Like Mulder in 'The X-Files', many people want to believe in something

Still from 'The Snow Society', by Juan Antonio Bayona, in which Roberto Canessa (Matías Recalt) prays after burying human flesh.

The first 15 minutes of

The Snow Society

are canonical and masterful. I would use them to explain in school how a story is set out and how the characters are characterized. With a superb economy of resources, Bayona tells who these young people are and why they behave this way after the accident, and in this narrative exercise a sequence in a church stands out. Thanks to it, it is clear to the viewer that religion is very important in the lives of these characters and in their way of understanding friendship and brotherhood. Without that sequence, the moral debates about anthropophagy that occupy much of the film's core would be incomprehensible or lame.

The Snow Society

is, to a large extent, a film about religious taboo: faith gives these castaways the spirit of solidarity they need to survive, but it also puts them in a destructive dilemma.

Of course, Bayona does not invent anything. That faith and those dilemmas are at the heart of the survivors' memories and are faithful to their stories and meditations, but highlighting their Catholic substratum is a narrative decision. All stories can be told from many points of view, focusing on certain aspects and ignoring others. The church scene puts religion at the center and takes away the secular universality of moral anguish. That is why this film challenges its time so deeply: its author has understood—perhaps without thinking about it, by pure absorption of the environment—that we live in religious times and that the secular view of the world is fading.

More information

The debate | Is Spain still Catholic?

This has nothing to do with the great organized religions, which in Western countries continue to decline (although their importance in the rise of Trumpist movements or in the escalation of war on the Israeli right should not be underestimated). Convents and seminaries are emptied of vocations, and parishes of parishioners, but spirituality gains prestige and relevance, and religious discourse permeates public life and culture in ways that are as subtle as they are unusual. Like Mulder from The

X-Files

, many people want to believe in something. With God dead and the homeland diluted, individualism and life without roots or strong community ties make this era fertile in millenarianisms, gurus and transcendent emotions that give meaning to the daily acceleration and banal consumerism. The viewer of

The Snow Society

, isolated in his Netflix subscription, envies the cohesion and brotherhood in faith of the victims of the Andes accident.

Thought and literature have responded to urban chaos with calls for retreat not unlike those of the hermits who founded some great religions. The apologies for the quiet, country, secluded and self-absorbed life, with the cult of holiness of Thoreau and his sacred book

Walden

, promote a new spirituality of simple things and communion with the earth. Since the pandemic, this narrative genre continues to be enriched, and any attentive reader can find a good handful of praise for the retreat in the best bookstores: from

Gozo

, by Azahara Alonso; to

The Little Life

, by José Ángel González Sainz, passing through the philosophical diatribes of Byung-Chul Han or the more political manifestos, such as the recently published

¡Silence!

, by Pedro Bravo.

In popular—or semi-popular—culture, it is worth dwelling on the complexity of

The Messiah

. The Javis already demonstrated a favorable sensitivity to religious sentiment in

The Call

. With

The Messiah

they explore the darkness of faith, but they do not do so from the secular denunciation to which the progressive mentality has accustomed us, but rather by adopting the point of view of those who look into the abyss and feel both its attraction and its panic. to jump The Javis understand very well the world in which they live and know that spiritual longing is the theme of our time. They present it as a tragedy that sometimes dresses up as farce and grotesque

kitsch

(they see authentic and deep pain where the majority only sees a meme), which is why they do not caricature it or denigrate it, but instead try to understand it.

I recognize that for someone like me, educated in anticlerical atheism, it is difficult to enter into certain games and overcome the contempt and mockery that everything religious arouses in me by instinct, but if an effort is not made to understand the substratum of irrational beliefs of today's debates, nothing is understood. Reason is a useless weapon to interpret many attitudes and manifestations that do not admit argumentative refutations or logical operations because they are emotional: when someone says they feel something, rational discussion is impossible, feelings cannot be refuted. Religion is behind many activisms—how many environmentalists speak of the planet in terms of divinity and understand their commitment as a transcendent sacrifice?—and many public discussions in which it does not matter who is right, but rather who is orthodox and who is wrong. heretic. Every day, a pure excommunicates an impure person. The book that best explains current radical politics or the dynamics of social networks is

Castiello against Calvino

, by Stefan Zweig.

Hence, redemptions and paths to perfection are also very successful, with all those public figures who flagellate themselves for their bad behavior and promise to be the best version of themselves. Sin, the nuclear element of all religious thought, governs in a way that disconcerts those born in more secular and frivolous times.

The need for transcendence, the desire for truth (or to be in the truth, to belong to the group of those who are saved) and paths to perfection move a disoriented world whose spirituality is sometimes expressed in a delicate and artistic way, and other times inspires righteous furies. very rude Exactly the same as in the years of the Counter-Reformation, when the sublime of Michelangelo coexisted with the bonfire of the auto-da-fé. Without the violence of then, of course, but only in Western democracies: let Salman Rushdie tell us how they spend them on other payments where the rule of law does not govern.

Maintaining a coherent and firm secular position is very difficult in such a context. Getting into Marx's beard and continuing to talk about the opium of the people is understandable, but also vacuous and counterproductive: in part, it has been the effectiveness with which we atheists kill God that has brought us here. Secularism has become so unaware of the spiritual dimension of intimate and community life that it now does not know how to deal with those emotions that previously regulated religious institutions and liturgies. Freed from them, today they express themselves in an entropy that threatens to burst the seams of reason.

Sign up here

for the weekly Ideas newsletter.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I am already a subscriber

_