There is a dotted line joining Fleabag with Detective Blanco from the books of carmen mola and that it goes through the superhero movies that will arrive in September, for the rehabilitation of Will Smith, for the resistance handbook of Pedro Sanchez and by Amadeo Llados, the coach who came out of alcoholism to create a new elite of muscular Spaniards, millionaires and clients of his services. “People only want redemption stories,” says a character in the novel The movement of the body through space, by Lionel Shriver (Anagram). And how can we go against him if that scheme of the sinner who becomes virtuous after hitting rock bottom is everywhere, of the fatty who, thanks to the force of willruns marathons and the juvenile delinquent who finishes Law and opposes a judge.
“Redemption is a Christian concept that has been used a lot in the fundamentalist communities of the new Christians, because being born again and becoming a different self, that path of self-salvation is well suited to what many people are looking for“, Shriver explained to EL MUNDO in a recent interview. “It is the same message that the business world constantly sells. Buy this shirt so that the world sees you as a different person. A better person. Wear this perfume and you will be attractive to others. Get out of yourself and come live our mythical Nirvana. Many people are selling this idea of redemption as entering a whole new self, free from the deceptions and tortures we all suffer. The world of fitness offers it through physical transformation: suffer in the gym and you will earn your way to a new you that will be strong, beautiful, self-possessed and capable of everything, instead of this mean, weak and sad creature. what you are now.”
What does this obsession with redemption mean? “I think it has to do with the relationship we have today with the idea of evil. Or more than a relationship, with the attitude of denial that we have towards the idea of theHe, just as we deny death”, says the writer Gabriel Albiac. “Understanding evil has become a central problem for our world.“, adds the screenwriter Isabel Vázquez. “We have gone from pure evil to the desire to understand evil. In my trade, there are many people who have Wicked as reference. Wicked was a 2001 musical that took the witch from the tales and invited her to explain why she was the way she was. It is a change of perspective in which we do not feel entirely safe yet. Let’s say redemption is a low-risk approach to dealing with evil right now“. And one more opinion to broaden that idea: “Within the Catholic Church there is a more or less progressive vision that says that we are all already saved from the death of Jesus”, says the biblical scholar Jaime Vázquez, author of The Dead Sea Papers. “That is the line that leads to saying, for example, that hell does not exist.” So what do we do with evil? Turn it into entertainment, into a dance step we call redemption.
Vázquez explains that redemption is represented in the Bible in two central figures, jesus christ and moses, but which has a collective meaning. Moses redeems the Jews, frees them from Egypt, just as “Jesus frees men from the slavery of sin.” They do not save themselves but their people. “That idea of individual salvationHe is, in any case, in Paul’s letters to the Romans and to the Corinthians and, perhaps also somewhat, to the Galatians”. Vázquez’s thesis is that this vision of redemption as a meritocratic individualist club has to do with the intellectual standstill of Protestant theology, after decades of leadership. Impoverished in their thinking, many Protestant congregations have specialized in a literal and pragmatic interpretation of religion, a vision easy to sell why people are sinful or virtuous. “I don’t think it’s a very interesting concept. I prefer to think of the relationship between good and evil as a Platonic dialectic.“.
The model of redemption that fascinates us in 2023 has less to do with Jesus Christ than with Lord Jim, the character of Joseph Conrad: a handsome boy with every imaginable charm who, in negligence (or perhaps it was in a stroke of bad luck), a ship of which he was captain sinks and he becomes, at least before himself, the cause and unfortunate survivor of the tragedy. From that moment on, Jim dedicates his life to making merits that erase his dishonor. “It’s just that Jim never gets to feel like he redeems his guilt. And he ends up very badly,” explains Albiac, an attentive Conrad reader. And that is the big difference with contemporary redemption, almost always directed towards the happy ending.