Chuck Klosterman On Film And Television by Chuck Klosterman Page B

course, that’s also the point: There is no sophisticated reason for believing in anything supernatural, so it really comes down to believing you’re right. This is another example of how born agains are cool—you’d think they’d be humble, but they’ve got to be amazingly cocksure. And once you’ve crossed over, you don’t even have to try to be nice; according to the born-again exemplar, your goodness will be a natural extension of your salvation. Caring about orphans and helping the homeless will come as naturally as having sex with coworkers and stealing office supplies. If you consciously do good works out of obligation, you’ll never get into heaven; however, if you make God your proverbial copilot, doing good works will just become an unconscious part of your life.
    I guess that’s probably the moment where I just stop accepting all this born-again bullshit, no matter how hard I try to remain open-minded. Though I obviously have no proof of this, the one aspect of life that seems clear to me is that good people do whatever they believe is the right thing to do. Being virtuous is hard, not easy. The idea of doing good things simply because you’re good seems like a zero-sum game; I’m not even sure if those actions would still qualify as “good,” since they’d merely be a function of normal behavior. Regardless of what kind of god you believe in—a loving god, a vengeful god, a capricious god, a snooty beret-wearing French god, whatever—one has to assume that you can’t be penalized for doing the things you believe to be truly righteous and just. Certainly, this creates some pretty glaring problems: Hitler may have thought he was serving God. Stalin may have thought he was serving God (or something vaguely similar). I’m certain Osama bin Laden was
positive
he was serving God. It’s not hard to fathom that all of those maniacs were certain that what they were doing was right. Meanwhile, I
constantly
do things that I
know
are wrong; they’re not on the same scale as incinerating Jews or blowing up skyscrapers, but my motivations might be worse. I have looked directly into the eyes of a woman I loved and told her lies for no reason, except that those lies would allow me to continue having sex with another woman I cared about less. This act did not kill 20 million Russian peasants, but it might be more “diabolical” in a literal sense. If I died and found out I was going to hell and Stalin was in heaven, I would note the irony, but I really couldn’t complain. I don’t make the fucking rules.
    Just to cover all my doomed bases, I watched a few other apocalyptic movies after
Left Behind
: I rented
The Omega Code
and revisited
The Rapture
. The latter film—a 1991 movie starring Mimi Rogers—was a polarizing attempt to make the end of the world into a conventionally entertaining film, and I still think it’s among the decade’s more interesting movies (at least for its first seventy-five minutes).
The Rapture
opens with Rogers as a bored sex addict, and it ends with her dragging her child into the desert to wait for God’s wrath. Part of the reason so many critics like this film is because writer/director Michael Tolkin “goes all the way” and resists the temptation to end the film with an unclear conclusion. That’s commendable, but I wonder what the response would have been if Rogers didn’t question God at the very end; her character essentially wants to know why God plays with people like pawns and created a totally fucked world when making a utopia would have been just as easy (and though I realize these are not exactly the most profound of existential questions, it’s hard to deny that they’re not the most important ones, either).
    Within the scope of mainstream filmmaking—it was released on the same day as the Joe Pesci vehicle
The Super
—
The Rapture
clearly seems like a religious movie. But it’s really not, because it doesn’t have a religious point of view. When push