Updating Spirituality for Postmodern Audiences
This essay was written in 2017, when I was a Graduate student at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, in the context of Dr. Ellen Seiter’s Seminar in Television Theory.
Meditations on Good and Evil in Top of the Lake: Updating Spirituality for Postmodern Audiences
Introduction: Hollywood in Need of a Church
Last week, Justin Bieber cancelled the final fourteen scheduled dates of his “Purpose” world tour. The singer, arguably one the most internationally iconic pop stars for the millennial generation, explained that he was cancelling the tour for his “soul and well-being” [1]. It was later published by several tabloids that the reason for this abrupt cancellation was rooted in his relationship with Hillsong Church pastor Carl Lentz, and that Bieber was even thinking of opening his own church [2]. These headlines, despite their anecdotal and unreliable nature, are symptomatic of a growing trend toward the spiritual quest in contemporary pop culture.
Hillsong Church, a Pentecostal ‘megachurch’ originated in Sydney, Australia, has been described as the place “where the cool kids spend Sunday morning after Saturday night at the club” [3]. With branches in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Buenos Aires and more than eighty other cities worldwide, it is unobtrusively connected to the world of fashion, celebrity and hipster clichés. Their ceremonies, formally similar to rock concerts, feature loud music, bright light shows, wellness quotes and passionate crowds, a space where Christianity converges with pop culture. “I think there’s just a hunger amongst millennials for authenticity and genuine relationships and connection, something that changes them on the inside spiritually” [4], explains Pastor Judah Smith, who’s been dubbed ‘Hollywood’s A-List Pastor’ and is represented by a publicist.
In a postmodern world, characterized by the death of the traditional idea of God and the fortunate domain of the scientific framework, new generations look for socially acceptable ways in which they can explore their moral quandaries and satisfy their spiritual needs. Hipster pop ‘megachurches’ have successfully emerged to fill this void, but they’re not the only outlet for metaphysical explorations in popular culture. Film and television, mostly through fiction, have also developed a particular sensitivity for stories in which contemporary forms of faith, mystical questions about human existence and the clash between good and evil play fundamental roles.
Quite often, these explorations take place in the form of state-of-the-art twists to the classic crime genre, which is a perfect environment for religious and spiritual dilemmas. What’s the value of life? What’s the nature of evil? Is there justice in our world? Is redemption possible? These are all questions that traditionally belonged to an ecclesiastical, explicitly religious context, and today are very present in literary and cinematic crime dramas, frequently surrounded by an aura of prestige and critical acclaim. Time and again, these narratives take place in a rural context, evoking nostalgia and emphasizing the impact that evil can have in the traditional idea of the ‘community’.
Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake (2013) is a fascinating, extremely representative example of this tendency, yet managing to challenge common expectations in the genre. Her feminist approach to the implicit power dynamics in crime presents a clever spin to traditional genre tropes, and its explicit acknowledgement of philosophical questions in its story preceded and impacted that of other prestigious criminal dramas such as True Detective (2014) or Fargo (2014). Through the analysis of their characteristics, in these next pages we’ll delve into the ways in which contemporary fiction reframes and updates spirituality for modern-day, increasingly millennial audiences.
God is Dead: The Postmodern Need for Criminal Drama
Postmodernism, as a cultural and intellectual phenomenon, has had an undeniable impact in all the cultural productions of the last decades. Often associated with terms such as relativism, the end of teleology and progress and the death of history, it was perhaps best summed up by the Romanian and French playwright Eugène Ionesco, who became famous for his quote: “God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don’t feel so well myself” [5]. During the revolutionary May of 1968 in France, this sentence could often be seen written by graffiti artists on the walls of buildings [6].
Postmodernism was born as a reaction to the failure of the intellectual project of Modernism, which proposed a world of goals that gave meaning to life. Postmodernism is born, then, from the realization of the crisis of a model, but it’s not built by affirming its own principles, but by denying many of the characteristics of the previous one: modernity. The willingness to transcend, universalism, the existence of personal and collective destinies or the validity of utopias are all abandoned and deemed useless for the second half of the 20th Century.
This is perhaps best demonstrated by the evolution of a character like James Bond, who’s lived through the decades and, as a hero, has evolved from the willingness to save the world toward an individual conflict. In the latest episodes of the Bond saga, such as Sam Mendes’ Skyfall (2012), the character hasn’t only questioned his beliefs: he’s gone through a deep process of rebuilding his own identity and finding himself. Postmodern heroes don’t try to save the world anymore: they’re just attempting to save themselves.
The lack of universal references also prompted, as a consequence, the loss of God, religion and spiritual leaders as important motifs in artistic creation. Long gone were the days of deeply metaphysical filmmakers such as Carl Theodor Dreyer or Robert Bresson. In other words, if we don’t believe in external paradigms anymore, what’s our model, but ourselves? There’s no need for mythology and doctrine in a postmodern world: the notion of human beings as completely independent leads necessarily to self-reference and subjectivity. As Dr. M. Gail Hamner expresses:
“Globalization still carries many of the cultural sensibilities of postmodernity, particularly its weary cynicism in the face of the failed certainties of our modern predecessors, including the certainty of God’s salvific force. Globalization constitutes itself around secularity (or ‘postsecularity’); it floats on the surfaces of history and being, and wafts religiosity through the burners of ‘religion without religion’. In standard accounts, even when today’s globalized world takes religion seriously, it rejects appeals to transcendence as outmoded, false, and delusional. Transcendence has been ‘put under erasure’ by immanence.” [7]
This intellectual and cultural trend has had a huge impact that goes far beyond artistic creation: according to a recent study, a sharply declining 27% of young Americans attend religious services on a weekly basis [8]. Nevertheless, as explained in the introduction, the need for some sort of spiritual reflection and catharsis is extremely present, even in young people: it could be argued that it’s inherent to the human conscience and, regardless of the predominant trend, will adapt in one form or another –although this is surely a question worth exploring in many more pages of another line of work.
The Power of the Self: A Postmodern Interpretation of Spiritual Desire
In this context, artistic content has attempted to deal with spiritual (that is, non material) longings and speculations in a postmodern, postreligious era to different degrees of success. One of its most successful iterations has been the application of mythology to the dynamics of self-reflectiveness: rather than automatically being able to shelter under the umbrella of a unifying religious myth, each person has become potentially responsible for his or her voluntary adoption of an ethical or spiritual code.
In fact, as Peter Brooks puts it, “the entity making the strongest claim to sacred status tends more and more to be personality itself” [9]. In other words, there are spiritual needs, but in a purely postmodern logic, they have more to do with the self than with the state of the world. In an interview with Michel Ciment, Jane Campion admitted: “I think that my generation is drawn to the spiritual and desires less to participate in the ways of the world. I myself have meditated for five years. It helps me to moderate myself. I’m more conscious too of my inner feelings. Often we are led to do things out of pure excitement when they don’t correspond to our profound selves.” [10]
The character of GJ (played by Holly Hunter) on Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake is a perfect example of this tendency. GJ, an androgynous Swiss spiritual leader, arrives at New Zealand with a group of troubled women, who hope GJ and Laketop will help them rediscover themselves. Based on a real spiritual leader named Krishnamurti [11], Campion has stated that she intended to make her a figure who was awake from her dreams, truly connected with her own reality. Consciously or unconsciously, the role that the character of GJ plays in the universe of the series is perfectly aligned with the aforementioned interpretation of religion in a postmodern world. Her advice as a leader is purely based on the exploration of the self, as she clearly expresses:
“So, you are on your knees? Good. Now die to yourself. To your idea of yourself. Everything you think you are, you are not. What’s left? Find out.”
The Rural Context: Religion and Nostalgia, An Inseparable Binomial
Queenstown, on New Zealand’s South Island.
Bemidji, Minnessota. Fargo, North Dakota. Luverne, Minnesota.
Vermilion Parish, Louisiana.
Chibnall, Dorset.
These are the locations where the stories of Top of the Lake, Fargo, True Detective and Broadchurch take place. Have you ever been there? It’s unlikely. These TV series aren’t located in big, well known cities, even though it’s where 80% of the population -and, even more, their viewership- in the U.S. lives [12]. It’s no coincidence that all these critically acclaimed criminal stories take place in such isolated spots: even though it’s true that the rural context provides an amazing scenery reflected in the wonderful cinematography of these series, it’s undeniable that these locations play more than an aesthetic role, as they end up being part of the stories themselves. Rural environments are inseparable from crime stories, in the same way that great urban metropolitan contexts are inextricably linked to modern superheroes. But why?
On the one hand, small villages are closed environments, easy to control and to know well for the local police: these are circumstances that provide a limited number of suspects and a comprehensible dimension to the crime. Unfortunately, the greatest criminal stories rarely work for televised drama: white-collar crime, financially motivated and committed by business and government professionals, is generally structural and difficult to understand by audiences. On the contrary, blue-collar crime, primarily small scale and for immediate beneficial gain to the individual, has names, faces and personal relationships imbued in it, thus making it easier to dramatize.
But that’s not the only reason. From a spiritual standpoint, there’s a deeper motivation that makes the rural context (our past as a society) an ideal location for criminal stories of Good and Evil, of Right and Wrong. It has to do with the concept of nostalgia:
“Nostalgia signals the felt tension between irrevocable loss and hope for a world that is different. This tension produces a practical or lived gap into which flows at once the desire for and foreclosure of a specific knowledge. (…) In an era in which ontological transcendence is scorned for the sake of fleeting truths, the practical, social knowledge garnered religiously will be received (felt) as nostalgic. In this light, both religion and nostalgia mark the yearning for a social, worldly place that is currently lost to us because the door to that place opens through the fragile conduits of transcendence. (…) Nostalgia channels the utopian impulse for human happiness.” [13]
In other words, Queenstown, Bemidji, Vermilion Parish and Chibnall are places that evoke our nostalgia for a past way of life that we connect with an idea of purity, of happiness, pure social interaction and, most importantly, the possibility of transcendence. As viewers, we yearn for those places where goodness existed in its most pure iteration, where the line between right and wrong was extremely clear. This clarity is nowhere to be found in the postmodern world, and we miss it.
When crime disrupts these idyllic past societies, we closely identify with the willingness of our heroes (detectives, police officers, private investigators) to restore everything that was good and pure in that world. As the character of Deputy Bill Oswalt (Bob Odenkirk) expresses to his colleague Molly at the end of Fargo’s first season: “I used to have positive opinions about the world, you know, about people. Used to think the best. Now I'm looking over my shoulder. An unquiet mind, that's what the wife calls it. The job has got me staring into the fireplace, drinking. I never wanted to be the type to think big thoughts about the nature of things and... All I ever wanted was a stack of pancakes and a V8” [14].
When Oswalt refers to the job and the fact that it’s making him think about good and evil (the nature of things), his process is parallel to that of the viewer of the TV series: the irruption of pure evil through a series of bad choices and a clear villain in Fargo’s first season is precisely what makes the series attractive to contemporary audiences. Millennials -and postmodern viewers of all ages- find in Noah Hawley’s writing an apparently agnostic opportunity to reflect about the nature of pure good and pure evil, personified in emblematic characters and extremely clear and metaphorical narrative arches (as illustrated on the next page). This structure is extremely clear in Fargo, but it’s fundamentally similar to that of Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake and Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective: a geographically beautiful rural place with a tight-knit community is disrupted by the presence of evil, and their heroes desperately try to restore the previous order.
The Spiritual Battle Between Good and Evil: Narrative Dynamic in Noah Hawley’s Fargo
“She’s Dead. Wrapped in plastic”: Crime, Religion and Gender Dynamics
If the viewing of a film or TV series can be a reflective, transcendent, or even religious experience, what could be the social consequences of its content? And more importantly, what are the political values inherent to this kind of experience? As a filmmaker, Jane Campion has often asked herself these questions, and the matters of diversity and representation as well as power dynamics between men and women are extremely present in her work, including Top of the Lake. Campion, the first woman in Cannes Film Festival’s history to win the Palme d’Or for The Piano (1999), openly states: “I think that feminist culture arose as a reaction to stereotypical representations, to male dominated perspectives. A lot had to be clarified.” [17]
Campion reframes the spiritual implications of the role of women in society in two interesting, almost revolutionary directions. The first one of them is related to the common perspective of women as victims of a crime. The notion of the woman as a victim is obviously deeply rooted in the Catholic myth, that saw Eve -and many other women throughout its sacred scriptures- as weak victims of persuasion, easily manipulated, tempted by evil, and to some extent guilty of their own fate. Crime dramas, traditionally, have always assigned women the passive role of victims of a crime (often after a sexual offense committed by a man). They are white, young, and sexually objectified, almost without exception. This happens in David Lynch’s seminal work Twin Peaks (1990) with the iconic character of Laura Palmer, but it’s also commonplace in the more contemporary interpretations of criminal drama that have been previously mentioned (True Detective, Fargo).
Campion, on the other hand, takes the traditional role of the woman / victim / object and transforms it into an active one in the first season of Top of the Lake. The pilot episode begins with a young girl named Tui Mitcham (who is not white) trying to drown herself in a lake: after she is rescued, a school nurse notices that Tui is pregnant. Robin Griffin, a police inspector from Sydney who specializes in working with children, is called to interview Tui at the police station and solve the mystery. Tui is different from traditional female victims in crime dramas in several aspects, beginning with the fact that she’s not dead. She has suffered statutory rape, which is a crime with deep implications about society and gender dynamics, but she is empowered, constantly makes her own decisions and has friends (both male and female) who create an informal network of support for her. This portrait of the character reframes what it means to be a female victim, and along with that of Griffin (played by Elisabeth Moss) opens new possibilities for the representation of women in crime stories.
The second area in which Campion, as a feminist writer, makes a strong and refreshing statement about the role of women regarding the spiritual aspects of society is that of the Paradise, a camp where a group of independent women have left their previous lives and their partners to find peace on a meditation retreat. The character of GJ, as introduced previously, is the enigmatic philosophic leader of the camp. In having a female be the leader of the retreat -even swapping the gender of the character, who was originally based on a male religious leader-, Campion gives female roles spiritual agency: women, in Campion’s films, are able to take the reigns of their own lives.
In that same direction, the women of Top of the Lake don’t need to follow a man to develop their own spiritual needs. This might seem a small detail, but it’s quite revolutionary when taking into account that women have been barred from the priesthood for centuries. The Catholic Church, as an institution, hasn’t recognized yet the right of women to be ordained, and isn’t likely to do so anytime soon [18]. In the reality presented by Campion, women don’t need men to reflect on their relation with ethics: it is entirely possible from a female perspective to write their own moral codes and apply them to their world.
Pain and Redemption: The Notion of Sacrifice as a Necessary Step
How is our consciousness formed? What role can images play in the construction of our own spiritual identity, who we are, who we want to become, and what we believe is right and wrong? Jacques Lacan argued that the sense of identity is formed and energized by visual images (first through a baby’s identification of self in a mirror), and completed only when one enters into the realm of ‘the symbolic’: the realm of culturally shaped signifiers that create signified reality in people’s minds [19]. The cultural construction of images plays a fundamental role in our interpretation of reality: this is why, for example, monsters that genuinely terrified audiences in the 1950s seem laughable by today’s standards. Contemporary psyches have been shaped by machines that have generated more digitally enhanced, albeit similarly fantastical, signifiers [20].
Therefore, there is a socially constructed series of images and themes related to spiritual growth that affect most crime dramas: many of them have already been presented in these pages. The power of the self and the idea of personal development; the rural context as a place for the nostalgia of the good old world; the intruder bringing temptation and the battle between good and evil; the role of women as victims, now questioned by feminist theory. But as criminal narratives approach their climactic resolution, there’s a trope that stands above all: the notion of pain and sacrifice as necessary steps in the hero’s journey toward redemption and spiritual growth.
Religion often operates under the principles of exchange, both metaphorically and quite literally: actions on Earth are traded for a better afterlife, in the same way that ‘indulgences’ were sold by Catholic priests in the Middle Ages to forgive small consequences of sin. Be good and be saved; pay and be saved. In the classic dynamics of pain and sacrifice, “a heavy price is often paid -sacrificing material goods and animals, self-sacrifice, and in extreme cases sacrificing other persons- to obtain something from the ‘holy’ other: God(s) or Nature” [21].
The image of sacrifice has a symbolic value for the community: even when practiced alone, sacrificial rituals imply and rely upon commonly held values and practices. They are rooted in common beliefs and goals, which is what makes them so unusual for the postmodern world, which has renounced them, and at the same time makes them so appealing in the realm of fiction. For thinkers like René Girard and Sigmund Freud, sacrifice reinforces the ‘social fabric’ of a society: it is designed to suppress “all the dissensions, rivalries, jealousies, and quarrels within the community. (…) Its purpose is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric.” [22]
Several examples support the essential role of sacrifice as a symbolic, archetypal theme in contemporary crime dramas like Fargo and Top of the Lake, and even European northern series like The Killing and The Bridge, both of them adapted for American audiences. A recurring issue is the basic sacrifice that police officers and detectives make in their lives: there’s no such thing as conciliation of the personal and professional lives when you work in law enforcement. This is the case of Officer Gus Grimly in Duluth, in Fargo: he wanted to be a postman but has to sacrifice his preference for a peaceful routine in order to preserve the peaceful status of his town. It’s also the situation of Detective Robin Griffin in Top of the Lake: she has to travel from Sydney back to the town she was born to solve the case, but also to take care of her dying mother.
Even greater sacrifices are often demanded of our heroes: in Top of the Lake, women are subjected to the domain of men, thus sacrificing their own independence, and are asked not to defy the status quo for the sake of stability in their community (a very clear interpretation of the use of sacrifice as a means to reinforce the ‘social fabric’). In all these cases, there’s a symbolic representation of individual sacrifice for the collective good. The logic behind this kind of narrative is genuinely spiritual (it has to do with one’s strong beliefs of what’s right and good), and is absolutely unbecoming of postmodern dynamics (which suppress common goals): therein lies its appeal.
New Age Scripts: Balancing Naïveté and Self-Awareness
Metaphysical exploration has always been common in criminal narratives: as stated before, they provide a context that’s particularly suitable for characters reflecting on the value of life, the nature of justice -or lack thereof- and challenging ethical choices. This exploration, though, doesn’t come without its risks: it’s worth noting that most of the cases that we’ve analyzed have been criticized at some point, either for their naïveté or for their arrogant presumption when dealing with spiritual matters.
True Detective is perhaps the clearest example of this tendency. In the first season of the series, Detective Rust Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey) startled the viewers with his reflections on life, death and ontology. Among his memorable quotes: “I contemplate the moment in the garden, the idea of allowing your own crucifixion”, or “I'd consider myself a realist, alright? But in philosophical terms, I'm what's called a pessimist. I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware” [23]. Every episode of the first season was filled with this kind of comments which, although a bit heavy-handed for some -including myself-, made the series an absolute critical success. The second season, though, didn’t have the same reception, featuring “the sort of lines Pizzolatto probably coined before closing the laptop and reclining in a seat, convinced he'd just come up with a classic” [24]. Much like Rust Cohle warned in the first season, the series had become too self-aware of its philosophical ambition for its own good.
This risk is also present in Top of the Lake’s willingness to explicitly reflect on human existence and the nature of good and evil. Part of GJ’s dialogue, although it could be understood within the realm of self-parody, can feel a bit naïve, yet eager to transcend: “In nature there is no death. Just a reshuffling of atoms”, she explains to her followers [25]. While some critics noted that the scenes involving her character were “among the most memorable parts of this series” [26], others considered that some subjects were too “dopily and solemnly” presented, and that it was a case in which “the empress” had “no clothes” [27].
This was also the case for Fargo, a generally acclaimed series that was accused of having a villain that was “the sort of philosophical assassin who spools out speeches about predators and apes and women raped by Rottweilers”, and a script that missed most “potential sources of ambiguity or pathos” [28]. In their search for spiritual transcendence, fiction writers have to strike a difficult balance between naïveté and arrogant self-awareness: it’s a challenge that doesn’t go unnoticed by most critics, but is generally rewarded by audiences eager of some level of depth in their nightly dramas.
Conclusion
Film and television play a fundamental role in defining today’s cultural imaginary and, by extension, they clearly contribute to shape contemporary societies. As viewers, we expect our own experiences to be reflected in the screen, but we also want fictional narratives to challenge our daily choices and question our beliefs: internal conflict, moral dilemmas and ethical quandaries are what make characters interesting.
Moreover, the presence of spiritual (that is, non-material) struggles in audiovisual narratives is increasing, as a consequence of a postmodern framework that doesn’t allow many other socially acceptable outlets for metaphysical questioning. From Justin Bieber’s Hillsong ‘megachurch’, to James Bond’s recent search for redemption and GJ’s female-only meditation retreat in Top of the Lake, the ways in which we understand the spiritual life are clearly changing and evolving toward pop culture. But what might be the consequences of a narrative medium increasingly worried about answering the spiritual needs of its audience?
The transition from the highly hierarchical and undoubtedly patriarchal domain of churches and religion in the Western world to that of spiritual questions explored through artistic creation and pop culture seems to have some advantages. Film, TV series, music and multimedia contents operate in a more flexible framework in which discourses are more easily questioned than those of traditional top-down institutions. There is room for dissent. Like Jane Campion’s work proves, the presence of oppressive stereotypes and classic structures in the media is indisputable, but they can be defied, and traditional narratives can be redefined. This context can provide a creative environment for contemporary ethical questions to arise, as it often happens with science fiction, another genre perfectly suited for spiritual explorations. As explained in these pages, most metaphysical elements in contemporary fiction are still strongly derivative from traditional religious dogmas. But there’s a chance that tomorrow’s narratives, freed from the impact of centuries of religious oppression, could go one step further and present alternative, secular options to approach the transcendent experience.
Bibliography
BENNE, Robert (1998). Seeing is Believing. Visions of Life Through Film. Lanham: University Press of America.
BRADATAN, Costica and UNGUREANU, Camil (Ed.) (2016). Cinema and Sacrifice. New York: Routledge.
BESSIÈRE, Irène; FOX, Alistair and RADNER, Hilary (Ed.) (2009). Jane Campion. Cinema, Nation, Identity. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
CONKELTON, Sheryl and NEWLAND, Joseph (Ed.) (2014). Free to Love: The Cinema of the Sexual Revolution. Philadelphia: International House Philadelphia.
DANT, Tim (2012). Television and the Moral Imaginary. Society Through the Small Screen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
DESILETS, Sean (2017). Hermeneutic Humility and the Political Theology of Cinema. Blind Paul. New York: Routledge.
DOWNING, Crystal (2016). Salvation from Cinema. The Medium is the Message. New York: Routledge.
FOX, Alistair (2011). Jane Campion. Authorship and Personal Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
GRAY, Jonathan and OUELLETTE, Laurie (Ed.) (2017). Keywords for Media Studies. New York: New York University Press.
HAMNER, M. Gail (2011). Imaging Religion in Film. The Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Audiovisual References
An Angel at My Table (1990). Director: Jane Campion. Writer: Janet Frame (original novel), Laura Jones (screenplay). Hibiscus Films, New Zealand Film Commission, Television New Zealand. Feature Film.
Bright Star (2009). Director: Jane Campion. Writer: Jane Campion. Pathé Renn Productions, Screen Australia, BBC Films. Feature Film.
Broadchurch (2013-2017). Director: James Strong, Paul Andrew Williams, et. al. Writer: Chris Chibnall, Louise Fox. Kudos Film and Television, Imaginary Friends, Independent Television (ITV). TV Series.
Fargo (2014-present). Director: Michael Uppendahl, Keith Gordon, Randall Einhorn, Noah Hawley, et. al. Writer: Noah Hawley et. al. MGM Television, FX Productions, 26 Keys Productions. TV Series.
Holy Smoke (1999). Director: Jane Campion. Writer: Anna Campion, Jane Campion. India Take One Productions, Miramax. Feature Film.
Luther (2010-present). Director: Sam Miller, Brian Kirk, Stefan Schwartz, Farren Blackburn. Writer: Neil Cross. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). TV Series.
The Bridge (Bron/Broen) (2011-present). Director: Henrik Georgsson, Rumle Hammerich, Charlotte Sieling, et. al. Writer: Camilla Ahlgren, Hans Rosenfeldt, Nikolaj Scherfig, et. al. Filmlance International AB, Nimbus Film Productions, Sveriges Television (SVT). TV Series.
The Killing (Forbrydelsen) (2007-2012). Director: Kristoffer Nyholm, Fabian Wullenweber, et. al. Writer: Søren Sveistrup, Torleif Hoppe, et. al. Danmarks Radio (DR), Norsk Rikskringkasting (NRK), Sveriges Television (SVT). TV Series.
The Piano (1993). Director: Jane Campion. Writer: Jane Campion. Ciby 2000, Jan Chapman Production, Australian Film Commission, New South Wales Film & Television Office. Feature Film.
Top of the Lake (2013-present). Director: Jane Campion, Ariel Kleiman, Garth Davis. Writer: Jane Campion, Gerard Lee. See-Saw Films, Escapade Pictures, Screen Australia. TV Series.
True Detective (2014-present). Director: Cary Fukunaga, John Crowley, Justin Lin, Daniel Attias, et. al. Writer: Nic Pizzolatto et. al. Anonymous Content, Passenger. TV Series.
Twin Peaks (1990-1991; 2017). Director: David Lynch, Lesli Linka Glatter, Caleb Deschanel, et. al. Writer: Mark Frost, David Lynch, Harley Peyton, et. al. Lynch/Frost Productions, Propaganda Films, Spelling Entertainment See (1990-1991). Showtime Networks, Rancho Rosa Partnership, Twin Peaks Productions (2017). TV Series.
[1] Justin Bieber Cancels ‘Purpose’ Tour Dates for His ‘Soul and Well-Being’, by Joe Coscarelly. New York Times: July 25, 2017.
[2] Justin Bieber's 'Spiritual Awakening' with Hillsong Church and Carl Lentz Puts Music Career in Jeopardy. TMZ: July 26, 2017.
[3] Inside Hillsong, the Church of Choice for Justin Bieber and Kevin Durant, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. GQ: December 17, 2005.
[4] Could Going to Celebrity Church Make Me Feel Better About Trump?, by Rachel Handler. MTV: June 12, 2016.
[5] As quoted in Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (2000) by Jules Chametzky, "Jewish Humor", p. 318.
[6] ¡Dios ha muerto y Marx, también!, by Raimundo Montero. El País, July 27, 1998. Printed Edition.
[7] HAMNER, M. Gail (2011). Imaging Religion in Film. The Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Page 79.
[8] Could Going to Celebrity Church Make Me Feel Better About Trump?, by Rachel Handler. MTV: June 12, 2016.
[9] BESSIÈRE, Irène; FOX, Alistair and RADNER, Hilary (Ed.) (2009). Jane Campion. Cinema, Nation, Identity. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Page 251.
[10] BESSIÈRE, Irène; FOX, Alistair and RADNER, Hilary (Ed.) (2009). Op. cit. Page 259.
[11] Jane Campion on Top of the Lake, Spiritual Thinking, and Elisabeth Moss, by Mina Hochberg. Vulture, March 18, 2013.
[12] New Census Data Show Differences Between Urban and Rural Populations. United States Census Bureau. December 8, 2016.
[13] BESSIÈRE, Irène; FOX, Alistair and RADNER, Hilary (Ed.) (2009). Op. cit. Page 25.
[14] Bill Oswalt (Bob Odenkirk) to Molly (Allison Tolman). Fargo, created by Noah Hawley. Season 1, Episode 10: Morton's Fork.
[15] Still frames extracted from Fargo, created by Noah Hawley. Season 1.
[16] Note the clearly different color palettes between good and evil, notably warmer for good characters.
[17] WRIGHT WEXMAN, Virginia (Ed.) (1999). Jane Campion. Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Page 87.
[18] Pope Francis says women will never be Roman Catholic priests. The Guardian, Tuesday, November 1, 2016.
[19] DOWNING, Crystal (2016). Salvation from Cinema. The Medium is the Message. New York: Routledge. Page 110.
[20] DOWNING, Crystal (2016). Op. cit. Page 110.
[21] BRADATAN, Costica and UNGUREANU, Camil (Ed.) (2016). Cinema and Sacrifice. New York: Routledge. Page 43.
[22] BRADATAN, Costica and UNGUREANU, Camil (Ed.) (2016). Op. cit. Page 44.
[23] Detective Rustin Cohle. True Detective, created by Nic Pizzolatto. Season 1, Episode 1: The Long Bright Dark.
[24] The 11 True Detective Season 2 Quotes That Almost Made Us Stop Watching, by Jacob Stolworthy. August 11, 2015.
[25] GJ. Top of the Lake, created by Jane Campion. Season 1, Episode 5: The Dark Creator.
[26] Top of the Lake: an engaging crime drama that pushes females to the fore, by David Renshaw. The Guardian, August 28, 2014.
[27] Pregnant Girl Vanishes, and Story Lines Fork, by Mike Hale. The New York Times, March 17, 2013.
[28] Snowbound. The Minnesota noir of “Fargo”, by Emily Nussbaum. The New Yorker, June 23, 2014.
