This month’s topic comes to us thanks to Brian Fowler. I am grateful it is not about wrestling (but Bergman would have been nice). If you too would like me to investigate a movie of your choice, I am always open to suggestions. Sometimes I even take them.
Once upon a time I was an undergrad at the University of Notre Dame. My tenure there overlapped with the opening of the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, a temple of the fine arts on the south side of campus with its own movie theatre. I had many of my formative moviegoing experiences in that building, where I saw innumerable great and important films for the first time. Lawrence of Arabia. Ben-Hur. The Big Sleep. Ran. Fanny and Alexander. Amadeus. Birth of a Nation, for some reason.
Sometimes they showed contemporary art films. In the spring of 2005 or 2006 they had a special showing of Saved!, this month’s topic. I remembered the film coming out a few years back when I was in high school. I was already an ardent moviegoer then but had passed it up for whatever reason. Now was my chance. I arrived twenty minutes in advance to encounter a problem I literally never experienced again in that venue: tickets were sold out. I was not angry. I’M STILL NOT ANGRY.
Two decades later, I have finally caught up with the film, which has since become a cult classic. Was it worth the wait? Hmm. Let’s begin!
Sects!
It’s not hard to see why Saved! was sold out that night. Most of the Notre Dame student body shared my background. They were products of the parochial school system. From preschool until undergrad, I spent every year of my life–barring Kindergarten–in private schools, mostly Catholic. Saved! is a satire of Evangelical culture, but it is, above everything else, a high school movie. And that high school is, of course, a private religious school.
Religious schooling in America predates the establishment of the public school system. That’s what happens when your nation consists of wackos who fled home because they wanted to be the persecutors instead of the persecuted. Compulsory, theoretically nonsectarian public education—in English—was a gradual development of the nineteenth century. Sometimes, the impulse behind public education was noble. It was a tool to combat poverty and ignorance. Other times, the reasoning was less admirable. It was a nativist weapon against a rising tide of immigration: Germans, Italians, and Irish were coming to America in droves and bringing their religion with them. That religion was often Catholicism.
The Catholic school system dominates the history of parochial schools in America. It owed its rapid growth and expansion to the fact that public education was, in actuality, far from nonsectarian. “Common” schools were rooted in Protestantism, and they were nonsectarian only in the sense that they promulgated practices and beliefs common to all Protestant denominations, such as devotional reading of the (King James) Bible and venomous anti-Catholicism.
Catholic schools were formed as an alternative for largely immigrant communities who wanted their children to be educated in an environment where their faith was not relentlessly pilloried. Nativists widely viewed them as a third wheel, or a fourth wall, or a fifth column, or a sixth sense—something that definitely doesn’t need to be there and might even be nefarious.
“What does this have to do with Saved!, which takes place in some vanilla-flavored Evangelical school?” you might be asking. Hold on a second, I’m getting there! Jesus.
In the mid-twentieth century, the turntables were… things changed a lot. In 1951, as part of a concentrated effort to combat the Reds, the New York State Board of Regents composed a “nonsectarian” prayer for public schools to be recited voluntarily. A decade later, the Supreme Court decided this ran afoul of that pesky Establishment Clause in the 1962 decision Engel v. Vitale (Engel?! Those optics aren’t good.). One year later, in 1963, devotional reading of the Bible was shown the door in Abington School District v. Schempp (Schempp? Really, do the Justices ever think before they name these cases?). God was thus expelled from public schools. He was swiftly replaced with Communism.
Now, suddenly, a separatist school system was no longer an anti-American conspiracy to overthrow the very foundations of the Republic but a wholly godly endeavor to protect impressionable children from the predations of secular humanism. The Christian Day School movement and related phenomena (a sudden uptick in homeschooling) exploded, bringing us to the doorstep of this Dubya-era movie, when Evangelical Christianity and the “family values” movement was in full swing, even though George Bush fils belongs to the same church as Hillary Clinton.
Lies!
The religious culture on display in Saved! is, frankly, pretty foreign to me. I didn’t see much of my own high school experiences in the movie. The film stars Jena Malone, who was something of a parochial school prodigy, since she also appeared in a film set at a Catholic high school that tracks much more closely with my personal history (in the mood, if not the particulars).
Donnie Darko’s Kitty Farmer is a combination of all the worst elements of every religion teacher I ever had: overbearing, insipid, and shackled to a manichaean worldview. These same teachers also had good qualities; Mrs. Farmer does not (hats off to character actress Beth Grant for so expertly crafting this gargoyle).
Jim Cunningham, the motivational speaker/pedophile played by Patrick Swayze, is also a familiar archetype (well, not the pedophile part). I had to put up with a whole lot of school assemblies featuring speakers who might plausibly do things like try to rhyme “gusto” with “muster.”
Donnie’s treatment of these two—he tells Mrs. Farmer to shove something up her ass and calls Cunningham the, I quote, “fucking Antichrist”—is something my prudish high school self would never have done, but it represented a certain degree of wish fulfillment.
Donnie Darko isn’t exactly focused on the inner workings of a private high school, but it cares a lot more about the subject than Saved! does. Saved! is much more focused on social mores, especially this one: If you have sex, you will die. Or, worse, get pregnant.
The overly complicated setup involves Malone’s character Mary finding herself in, as my ancestors would say, a family way. I am going to pass over her on-the-nose name. A much worse offender is on the horizon (Mary’s last name is Cummings; this is a dirty joke that never… comes). Her pregnancy is the result of trying to cure her gay boyfriend the James Bond way. This doesn’t work, of course. She gets knocked up. He gets discovered and banished from the rest of the movie.
The scandal occasioned by being in close contact with a gay person puts Mary at odds with her best friend, Hilary Faye, played by Mandy Moore. Moore is primarily a singer, I think? If you put a gun to my head and asked me to name one of her songs, I would tell you to pull the trigger. She has some acting chops, and, apart from this movie, she is best known for a few other roles, from most to least notable:
- The voice of Aerith Gainsborough in Kingdom Hearts.
- The voice of Rapunzel in Tangled… but not in Kingdom Hearts (CONSPIRACY!).
- In the TV show This Is Us, adapted from the Hallmark greeting card, she is the wife of that jerkface who broke Rory Gilmore’s heart. No one breaks Rory’s heart and gets away with it. I’m glad your character died.
She tends to play sweethearts, which makes her role here proleptically against type because Hilary Faye is a megabitch. As tensions between Mary and Hilary Faye mount, Mary befriends the school outcasts, token Jew Cassandra Edelstein (Eva Amurri) and Hilary’s brother, who has a disability: He is played by a Culkin (Macaulay, the brother of Kieran and Rory). He is also a paraplegic, wheelchair-bound since his mother dropped him off a bridge or something (details are hazy; I might not have been paying attention). His name is—Are you ready for this?—his name is Roland. He’s in a wheelchair. His name is Roland.
The underlying, not-at-all subtle message of the picture is that rebellious Cassandra and skeptical Roland are the ones modeling Christian charity towards Mary while Hilary Faye and her friends (and, in one subplot too many, the school principal) are raging hypocrites.
Among the rituals on display, two stand out because I am not sure that they are really part of the Evangelical branch of Christianity. In a school assembly early in the film, Cassandra pretends to speak in tongues, a practice revived by Pentecostalism, a recent (early twentieth century) phenomenon which I always thought was on the fringes of the Evangelical movement (some Pentecostals, for example, do not believe in the Trinity).
The other example, in the worst scene of the film, is when Hilary Faye and co. attempt to perform an exorcism on Mary. It is the worst scene not only because it seems unmotivated (Do they truly believe Mary is possessed by a demon?) but because it includes a music cue from The Exorcist. Exorcism, an important part of Jesus’ ministry (in the Synoptic Gospels at least; not a single exorcism in John), is practiced across Christian denominations but is associated, in the popular imagination at least, with the Catholic Church… due to films like The Exorcist.
The school in Saved! does not have a lot of markers of denominational affiliation, but it is certainly not Catholic. It is headed by Pastor Skip, who is married, has a kid, and is even going through a divorce, which is a social taboo but not absolutely forbidden as it is in Catholicism. A poster in the background of one classroom just reads “Creationism,” not otherwise engaged with in the film. One scene I really appreciated is when Mary attends a Christmas service and wonders if her biblical namesake pulled a fast one to cover for her own mistakes. The church is a bland, empty conference room, and the pastor is a guy in a suit. The movie successfully resisted the Hollywood urge to make all Christian churches Catholic just for the sake of visual flair. Of course, the very notion of asking whether someone is “saved” (mostly directed at Cassandra) is Evangelical.
Speaking of Cassandra, I need to put in a word about her Judaism. Her primary character trait is “rebellious.” Her Judaism is reducible to being “not Christian.”
There are other aspects I could draw attention to, such as the adopted Vietnamese girl who is a probable reference to the 10/40 Window and Mary’s reluctance to say “God damn” (preferring “Fuck”), but I should move on to the movie qua movie.
Videotape!
Saved! had the bad fortune to come out in 2004. That was the same year mean girl Tina Fey brought the non-fiction book about mean girls, Queen Bees and Wannabes, to the screen in a story about a posse of mean girls who come undone when a new girl becomes meaner than the meanest mean girl. I believe it was called The Girls Who Weren’t Very Nice.
While Saved! is a cult film, it looks positively fetch next to Mean Girls. That movie has attained the notable achievement, second only to an EGOT, of going from film to stage musical to film of the stage musical. Along with Star Wars, it is also one of the few movies to have its own holiday. It has a cultural cachet that Saved! could never dream of, despite having nearly the same plot.
As a satire, Saved! falls short in one important aspect where Mean Girls succeeds. Mean Girls is mean. Saved! is not nearly mean enough. Mary is a nice girl. Not terribly bright, maybe, but guileless and sincere in her intentions. Her beliefs—and Christian beliefs in general—are never seriously interrogated. The movie pulls its punches exactly when it should go for the jugular. Since it’s an indie comedy from the early aughts, that means in the third act, which is a five car pileup of dangling plot threads.
Also like many indie comedies, it is a visually uninteresting film that relies on the strength of its writing. Some of that writing is, let’s say, of the era. You just can’t say those things anymore.
There are, of course, some terrifically funny moments. I laughed out loud at least twice. The funniest line, in my opinion, is in this exchange between Cassandra and Roland, which caught me off guard and made me snort whatever I was drinking out of my nose.
The moment is slightly ruined when Cassandra follows up with, “Okay, two reasons.” That’s the problem with the writing—overexplaining to make sure we get the joke.
The same thing happens in my other candidate for the funniest scene in the film. Right after the attempted exorcism, Mary confronts Hilary Faye and tells her that she doesn’t know anything about love. Hilary Faye responds with “I am FILLED with Christ’s love!” and beans Mary with a Bible.
Mary picks up the Bible, turns around, and says, “This is not a weapon!” in case we failed to appreciate the irony.
Mandy Moore, incidentally, is the movie’s MVP. She overshadows everyone, and it’s not for nothing that she is front and center on the poster, while poor Jena Malone is off to the side. She might even give Rachel McAdams a run for her money.
Is her performance enough to save Saved!? Not really. It can be pretty rote at times (Oh, a high school movie that ends at PROM? How original!). And it is PREACHY. This is a problem with Mean Girls as well. I must now make the heretical proclamation that I think Mean Girls, while good, is vastly overrated. Saved! isn’t popular enough to be overrated. I might come around on it on a second viewing, but I doubt I will ever love it.
Passover Special: Prince for Egypt (Haas, 2000)
As of the time of writing (and, unless something goes terribly, terribly wrong, the time of publication), we are in the midst of Passover 2024. Feeling festive, I decided to lose my Dingo Pictures virginity and watch their take on the Exodus story, Prince FOR Egypt (Ein Prinz für Ägypten). If you don’t know what Dingo Pictures is, blessed are you. Stop reading.
Still here? Okay, weirdo. Dingo Pictures is a mysterious German company that specialized in knock-offs of Disney and Disney-adjacent (Don Bluth, DreamWorks) animated films. They weren’t the only players in this game, but they were distinguished by the absolutely abysmal quality of their productions, with animation that looks like it was drawn in MS Paint and tiny voice casts (think two voice actors for ten roles). On the bright side, they lacked the resources to make their movies very long, and Prince for Egypt is a trim thirty minutes. It’s short enough that a sizable number of the reviews currently on Letterboxd are fools who followed me like the Pied Piper when I reviewed it this past Sunday.
The only way to truly appreciate the film’s awfulness is to see it for yourself. Stills don’t really do it justice. But, in any case, here is Pharaoh in all his glory.
Given their business model, I think it is safe to assume that this film was not made from any strong religious conviction but because DreamWorks had released Prince of Egypt, a Disneyfied take on the Exodus, two years prior.
The essentials of the Exodus story probably could be condensed to a half-hour (Didn’t Rugrats manage?), but Prince for Egypt makes an absolute fucking hash of everything, spending ten minutes just on Moses’ infancy. When the grown-up Moses flees to the desert and encounters the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob via burning bush, God manifests himself in physical form. This is a slightly unorthodox take, given that Judaism is famously aniconic when it comes to portraying the deity. Even stranger, God is not some majestic, bearded potentate like in the Sistine Chapel. No. He looks like David Ben-Gurion at a toga party.
With all this meandering, the movie only has enough time for one plague, and it isn’t even one of the biblical plagues. They had ten choices, but they went with option eleven: rats.
Despite its all-out assault on good taste (Did I mention Pharaoh’s Arab vizier, Sharif?), the movie is deathly afraid of violence of any kind, a huge obstacle when dramatizing the Exodus. Not only is there no death of the firstborn, eliminating the very raison d’être of Passover, Pharaoh’s army is cut off at the Red Sea instead of being drowned in it. Then the narrator—an Egyptian cobra who can even sssssibilate words that lack sibilants—informs us that Passover is celebrated at Easter time.
In its defense, Aaron, Moses’ brother, gets a lot more screen time than usual, and he even has a son, Daniel. The biblical Aaron had four sons, none of them named Daniel, but points for trying. The movie also underlines an obscure biblical detail, the despoiling of the Egyptians, to a degree I found surprising, although, given everything else at hand, maybe I shouldn’t have been so shocked.
Apart from these two details, this thing is one gigantic cosmic joke. You absolutely must watch it.
For more Sects, Lies, and Videotape, see the Index!
Gavin McDowell is a Hoosier by birth and French by adoption. He received his doctorate in “Languages, History, and Literature of the Ancient World from the Beginning until Late Antiquity” and is currently investigating Aramaic translations of the Bible. He also runs a book club out of Alternate Ending’s Discord, where we read novels and short stories that were later adapted to film. For more of his unprovoked movie opinions, see his Letterboxd account.