Game of Thrones and Religion

LA REINE MARGOT

Patrice Chéreau, 1994

"France is torn apart by the Wars of Religion. Catholics and Protestants have been fighting for years... To quench the hatred, Catherine sets up an alliance for peace: she marries her daughter Margot to Henri of Navarre, her Protestant cousin... Margot's wedding, a symbol of peace and reconciliation, will be used to set off the greatest massacre in the history of France."

Those are excerpts from La Reine Margot's prologue. The Catherine they're talking about is not Catherine Zeta-Jones. Not Catherine Deneuve. Not even Catherine the Great. It's Catherine de' Medici, the Adolf Hitler of 16th century. (Catherine was to Protestants as Hitler was to Jews.) Since the king in throne was reportedly a Mama's boy, Valois matriarch Catherine was practically the king and queen of France for quite a long time.

Millennials probably know Catherine from Reign, a CW series about Mary's life. The romanticized show portrays Catherine as a domineering yet sympathetic mommy with quite a good sense of humor — a glaring contradiction to the Catherine portrayed in La Reine Margot, which was marketed as Queen Margot in English-speaking countries.

A Religious Antireligious Absurdism

WISE BLOOD
John Huston, 1979

"It's wise blood. It ain't everybody has it... see, it's a gift... the gift of the prophets."

- Enoch Emory

"A religious antireligious absurdism." That's quite a lot of adjectives there, but Wise Blood is essentially an absurdist tragicomedy about antitheism, which sprouts from the lead character's childhood guilt.

War veteran Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif) is a twenty-something ambitious idealist. Driven by his own concept of truth, he starts his own church: The Church of Truth Without Christ, "where the blind can't see, the lame don't walk, and the dead stay that way."

The Dirty Laundries of the Church

THE MAGDALENE SISTERS
Peter Mullan, 2002

If The Magdalene Sisters was shown during the Magdalene laundries' "glory years" — no, wait — I don't think it would even be shown at all. The film is a massive punch in the face of those zealots who fantasize that women who don't abide by their religion's "values" are "fallen women," therefore they need to "repent."

Repent so by doing time at the Magdalene laundries, a purgatory where you have to work for hours without pay. It is also where the Catholic Church's dirty laundries are exposed, to the workers at least: a manipulative and corrupt Mother Superior, a perverse priest, basically the Church in their not-so-human form.

Fave Movie Quotes: Agnes of God

I was lying on the grass, looking at the sun.
The sun became a cloud, and the cloud became... the lady.

- Agnes