Thoughts on Heretic Movie

I just saw the movie Heretic a few hours ago and here are my thoughts

TLDR: Sister Barnes is the christ like figure who redeems Paxton and grants her the freedom to choose. Butterfly dream stuff is cool too.

Clearly this is a movie about belief and faith at its core; its all up to you. The movie leaves us with a sense of aporia, unease, weariness that the choice has always been ours. The ending takes the story beyond the level of a thou shall thou shall not, and forces the audience on the backfoot. We are forced to recognize that it has always been up to us. The time for analogy has fallen away, now is the time to choose. And not just now, but thirty minutes from now, and tomorrow, and even yesterday too, and a year from now, till death do us part.

The following is contrived and not exactly 100% implied by the movie, but these were the associations that I made.

Sister Paxton states that if she is reincarnated, she will come back as a butterfly and land on a hand to indicate it is her. So the movie ends, Sister Paxton escapes, and a butterfly lands on her hand. The viewer must then answer the question: Is Sister Paxton dead? We are shown a phone searching for service, which might be interpreted to indicate that Sister Paxton has escaped, and soon she will be reconnected with the outside world. Alternatively, we might take this to indicate that this is all merely a near death hallucination. There is no cell service, Sister Paxton will not escape. The butterfly indicates she has died.

However, we must remember the callback to the butterfly dream mentioned earlier by Mr. Reed. Zhuang Zhou dreams he is a butterfly, floating about, fluttering his wings, unconcerned with the tortuous inquiries of man, happy and content. Zhuang Zhou forgets he is a man. Yet suddenly Zhuang Zhou wakes up, only to find himself; his body, his limbs. But Zhuang Zhou doesn’t know if he is a man who has dreampt he is a butterfly, or if he is a butterfly who is dreaming he is Zhaung Zhou.

How are we to know the truth? The truth is whatever we believe it to be, and aside from that we cannot know. Is Sister Paxton dead, dreaming she is alive? Or has Sister Paxton truly escaped, and the butterfly is but a coincidence? Will Sister Paxton be reborn, as butterflies are?

Which is the case? It is up to you. In fact, it has always been up to you.

Let us take Sister Barnes on the other hand. Does Sister Paxton hallucinate her life being saved by Sister Barnes? Is her dead friend’s revival from death only a dream? Or does Sister Barnes genuinely rise from the dead and save the life of her friend before returning to eternal slumber? Does it matter whether or not the Christlike figure of Sister Barnes is real? Does the story have power if it never really happened? Does physical truth get in the way of the power of analogy?

Sister Barnes is the first of the two to call a spade a spade. She knows the truth, that Mr. Reed is a fraud, that there must be a rational explanation. More than that, she dies for having the courage to confront Mr. Reed. Power murders Truth. And yet, Truth rises from the dead, reveals itself, converts the non-believers— and then dies again. Does Sister Barnes sacrifice herself to save her fellow man? Does Barnes’s death liberate Paxton from paternal guidance, granting her the ability to choose for herself? Is it worse to have no choices at all, or to be forced to make every choice? Does Paxton gain the knowledge of good and evil, as Adam and Eve did? Did she make the wrong choice? Does Barnes rise from the dead to save Paxton? Will Paxton be redeemed as a butterfly or as nun?

On the Inferno poster: It could be taken as a warning that the nuns are descending further and further into hell, but I don’t find it totally satisfying to leave it there. Let’s remember that Dante travels through Inferno, to Purgatory, and finally finds Paradise. At first guided by reason, but finally by love. Is Reed Dante in search of his Beatrice? It seemed to me that Dante found his Beatrice, which the real Mr. Allegri never did. Reed found Beatrice, he gets the girl he wanted, the divine feminine is at his mercy, but his worship of power falls short. Love is not inculcated by power or reason, love is divine. The real Dante could never have Beatrice except in fantasies. Mr. Reed has his Beatrice, he has many Beatrices in chains, but has love only in fantasies. Reed cannot find acceptance, no matter how much he searches for it. No matter how many women he tries to convince, there is no wife making blueberry pie.

Back to the nuns. Sister Paxton—as she expects to die no less—claims that prayer does not work. And yet when facing death, she prays all the same. Maybe someone is praying for her at that moment, or maybe they’re not; she’ll never know, but it's nice to believe that someone is thinking of her. Her prayer is rewarded with divine intervention; maybe? Maybe her actions demonstrate belief more than her words, to pray is more important than to rationally expect it to work. Or maybe, she isn’t praying for herself. Paxton explicitly states that the purpose of prayer is so that others may believe they are being cared for, not for the one invoking God. Maybe Paxton prayed for Mr. Reed, that his soul might be saved even if hers would not. Maybe love conquers death. And to bring it full circle, maybe the love of the false Prophet saved Paxton’s life. It might be that Barnes unifies re

To continue the Divine Comedy comparison, reason does not suffice for paradise, reason must find its end at purgatory; reason must be reborn as love. It could be that the guide of human reason as embodied in Barnes was not sufficient, she must be reborn. As another ambiguity, Was Reed’s soul purified in Purgatory?

Sister Paxton, having been exposed to both the finite and the infinite, must now make the choice herself.

P.S.

I really like the choice of a Bob Dylan song as the credit song. Obviously the lyrics were relevant to the movie, but there really is not a greater representative of free choice than Bob Dylan. He invented himself anew. Over and over again.