An appreciation of Gabriel...or why this blog is entitled Time Consuming Trivialities.
I watched a movie the other day. It is the kind of movie a person wearing a cast would enjoy...or maybe I'm just plain weird. This movie entitled Gabriel is stuck in my head, not because of the decent acting or the kick ass action scenes, but because it was sort of the straw that broke the Camel's back as far as cinematic representation of a particular angel.
As I said before, I am a Christian. I am also one girl with a twisted sense of humor as well as a Psychology minor and a movie buff. So when I watch something dark and gritty in which the good guys and some of the bad trace their origins back to Heaven, there are a lot of things working in my mind at the same time.
What really hit me is that in the not so prolific angel saga of the Hollywood kind... somehow every single director/ writer/ producer/ actor insists on delivering good old Gabriel as a bit of a deranged being... and somehow he always ends up falling, the funny thing is that he actually slips into the dark side without noticing...
It has happened several times in several incarnations for this heavenly guardian, I will only mention a couple of movies since I pretend not to loose my mind or touch Milton because after all, this is under no circumstance a serious essay, it is more of a "I want to get the song stuck in my head out "type of reflection.
Going back to the question, what the hell is going on with the way people interpret Gabriel, lets go to the most reliable source available to pin down that jene se qua: the Bible and Jewish Folklore (I'm sorry my Catholic friends, but I'll take Jewish angels over your feathery boys in the clouds any day)
Gabriel means "he who derives strenght from God", right then and there you know this is no errand boy, but a badass on his own right. His place is the at the left of the Throne and he guards one of the four cardinal points of the Earth. He is also quite literally "the shinning boy"of heaven since he represents both fire and gold. Although according to the Bible Gabe is second only to Michael (who is like a Heavenly agent of Mossad) he is the most accessible of the archangels: because he carries the word. In fact he usually gets the assignments that call for close human contact, the Talmud has him running all over the place and doing all kind of apparently trivial stuff like visiting Abraham, burying Moses, protecting the modesty of Queen Vashti and of course we all know about that memo he had to pass on to the Virgin Mary.
Which brings me back to my point about the perception of Gabriel in film and in literature. Other than in Milton's Paradise Lost and of course the sacred texts, all efforts of the imagination tend to paint Gabriel as frail and slightly mad, striving to swim between waters, quite willing to serve the divine yet tainted, however minimally by humanity.
It is funny, but this conception has to be more than cliche, it has to have some sort of deep unconscious level to it. And it is not much about how we see angels, but about how we see ourselves. We are as Christophen Walken's Gabriel puts it, us humans enjoy walking around acting (most of the time) like conceited little monkeys who believe that the world revolves around us. In our mind, or that of Hollywood which sometimes tells us what to think, we are so frigging hot that heaven will break their rules for our sake, and an angel might fall because of us once in a a while.
Gabriel we conceive with tragic flaws, hence we have:
- An angry Christopher Walken who believes he can love God without loving His creation and falls because he cannot forgive
- A very confused Tilda Swinton who loves the idea of conversion by the Sword and falls because she cannot get the full scope of it all
- A damaged Hugh Jackman who is so lost in his humanity that has forgotten what it is to be standing at the left hand of God (that was the coolest, well, the only revelation of Van Helsing that made me cringe...as in why why why?)
- And a gun wielding Andy Whitfield who is so involved into his mission that he sort of risks it all to stay around a little longer
As I said I might have no point about this, it is just something that I have to take off my head, a bit that has been bothering me since I laid in bed, foot high and comfortable and chuckled at the misadventures of a righteous angel I knew was meant to screw it up somehow because of Hollywood cannon.
By the way, if you have been living under a rock and haven't seen THE PROPHECY, CONSTANTINE, VAN HELSING or GABRIEL, rent them and have some fun, it will not hurt... well Van Helsing, maybe a little.
The quote well... it will come from the man of the hour since I've spent close to 45 minutes typing my mini rant
"I am Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God" (Luke 1:19) - that is all he had to say, for the rest, blame or praise Hollywood scriptwriters.
