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Notes -
I pulled up the scene again, and the guy very directly states
[spoilers] "the body of Christ" while holding the jewel like a communion wafer, right before swallowing it.
That and everything else he says indicates to me that his actual idea was to convert the entirety of his wealth into nothingness, thus forever removing the temptation it represented. Otherwise, he could have just tossed the diamond into the sea or something. If he DIDN'T expect it to still be in his body for relatively easy retrieval, then this scene makes more sense in context.
[/spoilers]
I do think that was Rian's intended jab, even if its not theologically sound. As others have mentioned, the whole church seems more like a pastiche of Evangelical Protestantism, but given full Catholic dressing for the aesthetics.
Anyway, this idea seemed pretty close to something Alan Moore did in V for Vendetta, so I happened to catch what seemed like intentional subtext.
He does do that. In the moment that didn’t strike me as him fundamentally misunderstanding transubstantiation, rather it was some dramatic flourish.
Transubstantiation specifies that the transformation happens at the moment of consecration, not consumption. And that only bread is a valid host. And that only the substance and not the accidents (material representation) are transformed. Think in the RDBMS of the universe there is a Boolean field,
is_body_of_christ, and it gets set to True upon consecration.But I suppose your interpretation is correct and I was giving the filmmaker too much credit.
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Wikipedia mentions Johnson was raised Evangelical, so he has as much notion of Catholic theology as I do of nuclear engineering. This is the sort of thing that makes me wince when I see it in movies/TV/media; if you take things like the Eucharist seriously, it's very jarring, not to say hurtful if meant to be deliberately mocking.
I suppose in the movie the idea is meant to be that the bad guy treated his wealth like his god and it was his real religion, not whatever he pretended to believe ("you cannot serve both God and Mammon"). I just wish Johnson hadn't used Eucharistic similes.
That "V for Vendetta" part looks like the Reformed explanation of the Eucharist; it only becomes the body for those who truly believe, while for unbelievers it remains only bread (I'm shaky on Protestant theology so I'm probably not getting that right). Consubstantiation not transubstantiation.
The V panel also gets it wrong: it's not "whatever it is now", it has to be bread and wine, so you can't have a Coke and cookies eucharist.
Well in-context that's not an issue, its an actual communion wafer, but V poisoned it.
I guess then the argument is that sure, the wafer turned into Christ's body but the poison was still poison.
I do notice some crossover in Rian and Moore's apparent approach to depicting right-wingers, although Moore does allow them to be sympathetic and maybe even be correct in some way before they get their just desserts. Rian, as mentioned, is obsessively devoted to ensuring his RW characters aren't allowed to claim even a single win.
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