Religion in Exit Wounds and Waltz With Bashir

(The following discussion focuses on a tiny element of this week’s texts, and I make no claim that the issues of religion are a paradigm-shaping theme in either narrative. However, I do think that the way religion appears or disappears is very interesting as a picture of the artists and the society they portray.)

When I first read these two stories, both dealing with the impact of wars with significant religious inflection, I was surprised to find so little exploration of the actual beliefs and subsequent behaviors of the combatants and victims. Waltz With Bashir particularly mentions that the perpetrators of the massacre which drives the protagonist’s search for his own actions are Christians, even mentioning that they carved crucifixes on their victims as a precursor to the massacre, but no real explanation of their position or beliefs other than the simple label “Christian Phalanges” appears in the novel. While such an omission could be merely because these facts would be apparent to anyone reading the account in Israel or Palestine, I think that combined with an earlier scene, the unspoken method of presenting religion without explanation actually mirrors the way religion is perceived by the artists.

On page 31, the soldiers in the tank debate over what to do. One offers up the suggestion that they pray, while another argues that shooting is more effective, and that you should pray while you shoot if you have to pray at all. Importantly, no mention of what belief system the prayer would fit into appears, nor do we see any praying soldiers, merely apocolyptic streaks of fire as the soldiers reject appeals to spiritual authority and instead become the life-and-death authorities. Despite this attempt to control their own situation, the powerlessness of the authority taken appears in the very next scene, as the desperate soldiers drive up to an point where death has taken over, and the soldiers merely take charge of the remains of anonymous corpses.

Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds, though it presents religion as much more present, seems to regard it again as merely a superficial covering of a person’s behavior, rather than any significant influence for changed life patterns. Numi makes some very bitter and political statements about the exclusion of unidentified bodies from Jewish cemeteries, and Kobe’s father Gabriel appears to have embraced the appearance of Judaism for the sake of his new wife, but neither of these actions appears to have any weight for Kobe, and, since the values Kobe represents don’t seem to be significantly different from the narratives’ themes (though naturally he undergoes change, as all traditional protagonists tend to), I generally take his view of his father’s religion as that which the narrative presents as fact. In that view, Gabriel’s piety becomes a complete sham, a shell he uses to hide from his wife the fact that before (and perhaps even during) their marriage he pursued sexual relationships with several women, some of them very young like Numi, some women his own age who were married to other men – all of them profoundly unethical, involving multiple betrayals. In light of this kind of relational viciousness, Gabriel’s facade of religiosity appears as nothing more than a sop for his overly gullible wife, who also seems to have her sincerity undercut by the anger she displays when Gabriel is late while Kobe waits.

All in all, the appearances of religion seem very similar in these graphic novels to the elusive “truth” that both portray the protagonists searching for. Whether it is the guilt one has no high power to absolve one of, or the pain from absence that is part of no providential plan, religion offers no comfort for the characters. Often, instead, it exacerbates the problems. However, the authors’ attitudes towards religion leaves the underlying motives behind this treatment difficult to discern. Since they provide no real presentation of the beliefs which motivate the atrocities, whether massive in scale or subtly emotional, the result is a world which functions on a surface level on the spiritual plane, using labels and images (such as the crucifix or Star of David) as an excuse or condemnation rather than exploration. The lack of curiosity here displayed does rather interest me, even though I cannot really say I have a conclusion to the issue presented by the two texts.