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.  

In Bock’s film, the father represents a version of the Gnostic demiurge, a male creator/provider. He is flawed without his female counterpart, and is not adequately able to provide for the family. It is this lack of the divine female influence that is the root of the family’s troubles, but the father is at a loss, unable to supply the feminine aspects of parenthood to his children and even failing in his own paternal role without the help of his soul-mate. His stern and controlling nature is hanging on to what he knows, but blind to his faults. He denies his eldest son’s request to go out into the world because he is overprotective and tired. In reality, the eldest son will suffer the same fate if bound to this hopeless, isolated existence. As the son sneaks off to enter the world, we are briefly shown a portrait of this him next to a portrait of Jesus, setting up a comparison of the sons and of the fathers as well.

In a dream the eldest son visits a housing complex and passes by three women, at least one of whom eyes him as a potential lover. But he passes them by without engaging them and instead focuses his attention on a baptism being performed in a pool behind a locked gate. He, too, is suffering because of his denial of the real sensual female presence around him and his fixation on a pure Christianized idea of the female that lies beyond his reach. By remaining pure and focusing on the promised afterlife, he is denying himself the female presence he so desperately needs in this life now that his mother is gone.

The younger son, too, dreams of a female figure but she is a burly matronly woman, dispassionately engaged in cleaning bed sheets in a Laundromat. There is no love, only antiseptic purification, and the boy is horrified to find that he too is being callously locked in a machine to be washed, as well.

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.

Ultimately, the father makes a midnight dream journey through the streets and into the underworld to reach her. He passes a lamp which leans across the street and quietly falls to the ground behind him, symbolizing the female light of the gnostic Sophia falling to the material realm of earth.

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.

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.