Major Spoilers for Midnight Mass Ahead! Review: 7/10.
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The two of them float there like little wooden ducks in their little wooden canoe, squinting at the blinding light from the island--their home. The smell of burning flesh is nauseating, more nauseating is the knowledge that their loved ones are the source of that smell, and of the ashes, falling like a gentle first snow upon them now. They're not the last people on Earth, but they might as well be. The only thing they can do is to thread their fingers together and watch the rapture from afar. Adam and Eve, cast from Eden.
The final shots of the new-ish Netflix series Midnight Mass are powerful and poignant, laden with Christian symbolism, abject horror, and a healthy helping of hope. It leaves an impression, at least for me. The final moments of the series certainly go out with a bang and, like the rest of the show, are shot and scored beautifully. The aesthetic cohesion, while easy to do given the strength of Catholic imagery in general, is still to be commended.
Over all, I found the show entertaining, suspenseful, and well composed visually speaking. There were some pretty good acting performances, cool shots, and great music. I personally liked the beginning a little better because toward the middle there seemed to be a change in pacing and writing that I found to be a turn for the worse; though the intense ending regained some of the intrigue for me, it ultimately left me fairly unsatisfied.
While the first couple episodes made me actually appreciate the "slow" pacing, I found that it soon devolved. Initially, I was impressed with the balance of scares and gore with character and setting development and other more understated ways of building suspense. Often, I find that horror movies and series will increase the volume of scares too soon and find themselves scrambling to escalate things at an exponential rate-- things quickly lose their suspense and mystery. This series did a good job avoiding this trap.
However, I soon became bored with it, not because I wanted more frequent or intense bursts of gore and terror, but because they started really laying it on thick with the "deep" dialogue. Long monologues, like the scene where Erin and Riley discuss the meaning of death in episode 4 ("Book IV: Lamentations"), where characters wax poetic about spirituality are absolutely mind-numbing. This scene went on for at LEAST 5 minutes too long-- which feels pretty damn long when you're watching it. I think that if your show can't tell me the "profound" messages you want to express without resorting to this kind of constant hit-you-over-the-head dialogue about theology (which it often had between Pruitt and Riley, Erin and Riley, Pruitt and Bev, etc.), you're not doing it right.
Speaking of which, I want to discuss the show's attempts at theological and societal discourse. Disclaimer: I do NOT think this show is racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. In fact, it is pretty disapproving of those things and makes a solid attempt at representing diverse characters, in religion, sexuality, and race. Most importantly, Midnight Mass is pretty ambitious in its desire to comprehensively discuss faith-- in a traditional religious sense and in a more contemporary existential sense.
Despite all the copious dialogue about faith and the various interpretations of faith we get from various characters, attempting to represent many ways that people engage with these traditions, I don't think Midnight Mass really contributes much of substance to the discussion here. Midnight Mass seems to give me a generic message of "Religion is neither good nor evil; it's the way people use it "AKA "religious fundamentalism = bad". I give the show credit for portraying shades of gray in this regard, such as with Monsignor Pruitt (played beautifully by Hamish Linklater) who seems to be a generally reasonable figure in his faith who goes "too far" because he is blinded by his (forbidden) love of Mildred (Alex Essoe). Ultimately Pruitt commits the irredeemable sin of destroying his entire community, but he remains very sympathetic the whole time. And though I appreciate the complexity the show holds here, Pruitt's sincerity and "goodness" despite the atrocities he commits is... interesting in its context. This is because the show seems more eager to blame the un-nuanced and irritating fundamentalist, Bev Keane (strongly portrayed by Samantha Sloyan), a convenient prudish, bitchy female villain figure. Even if she isn't all to blame here, the brunt of the negative feelings the audience has are projected onto her.
Ultimately, though I believe this was a goal of theirs, I still think that Midnight Mass pretty much fails to properly critique the church. Though it shows how average, well-meaning people were sucked into a cult, it still somehow manages to individualize/pathologize this by relegating the blame to these specific people and circumstances. Obviously specificity is narratively important, but something about this felt like it couldn't quite stand up as a broader critique-- probably due to the fact that in the end, Pruitt's romantic love interest is a big part of the cult's creation rather than something like the corruption of power or black and white moralistic faith.
Most importantly, Midnight Mass has nothing comprehensive to say about the actual problems with the Catholic church. To be fair, they have that scene in "Book II: Psalms" where Riley Flynn talks about how churches suck the money from communities-- "small, starving villages with big, fancy churches"--but Pruitt very gracefully deflects this, and by his character alone, the viewer just kind of forgets about it. Pruitt is consistently shown to be a good man whose faith in God takes a dark turn as he is blinded by earthly love, but most of his theology (before he is fully consumed by the "angel's" blood and becomes very crusade-y) is very palatable to a wide audience. The only corruption mentioned regarding their church, St. Patrick's, is the accusation that (again) Bev Keane used the Rec Center to launder money at a time when Pruitt was too senile to notice. One would think that Pruitt's Greek Tragedy style downfall proves him and his sometimes militaristic and scary faith wrong, but (at least to me) he's still very likeable, and a lot of what he says is genuinely reasonable and almost indistinguishable from a heroic figure, Erin Green's, philosophy. Therefore, the show only partially succeeds in being nuanced; in fact, it feels lukewarm, somewhat confused, and unprincipled at times.
Another example of this lukewarm-ness is the show's attempted indictment of Islamophobia through Sheriff Hassan (played compellingly by Rahul Kohli). I like the character a lot, but I don't think the show nailed it with the commentary. The reason it falls a little flat for me is that the show sometimes (mis)directs its critique of Islamophobia in more of a "religious" sense than a racial/ethnic one. It condemns the irrational fundamentalists at the PTA meeting in the third episode, sure, but they really stick to strictly scriptural arguments, pitting the Bible against the Quran. To be fair, I know that in order to seem respectable, lots of people cloak their racism and xenophobia in religious doctrine, but it seemed to me that the microaggressions barely hinted at racism and heavily leaned on the angle of "these people think all other religions are bad". However, Hassan does have a substantial monologue where he explains to Sarah Gunning his origin story which is rooted in the Islamophobia he has had to face on the force. It's a powerful scene, and I will give the show credit where it's due.
Hassan explains how he became a New York City cop after 9/11 to "protect this country," and then even works in the top anti-terrorist FBI group... but then they start getting people to spy in mosques, surveilling and demoting their own Muslim officers. After the death of his wife, the only thing holding him there, he has to leave. For all his patriotism, he is still distrusted and disdained by his fellow officers. But it's worth noting to me that nowhere in his monologue does he describe profiling people because of how they look (it wouldn't be unreasonable to slip in a quick line about how tons of random brown people were accosted after 9/11), just says they "leaned on them hard if they were Muslim". Furthermore, of course Sheriff Hassan has to be a model American; an American before being a Muslim or anything else. Of course he weeps at 9/11 but then, presumably, doesn't speak out against the Iraq war. Of course he specifically wants to "fight terrorism". He needs to be unequivocally "one of the good ones".
I'm a little confused as well by the "post-racial" settler thing going on in this island community. What are the origins of this nondescript island community wherein most people, regardless of background, attend a Catholic church? Most of the main cast is white, so I'm definitely not calling the show a bastion of representation, but I think they also made the somewhat confusing choice to make the townspeople (extras) relatively diverse, when these kinds of isolated, tiny island communities are typically quite homogenous (not necessarily white, but homogenous). Did they do this for the sake of adding some "representation" even though these aren't speaking roles? What's the history of this place? Were there Natives there before this community?
They also don't acknowledge Leeza or her mother's Blackness, only Leeza's disability which is restored to her in the end and is actually framed in a neutral-positive light since it means that the "angel" blood is no longer inside her. But there's not much racial implication about how Joe Colly, the town drunk who is the epitome of white trailer trash, accidentally shoots Leeza with a gun. There's all kinds of potential politics here regarding race-class. A white man shot a Black girl in the back--that evokes things. Plus, Belcher talks about the use of the white trash stereotype to reinforce racism: "pathologizing whiteness [making Joe the worst kind of white] is what allows black inequality to appear fair and legitimate, rather than a product of white supremacy" (Belcher, 4). But race never really comes up.
This all brings me to the ending.
When the imagery is so rapture-like (all the fire), it is understandable that one could take away certain moralizations that I am sure are unintentional. Everyone dies. Even characters in the final group of untainted, non-vampiric heroes who could have, I think, remained alive. Primarily, I'm thinking of Erin Greene, a very milquetoast character with no discernable flaws, Sherriff Hassan, and Dr. Sarah Gunning, another hero of the story. These characters seemed to me like they could have escaped, but instead we see that they all die in the hell-scape with the rest of the vampiric town. The heretic (Hassan is Muslim), the whore (Greene got pregnant out of wedlock), and the homosexual (Dr. Gunning is a lesbian) are punished for the sins of others. They remain the heroes, don't get me wrong, and I admit that I'm reading way too far into this, but I just thought it was interesting that these characters who seemed most likely to survive also died in tragic and painful ways (along with everyone on the island).
Though the destruction of Crockett Island is an apocalypse of tiny proportions, it is still apocalyptic, and thus, I feel that it can be analyzed within the tradition of apocalyptic fiction.
The finale kind of devolved into zombie shenanigans which was a genre switch that came from out of left field. In its parallel to zombie fiction, I feel like it isn't a stretch to say that the only ones who get to live are portrayed as "the future," "the hope". The new Adam and Eve: Leeza and Warren. A chaste young heterosexual couple. Leeza has a disability and they're also an interracial couple, so it's not enforcing most societal norms, but still feels somewhat reminiscent of the modern "tendency for horror films to reimagine familial structures—while leaving their underlying heteronormativity intact" (Cady & Oates, 311). While the survivors are only kids themselves and don't have a child, the end of Midnight Mass reminds me just a little bit of the ending of 28 Days Later wherein a white man and a Black woman ("a reconstituted, interracial, heteronormative family" [Cady & Oates, 315]) peacefully and heterosexually couple up to start rebuilding the world...
Overall, though the show was fairly weak in its attempted societal critique, it was not actively harmful. Having just written all of the stuff in previous paragraphs, I gotta say that a lot of it is ridiculously over-analyzed and, frankly, silly.
So ultimately, I give Midnight Mass a 7/10. I enjoyed watching it for the most part, though it really dragged in places. It was well shot, well designed, generally well produced. It was poignant and did move me quite a bit at times. But, I wasn't satisfied with the pacing or the ending.
SOURCES:
Belcher, Christina. “There Is No Such Thing as a Post-Racial Prison: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and the White Savior Complex on Orange Is the New Black.” Television & News Media, vol. 17, no. 6, 18 June 2016, pp. 491–503., https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476416647498.
Kathryn A. Cady & Thomas Oates (2016) Family Splatters: Rescuing Heteronormativity from the Zombie Apocalypse, Women's Studies in Communication, 39:3, 308-325, DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2016.1194935
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