Dogma: A Movie Analysis
... movie together. Smith’s movie forces us all to view religion, particularly Catholicism, in a different light. Some find the movie offensive, but I shake my fist at them. The movie is exactly that – a movie. It is a comedy, a fantasy even, and the director has taken every step necessary to inform viewers that is nothing more (including a humorous ten minute disclaimer in the beginning of the movie). Underneath the violence and humor is where you’ll find the true value in this movie -- the theological gems that cause you stop and think. One of these gems is Smith’s incorporation of the idea that God doesn’t have to be male, or of any gender for that matter. The human mind is extremely advanced, yet equally and simultaneously limited. We can not see God as the universe itself, as those in many eastern religions do. Westerners have to stick God with a name, a face, even a gender. But in truth, God is an infinite mystery. The movie toys with this western idea of trying to describe something which is ultimately indescribable. The thirteenth apostle provides us with another good theological bite to snack on. Rufus suggests that the bible is not entirely accurate and the authors may have distorted some facts (in his case, he was excluded from the Bible because he was black). For quite some time, scholars have disputed the accuracy of the Bible. It would appear that Kevin Smith had the right idea when creating the black apostle. Only certain people were allowed to record the word of God, and from those chosen few, an even smaller choice group was incorporated into the Bible. Smith plays with this idea of biased biblical accounts all throughout the movie. Elizabeth Castelli, a professor of Religion at Barnard College, conducted a brief question and answer session with the company producing the movie. Castelli states “From a scholarly point of view, the Bible is a fragmentary record that was written by various religious communities to preserve stories about their shared pasts. Some of the texts in the Bible were also written with the explicit goal of persuading their audiences to accept a particular point o...