Year One (2009)
Columbia Pictures / Sony Entertainment
d. Harold Ramis; pr. Judd Apatow, Clayton Townsend, Nicholas Weinstock; scr. Harold Ramis, Gene Stupnitsky, Lee Eisenberg; ph. Alar Kivilo; m. Theodore Shapiro; ed. Craig Herring, Steve Welch; cast. Jack Black, Michael Cena, Hank Azaria, Oliver Platt, Michael Cross, Olivia Wilde, Gia Carides, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Vinnie Jones, Juno Temple, June Diane Raphael (108 mins)
Harold Ramis’ Year One is a rationalist/atheist triumph – the savviest religious satire since Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
Python’s film – a true comedic masterpiece of the C20th – of course, scandalized Christians everywhere. Narrow-minded and literalist as Christians tend to be, they took it as a blasphemous assault on their beloved, mythical saviour Jesus Christ. After all, blasphemy is a crime still punishable by death in many Theist nations (although Islamic now more so than Judeo-Christian although such Catholic countries as Ireland still have blasphemy laws in amongst their legal statutes, an unacceptable fusion of Church and State: just the political quagmire that Ramis here satirizes in the latter half of Year One). There is a blasphemous Christ figure in Year One also (what religious satire is complete without lampooning the woeful ethos of Messianicism) but Ramis cleverly conflates the symbolism so that the merciless attack on Judeo-Christian religious myth (never once here accepted as fact) is wholeheartedly in terms of what might be termed the “cinema of anthropological speculation”.
The cinema’s only Darwinist genre, the cinema of anthropological speculation examines human pre-history – i.e. the truth of human evolution over millennia – by examining prehistoric human behaviour, ritual and socialization.
Early examples were evolutionary incorrect fantasies about humans vs. dinosaurs (scientifically impossible of course as the dinosaurs were extinct long before humans evolved), most notably in the Hammer classic One Million Years BC and its animal-fur bikini-clad starlet Raquel Welch. Stanley Kubrick evoked alien guidance shaping human pre-history in the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Frenchman Jean-Jacques Annaud (long before the ridiculously pro-Tibetan propaganda of Seven Years in Tibet) essayed the proverbial “Dawn of Man” in Quest for Fire, the international success and acclaim of which spearheaded a rush of inferior cave-person films including The Clan of the Cave Bear (which saw blond-haired, blue-eyed Darryl Hannah assume the Welch role as an intelligent cro-magnon woman in a society of greasy, black-haired Neanderthals) and Caveman (a comedy in which Ringo Starr leads a band of misfits into the discovery of, among other things, the joy of pot – bringing to the screen the first, and to date only, stoned dinosaur).
Year One begins as a prehistoric comedy in the manner of Caveman though with a much sharper wit and sense of behaviourist observation, punning on the hunter-gatherer origins of human society and its according elementary class systems. However, as stars Jack Black and Michael Cera leave their primitive tribe and journey over the mountains where, like Christopher Columbus and other explorers they discover the world is not square and they will not drop off the end if they continue to explore, they increasingly encounter characters based firmly on Judeo-Christian religious myth – first Cain and Abel, then Abraham and Isaac and on, naturally, to explore the question plaguing every atheist’s imagination since rejecting the Bible as fairy story: just what exactly did go on in Sodom and/or Gomorrah? In so doing, director Ramis cleverly fuses Darwinian evolutionary fact and Judeo-Christian Biblical mythology for what is essentially a revisionist version of the Old Testament, informed by the intelligence and independence of individual humanism found in the political atheist movement since the publication of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.
Indeed, Year One is riddled with the spectre of Dawkins, so much so that any theist belief here is clearly delusional. It accepts Darwinian evolution as fact and posits two rationalist cavemen who find themselves in the midst of a world of religious madmen (Hebrew and otherwise) who enslave the hapless hunter-gatherers (a clever assertion of religion as the evil usurping Darwinist truth).
And in the central character played by Jack Black, Ramis condenses two religious archetypes found in Judeo-Christian Creationist and Messianic lore. Thus, before Black is forced away from his village, he eats the “forbidden fruit” from the “tree of knowledge” (as did Eve in the Garden of Eden, resulting in the expulsion of humanity by God – if one believes this Christian mythological tripe) only to be cast out by the local spiritualist, a deluded shaman who believes that the world was carried forth from a sea on the back of a giant turtle. Ramis builds up the act of consuming the forbidden fruit – supposedly the secret of good and evil – only to finally ridicule it as a myth as relevant to human nature as the shaman’s turtle. Ramis’ complete debunking of Judeo-Christian lore through Black’s character takes another step in the second half of the film where he plays up his role as “the chosen one”, the messianic deliverer of the poor people (the “saviour” of Sodom no less – heh heh). In that, Black’s character is a conflation of Adam and Jesus and through the course of the film reveals both as equally absurd and irrelevent for humankind, the latter “saviour” myth a construction based firmly on ignorant superstitions designed by the religious elite to keep the populace in line (precariously one might add).
Ramis’ sacrilegious debunking is thorough and methodical, beginning with Cain and Abel. After slaying his brother Abel, Cain leaves his village to escape the wrath of his Father Adam, the head of a tribe who believe wholeheartedly in doing the Lord’s will. However, Cain (as played by the marvellous David Cross) is not a villain. Indeed, he too is a Rationalist and as such, a moral relativist ready to do whatever it takes to suit his own self-interest, his screen likeability obfuscating any notion of absolutist good and evil – his literary antecedent is “the scoundrel”. Indeed, Ramis ridicules those who have an absolutist morality – inevitably the deluded, morally hypocritical religious leaders of tribes (first that of the Biblical descendents of Adam and Eve and second the Hebrew nation as led by Abraham). Cain’s father – who rules the tribe as interpreter of “the Lord” – thinks so highly of men but so little of women that he considers his own daughter a “lay” whom he gives away to the visiting Black as an act of hospitality (just as the Biblical Lot did to his daughters in the Biblical Sodom story): Black is delighted at the prospect of a God-given easy lay only to find out that the daughter is a lesbian.
Abraham – the father of Judaism - is a true nutter who is prevented from sacrificing his protesting son only by the timely intervention of the two rationalist cavemen Black and Cera – symbolically the intrusion of Darwinist “truth” into religious “myth”.
Here, Ramis presents an absolute travesty of Judaic folklore in the manner of his early work for the American satirical institution National Lampoon Magazine where he – alongside such satirists as Doug Kenney – first perfected his talent as co-screenwriter of National Lampoon’s Animal House and director of National Lampoon’s Vacation. Indeed, one might be tempted to think of Year One as “National Lampoon’s Old Testament”. Abraham, whose son is a brat, believes that as a pact with his God, he must cut off the tip of his penis – just the foreskin mind you – an act he also intends to carry out on Black and Cera, who understandably flee (accompanied by the thrill seeking Isaac) for the promises of abundant whores in Sodom, a city that the blathering deluded asexual idiot that is Abraham (cleverly played by Hank Azaria) insists is set to be smitten by the same Lord who apparently considers genital mutilation a sacred covenant between humanity and divinity but sex for money a sin worthy of genocide. As such – known of course as “circumcision” – is a founding myth of Judaism (where it indeed signifies the holy pact between Abraham and God – or “Yahweh” as the Jews name their particular deity), Ramis effectively mocks the Jewish religion as founded on the gibberish of a deluded madman obsessed with cutting off his own penis – indeed, Ramis slyly relates the emphasis on genital mutilation or genital control found in most monotheistic religions (echoing the analysis also found in Dawkins’ The God Delusion).
BLACK AND CERA AT THE PREMIERE
Having thoroughly debunked the Old Testament creation myths, Ramis moves onto Sodom, presided over by a King (who presciently is prepared to put political expediency above any religious belief) and a High Priest (campily played as a flaming homosexual by Oliver Platt). Sodom’s religion is polytheistic. Living in the desert of Judea without rain has led these superstitious orgiasts to sacrifice virgins to the Gods in the hope of being blessed by rain. The sacrifices have become – like those of the Mayan civilization depicted in Apocalypto (Catholic director Mel Gibson’s follow-up to the homo-erotic sado-masochistic pornography that was The Passion of the Christ) – public spectacles; grand entertainment to pacify the masses into believing in their self-appointed “holy men”. As ridiculous as this belief in sacrificing virgins to bring on rainfall is, it is little different to Ramis than the near-sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham upon which the Judaic religion is founded. Ridiculing religion allows Ramis free reign for the blasphemous indulgence of Biblical subversion, which he does with considerable aplomb.
Indeed, all religious authority here seeks one thing – to regiment and control the individual, politically, culturally and sexually. Thus, Black’s status as rationalist is in his assertion – echoed in the rhetoric of the Self-Help movement – that he alone has the power to shape his own destiny: he is guided only by his individual rationalist will and is not answerable to any religious code.
Indeed, all religious codes would enslave the individual – such is the machinations of power when religion has a political foothold over any collectivized society which would hold “blasphemy” a death-penalty offence (a true absurdity given this film’s condemnatory view of organized religion). In this, Year One is a repudiation of religion and an affirmation of the individualized destiny that comes with rationalism – hence Black’s highly symbolic actions at the end of the film in renouncing the Messianic status heaped upon him: there is no Jesus to save the world from sin. Amusingly, it is God’s children who are the most vicious and religion alone which permits the most barbaric and inhumane actions – from human sacrifice to slavery to genital mutilation as empty, meaningless religious ritual. God’s way (whether monotheist or polytheist) here is death, murder, mutilation and destruction – the way of madmen and hypocrites.
Monty Python’s Life of Brian exposed Judeo-Christian lore as absurd, Year One condemns it as sheer madness and attempts to rescue whatever humanity is left in the Bible after it has been thoroughly infested by a Darwinist truth. Thus, Ramis’ triumph in Year One – the first step in a revisionist treatment of Biblical stupidity – is to rescue Sodom from its Biblical fate and make it exemplary of the human condition: from sexual excess to religious monstrosity to political expedience Sodom becomes a microcosm of humanity, a debauched moral relativism which reveals human frailty as much as it does human nature. Sodom is human nature here and God, well, God – whether mono or polytheist – is the unseen, unfelt, irrelevant construction of deluded madmen, either asexual to the point of mutilating their own genitals or morally hypocritical about gender and power. In this Year One is perhaps the first comedy to tackle religion directly informed by the political atheist movement popularized since the publication of Dawkins’ The God Delusion. The belief in God here, to the humanist Ramis, is indeed a delusion, a moronic one at that.
