Religion and Place on Television (Or, Waiting for Friday) – Nick Dion

I am looking forward to Friday night.

Perhaps I should backtrack; I own a television. That’s right – a television. What’s worse, I have actually been known to watch it at times. Worse still, I have been known to enjoy it. What might be a series of casual admissions for most becomes a loaded one in the eyes of certain academics. I’m a shallow populist. Not only do I not work all the time (which, it would seem, is how often I should be working) but I fritter away my time with mindless drivel. And make no mistake – much of it is mindless drivel. There will be no argument that television content is the best it has ever been here. If I hear of one more show about doctors/nurses/various other forms of hospital staff, or if I see any more permutations of the letter ‘C’, ‘S’ and ‘I’ in a television show title, I will run my eyes through a meat grinder.

So why Friday? Two long-awaited television premieres: Caprica, and Spartacus. I will not actually be watching them on Friday night. Both air on the new brand of à-la-HBO cable networks that no student could afford. But thanks to the miracles of Sidereel, I will catch up on what I missed over the weekend. In many ways, my feeling of anticipation is completely unjustified; I have yet to even see an episode of the shows. But both shows belong to genres that I have come to enjoy… and which demonstrate the way in which religion links us to the places we inhabit.Caprica is meant to be a prequel to the awesomely awesome science fiction remake seriesBattlestar Galactica (BSG). The premise is simple. In a society not unlike our own, scientists create a race of robots, the Cylons, to do the dangerous and dirty work that humans do not want to do. The Cylons become sentient, rise up against their human masters, and a lengthy war ensues. This story, the backdrop to BSG, forms the main action of Caprica. BSG begins as the Cylons, having lost the war and having been exiled from the humanoid planet (which is not Earth – more on this later), return to wage a new war on their creators. In a ‘shock and awe’ campaign of their own (minus the embarrassing ‘mission accomplished’ banner), they destroy the humanoid planet along with the majority of its people. Only a small fraction (50 000 or so) survive, and these are those who happened to be way from the planet in some form of space travel at the time. Not a perfect summary, but it will do for our purposes.Prediction of environmental catastrophe? Yes. Postmodern warning about the dangers of technology? That too. Psychological investigation into the recesses of the human morality? As well. But religion? Of course. Religion is present from the beginning, emerging most obviously as a way of managing trauma and anxiety. Who wouldn’t want a little bit of Jesus after their planet had been destroyed? Except our characters are less satisfied with Jesus than with the Greco-Roman pantheon. Zeus, Athena, Apollo… these are the deities of the future. Having become sentient, the Cylons have also found religion – and theirs is monotheistic. The dynamic theologies of the monotheistic Cylons and the polytheistic humans plays a central role in the progression of the main plot.

As the series progresses, the humans decide that their best hope for survival lies in their finding Earth, a mythical planet that their ancestors once sought inhabited. How is earth to be found? By decoding the legends about these ancestral travelers located in sacred scriptures. The series takes shape as a form of pilgrimage, a retracing of steps in the search for safety in a holy land. Religion works to create a ‘safe place’ in the universe of darkness.

Spartacus, on the other hand, I locate in the tradition of HBO’s

Rome and the movie Gladiator. With a focus on casual sex, violence as entertainment, and the political intrigue of imperial politics, we come to learn about the ‘shadow side’ of humanity… and appreciate just how little difference existed between Roman society and our own. I do not mean to suggest that any of these shows are exact historical renditions (though, in all three cases, an effort is made in that direction). On the contrary, it is specifically because we project ourselves onto our interpretation of classical Rome that we can see that which might have been hidden previously.Here, again, the link between religion and place is recreated against the backdrop of a classical world of polarised societies, each with its strange and foreign gods. Who could forget the early scene in Gladiator where, having driven off the enemy in the forests of Germania, Maximus settles into his tent with the figures of his household gods and prays for the safety of his family? Weeks from home, Maximus reconnects with the civilisation of Rome and his loved ones therein through these portable deities. The link to the divine becomes a link to home.

Our experience of place in modern society can often be as disorienting as those portrayed in BSG and Gladiator; everywhere feels so near yet so far at the same time. I can speak to friends in Europe online, but I would still need hours (and hundreds of dollars) to actually get there. The network of places that make up the world can make place feel superficial, like the ground we stand on could fall out from beneath us at any time. Blame globalisation. Blame capitalism. Blame postmodernism. It does not matter. The experience remains the same. Don’t believe me? Just flip on the television.