The concept of heaven keeps the wolves of the brain from tearing consciousness apart. The golden sepulchres, glistening streets, and roaming angels with faces of lost loved ones softens the death blow. Maybe it won’t be so bad. It takes the edge off of grief, goes down a little hot, loosens the mind from the other voice that’s whispering one word in the dark corner of the mind: “silence”. John Boorman’s cinema was a tapestry of death—men, almost always men—were conjoined with a moment of utmost sensation, usually captured in a prolonged ecstatic trip with the realization that their mortality was slipping away. This was it. That great cataclysmic moment. The in-bred rapist from Deliverance became an avant-garde figure with an arrow having penetrated his chest, dancing a little bit like a drunk, fighting through his looming rigidity, and reaching for the last remnants of life with groping hands, before collapsing onto a tree trunk in the middle of the Appalachian Jungle. In Point Blank Lee Marvin might as well be dead. Gunshots, flaring red cinematography—he barely talks, this assassin. He’s just a man, like all of Boorman’s men, but he has a way of imbuing them with a bit more, rendering them with a messiah complex of knowledge beyond the veil.
No one other than John Boorman could have made Zardoz. In this film, he imagines Heaven as a wretched place without meaning, because there is no God, just people. They’re roaming around without the ramifications of death, as they build caste systems, and other modicums of oppression. They’ve built hell because it’s what they know. Life is all we have, and isn’t it awful? Isn’t it incredible? Is Zardoz pessimistic? Realistic? Liberated? Does it matter? It’s supposedly science-fiction, but Boorman never had much use for genre signifiers. It’s the year 2293 on Earth and the human population has been divided into Immortals and Brutals. The Brutals live in an irradiated wasteland, and have been made to work for the Eternals—fooled into believing in a man-made God named ZARDOZ—who flies around the skyline as a giant rock-face, telling these men of action that the Penis is Evil, and the Gun is good. ZARDOZ resembles Rene Margritte’s surrealist oil-on-canvas painting of a castle atop a floating rock, coming to the same thematic conclusion of luxury. If you kill God then you can find the answers for yourself, threading around all sorts of other realizations like self-hood, utopia, and revolution, all of which are filtered through the character of Zed, played by Sean Connery in red lingerie. Connery, who is functionally James Bond in every single role he ever took, except maybe, as the father of Indiana Jones, is a troubadour, given foresight through a floating book. Both brutal and Eternal, deliverer, vessel, Judas, Christ.
