I’m Alexander Cheves, and this is LOVE, BEASTLY—a blog about sex, feelings, and manhood. It’s written mostly for men—gay, straight, bi, MSM, or just curious—but some readers are women, and some don’t fit into categories. Everyone’s welcome here.
This is Beastly Reviews, where I write about films that made me feel something.
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The Twilight films taught teenage girls to close their legs and wait for the one—even if he's a vampire. Divergent is the next teen flick with a coded conservative message, albeit one more politically on-the-nose: Christians, the "punished minority" of society, must fight the educated liberal elite for their freedom. Sure, Jan.
Christians love telling everyone how oppressed they are—never mind that the Constitution, the Pledge of Allegience, and the Natioanl Anthem all reference the Christian god. The laws of this country were written mostly with Christians in mind, but sure, be an oppressed minority if it makes you feel better about stripping away real, life-saving rights from queer people, brown people, Muslims, and anyone of African descent. Divergent echoes this stupid, tone-deaf wolf-crying and has been almost universally panned, but Christians don't care if films are bad. Christian movies tend to revolve around football, but this one revolves around an emerging pop-culture motif: a girl with a bow-and-arrow who takes on the government. Sound familiar?
Tris (Shailene Woodley) lives in a dystopia—the future Obama wants, allegedly—where everyone is siloed into a social class based on a biometric scan, or something. But when it’s time for her to be scanned, the machine crashes and she’s labelled "divergent," which means she cannot be filed into any social caste. This allegedly makes her some kind of outlaw. (Why? We are never told.) She has to fight her way out, find other "divergent" people, train to be an anti-government activist, choose a go-to weapon (bow and arrow), meet a hot guy, and save the day. You get it. In the end (spoiler) she escapes the evil city: the last thing we see is her making it outside the urban walls into the lawless (presumably homespun, conservative) countryside.
The film is structured, as these films are, like an obstacle course—a series of challenges Tris must face before a final showdown. The token hot stud Tris meets is Four (Theo James, my god) with whom she locks lips—but never legs—along the way.
Anti-state teen lit is nothing new. Alan Moore's V For Vendetta, Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, Orwell's 1984, and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (and, to some extent, Harry Potter) were all on my high school reading list when I was angsty and young. But Divergent is something else. Instead of taking aim at fascism, the Vietnam War, and government surveillance, this film (and the book it’s based on) takes aim at liberals and suggests that the meek, humble servants of the world are being manipulated and controlled by "the media" and the secular, educated elite.
Those books from high school were powerful and dangerous, and everyone should read them. All have been banned by some censoring institution at some point (mostly Christian ones). If there is an oppressor among us, it's the class of people exerting a lot of energy to be seen as society’s victim. The Hunger Games franchise, for all its pomp, is the youthful resistance fiction of today. Divergent is not—it's a thinly veiled God's Not Dead, a Left Behind movie without the overt Bible verses, a movie that church youth groups across America will screen in an attempt to seem cool.
Divergent is based on the novel of the same name by Veronica Roth, a self-professed Christian. In his review, David Edelstein notes the book's treatment of intellectuals. One of the classes people are grouped into, "Erudite," the educated arm of society, is depicted as control-hungry villains pitted against the "Abnegation" class—humble servants. Edelstein writes: "The novelist, Veronica Roth, reserves her loathing for the 'Erudites', who spend their days in intellectual pursuit. She appears to be one in a long line of religious conservatives (her first acknowledgement is to God, 'for your Son') who think there's nothing more dangerous than intellectualism, which makes people apt to seize power and impose Maoist-like uniformity on entire populations—on pain of death."
Call me a liberal elite, but I like intellectualism, and I feel safer among smart people. Divergent disguises its anti-intellectual colours just enough to be a little fun, and the effect is a bit embarrassing. Tris and Four are too cool to be believable, even for the Christian-rock populace who practice that "Jesus was a rebel" brand of faith. Tattoos have an out-of-place prominence here: Four's sexy, muscular back is covered in tribalistic symbols of the social classes and Tris has an eye-rolling Bible-girl tattoo of three birds on her collarbone representing the family she was forced to leave behind.
Like most college-educated liberals I know, I'm smart enough to see that a healthy amount of government distrust is good. Because the only thing more frightening than a bunch of angry tea-partiers getting mad about same-sex marriage and forming citizen militias is the actual danger of real totalitarianism. But if we ever teeter that way, it won't be with college literature professors in charge. I know the people who will strip my rights and censor my books without a thought, and they're not liberals.
Christians are not outcasts—they just love trying to be. The truth is, they love state propaganda. They pass laws to keep their beliefs unchallenged, attack trans kids, keep prayer in schools, enforce the pledge of allegiance, and defund abortion clinics. They don't want you to be truly free. The trick of calling the secular, college-educated world the oppressor is that doing so tries to makes their Christian doctrine look renegade and countercultural when, in truth, most great countercultural figures have recognised Christians for what they are: the ones we truly need to be wary of.
They hate colleges and "woke" institutions. They hate cities and see them as dystopias—places where, heaven forbid, the throwing-together of cultures might actually result in a more equalizing, egalitarian, democratic world. Tris is victorious at the end of the film when she escapes the state-controlled city to the open land beyond its oppressive walls. (In a queer story, victory would be arriving in a city, not leaving one.)
If you're an evil college-educated elite, watch Divergent if you want to feel like a villain. It's fun.
Love, Beastly