The Bodies and the Lucky Ones

 You know, for a queer lapsed Catholic heretic I sure like a lot of movies about priests. 

John Michael McDonagh's Calvary makes a good companion piece to First Reformed in a lot of ways: both follow a lonely Good Priest who grapples with the moral context of his times and whose sincere ethical engagement with their religion is contrasted with that of their fellow Christians. Both turn on a challenging encounter between that priest and one of his parishioners: in First Reformed Reverend Toller argues the merits of bringing a child into a world on the brink of climate apocalypse with his eco-activist congregant Michael; in Calvary Brendan Gleeson's Father James Lavelle hears the confession of a parishioner who calmly informs him that he will kill him in a week, as an act of retaliatory terror against the Church whose priests repeatedly violated him as a child (importantly, this unrepentant penitent chooses to kill Lavelle precisely because he is not one of the clerics who hurt him: killing a good priest, he thinks, will cause people to sit up and pay attention). 

At the climax of the film, as the priest and his killer confront one another on a beautiful County Sligo beach, the killer/victim rages that 'We were the lucky ones! There's bodies buried back there! Buried like dogs!' And this reminded me of a film I saw for the first time this week, and which I will probably be thinking about as much as I think about Calvary and First Reformed, RaMell Ross' Nickel Boys, based on the novel by Colson Whitehead, which shows us life literally through the eyes of its two protagonists, Elwood and Turner, two black teens who find themselves incarcerated at a segregated reform school during the sixties. The brutal new reality the idealistic Elwood and the more streetwise Turner find themselves confined in is also divided between the lucky ones and those who are not so lucky. Indeed, as such places often do, Nickel Academy operates a kind of hierarchy of luck: the white students are incarcerated in nicer premises, and not subject to the harsher conditions of the black students, who are further stratified based not just on the Academy's overt system of four ranks (beginning at 'Bug'), but by what kinds of punishment they find themselves subjected to: brutal beatings in a room with a fan that drowns the sound of screaming for those who are a little less lucky; confinement to a rooftop sweatbox for those unluckier still; and, for those whose luck is worst of all, being taken 'out back', murdered and buried in an unmarked grave in the part of the school all the students know to call 'Boot Hill'. 

I am using the word luck because that is the word that the killer in Calvary uses, but it is of course not quite the right word. Luck is an impersonal force, a random factor which cannot be controlled for: but every child who died at the hands of the Church in Ireland, every child murdered at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, the real life inspiration for Nickel Academy, every child buried in the grounds of the Canadian Residential Schools, is there because of decisions made by adults, who calculated that they could get away with murdering those children because those deaths would never be discovered, because any children who spoke out would not be believed, because those children did not matter. And that goes too for the 'lucky ones' - the kids who were only shoved in the sweatbox, only sexually abused, only taken away from families and cultures the authorities wished to wipe out, only forced to wear a different name and kneel before a cross. These were not just things that happened. They were things that were done to children, by adults. 

And they are things that are being done again now, with the full knowledge and connivance of our oh-so-moral authorities. In the US, depending on what state they are unlucky enough to live in, trans children are already potentially subject to judicial kidnap and fostering out to 'good Christian families', with all the horror those three words usually entail. In the UK our Health Secretary cheerfully restricted access to puberty blockers for trans kids, a wilful and sadistic act of mass child abuse which will leave those children feeling under attack from their own bodies. Like the pious facade of the Catholic Church or the Nickel Academy, these actions are taken under the cover of morality, but they are really about creating and maintaining a population of children who can be abused with impunity, and they will result, just as they did then, in the bodies of dead children and, in a decade or more when, as the saying goes, everyone will have always been against this, in a generation of traumatised adults who will have the burning cold comfort of knowing that they were the lucky ones.