“The Only Christ We Deserve”: Meursault Meets The Dude
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Christ-figures, in literature and cinema, are always going to be problematic. The theological tail of the Jesus-comet is long and dense: attempts at transferring its energies to Christ-like creatures with exclusively human natures are always going to come up short. The trick to avoiding this artistic fate is, I think, to make it clear that allusions to Jesus Christ — redeemer, divine and incarnate Logos, God-Man, sacrificial lamb — are at best immanent allegories of a presumptively transcendent event. Whether one is Christian or not, it’s clear that there isn’t anyone quite like Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the anointed one. But perhaps there are people “like” Him. The scare-quotes indicate that the analogies and allegories go only so far, certainly not far enough. The scare quotes mean our efforts at seeing similarities between the divine and the human are inadequate when they are not outright failures. Any artistic imitatio Christi that does not fail will have a Christ-figure who is mostly not like Christus Victor, and where he or she is Christ-like it will be in an attenuated, highly distorted way.
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