutely no understanding of their own religious texts, history, or theology seek to impose their moral order with the sort of ferocity that only people who have no idea what they’re talking about can muster.  Next time a fundamentalist Christian talks about ghosts, you should ask them if that’s their religion or just static cling.

Terry Sawyer