Ready for a Punk Rock Jesus Movie?
How can serious literature keep up with the storytelling of comic books? I have been reading The Woman Upstairs, the new novel by Claire Messud, one of my favorite writers. So far it's a somewhat interesting, if a bit slow, story about a woman who is full of resentment and wants more than anything else to me a famous artist. Messud wrote one of my favorite novels, The Emperor's Children, and hopefully The Woman Upstairs, which will be out shortly, will pick up and live up to that title.
In the meantime, I keep getting distracted from The Woman Upstairs by Punk Rock Jesus. Punk Rock Jesus was a limited run comic book published by Vertigo that has now been issued as a stand-alone graphic novel. I understand that novelist like Claire Messud are gifted, and having a writer require a little patience on behalf of the reader is necessary for a rich payoff as the book develops. But the thing is, so far The Woman Upstairs is about a lonely and cranky narcissist who is angry at the world because it didn't make her famous. Compare that to Punk Rock Jesus, written and drawn by Sean Murphy, which is about -- well, that will take some explaining. But it's a lot more daring and interesting than Messud's work.
In fact, it's amazing that the film rights to Punk Rock Jesus haven't been sold. The story is a cross between The Da Vinci Code and The Kids Are Alright (that is, the rock and roll Who film, not the film about two lesbian mothers). It's the near future, and the corporation known as Ophis has cloned Jesus Christ. They did so by cloning some DNA off of the Shroud of Turin and using it to impregnate a teenager named Gwen.
Ophis and its "J2" project wants to bring up the new Jesus, named Chris, as something of an evangelical dope to appeal to born-again America, known as the New American Christians. There is a battle between Christians who believe Chris is the second coming and those who think that Ophis is trading in blasphemy.
Toss in a female Jewish doctor (yes, her religion matters in the story) who cooperates with the cloning to pay for her environmental zealotry, a former Irish terrorist hired to protect the new Lord, and punk rock, which Chris turns to to fight the power, and you've got something you'd think would be completely ridiculous. The thing is, it's hard to stop turning the pages to find out what happens next. Murphy manages to avoid camp through the use of the basics: smooth and believable plotting, good characters and a way with dialogue that bests many novelists.
He also has the virtue of being direct about politics, which is probably why he and other comic book writers are more popular than our literary novelists. With the exception of one character, I was enchanted by The Emperor's Children, Claire Messud's previous novel. But that one flawed character is part of a larger flaw with Messud and other modern novelists. A main character in the book is Murrray Thwaite, a liberal journalist who reminded me of Richard Cohen. Thwaite's children struggle to make it in post-September 11 New York, but Murrary's biggest challenge turns out to be his nephew, Frederick "Bootie" Tubb. Bootie, a midwesterner unimpressed by Murray Thwaite's Manhattan elitism, almost upends his uncle's life.
The thing is, we never know why. I suspect it's because Messud didn't have the courage to make Bootie a conservative, even though that would have made him a perfect foil for Thwaite. Because to do so would have meant creating a conservative character who was human and could outsmart someone on the left. In a similar fashion, The Woman Upstairs has a character who who is violent and dysfunctional because he supported the Iraq War. To liberal novelists, conservative characters are either not used when doing so would make them look good, or else treated as caricatures.
In Punk Rock Jesus, the anti-corporate, anti-religious worldview is obvious, yet liberals often don't come off much better than the conservatives. The themes and the scenes are big and weird enough for a 1970s Charlton Heston sci-fi flick. It is this bigness, this daring to create a fiction that comments in a bold way on the world, that makes Punk Rock Jesus the more interesting read. I can't wait to see the movie.
