Tolkin's 'The Rapture' and the aesthetics of negative surprise.

One of my favorite moments in film, or for that matter in any narrative art, comes at the end of Michael Tolkin’s movie The Rapture, which he wrote and directed, and which was released in 1991.  Tolkin is probably best known for writing The Player – both the novel and the screenplay for the Altman movie, which always struck me as a cynical and obvious movie about cynical and obvious people, and yet another example of why I’ve never liked Altman.  The Rapture is another thing altogether.

I find the exact sequence I’m talking about on Youtube, so you can watch it if you want.  Let me set it up a bit.  I’m doing this from memory about a movie I haven’t seen in at least 15 years, so I may get some of this wrong, but in essence, the story goes like this: Mimi Rogers plays a woman in her 30s, who lives in L.A., working a dull and dreary job as a telephone operator by day, and indulging in a lifestyle that at the time would have been called ‘swinging’, and nowadays isn’t called anything at all, really.  In time, she finds herself intrigued by a kind of cult, or sect, a version of evangelical Christianity which takes its cues from the gnomic utterances of a young boy, and soon enough she sloughs off her old life and joins.  She also marries David Duchovny, a one-time partner of hers, who’s also in the cult, and the two of them have a daughter.  Cut forward: the girl is now 6 or 8, and Duchovny gets killed in an episode of workplace violence, leaving Rogers and daughter alone.  Soon afterwards the boy-prophet instructs his followers that the Rapture is coming, and tells Rogers to go out into the desert and wait.  This she does, taking her daughter with her, but the waiting proves to be longer than she anticipated, their camping place is remote, they have no money, and soon they’re literally starving to death.  There’s a sub-plot in here about a benevolent state trooper, but I’ll skip it, because things are getting worse, Rogers refuses to leave, and finally her daughter pleads with her to send them both to heaven; Rogers complies by shooting the girl, but can’t bring herself to commit suicide.  Then the state trooper arrests her and jails her; and then this happens:

From here, the movie continues on to the Final Judgment, all of it played perfectly straight, and I won’t give away the ending, but it was disturbing.  This is not a movie for children.

Now, if you’re at all like me, this is not what you expected, not at all.  I myself assumed the whole thing would end with her going to prison, and a neat, if somewhat obvious lesson for us all in the dangers of fundamentalism.  That’s the Hollywood I know. Instead, what I got was a dramatic meditation on faith, responsibility, guilt and doubt, all of it wrapped up in a quite literal version of Christian eschatology, an ideology which isn’t mine (and isn’t Tolkin’s, either: he’s Jewish, too) but which does bring up some questions which I don’t mind calling profound.

When I first saw it, it was so unexpected that I was astonished.  It just didn’t seem possible that a man well-versed in studio values and LA lore would make a movie so painfully direct, and so contrary to what one can presume to be his audience’s worldview.  And it struck me as a prime example of what I have since come to call ‘negative surprise’ – that is, the shock that comes when something that you think is going to happen doesn’t, when the story you were certain was going to turn, doesn’t turn at all: it just keeps going straight, and the mind boggles.  There’s something outrageous about it, and people who don’t like it are going to hate it. (I once made a girlfriend to watch it, and when we got to the scene above, she said, “Oh, come on…” and left the room.  But then, she grew up in a Christian household.)

I can think of other examples of this sort of thing.  Denis Johnson’s first novel, Angels, narrates its protagonist’s days from a very close third-person perspective, reading all his thoughts right up through the crime he commits, his trial and capital sentence, and finally his execution, staying right there in his head until he takes his last breath, a latter-day Death of Ivan Ilyich, when a less daring author would have eventually averted our eyes.  Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater strikes me as one long episode of negative surprise, a book which, to borrow a phrase from Joseph Brodsky, starts on high C and just keeps ascending from there, without pause or respite, through some 400 or so pages of dense prose.  There are lesser, comic versions too: I think of Tim Burton’s MarsAttacks, which begins with an all-star cast (Jack Nicholson, Annette Bening, Glenn Close) and then quickly starts killing them off, until the only one left is Tom Jones.

There’s something deeply disruptive about this sort of thing.  It contravenes your sense of intention, you think, Ohhh, they don’t really mean to follow through on this…do they?  But they do, and that’s part of the point: if these were just holy-shit moments they’d be fun, but not quite so valuable.  Instead, what you see is someone deliberately doing what you thought could not be deliberately done.