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 comes to shove, Tolkin’s script adopts a staunchly humanistic take: The Mimi Rogers character asks God why his universe doesn’t make sense. Like most people, she thinks life should be a democracy and that God should behave like an altruistic politician who acts in our best interests. You hear this all the time; critics of organized religion constantly say things like, “There is no way a just God would send a man like Gandhi to hell simply because he’s not a Christian.” Well, why not? I’m certainly pulling for Gandhi’s eternal salvation, but there’s no reason to believe there’s a logic to the afterlife selection process. It might be logical, and it might be arbitrary; in a way, it would be more logical if it was totally arbitrary. But the idea of questioning God’s motives will always be a fiercely American thing to do; it’s almost patriotic to get in God’s face. I’m pretty sure a lot of my friends would love the opportunity to vote against God in a run-off election. Even I’d be curious to see who the other candidate might be (probably Harry Browne).
In contrast, 1999’s The Omega Code is much like Left Behind in that it doesn’t really offer any options besides buying into the whole born-again credit union. Since both stories are so dogged about the Book of Revelation, they share lots of plot points (i.e., two Israeli prophets screaming about the Second Coming, the construction of a church on The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, a miracle agricultural product that will end world hunger, etc.). The main difference is that The Omega Code has ties with Michael Drosnin’s The Bible Code, arguably the goofiest book I’ve ever purchased in a lesbian bookstore. Drosnin’s book claims the Torah is actually a three-dimensional crossword puzzle that predicted (among other things) the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin; more importantly, it allows computer specialists to learn just about anything—the date of the coming nuclear war (2006), the coming California earthquake (2010), and the best Rush album (2112). I have no idea why I bought this book (or why it was assumed to be of specific interest to lesbians), but it forms the narrative thread for The Omega Code, a movie that was actually less watchable than Left Behind. Surprisingly, The Omega Code earned about three times as much as Left Behind ($12.6 million to $4.2 million), even though it was made with a much smaller budget ($8 million and $17.4 million, respectively).
I’m not sure why The Omega Code made more at the box office than Left Behind; it’s kind of like trying to deduce why Armageddon grossed more than Deep Impact. But the most plausible explanation is that Left Behind tried a marketing gamble that failed: It was released on video before it was released in theaters. At the end of the VHS version of Left Behind, there is a “special message” from Kirk Cameron. Kirk appears to be standing in the Amazon rain forest while explaining why the movie went to Blockbuster before it went to theaters. “You are part of a very select group,” Cameron tells us, “and that group makes up less than one percent of the country…[but] what about the other 99 percent of the country?” The scheme by Left Behind’s production company (an organization that calls itself Cloud 10) was to have every core reader of Left Behind see the film in their living room in the winter of 1999 and then instruct each person to demand it be played theatrically in every city in America when it was officially released on February 2, 2000. “We need you to literally tell everyone you know,” Kirk stressed in his video message.
I was working as the film critic for the Akron Beacon Journal in early 2000, and—all during January—I kept getting phone calls from strangers, telling me I needed to write a story about some upcoming movie that I had never heard of; I’ve now come to realize that these were Left Behind people. I can’t recall if the film ever opened in Akron or not. Regardless, there is a part of me that would like to see this as an example of how Left Behind is different from other kinds of entertainment. Its audience truly felt it had a social and spiritual import that far exceeded everything else that opened that same weekend (such as Freddie Prinze Jr.’s Head Over Heels). And I’m sure that some of the people who called me that January truly did believe that a Kirk Cameron flick could save the world, and that it was their vocation to make sure all the sinners in suburban Ohio became aware of its existence. However, I can’t ignore my sinking suspicion that the makers of this movie merely assumed their best hope for commercial success was to manipulate the very people who never needed a movie or a book to learn how to love Jesus. They took people who wanted to rescue my soul and turned them into publicists. Which makes me think the people at Cloud 10 are probably a few tiers below Stalin, too.
There are eleven books in the Left Behind series, and many have excellent subtitles like The Destroyer Is Unleashed and The Beast Takes Possession, both of which may have been Ronnie James Dio records. I am not going to read any more of them, mostly because I know how they’re going to end. I mean, doesn’t everybody? I went back and read the Book of Revelations, which doesn’t make much sense except for the conclusion—that’s where it implicitly states that Jesus is “coming soon.” Of course, Jesus operates within the idiom of infinity, so “soon” might be 30 billion years. Sometimes I find myself wishing that the world would end in my lifetime, since that would be oddly flattering; we’d all be part of humanity’s apex. That’s about as great an accomplishment as I can hope for, since I just don’t see how I will possibly get into heaven, Rapture or otherwise.
When I was a little boy, I used to be very thankful that I was born Catholic. At the time, my Catholicism seemed like an outrageous bit of good fortune, since I considered every other religion to be fake (I considered Lutherans and Methodists akin to USFL franchises). Over time, my opinions on such things have evolved. But quite suddenly, I once again find myself thankful for Catholicism, or at least thankful for its more dogmatic principles. I’m hoping all those nuns were right: I’m angling for purgatory, and I’m angling hard.
Acknowledgments
Due to the schizophrenic nature of this collection, it would be impossible for me to thank everyone who—at one point or another—intangibly contributed to this manuscript. Consequently, I’m not going to try. However, I must express an avalanche of kudos to my editor at Scribner, Brant Rumble. Beyond being a brilliant editor, Brant might be the last sincere human in all of New York.
Additionally, there are a few random cats whose editorial insight directly influenced certain passages, and they are as follows:
Kate Condon