Wake Up Dead Man

It is not about believing but living

This past Sunday, our sermon began with a reflection on the latest Knives Out installment, Wake Up Dead Man. My two daughters sat upright, grinned at each other, and quietly but visibly cheered. I’m not sure they’ve ever listened more attentively to a sermon.

We’re big fans of the first two Knives Out movies in our family, for all sorts of reasons: the classic whodunit scripts, Daniel Craig, gorgeous cinematography, unforgettable characters, and the painfully on-point social commentaries.

I hadn’t even been aware that another movie was out (on Netflix) until I started getting tagged in posts about the film. One fellow historian texted me to ask if I was a consultant. I was not, alas. But once I watched it for myself, I understood why he asked.

The starring roles (apart from Craig’s Benoit Blanc) belong to two priests. Somehow, it manages to present a more nuanced appreciation and critique of Christianity than almost anything else I can remember watching.

Here’s the teaser:

The film focuses Monsignor Wicks, the angry, culture-wars-fighting Jesus and John Wayne prototype, and Father Jud, a former boxer turned priest who tries to put violence behind me and model his life and his ministry after Christ.

When told “a priest is a shepherd, the world is a wolf,” Jud rejects this claim. “You start fighting wolves, and soon everyone you don’t understand is a wolf. . . . Christ came to heal the world, not to fight it.”

Turns out, filmmaker Rian Johnson is a former youth group kid.

I learned this from Tyler Huckabee at Sojourners. Huckabee interviewed Johnson and you can read the whole conversation here, but here’s a bit of their conversation to get a sense. (No spoilers…)

Tyler Huckabee, Sojourners: You’ve talked about how Christianity played an important part in your life when you were younger, and that’s very obvious in this movie. I was curious if you think that upbringing has shaped other movies that you’ve worked on.

Rian Johnson: Every single one. This is the first movie where I’m coming at it on the surface, but every film I’ve done in some way has been about this topic.

I was a believer earlier in my life. It wasn’t just that I was raised in a religious household or brought to church. Up through my childhood and early 20s, I was deeply Christian. My relationship with Christ was how I framed the entire world. I’m not a believer anymore, but when something is that profound in your life, it carries through all those years. It shapes how you see the world, and it’s something you keep revisiting. It’s a well that you draw from. So, everything from Star Wars to Looper had a lot to do with essential Christian ideas that I grew up with. It is a bedrock foundation for me. Once a youth group kid, always a youth group kid….

I’m gonna ask you one more question. The last song, Tom Waits’ “Come On Up To The House,” that the movie ends on, was a great way to wrap things up. Were there any other contenders for the final needle drop?

No. That was it from the very, very start. It had to be that. I love that song. I love Tom Waits and that song is so generous in spirit: “Come on up to the house!” It’s saying, put down your grievances, let’s put down all this nonsense, just come on up, and let’s be human beings together.

Perhaps predictably, the film hasn’t been all that popular among conservative evangelicals. Although focused on two Catholic priests, the film depicts a militant version of culture wars Christianity familiar to many who have spent time in evangelical spaces.

There are some spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t watched the film yet, pause here and go do it and then come back…

Over at The Gospel Coalition, Brett McCracken saw “2 corrupted Christianities” represented in the film—that of a “Trumpian faith,” and the “progressive inclusive faith” of Father Jud. It took me a moment to recall why Father Jud would be so offensive to McCracken, and then I remembered that Monsignor Wicks, the movie’s bad guy, had rained down judgment on gay people, among others. McCracken thinks Jud should talk more about sin. “For all he talks of grace, is Jud’s a ‘cheap grace’ that downplays turning from sin?”

This struck me as an odd reading of the film, one that begins with the very culture wars framing that the film is trying to disrupt. I don’t think McCracken mentions the character Louise at all in his review, and this is a mistake. I don’t think you can understand the message of the movie if you don’t pay attention to Louise, and to her phone call with Father Jud. It is the turning point of the film. More than a plot twist, it changes the film from one thing into something else entirely. Until then it was a murder mystery, and the church setting merely a plot device. The phone call comes at the height of tension, just as things are about to be resolved or fall apart entirely. Time is of the essence. The detective is in the room. And then, everything stops. We’re left in the dark, along with Blanc, waiting. Impatiently. But the impatience belongs to us, and to Blanc. Father Jud is remembering who he is, who Louise reminds him he is simply by assuming that is who he is. He’s a priest, after all. After that scene, things shift. It feels now that the murder mystery was a plot device for something else entirely.

This was exactly the point Hannah Anderson made about the film yesterday over on X. (I’m not on X much and no longer post there, but I do keep track of political events there.) She was responding to another critique by a fellow evangelical, Matthew Lee Anderson. Anderson called the film “a nauseatingly preachy movie”… “basically an Angel Studios film for post-evangelicals…it had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer…”

To which Hannah Anderson (@sometimesalight) responded:

“It’s so blatant, in fact, that one might even begin to think it’s intentionally blatant. True preachiness doesn’t have that self-awareness. The film is hyper-aware of what it’s doing in a way that’s pretty consistent with a cultural moment marked by memes & meta realities.

So a more accurate critique might be that the film as an artifact is embodying the theme of ‘story’ at a meta level as a way of reinforcing the internal claim that the power of Christianity is in its value as a story, not necessarily as fact.

But that isn’t really the tension between evangelicals & post-evangelicals who are more concerned w/ arguing issues & stances….This also explains all the ‘inaccuracies’ that people are naming about church structures & ‘that’s not how the Roman Catholic Church works.” It’s not the RCC & it’s not attempting to be factual. It’s telling a story.…

The film’s claim is that Christianity’s value lies in its power as a lived story. So when Blanc offers grace, he’s participating in the ongoing story of Christ whether he believes it or not. Belief as a question is sidelined. It’s about entering into a living story. And thus the title…Wake Up DEAD Man.

“I would argue that the primary tension of the film isn’t law vs. grace (as in Les Mis) but living Christianity vs. dead Christianity. The film sidelines the question of “do you believe in Christian teaching?” for the question of “do you live out Christian teaching?”

Blanc doesn’t go to church because he can’t believe. He wants facts. The congregation is content to die because they’re satisfied with believing correctly. Martha justifies her actions based on core beliefs.

The move the film makes is to shift away from the centrality of believing the story of Christianity to living the story of Christianity. I think that’s why we’re seeing such diverse reactions to it. The divide isn’t between evangelical & exvangelical or even evangelical & mainline.

The divide is between emphasis on belief as the means to living faith & emphasis on action as lived faith. That’s also why it feels so “political”—for the American church, the question right now is “Is it enough to claim & speak Christian belief or do our actions name us as Christian?”

That’s the point of the title: Wake Up DEAD Man. It’s not concerned w/ proving or disproving the facts of Christianity so much as calling us to come alive in it. In the world of the film, Blanc doesn’t need to believe—he just needs to act in accordance w/ the story of Christ.

We can debate whether actions are sufficient or whether they can even be sustained without belief. (I tend to think they can’t and that union with the living Christ is what keeps good actions from becoming oppressive actions & that union requires belief in Christ as living & active.)

But what the film is putting a finger on is both the danger of religion that doesn’t live out the story of Christ (Wicks & church) as well as the hollowness of life lived only by fact (Blanc). It’s challenging both because both focus on belief in the story > acting within the story.

In this way, the form of the film is primarily about telling a story. It isn’t supposed to be an accurate, factual depiction of a particular church tradition because the church functions for the sake of the story.

And all the over the top scenes like the sun shining down on Blanc during his Damascus Road “conversion” are intentionally obvious in the same way live theater can be over the top & obvious. We are living & operating within the story. We’re expected to suspend…disbelief.

Those of us shaped by more literal hermeneutics will want to rush to “What is the film saying?” because we’re asking what it professes—what does it believe? But we might start by asking “How does it work?” Which is about analyzing its action & form.

And that, ironically enough, is kind of the point. Do we tell or do we show our Christianity? Does the form of our lives support the story we say we believe? Are we living out the story of the living Christ or are we satisfied with making claims that have no life in them?

Believing in the Resurrection means believing that we are part of an ongoing story of the living Christ & that this story is best told by living it out. By loving God & neighbor, be receiving & extending grace, by seeking to become who we claim we are. By living as Christ lives.

Amen, Hannah.

If you find Hannah as insightful as I do, I recommend following her here on Substack at The Occasional Writings.

And if you want some of what Hannah offered but in the form of a sermon, here’s the sermon that captivated my girls (and me) this past Sunday:

And for more from Pastor Len, he also recently started up here on Substack. You can follow him at Seeking Transcendence, where he posts sermons like this one and occasional writings.

Also, we’ll be back from our Christmas hiatus tomorrow with a Live episode of The Convocation Unscripted. Tomorrow, 5pm ET. I’ll be joining from Chicago, where I’ll be attending the American Society of Church History and American Historical Association for the next few days.

Get the link here—we’ll have plenty to talk about.

One more thing: Is Knives Out family-friendly viewing? Depends on your family. The other priest’s confessional is a little…“inappropriate” as I like to say to my kids, but also hilarious.