Arcade Fire and the Gnostic Afterlife
Arcade Fire’s recently released Reflektor album is receiving critical praise, and as usual their music is being delivered to the public through a variety of entertainment mediums. From the digital album to an SNL appearance, PBS audio concert, 30 minute short TV special, award show spots and music videos in multiple formats from traditional to the interactive. Case in point: with the single Afterlife, music fans can enjoy several video versions of the song. These include a live performance directed by Spike Jonze, a video version using footage from Marcel Camus’ “Black Orpheus”, and an official video written and directed by Emily Kai Bock.
Bock, a Canadian filmmaker
who released her video as part of the Creators Project, has received
high praise for the short film, featuring a Hispanic father and
two sons who are suffering through the loss of their family matriarch.
Christopher Rosen, writing in the Huffington Post, even declared that “Arcade Fire's ‘Afterlife’ video is better
than a lot of this year's feature films.”
Most reviews refer to the work as melancholy, emotional and struggling to make
sense of personal loss. But, though true, these observations are just touching
the surface of this piece of art, and the trinity of films in general.
Beneath the
exoteric tale of family loss and coping lies a deeper philosophical theme which
runs through many of Arcade Fire’s other works, as well. The esoteric ideas
behind this Afterlife film explore a gnostic
philosophy. These ideas clash against the backdrop of a traditional Latino family
with Roman Catholic beliefs. This is a theme Win Butler often adopts, creating
tension by exploring the contentious relationship between gnostic ideas and
those promoted by Catholic and Evangelical Christians.
Just as the film “Black
Orpheus” borrows from the classical orphic mystery school, telling a mythic
story in which the male-female relationship bridges into the underworld that is
the afterlife, Arcade Fire explore the same themes in Emily Kai Bock’s work.
Except, in Bock’s work, the tension is developed through displaying the void
created by a male-dominated system which eliminates the role of the feminine
divinity.
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Both boys are touched
in their dreams by the comfort of their real mother, who is gone from the world
they know. They clearly need her and she longs to be with them, but this
reunification is impossible in their world. It is clear that in three different
aspects, maiden, mother and wife, the female figure is missing and desperately
needed.
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He then journeys
through the material world, represented by the mining facility filled with
mountains of earth, and ultimately descends into the underworld through the
cellars of the factory. In the basement he finds his love, dressed in mourning
clothes, and upon embracing her is able to see shafts of light coming from heaven
above. But alas, it is just a dream.
In the final moments of the film we are
left with the despondency of the three men together on the couch, bathed only
in the electronic light of the television. It is a lonely, desperate film,
populated by characters who do not understand the root of their own problems,
but who feel it deeply in their subconscious.
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Curiously, the melancholy
extreme of Emily Kai Bock’s film is counter-balanced by the exuberant joy displayed in the Spike Jonze performance.
In fact, by creating three versions of videos for the song, Arcade Fire achieved
some symmetry. In the center lies the version taken from clips of “Black
Orpheus”, with both male and female elements struggling passionately with love
and against their own mortality. To the right of this is Bock’s
male-dominated version, unable to come to grips with its lack of feminine
influence and mired in despondency. On the left lies the Spike Jonze version, which showcases a woman who, free from her male companion, dances joyfully on
a stage amongst a bevy of young girls. In the end, perhaps the band is trying
to tell us that unity and balance is the only path to happiness in this life,
and perhaps in the next one as well.
Labels: Afterlife, Arcade Fire, Gnostic, Reflektor
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