When I announced this month’s topic on Discord, I was asked what I thought of VeggieTales’ take on Esther. I don’t know what that means, but if you want me to find out, feel free to make a request. Many thanks to those who have already done so: Pulpatoons, Alex Frith, Brian Fowler, Pulse, Brian T., STinG, and Margaret. Your requests will be fulfilled in that order this coming year.
Welcome back to Sects, Lies, and Videotape, where we look at religion in film and television. This month, we will explore uncharted territory: the Bible. The real Bible, I mean. The Hebrew Bible. After asking friend and colleague Dr. Amanda Albert for recommendations for some Purim viewing, she handed me three lemons. That’s not very seasonal—lemons are for Sukkot—but, in any case, they will be the three movies under discussion today, all adaptations of the biblical book of Esther.
Now I know what you’re thinking. “Purim was in the month of Adar, Gavin! We’re almost at the end of Nisan.” Too true, but here’s the thing. While Esther is the origin story for Purim, the core of the narrative—chapters 3 to 7—takes place over a few days in the middle of Nisan. In fact, the key turning point of the story takes place over Passover. “Passover?!” you say, “That was only two weeks ago!” It was! Now shut up.
There’s more to it than that. Not only does the story of Esther covertly take place over Passover, the villain, Haman, is hanged for his crimes. By the Middle Ages, Haman was paraded around and burned in effigy as part of the Purim festivities. Jews hurling abuse at a bearded guy on a piece of wood was viewed poorly by Christians. The Roman Emperor Theodosius even banned the practice (Theodosian Code 16.8.18). If you think that this was an overreaction, here are a couple of medieval manuscript illuminations depicting the death of Haman. They’re, uh, provocative.
The main point is, Good Friday was also two weeks ago, so our theme today is topical twice over.
On that note, I am going to cover both Jewish and Christian dramatizations of Esther. The first, chronologically, is 2006’s Esther and the King, an abridged but straightforward adaptation that is so wholesome it’s creepy. It is a Mormon production, of course. The other two are Jewish—both from 2014—but are polar opposites in everything but aesthetic quality. The first of these, The Lot, is some Flash-adjacent abomination utterly devoid of humor and doubling as an apologia for the state of Israel. Our final entry, Megillas Lester, is equally Jewish but diametrically opposed in tone. It has little interest in geopolitics and a great deal of interest in trying to be funny. It does not succeed, but boy does it try!
Sects!
In the past, I have made the mistake of presuming that the story of Esther is well-known, even to those who have never read the biblical book. This has turned out to be incorrect, so here we go: Esther takes place in ancient Persia, during the reign of Ahasuerus, who is the Achaemenid king Xerxes. Or Artaxerxes. Or Artaxerxes II. One of those guys. He lives a life of decadence in his capital city of Susa, where he throws lavish 180-day parties—the kind of party you can only hold once or twice a year. Things get a little crazy, and Ahasuerus wakes up on day 181 to discover that his wife, Queen Vashti, has vanished, because he deposed her at some point in the preceding half year. He needs a new wife pronto, shops around, and decides on the young orphan Esther, birth name Hadassah, the charge of the righteous Jew Mordechai, her cousin/uncle/stepfather/husband.
Meanwhile, the king elevates one Haman to the rank of chief vizier and orders that all bow before him. Mordechai refuses, breaking the precedent established by his ancestors, and Haman, who is something of a drama queen, responds to this slight by ordering the annihilation of the entire Jewish people. Mordechai goes to Esther; Esther goes to the king; and the king has Haman hanged on the cross gallows that the minister had prepared for Mordechai. Mordechai establishes the holiday of Purim to commemorate the day Haman had chosen by lot (pur) to destroy the Jews.
I have omitted some minor characters. First, there is a subplot about two eunuchs, Bigtan and Teresh, who attempt to assassinate the king but are foiled by Mordechai. Another minor character is Zeresh, the wife of Haman and the mother of their ten sons, who all meet the same fate as Haman. Both the eunuchs and Zeresh appear in all three film adaptations.
Am I forgetting anything? Right. The book of Esther ends with an ironic reversal. The king cannot annul his decree against the Jews because of reasons, but he can authorize the Jews to take up arms in self-defense. The first Purim was therefore a bloodbath, as Jews massacred the very people who intended to massacre them. This part of the story is often omitted, in part because it is unsavory to modern sensibilities, in part because it is superfluous to the main narrative. Nevertheless, one of our films has decided to portray it in all its gory details. This part of the story was well-known to former president of Iran and Instagram influencer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man who cannot believe in real genocides, so he contents himself with fictional ones.
The story has found a warmer reception outside of the Iranian ruling class. Although it was the one biblical book missing from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and its canonical status was disputed by the early rabbis, it eventually grew to become one of the more beloved books of the Hebrew Bible. Moses Maimonides, the medieval philosopher of the Aristotelian school (like his Muslim contemporary Averroes), wrote that, in the Messianic Age, all the other books of the Prophets and the Writings will cease to be read, but the book of Esther will remain.
I can’t state for certain why a book of such Rabelaisian qualities would become so cherished. Maybe it’s because it is the foundation of a holiday where it’s a mitzvah to get drunk. What I can say, objectively, is that it is the basis of thirty or so medieval commentaries and the direct inspiration for a whole parade of imitations, all of which underscore your Jewish uncle’s (or your Jewish friend’s uncle’s) trite observation that the basis of every holiday is “They tried to kill us; we survived; let’s eat!”
Historically, Christians have been a little cooler on Esther. Some early canon lists, including Athanasius of Alexandria’s festal letter for Easter 367—the first to name the entire canon of the New Testament—do not consider Esther to be a canonical book. Some, like Gregory of Nazianzus, do not even mention Esther at all. Even Martin Luther, who eventually opted to retain all of the Hebrew books of the Bible in his German translation, had doubts about Esther. A string of early modern commentaries, gathered by Elliott Horowitz in his book Reckless Rites, explains why: Esther is parochial, irreligious, and violent.
Such different attitudes to Esther naturally lend themselves to different portrayals on film. And so we have three films, all telling the same story, that are entirely unique. Let’s take them in order, shall we?
Lies!
Esther and the King, our Christian (well, Mormon) entry, is as square as square can be. It has hacked off the beginning and the end of the story—the sex and the violence, respectively—in favor of an adaptation of Esther 2–7 that veers neither to the right nor to the left. Okay, okay, it’s tarted up with songs and jokes. We’ll get there in a minute! It’s part of a series of “Liken” films, described on Wikipedia as “a continuing musical based on events in the Old Testament and New Testament of the Bible, as well as stories from the Book of Mormon.” In other words, I will be returning to this well in the future. There is nothing overtly Mormon about this, however, apart from the singing, the queer-coding, and the ever-present sense that you have just stepped into the Black Lodge.
Killer BOB stalks his next victim.
Each entry in this series has a present-day framework narrative with recurring characters. In this case, a mother, as she unspools a roll of plastic, instructs her little girl about the importance of fasting. And she knows just the story to illustrate this point!
Now, fasting is a plot point in Esther, and it occurs just before the climax, but it is a very strange thing to put on your wheel of morality. Esther even sings a whole song about it, yet it does not get much emphasis in the story. The throughline is actually that Esther has hidden her identity from the king, and she needs to learn the importance of self-confidence and being herself etc. etc.
The Lot goes in an entirely different direction. To compare the tones of the two, here is the death of Haman in Esther and the King:
Womp womp, my wife ran off with my executioner.
Here is the same scene from The Lot:
Less Jesus, more Judas.
Everything about the Esther story is serious business in The Lot. It begins with something we never see in Esther and the King—a date. The book of Esther is notoriously difficult to date, but rabbinic tradition has found a way, using clues found in other biblical books like Ezra and Daniel while ignoring sources like the Histories of Herodotus.
So our story opens in the year 3390 anno mundi, where we see two travelers—Haman and Mordechai—journeying across the desert to Susa. They are going to plead their cases before the Persian king regarding the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, which was authorized by Ahasuerus’ predecessor Cyrus but since halted. Along the way, Haman nearly dies of thirst due to a lack of provisions and preparedness. Mordechai saves him on the condition that Haman become his slave.
The astute reader might not recognize any of this from my summary of the plot of Esther above. That’s because it’s not there. It comes from rabbinic tradition, which situates the events of Esther in the middle of the book of Ezra.
This movie is far more interested in dramatizing the extrabiblical traditions about Esther than the events of the actual biblical book, to the point that the movie presents sequences out of order and apologizes for it.
It has two things the other Esther movies don’t have. One is the actual depiction of the casting of the lots (purim), as one would expect in a movie called The Lot.
The other is the violent altercation between the Persians and the Jews. This is in the biblical book, of course, but, as stated above, it is usually omitted for reasons of good taste. What does it look like if you don’t have good taste? It looks like this.
I’ve only scratched the surface of this film’s horrors. At one point, Esther saves a slave who is being sold by an African slaver. The Queen addresses him as a “Son of Ham.”
At another point, apropos of nothing, we are treated to the story of Samson, with an emphasis on his grisly death.
“Mom, can we have The Passion of the Christ?” “We have The Passion of the Christ at home!”
At the end, we are at least reminded of the reason for the season: the reconstruction of the Temple. Even though the Temple has since been destroyed again, we can still rebuild it anew, by God, even if we must engage in violence to do it!
Our last entry, Megillas Lester, is also Jewish but has a much lighter touch. It is all Purim and no Esther—literally no Esther. Our hero, Doniel “Lester” Lesterovich, is responsible for his school’s Purimspiel. After some head trauma, he finds himself inserted into the Esther story, where, like Dorothy in Oz, every character is played by someone from his waking life. He tips off Vashti that the king is about to execute her—per rabbinic tradition—so she lives and Esther never enters the story. Mordechai charges Lester to un-fuck things up because he’s definitely not going to bow down to Haman to prevent a genocide.
Fun fact: Haman’s hat in this film is an overt reference to the hamantasch, a pastry eaten at Purim (and allegedly shaped like Haman’s hat).
Two things about the title immediately tip us off about the specific cultural milieu of Megillas Lester. The first thing is the S in Megillas used to render the Hebrew letter tav, normally transcribed as a T. Normally, that is, if you are not an Ashkenazi Jew or a descendant of one living in the Jewish state (New York). The other is the limp pun on Megillat Esther (literally, “The Scroll of Esther”), whereby Lester is substituted for Esther. Because they sound the same. Har.
So, while The Lot reflects an Israeli perspective, Lester is more representative of American Jewry. This means, first of all, performative Yiddish, by which I mean the peppering of Yiddish words and phrases into dialogue just in case we forget that the characters are Jewish.
Or not Jewish. It’s not like the Jews were the only ones to speak German in Ashkenaz.
It also means a panoply of ethnic stereotypes that help make up the beautiful, rat-infested patchwork that is America’s cultural capital. Most prominent are the I–talian garbage men who become Bigsan (not Bigtan) and Teresh in Lester’s dream.
Then we have the barman at Ahasuerus’ wine party, who is a goddamn leprechaun.
Last of all, we have Ahasuerus himself. I’m not sure what he’s supposed to be. Whatever Tommy Wiseau is, I guess.
It also has jokes. The worst jokes. I’m not even counting the stereotypes. Bigsan and Teresh’s first attempt on the king’s life instead takes out his prize horse Hangover. Immediately, the king calls for a horse doctor. “Did someone ask for a horse doctor?” a suspiciously-dressed bystander says. “A Doctor Soos?” If you didn’t know the Hebrew word for “horse,” you do now!
At least, of the three movies, this is the one that best understands that Esther is a comedy and the king is also a buffoon. It’s a musical too, and not a bad one. It includes Haman’s show-stopper “I am Evil” and a commercial jingle he ran in his former life as a barber.
There are some deep cuts from rabbinic tradition in this image. That is not a pun.
Videotape!
I wouldn’t call any of these movies good in a conventional sense. Of the three, I do think Esther and the King is most successful at achieving what it sets out to do. It is very corny, but deliberately so. The humor is dumb and obvious but harmless, and the actors seem to be enjoying themselves. The music is also… kind of good? I found myself humming it after the fact.
The Lot is far less successful since it has failed (so far) to ignite a nuclear war between Israel and Iran. Its pleasures are few. One of them is morbid curiosity of the “Can you believe this?” variety. The other—specific to me—is seeing the obscure texts you’ve been studying dramatized in living color. When I saw the Persian king being crowned by a pair of eagles, I got real excited.
As for Lester, its tone is on the money and the songs are decent (also hummable). It’s beautiful on the inside, I suppose. Because on the outside…
Look, this movie is the fugliest thing I’ve ever seen. It is actively painful to watch. This is its biggest liability by several magnitudes, dragging it from mediocre or even passably good down to “the abomination of desolation spoken of in Scripture.” It’s at least better than The Lot, which is both morally and visually repugnant. Lester badly needed more sponsorships than the one it got from the Baltimore chain Dougies. If you don’t want to commit to the full hour, at the very least you can spend two whole minutes in hell.
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 is supremely unqualified to talk about film. For more of his unprovoked movie opinions, see his Letterboxd account.