A few quick thoughts about one scene in Mrs Davis
A few quick thoughts about one scene in Mrs Davis
The wacky, all-over-the-place series about faith and tech does something almost profoundly biblical one moment and then lurches in a completely different direction the next.
Warning: There be spoilers here, especially with regard to Episode 7.
Mrs Davis is a very weird show.
Before I watched this series—which finished its first and possibly only season last Thursday—all I knew about it was that it had something to do with a nun fighting an all-powerful artificial intelligence, and that it was being billed as “an exploration of faith versus technology—an epic battle of biblical and binary proportions.”
But the show turned out to be a lot, lot stranger than that. It’s a really goofy grab-bag of seemingly random elements: a quest to destroy the Holy Grail, a hyper-violent shoe commercial, an imprisoned Pope, a Vegas-style magic show, a professor named Schrodinger (who, yes, has a cat)… they’re all part of the mix.
And the series takes the notion that nuns are brides of Christ very literally, as the show’s main character—Sister Simone—periodically meets Jesus (aka “Jay”) in some sort of parallel spiritual dimension for falafel and conjugal visits.
I could barely get a handle on it all, and ordinarily I would have let the series pass without comment. But then something happened in Episode 7 that took this show to a new level, for me—not to the extent that I want to write about the series as a whole, but I do at least want to note a few extraordinary elements in that episode.
Specifically—and for reasons too convoluted to get into here—there comes a point where Sister Simone has to go into the belly of a whale to retrieve the Holy Grail, and she does this while wearing a diving suit called a “Lazarus Shroud”, to protect her from the whale’s stomach acid.
And then, once she gets inside the whale’s belly, she… finds herself in the tomb of Jesus, with Jesus’ body lying there, wrapped in its own shroud.
And then the Virgin Mary shows up, holding an infant version of Jesus.
For a moment, this series seemed, to me, to be on the verge of something profound.
At one point in the gospels, Jesus explicitly compares the three days that he will spend in the tomb to the three days that Jonah spent in the belly of the great fish (Matthew 12:40; cf Jonah 1:17). I have often heard people talk about this passage, but I can’t recall ever seeing it dramatized in any significant way onscreen before. The word-for-word adaptations of Matthew produced by The Visual Bible and The Lumo Project include that line as part of their dialogue, of course, but they don’t dwell on it at all. Neither does Pier Paolo Pasolini in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964).
So to the extent that Mrs Davis was doing something new, I was really engaged by this scene. The belly of the whale? Jesus’ tomb? A “Lazarus Shroud”? I was there.
And then, within seconds, this scene lost me altogether.
And dialogue like this is the reason why:
SIMONE: Is he dead?
MARY: Yes, but also no. My son is there (looks at enshrouded body), and here (looks at baby in her arms). Both alive and dead at the same time.
SIMONE: How is he— and you—
MARY: Simone, please, there’s much to explain, but right now your body is passing through the whale’s intestinal tract, approaching the Grail. And if you’re going to destroy it, you need to understand. This place is a tomb—his tomb. This is where I sat with him, for three awful days, long after he had turned cold. It is where my grief turned to anger, leading me to make my greatest mistake. When I learned the Romans were coming to take my son, the sadness I felt, knowing I would never hold my baby again—it destroyed all logic and reason. I took a part of him for myself, the part where I used to kiss him when he was a child. (kisses baby’s head) And I preserved it with pitch and amber, and turned it into a bowl.
SIMONE: The Holy Grail is Jay’s [i.e. Jesus’s] skull?
MARY: You must think this is sick. How could you not? But mothers do insane things out of love for their children.
Mary goes on to explain that Jesus has been tethered to this world by the Grail for the past two thousand years—stuck in a sort of limbo, the very limbo where Simone has been meeting him for their conjugal visits—and she says Simone needs to “destroy the last remaining piece of him on Earth” so that his spirit can finally be set free.
Where. To. Begin.
There are so, so, so many things “wrong” with that dialogue—so many ways it deviates from the biblical and traditional narratives—that it feels kind of ridiculous to even think about taking it seriously enough to nit-pick.
And yet I can’t help myself:
No, neither Mary nor anyone else stayed with Jesus in the tomb. (There is only one gospel that places Mary at the crucifixion of Jesus—John’s gospel—and even that one doesn’t give her any role in the burial of Jesus.)
No, the Romans weren’t coming to take the body of Jesus, they were coming to make sure no one else took it. (They wanted it to stay in the tomb, not come out of the tomb.)
No, the body of Jesus was not taken apart, least of all by his mother, and there are no “pieces of him on Earth” holding him back from the afterlife. (The fact that Jesus rose from the dead and transcended earthly limitations is kind of central to the whole idea of Christianity.)
And the Holy Grail, of course, is supposed to be a cup—the cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper, before he was dead—and not a piece of anyone’s skull, right?
Well, okay, here I have to admit that I don’t know all that much about Grail lore, and for all I know, there may be some sort of basis for the Grail-skull link here. Maybe there is some pagan, pre-Christian version of Grail lore that the series is tapping into. Or maybe there is some other myth, legend, or scholarly hypothesis that the writers had in mind.1 I don’t know. Feel free to let me know in the comments.
What I do know is that I can handle a lot of weird stuff—I could roll with the show’s very literalistic take on nuns being married to Christ, for example—but any story predicated on the notion that the Virgin Mary cracked her own son’s skull open while his body was still newly buried in the tomb just loses me. Utterly loses me.
And to lose me like that so soon after piquing my interest with the tomb / belly of the whale thing… well, it was a kind of whiplash.
Anyway. I figured some people might be interested in knowing about this aspect of the show, if they hadn’t heard about it yet; and I wondered if anyone might know something more about Grail lore that would help to illuminate this scene for me. So I’m writing this post and tossing it out there, just for the record.
One other thing about this scene, though:
The Virgin Mary is played in this scene by Shohreh Aghdashloo, an Oscar-nominated actress (for 2003’s House of Sand and Fog) who might be best-known now for playing the foul-mouthed UN Secretary-General Chrisjen Avasarala in all six seasons of the excellent sci-fi series The Expanse.
And, as it happens, this is not the first biblical character Aghdashloo has played.
Aghdashloo, who is of Iranian descent, previously played Mary’s kinswoman Elizabeth in 2006’s The Nativity Story—and I interviewed her on the junket for that film, and it was through our interview that I first learned about Iranian Bible movies, which have since become something of an interest of mine.2
So it was very interesting to see her play another biblical character, however radically non-biblical this version of that character might be.
Oh, wait, one other thing comes to mind, too:
One of my favorite Orthodox icons is the one that shows the “dormition”, or death, of Mary. In it, the disciples gather to pay their respects—and Jesus stands behind them all, holding Mary’s soul, which is wrapped in swaddling clothes like an infant. Just as Mary once welcomed Jesus into her world, so now Jesus welcomes her into his.
The scene in Mrs Davis that I discuss above plays like a reversal of this image.
Instead of Jesus holding a sort of infant Mary while standing next to the adult Mary’s body, the scene from Mrs Davis shows Mary holding the infant Jesus while standing next to the adult Jesus’ body.
Instead of suggesting that the deceased person is progressing on her spiritual journey—by embarking on a phase of it that is so new to her she approaches it like a child, with infinite room to grow3—the scene in Mrs Davis suggests that the deceased person has regressed on some level, because his mother simply can’t let him go.
Is the series intentionally flipping the iconography around? Were the makers of this series aware of the existing iconography? Or is it just a coincidence?
I don’t expect to ever find out, but I’m interested, all the same.
A quick Google turns up an article on a Knights Templar website which claims that Grail lore “is intimately connected with legends involving severed heads”. Incidentally, Googling the words “grail” and “skull” turns up quite a few pages about Indiana Jones—because, of course, Jones has encountered both the Holy Grail and Crystal Skulls in his adventures. He was also forced to drink from a severed head in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
See my write-ups on Abraham, the Friend of God, Prophet Joseph, The Kingdom of Solomon, Saint Mary, and Jesus, the Spirit of God, which range in length from a single paragraph on the Abraham film to a 22-part series of blog posts on the Joseph TV series.
“Further up and further in,” to quote The Chronicles of Narnia’s slogan about the afterlife. I’m also thinking of Carolyn Arends’ ‘We’ve Been Waiting for You’, which draws an explicit link between being born into this life and making one’s entrance into the next life.