In the name of the mother? the daughter? and the womanly spirit?

April 30, 2009 at 5:26 am · Filed under Uncategorized

First, we have the Bible; written by many, but the King James version is used more often.  Then we have Dogma; written by stand up comedian Kevin Smith.  Total opposites with alot of similarities.  Now there are all sorts of directions I could go with this movie, but I’m only going to pick one.

How about a summary for those who have not seen it.  So there are these two angels named Lokey and Bartlby (sorry if I totally spell these names wrong….I promise I’ll get it right for my paper).  Lokey was the angel of death at one time.  Bartlby didn’t like all the killing of sinful souls so he convinced Lokey to quit and seek something less bloody.  Since he quit, God sent them to roam Earth with us insignificant humans until the end of time.  If that wasn’t bad enough, when the world ends, they get to sit outside the gates of Heaven forever!!!!  Well, they find a loophole that says if they become mortal and pass through the arches of a certain catholic church, then their sins are forgiven and off to Heaven they go.

Meanwhile, their is a woman who we find out is the descendant of Jesus Christ who must be saught out to stop these two angels.  Why?  Because there is a catch to the two angels walking through those arches.  Somewhere in the Bible it says basically that since God’s word is the last word, that means that the angels getting back into Heaven would go back on God’s word.  And because of that, the world would cease to exist.  So this last kin, Bethany (haha….Bethany….Bethlahem…..get it?), has to stop these two angels.

The journey goes on and Bethany and God (played by Alanis Morisette) end up saving existance.

Now my focusing question is why does Kevin Smith’s interpretation of a biblical soap opera depict God, Bethany, Muse all as women?  As most of us know, the Bible portrays God and Jesus as men.  I like that Kevin Smith portrayed them as woman and Muse even said that she wrote the story of the Bible for those people to be women, but the male writers changed it so that they would be men.  I think that is very interesting coming from a woman’s point of view as well as a catholics point of view.  Growing up Catholic, this sure puts a cool spin on the story that was taught to me.

I think it will be interesting for me to find what other people think of this topic and I am very open to suggestion if anyone has any.

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