Lev Kuleshov and the Happy Horror of Resurrection
Imagine this: you are walking alone in an old cemetery at midnight. The night is still, aside from occasional gusts of wind that whistle through the barren trees. Dark clouds creep across the sky, partially concealing the full moon, casting long shadows on quiet earth. The silence is broken by an owl hooting nearby, and somewhere in the distant darkness some animal screams. Your hair stands up on the back of your neck. You are completely alone, but it feels like you are being watched. You steal nervous glances at the trees, but you see nothing. Suddenly, a supernatural gale tears through the cemetery splitting trees and—by some magical power—blasting dirt away from before the graves. You are standing alone in a cemetery filled with open graves. Suddenly, you hear a shaking and rattling. Coffins burst open with violent force. You jump to the ground in terror and cover your head as splinters of wood fly into the air. Then you hear something even more horrifying: the squishing sound of raw, bloody meat moving around. Horrified, you creep forward to peer into one of the graves and are haunted by what you see. In the coffin, flesh is stretching over a lifeless skeleton. You see what looks like a skinned human as muscle, fat, tendons, and ligaments reattach to dusty bones. Its chest begins to move as its heart begins pumping, and suddenly its back arches. You hear a thousand gasps all at once as the corpses throughout the graveyard suddenly inhale. Skin stretches and crawls over the body as if pulled by invisible hooks. Finally, its eyes open and stare straight into your entranced gaze. You rise to your feet to run, and it does the same.
This sounds like something out of your worst nightmares. If you would film this scene in black and white, no one would doubt that this belongs in some old horror movie. The imagery is chilling. You probably wouldn’t want to read something like this to young children lest they be plagued by nightmares for weeks. And yet, we are going to read essentially the same story this Sunday in church.
Ezekiel and the Valley of Dry Bones is a classic story (Ezekiel 37). It even has a fun and catchy song based on it. So how can a passage with such horrifying imagery be so well loved by so many? I think we can explain this phenomenon with an analogy from the world of film theory. Lev Kuleshov was a Soviet filmmaker and theorist, who argued that editing was more powerful than even acting in creating meaning in film. He is perhaps best remembered for an editing experiment he performed at his film school, in which he demonstrated that viewers can derive more meaning from two or more shots than from a single take. This phenomenon has become known as the Kuleshov Effect. For his demonstration, he showed an image of a man with a neutral expression and then paired it with various other images: a bowl of soup, a beautiful woman, etc. When viewers saw the neutral face cut together with the beautiful woman, they thought the expression was one of desire. When it was paired with a bowl of soup, they saw hunger. Meaning was made by association, not the expression itself.
Perhaps the people who made the Revised Common Lectionary had something like this in mind when they paired this story with the resurrection of Lazarus. While the Ezekiel passage has a hopeful meaning on its own, its more horrifying aspects feel downplayed when it is partnered with a story about Jesus raising his friend from the dead. At the resurrection of Lazarus, it isn’t one person alone in a graveyard. Jesus is there, his disciples are there with Mary and Martha, there is even a crowd of people there. We don’t have to deal with the body horror and loneliness we see in the Ezekiel passage, and so those aspects fade away. Of course, Kuleshov was working with film, but in a sense, a similar principle applies in literary form here. Pairing this text with a particular other passage, goes far in making meaning for us. However, it is worth asking whether this pairing also robs this passage of some meaning. If you read this story alone in your room at night, while listening to some scary music after having just watched a zombie movie, it would almost certainly feel different than listening to it read in church. For one thing, it would be significantly more horrifying. But is that what we want? Do we really want to associate resurrection with horror? No, probably not, but maybe we should.
There is something bodily horrifying about the Ezekiel story that we miss when we only see it in the happiest light. If we’re being perfectly honest, there is something horrifying about God bringing life from death in our lives as well. Obviously, we all hope for our own resurrections, and we imagine ourselves being beautiful in the new life, like the colorful flowers of spring, but what about the dark side of resurrection? Hopefully, the people who have hurt us and who we have hurt will also be there with their beautiful new resurrection bodies. Will all the pain of past conflicts just wash away? Will we continue to be estranged from family members in God’s kingdom, or will we have to do the difficult work of reconciling, even if that means exposing old wounds and praying that we can actually solve some of our problems?
Even before death, we run into other problems. We see God bringing new life from dead places on this side of eternity as well. An old church with failing membership suddenly gets several young families to join. It has a Sunday school program again. There is life and vibrancy throughout the church. However, as much as we like having kids in church, if we’re being honest, that can cause a problem. With enough kids, it is only a matter of time before mud gets tracked into the sanctuary, a decoration gets knocked over, someone pukes on an altar cloth, or a window gets broken. Kids are very good at breaking things and making messes. A resurrected Church comes with all the faults and flaws that humans in community bring. More people means more drama, more church politics, hurt feelings, frustration, and taking sides. Resurrection hurts. As much as it can be beautiful and inspirational, it is also gross, messy, chaotic, and sometimes downright frightening. We can understand why people might see their old church changing too quickly and run away, frightened of what it is becoming, preferring to worship God on their own to remaining in such a strange new community.
When we forget to see the horror in the Valley of Dry Bones, we fail to see the courage and trust Ezekiel demonstrates. Even in the presence of what we would call a zombie attack today, Ezekiel listens to God and bears witness. As ugly, chaotic, and terrifying as it may be, Ezekiel stays with it to watch. He may not be able to explain what is happening. It may be far beyond what he understands to be possible, but he watches events unfold nonetheless, trusting that even if he can’t make sense of things, God is at work here. In the face of horror and rapidly unfolding change, Ezekiel trusts God long enough to witness a miracle of new life in a place of death.
