One of the non-computer things I did over the weekend was to watch the movie version of Stephen King's Green Mile. It happened to be offered on somebody's streaming service this weekend, and I remembered that a departed friend had been moved by it, while living, and urged me to watch it. Watching the movie was like reading a last letter from this person--someone who was brave and strong, while living, but had to have been in pain even when the film was in theatres.
Horror fiction has traditionally justified itself by tapping into religious beliefs about the afterlife and the supernatural, even though this has meant that it's contradicted other religious beliefs about those topics. In some faith traditions people linger in between life and death as ghosts, so ghosts can be completely benign; in others people are either living or dead, and what appear to be ghosts of departed friends are deceiving spirits, so even if someone reports that the ghost of his old dog led him safely around the washed-out bridge, the deceiving spirit was only setting him up for confusion and temptation later in life. In some traditions Jesus was unique and it's blasphemous even to speculate about what might happen if some other person was able to emulate His love and sacrifice; in some traditions emulating Jesus in every way is what everyone is meant to do, and it might even be virtuous to imagine a contemporary man or woman who could be the "Christ figure" in a work of fiction.
The Green Mile is one of those stories where a contemporary character is a "Christ figure." If this offends your beliefs, don't read the book or watch the movie.
I'd read the book before watching the movie, so I don't think knowing the ending spoiled anything.
The movie opens in a geriatric care home where a healthy, handsome man, apparently about sixty years old, goes out for a walk, comes in and watches a movie with his housemates, and runs out crying during a harmless dance scene. One of his housemates goes after him,guessing that there has to be a story to explain his reaction. There is, of course.
In 1935, he says, he was a prison guard. The man who plays the senior prison guard, not young in 1935, doesn't look like the man who plays the protagonist in the care home in 1999, but movies traditionally use different actors to play the same person at different ages; let it pass. The passage from where a convict was imprisoned to where he was executed was traditionally called his last mile, irrespective of the actual distance. The prison's concrete floor was painted green so they called the corridor that led from the convicts' cells to the electric chair the Green Mile. A co-worker nobody liked, who kept his job because of family connections, led in a new convict squawking "Dead man walking!" The protagonist, Paul, told him to be quiet and try to help keep the convicts calm. The co-worker, Percy, had a hard time being quiet and calm; he was a classic coward-bully blend. The new convict was about eight feet tall and could speak, but not very well. He obviously wouldn't have been able to learn much at school if he'd ever attended one, which he probably hadn't. His name was John Coffey (there's a sort of tradition where fictional Christ figures' initials are J.C.). He had been found clutching the heads of two murdered children.
But somehow, as the main plot of the movie starts moving, Coffey doesn't seem the murderous type. Another convict has been making a pet of a mouse. Percy stomps on the mouse. Coffey takes the body in his hands, breathes on it, and coughs out a cloud of dust while the mouse scampers away, healthy as ever. The other men on death row shake their heads. Did they see what they thought they saw? Paul shakes Coffey's hand. Paul has had a painful illness all year. Coffey coughs, and Paul is well again. Another guard's wife has an inoperable tumor people have avoided telling her about. Coffey is smuggled out to the guard's home, inhales the woman's breath, coughs, and accepts a St Christopher medal she was wearing when she wakes up healthy.
The mouse's master's execution date approaches. To comfort the man, someone tells him the mouse can be sent to a special mouse circus in Florida where people will pay to watch his tricks. Percy, seeking promotion to a better paid job, wants to "be out front" during the execution, which is public. Being a jerk, he takes this opportunity to tell the convict that the mouse circus does not exist. Despite having been taught that, just before the electrodes are applied to the convict's scalp, the scalp must be wetted down with a sponge so the convict will be electrocuted rather than burned alive, Percy takes the sponge, reaches down into a bucket provided him, but places the sponge between the scalp and the electrodes completely dry. He claims he didn't know that the sponge needed to be wet. Nobody believes this. The guards don't file a complaint about Percy because they want him to be promoted to a job outside the prison.
Coffey has been completely non-judgmental about the other convicts--all but one. This one acts mouthy and obnoxious in prison. He might merely be young and scared, but no, Coffey says, he's a bad man. The man's badness disturbs Coffey so badly, for no obvious reason, that Paul ends up holding Coffey's hand through the bars and letting Coffey project a memory to him through telepathy. The young convict was a hired helper who murdered the two children. "He killed them with love," Coffey keeps mumbling, transmitting the memory of how the man told each child "Be quiet or I'll kill your sister instead of you." There is, Coffey says in his clumsy way, too much of that in the world. Too many people are killed by evildoers manipulating their love.
In the book the other characters explain at length that Coffey's role as a Christ figure seems to require him to be a very slow thinker. He seems to feel so much empathy that, if he were able to think intelligently about it, he wouldn't be able to live with it. The movie manages better, I think, by not belaboring this point, though perhaps I feel that way because I already know that a room-temperature IQ score is part of Stephen King's vision of his character. Though Jesus was a rabbi and claimed royal blood, as a Jew He was part of a despised minority group in the Roman Empire. Coffey has a black-coffee complexion but, to get the "despised minority" vibe going in 1999, Stephen King had to throw in that the man can barely put a sentence together. One of those cases where gigantic size and intellectual deficiencies seem to be part of a genetic syndrome. I'm not sure why King believed that a person who was able to act as a Christ figure might not have been given the spiritual capacity to understand what he was doing, might not have been a genius; I suspect he just wanted to ensure that everyone in the audience has their face rubbed in the idea of the Christ figure being someone they'd find hard to like, trust, or respect.
Coffey was found holding the children, trying his utmost, howling in the pain of his effort, to draw life back into their bodies, but he couldn't. That was why, on the few occasions when anyone asked him what had happened, he could only blubber that he was sorry he "couldn't put it back." He didn't know the name of the murderer; he didn't expect anyone would pay any attention to his testimony if he accused the murderer. He feels bad enough about being unable to revive the children that he's ready for his strange life to end, anyway. But he's glad the murderer was convicted of another murder and is on death row.
The plot proceeds to blow up in the sort of violent confrontation Stephen King's primary audience of young men demand, while its social and philosophical implications seem to be weighing on King's own mind. Paul realizes that, having encountered a Christ figure, he is going to be required to be "out front," in the presiding role, during the sacrifice of that Christ figure. He is going to be cast as Pontius Pilate. He won't have to throw the switch, but he will have to apply the sponge. He doesn't think he can do that with Coffey, no matter how many other convicts he's done it with before. So, like all Christians who believe that whatever harm we do or good we fail to do to others has been done to Christ, Paul has to seek guidance and consolation from Coffey himself. Maybe Coffey would like to escape from prison?
Coffey would not. He's spent his whole life roaming around "where God leads" him, channelling healing energy in a way that costs him pain, and he's eager for it to be over.
Is there anything he would like?
Well, Coffey says, he never has seen a "flicker show."
Which is why Paul can't watch that particular movie without crying. He leads his sympathetic housemate out for a short walk and explains that people Coffey healed have extra long lives. He chose that particular home because it's near to an abandoned house where he's still visiting the mouse. After Coffey's execution, Paul resigned from the prison and tried being a teacher, preventing crime, instead of punishing it...
Not even Stephen King could imagine how that might have been said to work but, at this point in the movie, I didn't care. I was thinking of friends who were ready for their mortal lives to be over, when the time came. I don't usually mourn for people who were ready to go so much as I do for people who die young. A school friend's father, a member of the community I hadn't known well but had respected, died just last week. I cried.
I don't know that real people ever have all of the traits of fictional "Christ figures." I know that real people do have the traits of what some Christian traditions call saints; I can easily imagine people whose faith tradition taught them such praying to the departed spirits of David Peters, or Mitch Snyder, or Zahara Heckscher, and the thought has crossed my mind that--oh no you don't, God, I am too old to be of any use as a martyr. I don't want Greta Thunberg or Rachel Parent or any other young person to be a martyr for Glyphosate Awareness, either. Movements benefit from martyrs but I hope we can succeed without one.
I do know that any person, perhaps especially a person you find hard to like or trust--someone with intellectual deficiencies, someone with a repulsive-looking disease, someone obese--can be the Christ figure in any scene in anyone's life, any day.
Last week some social media discussion was about people who choose to have no contact with their parents. I do understand that in some cases that's the best either the parent or the child can do, and one reason why boarding schools exist--and why, before boarding schools were invented, in some cultures teenagers were "fostered out" to live in different families--is that some parents and children can't be in the same house. Occasional contact, greeting cards expressing a hope that things may get better, may be an optimal outcome. Sometimes things get better; sometimes addicts sober up, sometimes abusers at least notice when you become stronger than they are, sometimes the way you grow and change stops reminding them of someone else, sometimes your own independence stops parents trying to control your life and stops you mentally letting them. I think most families where parents and children are not friends can benefit from family counselling, and old books like Peoplemaking and The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense can be worth more than their weight in gold. But some people were never meant to be close friends with their parents, or with one or some of their children. Sometimes, even where the family obligations are carried out in an exemplary way, even when separation is not caused by resentment so much as by personality difference, people aren't friends. I think that if more young people tried harder to love and stay close to their parents, this would be a better world; but it doesn't always happen. Well, when the parent who is not physically dangerous to the child but is irredeemably annoying starts to need the child's help, it may help the adult child to think of the parent as a Christ figure.
People who have less than you have are always such a drag. I know this because I'm probably one of them. People who might be willing to eat your food or ride in your car, once, but they're probably never going to invite you to eat their food or ride in your car, and if they did you might be inclined to refuse, may be even harder to take if we have talents you need or even looks you fancy. The Bible very specifically says that anyone who has less than you is likely to be a Christ figure in your life's story.
People whose ethnic identity turns you off...let's be anti-p.c. and consider White people, White men, Jewish White men. Jesus Himself did not try to persuade His disciples that foreigners were the Christ figures in their stories. For them it was enough of a step to imagine that a foreigner like the Roman centurion or the Samaritan woman at the well might be a fellow disciple. But when they had received the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, then they welcomed foreigners into the new Christian movement. If you have a strong preference for one side or the other in an international or intertribal conflict, it is possible that someone from the side you don't favor may be a Christ figure for you..
The people who serve as Christ figures for us may offer us guidance, or consolation, or correction, or opportunities to practice mercy and charity, or any combination of these things.
I think it undoubtedly added something to my experience of The Green Mile that it came as a posthumous message from a friend. Nevertheless I think it might be helpful for others to find a time to sit through all three hours of the movie, and reflect on the Christ figures in their personal stories.
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