The Identical (2014), by Dustin Marcellino

*

This is one of those..."hint movies." They have the perpetual hint of trash about them, but they're consistently circling the trash drain, never quite dipping too deep down below the waters. Eventually, there is a moment of release--in many of these films, there are sometimes several such moments--but the whole affair feels too solid, too well-disguised, for the distinct traces be properly identifiable. My first true Christsploitation movie on the site (Noah didn't count) is The Identical, a movie about the story of Elvis with a Christian spin--and man, does it make some weird decisions.

Based loosely on the possibilities of the fact that Elvis Presley had a miscarried twin brother, we follow the Hemsleys, a Depression-era couple whose child turns out to be twins. They can take care of one child, but not the other, and so when William Hemsley goes to a tent sermon led by Reverend Wade, he hears the words "It is better to give than to receive" and takes them perhaps a bit too literally. You see, Mrs. Wade has miscarried multiple times and it seems unlikely that the Wades will ever have a child. This is going where you think it's going--yes, William wants to give one of the babies to the Reverend and his wife. His own wife resists as first but fortunately they resolve it offscreen, and little Dexter Hemsley becomes Ryan Wade. The Hemsleys hold a funeral for their child (...why?) and we cut away to instead follow Ryan Wade as he grows up. His father wants him to be a preacher, but Ryan is much more interested in music, particularly the nascent genre of rock and roll. His father continually punishes him for sneaking out to rock clubs (or "honky-tonks" as he calls them) and eventually makes him join the Army...hey, just like that Elvis guy! (Except Elvis was drafted, not pushed in by his dad.) Ryan eventually hears about rock legend Drexel "The Dream" Hemsley, who maintains the same level of fame in this universe as Elvis; after marrying his girlfriend Janey, Ryan decides to enter a Drexel Impersonator contest which the King himself is judging. He's so good that he gets a deal as "the Identical," a Drexel cover artist who gets paid as much as Drexel himself (!!!). Eventually however Drexel dies in a plane crash (just like Elvis?) and Ryan retires, aiming to make peace with himself and his father, as well as his birth family when he learns of them. He decides to return to music in the end, so that his brother's dream can live on.

This movie is actually pretty sweet, even though I don't share its religious values, and even though it twists history to do what it yearns to do. The acting is good, the sentiment seems real, the filmmakers obviously adore and respect Elvis, the direction is pretty solid, it's pretty-looking, and it actually lands quite a few of its jokes. Of course, I may speak from a position of relief that this movie is never truly uncomfortable (except for one possible moment explored below); still, Stockholm Syndrome is better than what I can usually hope for in a movie like this, so I'll take it.

That having been said. It's still a movie about an Elvis impersonator who is as successful as Elvis himself. It's still about a movie put in that situation by a couple faking their child's death to cover up a simple adoption situation. (Did they seriously think adoption wasn't a thing during the Depression?) It's still a movie where a husband tells his wife to her face, "Maybe we can just give up the one?" It's still a movie where the first dialogue that isn't narration is some incredibly jarring yelling. But that's not the full depth of it. For one thing...Elvis exists in this universe. I have seen this commented on by everyone who's ever reviewed it, but it bears repeating time and time again: Elvis Presley is mentioned to exist and have the same career as he did in real life in this universe. Meaning this is a movie about a hugely successful Elvis impersonator who is himself impersonating an Elvis impersonator. A single line that includes Elvis in this universe undoes the whole dynamic, but that's really only the biggest problem.

Janey is originally seeing someone else when she re-enters Ryan's life, working as a nurse. However, he keeps creeping on her, calling her from work over and over, and sending her flowers. Worse, he uses the fact that she accidentally revealed the identity of one of her patients--Drexel Hemsley's dying mother--to creep on, well, a stranger's mother, because when Ryan decides to creep into the room of the hospital where Janey works to see Mrs. Hemsley, he doesn't know they're related. He explains to her, "I'm a big fan of your son's music and I just wanted to offer you a little prayer," but if someone came into my hospital room when I was sleeping and that was their explanation I would say something along the lines of, "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!" Admittedly, the conclusion to this creepiness results in the pretty-funny scene where Ryan and his boss from the auto shop show up to serenade Janey, getting arrested in the process--he convinces her to get a single cup of coffee with him, and we Gilligan Cut from his arrest to their getting married. Again, this movie does do some things right.

It's interesting because while the movie insinuates that rock and roll was invented by two white guys playing black guys' instruments (actually, from a metaphorical statement, that's...well I mean the white guys don't steal the instruments in this case...), it takes a strong stand against traditional conservative authority. Reverend Wade's treatment of Ryan is shown to be, if not abusive, then sincerely troubling, for both of them, especially when it results in the elder man's heart attack. The movie seems to say that that old way of yelling at your kids, making them follow in your footsteps whether they want to or not, telling them to "be a man," shipping them off to the Army for misbehaving...that hurts both of them, and only in letting it go do the old priest and his son find peace. When the cop shows up to bust the "honky-tonk" that Ryan sings at (with the term itself being a racially-charged phrase), he says to the mostly-black crowd the place is "dark and stinky" and that it's full of "reefers and devil music." Ryan tells him there's nothing wrong with the people there and gets a punch to the gut. Racism and intolerance towards certain types of music are condemned just as surely as that '50s household lifestyle is. Where I was perhaps a bit uncomfortable was where the movie had a scene set during the Six-Day War which was likely intended as an analogy for a modern-day pro-Israel message. It feels out of place with the rest of the movie, but, chemical weapons aside, the scene is framed to be more of a pro-Judaism message, which I support (though I know that associating modern Israel with Judaism can be uncomfortable for some). For a Southern white church in the '60s to include a Menorah in their church and to declare foreign Jewish folk to be God's Chosen People seems pretty progressive to me. This is sort of a setup to when Ryan finds out later that Mrs. Hemsley was Jewish, making him Jewish as well--a fact which seems to delight him. For once, I feel I can presume innocence, and feel comfortable believing that this movie is just pro-Jewish, which is much-needed in movies in the 2010s.

I have so much difficulty digging into the strangeness of this movie, and why they might have done it the way they did. I'm glad that its quirks exist, though, and I can be distracted by such gems as the confirmation that Drexel Hemsley did in fact star in a series of increasingly-shitty beach movies before his untimely demise, just like his real-life counterpart (err...impersonatee?). I can notice little bits like the fact that Ryan's adopted mom never ages even while Pastor Wade shrivels into an old mummy. I can look forward to the bizarre Tarzan yodel Reverend Wade lets out when he finds out Ryan knows the truth about his parentage. Yes, this is a "bad movie." And, it's part of a genre which I normally otherwise find to be really upsetting. But it largely avoids offense and thus carries enough of that elusive hint, that seductive trashy odor, to make it a classic for me.

* Call me crazy, but I looked over my copy a few different times and for the life of me, I swear this movie has no title card. My DVD actually stopped working after my last look-through, and appears to have died permanently! That's why I've used the poster instead, which, incidentally, is from IMDB.

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Book Club of Desolation #19: Left Behind (1995), by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

Disclaimer: If you are a person whose beliefs generally align with the views put forward in Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind series--i.e. you are a premillenialist dispensationalist Evangelical Christian--you probably will not want to read this review. If you are a fan of their prose I recommend similar caution. This is because whether you find such an action justifiable on my behalf or not, I am about to, as the expression sometimes goes, rip this book a new one.

And before I continue with this next entry in our Bookvember adventure, I want to give a secondary disclaimer to those of you who don't buy into the Left Behind mythos: I don't have anything against mainstream Christianity. While I have my own beliefs and I will confess that those beliefs sometimes rub up against Christianity, I recognize that typical Christian beliefs in the United States are relatively non-toxic. I write this with the recognition that there's no avoiding discomfort in a review such as this--but I really do have to share my opinions on this book, for the reaction it elicited in me.

Left Behind, for those of you unaware, is a series telling the tale of those "left behind" to face the Great Tribulation after the Rapture takes the forgiven to Heaven. In a general sense, the first book establishes the premise of the series while introducing our principle characters. There are the members of what will be called the Tribulation Force (a league of faithful Antichrist-fighters), and their allies: we focus primarily on adulterer pilot Rayford Steele and a reporter named Cam "Buck" Williams. There is a plot about how in the early days of the Rapture, an Israeli scientist named Chaim Rosenzweig figured out to fertilize desert sands without irrigation; for this, Israel suffered a massive assault from post-Soviet Russia, wherein not a single person was killed, apparently by the hand of God. In the wake of the Rapture the social order has developed further from this, moving towards a UN-led one-world government under the command of charismatic young Romanian politician Nicolae Carpathia. Carpathia--if you couldn't tell from the name--is the Antichrist, and our heroes of the Tribulation Force slowly uncover the conspiracy he's set in place to ensure the rise of his dominion.

Here's the thing about Left Behind: it is not an inherently bad idea. There is a lot of mileage to be gotten out of a Rapture story--perhaps because of the Left Behind series, there has been an embrace of the idea in pop culture, regardless of the degree of religious intent in its presentation. Both as a secular and religious idea, Left Behind has potential. If you want to tell a more secularized version of the story, you'd have your basic Post-Apocalyptic model, with some potential for fantasy exploration--you could pit your characters against demons, for example. You could keep it ambiguous if it's the Biblical End-of-the-World or just an event that resembles such. And if you wanted to tell it as a story meant to convert people to Christianity, that could work just as well! Christianity guiding principle is ostensibly salvation, and so even if it jiggles the rules on the Apocalypse a little bit--have a story where our heroes are saved by their actions in the face of their final test! Left Behind thinks it's telling the latter story (and I'm sure at least some of the heroes go to Heaven in the end), but like a lot of works by Evangelicals, where it chooses to put its focus is where it becomes a thing of malice rather than mercy.

The issue with any sort of Rapture story is that the idea of a Rapture is inherently exclusionary. Typically, the estimates on the total of souls allowed into God's Kingdom by Rapture-believers represent a distinct minority of the human race. This usually contrasts the pop culture depiction of the Rapture wherein enough people are gone that society as we know it has collapsed. That was what I was expecting in Left Behind--cities on fire, planes crashing to the ground, power outages, cats and dogs living together...mass hysteria. Instead, the basic economy stays intact, airlines stay open, there is comparatively little social strife en masse...almost implying that few people were taken to Heaven in the end. And we do get specifics on who was taken, and who wasn't.

To begin with, all fetuses are taken to Heaven. This is a prelude to the scene wherein we learn about the abortion clinics who encourage people to get pregnant and have abortions just so they can stay in business. And the people who get pregnant and abort just for fun. I've already opened enough Pandora's Boxes, so I'm not going to go much further with this thread, but if the authors actually believe these clinics and people exist, that is absolutely repugnant of them. At best, they are emotionally manipulative; and frankly, folks, I'm just tired of all this hand-wringing hate against women who just don't want or can't have children.

Then there is the telling passage where we are learning about how babies and children almost universally vanished. That is a bit more bearable to me because it's less emotionally manipulative; then they say "even a few teenagers" were Raptured. That's some pretty telling phrasing there. Whether it's the opinion of the character saying that or the voice of the authors speaking through them, someone in the equation believes all but a few teenagers are so corrupt that they deserve eternal torture. I could dig my grave even deeper by wondering why any of these people deserve eternal torture for things like adultery or looking at porn (or "magazines which fed my lust," as the milquetoast prose would have it), but the more I tried to avoid looking for stereotypical opinions in the book, the more I found them. Of course the two old white Evangelicals writing about the Apocalypse believe that once puberty hits you you're worthy of damnation. Why would adolescent mistakes be forgiven by an all-benevolent deity, amirite?

I also don't really need to say that the book is racist, but when you've got a whole lot of celebration over Jews converting to spread the word of Christ, it's a little hard to avoid. Similarly, a lot of attention is drawn to the fact that the Antichrist is Romanian. Fiction is a slippery thing, in that it doesn't always represent the heart and soul of the creator, but if you do something too many times it's going to seem like a telling statement. I don't entirely know why LaHaye and Jenkins think Eastern Europeans are so sinister but it gets draining quickly.

Really, that's my issue with Left Behind: I went into it expecting better. The series is probably the most famous line of distinctly-genred "Christian fiction" books I know, and consequently, I was expecting something milder, more optimistic. And more convincing, because if Christian fiction is truly Christian it won't merely be entertaining. This sort of fiction should be convincing people to join up with what the authors (think they) practice, but instead it frames such a choice as one motivated by fear and exclusion. What is more is that, like a lot of the movies we've seen hitting theaters recently, it attempts to preemptively dismiss those who disagree with its view. This is not inherently an unsound argument strategy--you can toss out an opposing argument before it's aired, but it depends on how much you strawman your opposition, and how expertly you expose the irrelevance of such opposition. Near the end, the characters dismiss moderate Christians and their refusal to focus on the real problems of judging drug-users, abortion-havers, and porn-readers simply because the authors make them dismiss such people. After all, people, this is the Antichrist on the line, people!

Let's talk about this Antichrist. Nicolae Carpathia. What frustrates me is that that name is almost genius. He sounds like a fucking Doc Savage villain, and in a melodramatic, over-the-top pulpy atmosphere a character with that name could be used brilliantly. But this is meant to instead be a "subtle" tip-off that the head of the UN is the Son of Satan himself. The more I read that name the more I felt like the authors thought I was an idiot--that I couldn't figure out this guy was the Antichrist unless his name was some equivalent of "Damien Draculaston." I suspect from a certain point of view they do view their readers as not overly clever; that's why we're informed that Carpathia's enemies are heroic (i.e. masculine) via the fact that they have names like Rayford Steele, Buck Williams, Dirk Burton, and of course, Steve Plank. Maybe it's, yknow, "Plawnck," like the scientist, but if they mean like a plank of wood then it sounds like something Mike and the Bots would have called Reb Brown during Space Mutiny. If I can carry this tangent further, I have to comment on the fact that Rayford Steele's loved ones call him not "Ray" but "Rafe." "Rayford" is bad enough, but what could compel a writer to pen a series featuring a man named "Rafe Steele" as the protagonist?

Returning, though, to Carpathia--no, his name was not the only beef I had with him. Repetitious padding is what comprises most of Left Behind, but you will get so tired of hearing how Carpathia is handsome, famous, charming, the Sexiest Man Alive (which gets played up a huge deal), and 33 years old. Yes, I get it, he's 33 because that's how old Jesus was when he died--now I officially never want to read the words "33 years old" ever again. Then, the authors describe him on several occasions as "blond Robert Redford." NO. That is dishonest writing. If your fallback for physically describing your character is to compare them to a celebrity, you need another draft at best. Carpathia is set up to be charismatic because, as per the Christian tradition, he is a honey-not-vinegar sort of Antichrist, so nice and likable and talented that no one ever criticizes him, which is definitely an accurate and realistic view of humanity. We totally have people and things in our culture which are never criticized by anybody, right? In choosing this approach for him as a character, the authors make him come across as obviously evil--literally too good to be true. We humans wouldn't react to a man like him with adoration: we'd ask what he's selling.

Of course, another (possibly) unintended effect is that the book seems to encourage suspicion of those who bring peace and innovation. People have applied the idea of a charismatic and likable Antichrist to real figures all throughout history--"Of course Obama created a health care system which benefited millions! Giving you what you want is how the Devil hooks yeh." The message seems to be that political allegiances between nations, like the UN, are steps towards an order which will be easy for the Antichrist to rule. Consequently, it also warns us of figures in power bearing messages of pacifism. Admittedly, there have been real dictators who have abused our desire for peace to unleash terrible war--whether it's tricking us into thinking a war will bring peace or lying about their intent until their power is secured. But I've seen that fear used as an excuse to fight vague threats--somehow the presence of a supposed Antichrist induces moral corruption, but the definition of "corruption" and how it manifests often seems as vague and nebulous as the present definition of "political correctness." You get people believing that literally every politician is the Spawn of Satan and then you get people voted in who are going to make sure there's no education system to tell them otherwise. But I digress.

Eos, bring the dawn; Athena, heal my brain. Left Behind was disappointingly paranoid, misogynist, and boring. If you love reading books where the same details are repeated until they become meaningless, this may be your book. Christians deserve better fiction than this, in terms of both theme and writing quality. Dodge it like it'll burn you--and don't let yourself settle for this!

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