2023-08-08 00:05:10
Updated Tuesday, August 8, 2023 – 00:05
The series, the movies, the chatter of viral characters and the self-stories of politicians… Everything is based on stories that travel from humiliation to personal affirmation.
Amadeo Llados, personal trainer.Lionel Shriver “I really sympathize with men. I know they feel abandoned, defenseless and degraded” Carmen Mola “We are not prudish writers. If we are writing about evil, we are going to reflect it on its end”
There is a dotted line that connects Fleabag with Detective Blanco from Carmen Mola’s books and that goes through the superhero movies that will arrive in September, through Will Smith’s rehabilitation, through Pedro Sánchez’s Manual of Resistance and by Amadeo Llados, the coach who came out of alcoholism to create a new elite of muscular Spaniards, millionaires and clients of his services. “People just want redemption stories,” says a character in Lionel Shriver’s novel The Body’s Motion Through Space (Anagram). And how can we go against him if that scheme of the sinner who becomes virtuous after hitting bottom is everywhere, of the chubby who, thanks to the force of willruns marathons and the juvenile delinquent who finishes Law and opposes a judge.
“Redemption is a Christian concept that has been used a lot in the fundamentalist communities of the new Christians, because being born again and becoming a different self, that path of self-salvation is well suited to what many people are looking for“, Shriver explained to EL MUNDO in a recent interview. “It is the same message that the business world constantly sells. Buy this shirt so that the world sees you as a different person. A better person. Wear this perfume and you will be attractive to others. Get out of yourself and come live our mythical Nirvana. Many people are selling this idea of redemption as entering a whole new self, free from the deceptions and tortures we all suffer. The world of fitness offers it through physical transformation: suffer in the gym and you will earn your way to a new you that will be strong, beautiful, self-possessed and capable of everything, instead of this mean, weak and sad creature. what you are now.”
What does this obsession with redemption mean? “I think it has to do with the relationship we have today with the idea of evil. Or more than a relationship, with the attitude of denial that we have towards the idea of the maHe, just as we deny death”, says the writer Gabriel Albiac. “The understanding of evil has become a central problem for our world“, adds screenwriter Isabel Vázquez. “We have gone from pure evil to the desire to understand evil. In my trade, a lot of people have Wicked as a reference. Wicked was a 2001 musical that took the witch from the tales and invited her to explain why she was the way she was. It is a change of perspective in which we do not feel entirely safe yet. Let’s say redemption is a low risk approach to dealing with evil at this time“. And one more opinion to broaden that idea: “Within the Catholic Church there is a more or less progressive vision that says that we are all already saved from the death of Jesus,” says the biblical scholar Jaime Vázquez, author of Los papeles of the Dead Sea.”That’s the line that leads to saying, for example, that hell doesn’t exist.”What do we do with evil then? Turn it into entertainment, into a dance step we call redemption..
Vzquez explains that redemption is represented in the Bible in two central figures, Jesus Christ and Moses, but which has a collective meaning. Moses redeems the Jews, frees them from Egypt, just as “Jesus frees men from the slavery of sin.” They do not save themselves but their people. “That idea of individual salvationHe is, in any case, in Paul’s letters to the Romans and the Corinthians and, perhaps also something, to the Galatians”. Vázquez’s thesis is that this vision of redemption as a meritocratic individualist club has to do with the intellectual halt of Protestant theology, after decades of leadership. Impoverished in their thinking, many Protestant congregations have specialized in a literal and pragmatic interpretation of religion, a vision easy to sell why people are sinful or virtuous. “It doesn’t strike me as a very interesting conception. I prefer to think of the relationship between good and evil as a Platonic dialectic“.
The model of redemption that fascinates us in 2023 has less to do with Jesus Christ than with Lord Jim, the character of Joseph Conrad: a handsome boy with every imaginable charm who, in negligence (or perhaps it was in a stroke of bad luck), a ship of which he was captain sinks and he becomes, at least before himself, the cause and unfortunate survivor of the tragedy. From that moment on, Jim dedicates his life to making merits that erase his dishonor. “Only Jim never gets to feel that he redeems his guilt. And he ends up very badly,” explains Albiac, an attentive reader of Conrad. And that is the big difference with contemporary redemption, almost always directed towards the happy ending.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge y Andrew Scott, en ‘Seabag’.
There are exceptions. “Do you know which current series has a very complex vision of redemption? Fleabag,” says Isabel Vázquez. “The character of Phoebe Waller-Bridge comes from a tragedy for which she is responsible, and when she breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the audience, to us, mocks any expectation we may have of redemption. In fact, he keeps doing whatever he wants, repeating himself over and over again and making jokes about all the codes he breaks.” Of course, as the series progresses, viewers begin to suspect that this rebellion against guilt is a way to reach a moral acceptance of themselves by the long way. “Fleabag becomes a redeemed sinner for a contemporary viewer who can’t stand self-righteous characters.”
It does not seem easy to reach that path of redemption in which the pain for wrongdoing or self-inflicted is not resolved through some slightly easy epic story. In which running a marathon validates 10 years of erratic life. We all intuit that there has to be a less sanctimonious and more radical way of thinking about what we are ashamed ofbut how to find it?
Because, in general, we all think that the evil we have done in life is due to carelessness or weakness rather than because we are horrible people, right? “That is true in part, but only in part. And it is a very comfortable position,” Albiac replies. “Evil must be considered with courage, because without evil there is not even freedom. Freedom is the ability to face evil, to choose in the face of evil. Without evil there would be no ethical content.”
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Saber ms
#fucking #redemption #story #live #mythical #Nirvana