Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology. By Gerard Loughlin. Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 306 pages. $29.95

Gerard Loughlin’s Alien Sex is part of Blackwell’s Challenges in Contemporary Theology series, a series that has produced some of the most creative theological thinking in recent years. Loughlin’s book is no exception. As the subtitle indicates it explores the relations between the body and desire in cinema and theology. There are many books and articles that deal with the use by filmmakers of religious and theological themes, motifs, plots, and myths. This is not what Loughlin is doing. Rather, he is deploying the methodological approach that lies behind the other books in this series and that was anticipated by Barth in Church Dogmatics IV/3, of posing the questions and concerns of our contemporary cultural situation and examining how theology would responded to them. In so doing, theology itself undergoes a process of refocusing, if not change. Loughlin’s innovative method of dealing with his material is in line with the theological approach taken but also connects with the cinematic perspective. His subject matter, however, covers a wider range of interests than film and theology and delves into the realms of art history and literature. He collocates these various fields by using devices that correspond to the cinematic editorial techniques of jumpcutting and intercutting; he explicitly uses these terms to describe what he is doing. For example, in Chapter 5, “God’s Sex,” which begins with an analysis of Ken Russell’s film The Devils, Loughlin intercuts with Georges Bataille’s theory of cosmic parody and then jumps to Hans Urs von Balthasar’s adaptation of Gregory of Nyssa’s theology of desire and the displacement and conservation of biological sex onto spiritual beings, including the Trinity in both its immanent and economic aspects. The chapter ends with Dante and Beatrice before the final vision of the celestial rose in the Paradiso. Loughlin observes that the image here “is also a parody or analogy of the final argument of this chapter. We will better think eros the more we remember that an infinite distance stretches between the clouds on which Dante and Beatrice stand and the glory of the celestial rose on which they look” (162). In retrospect, the reader can see that Loughlin has enacted a particular divina commedia within this chapter. He has moved from the inferno of The Devils (an inferno that is not without its own redemptive moments, as in the love relationship between Grandier and Madeleine), to the purgatorio of a working out of a relationship of both tension and complementarity between Bataille’s use of parody and Balthasar’s use of analogy, to a final paradisiacal vision of redeemed but not annihilated erotic love—a vision of infinite distance between the lover and the beloved that is covered but never canceled out by love; but this in turn is a vision of the Trinity. The necessary distance that is constitutive of desire is, in a way we can never fully comprehend, the inner life of God himself and of God’s relation to contingent being. Just as a film consists of a number of stills that become animated only when set in motion at a certain speed, so too this chapter—and for that matter the rest of the book—consists of apparently disparate shots that when given the continuity of thoughtful reading produce a coherent view of a number of significant issues.

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