Gnostics of the Galaxy

My wife and I love Marvel movies. We are, in some sense, Marvel-Junkies. Whenever a new movie comes out, we head over to The Waterfront Cinemark, get our drinks and popcorn, and settle in for what has the potential to be a very fun ride. Yes, the movies aren’t always the best–but that’s part of their charm. If you want a movie that’s going to win seven Oscars, go see Oppenheimer. But if you want to spend your evening doing something nerdy, and fun, and kind of weird, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (hereafter MCU) is for you.

Because we love Marvel so much, you can imagine our surprise and happiness when we saw that Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3 was nominated for an Oscar this year in the category of ‘best special effects.’ The movie, after all, is a spectacularly vivid and colorful film, as one can expect from director James Gunn. Gunn really likes tying retro music with the grandeur of space—and in the MCU particularly, this approach has really paid off. As a writer, Gunn gives the audience much sought after weirdos and underdogs, who go through fairly complex origin stories and arcs of character development. He balances humor and seriousness, irreverence and an awe at creaturely existence—and somehow, he almost always makes his films come to bear on contemporary discussions around difference, identity, freedom, and power. All this is to say, there is a lot going on in each Guardians movie! In this paper, my hope is to give a specifically theological reflection on the latest installment in the series, Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3 by analyzing it as a piece of religious—and specifically gnostic—literature.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since Guardians: Volume 1, and any theological musing on the third installment has to deal with that fact. The main characters of the Guardians of the Galaxy are Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Rocket the Racoon (Bradley Cooper), Drax the Destroyer (Dave Batista), and Groot the Tree (Vin Diesel). In Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 1, Gunn gives the origin of the team, telling the story of their conflicting interests and their unlikely team-up, by means of which they save the galaxy from the tyranny of a megalomaniac religious zealot (Lee Pace). In the second installment, Gunn dives deeper into his characters’ sometimes dysfunctional relationships with one another, though the main conflict concerns Peter Quill’s mixed ancestry, a fact only alluded to in the first Guardians movie. The story ends with the crew of misfits bound more closely together than ever before, as an intentional familial unit. This, of course, makes the events of Infinity War that much more devastating—with the success of Thanos the Mad Titan’s (portrayed by Josh Brolin) quest for galactic domination, the bonds that hold the team together are tested to the breaking point, and, like all of the characters in the MCU, the trauma of these events changes everything. The mood that is set in the aftermath of Endgame is grim—as my wife said to me when we watched it together, the third installment of Guardians of the Galaxy felt more like a horror film than any of the others did. The Guardians family is fragmenting—and things only seem to be getting worse.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3 opens in the aftermath of the Infinity Saga. Gamora, who was essential to the team, has been killed by her father Thanos, in order for him to achieve his nefarious goals; Quill’s impulsiveness nearly wiped-out half of all life in the universe; Rocket and Nebula (Gamora’s sister, played by Karen Gillan) spent five years without the rest of the team, and then joined the Avengers for the plan bring the rest of the universe back. And on top of all of that, an alternative Gamora has come back from the past (because, well, time travel and junk), but she was never in love with Quill and maintains that he just needs to get over his love for her. The team is basically at an all time low when disaster strikes and drastic measures must be taken to save the life of Rocket the Racoon. This provides Gunn with the perfect opportunity to dive into Rocket’s backstory and introduce the new baddie the Guardians will have to face off with: the High Evolutionary.

The High Evolutionary (portrayed by the Nigerian-British actor, Chukwudi Iwuji) is an interesting character in his own right. He is a cosmic being who is driven on by his desire to perfect the raw matter of nature. He was inspired by his experience of the Terran home-world, Earth, and thought that he could make something just like it, only without its imperfections. And yet, try as he might, he seems to never be able to get his experiments quite right. Some of the animals that he has experimented on become utterly deranged. Some become increasingly more violent. And even in the society that we get to see in the movie, it is plagued with social ills, like drug use and other illegal activity. The High Evolutionary, however, makes just as much use of what is bad as what is good. Just as he has created certain well-behaved citizens that act according to human rationality and docility, so has he also made what he calls “the hellspawn”, a number of brutal, animalistic evolved beings, who are fused with machines of violence, terror, and domination. These hellspawn are the products of failed experiments, and serve to carry out the High Evolutionary’s more sinister purposes.

Over the course of the movie, we find out that Rocket the Racoon was made as part of the High Evolutionary’s experiments to create the perfect society. He was an “improved” racoon, part of batch no. 98. The inhumane experiments done on him caused him to walk erect like a human, as well as think with a sort of intelligence and inventiveness that the High Evolutionary has never been able to reproduce in any other specimen. After Rocket escapes the High Evolutionary’s ship, the latter becomes obsessed with finding the racoon, so that he can study Rocket’s brain and replicate it in his more perfect experiments. This will mean killing Rocket—but as a failed experiment, the High Evolutionary considers him to be expendable.

Now, the Guardians series is more than just a confusing science fiction super hero movie series, as I mentioned above. There are moments of real insight that make it more than simply entertainment. And the thing that first struck me while watching this movie is how deeply gnostic it is. What do I mean by this word? If you’ve heard this term before, it was likely with the meaning of a vague disgust for the body or creaturely existence. But I’m using it a little differently. Let me explain. The gnostics were various Christian and para-Christian communities that flourished in the near east directly after the apostolic age (early second century). And they often taught things in myths or stories because they believed that this mode of communication was more effective than the dogma we normally associate with Christianity. Not all gnostics shared the same myths and not all gnostics shared the same beliefs. Most if not all did follow one of a few charismatic leaders, of whom their congregations were usually named after (Valentinus for the Valentinians, for example). Some were more Greek in nature, some had roots in traditions of reading the Hebrew Scriptures. All of them, though, were outside of the communion of the church of the apostles, and so they are often referred to as their own type of churches.

Gnostic mythology often stressed that God was somehow inaccessible to most people. In fact, when the material world was created, God wasn’t really responsible for it. Instead, the bumbling, clumsy Demiurge decided that he wanted to make something that reflected God’s perfection—but the best he could do was create matter, whether it was stones, dirt, bodies, animals. None of it moved; none of it teemed with life. Rather, it was inert, all unfit to even be called a “creation.” Somehow or another, cosmic stuff got mixed with the Demiurge’s creation. Maybe God came down and placed a spark of himself in the material universe. Maybe a divine effluence from Holy Sophia was trapped in the realms below. Maybe the cosmic being sacrificed himself to be devoured by the anti-cosmic powers of darkness and the pieces of himself remain trapped in their kingdom still to this day (yes, really!). But the point of the gnostic way of life is to realize one’s divine spark, the way in which one is the image of God and not of the demiurge (that careless, maybe even evil false-god)—and to finally reunite with the God who is supremely loveable and good. The gnostic’s life in the here and now is basically consumed by limiting one’s use of and participation in the fallen kingdom he or she inhabits—to fight against the principalities and rulers that have been given authority by the Demiurge to keep God’s children trapped in the realms of matter and to resist the siren song of material existence and earthly pleasures.

What does all this have to do with Guardians of the Galaxy? I think that Rocket’s origin story is a gnostic origin story. Rocket is thrust into existence, much as the gnostic would view his own birth in the material universe. Some cruel God has brought him into being, simply to experiment with him for a little while and then place him on the chopping block (death). It is no mistake that Rocket’s first words after the experiments that give him consciousness are “it hurts.” For the gnostic knows that existence is suffering—something is not quite right with the world. And this leads him to question whether or not the maker of this not quite right world might be not quite right, as well.

Rocket makes friends with other creatures in the cage that is his home (remember: many gnostics viewed the body and the world as a sort of prison!). They are a weird assortment of creatures.  None of them have perfect bodies; in fact, the material of their flesh is grotesque and gruesome. But Rocket learns to love these animals, calling them his friends, because he is able to see though their rough exteriors to their good hearts inside. They go through the sacred action of naming themselves—an act of self-definition in which they toss aside the names that have been given them by the High Evolutionary. They establish themselves and their community within the prison of their world in defiance of everything that the Demiurge has created around them.

Just as in the Gnostic mythos, the demiurgic figure, the High Evolutionary, is incompetent. In fact, he is quite limited. We find out that he has tried many different worlds, and has failed to bring about ideal perfection in any of them. Rocket himself is a symbol of the High Evolutionary’s incompetence: much like the Demiurge in the Gnostic mythos mentioned above, the High Evolutionary has no idea how he was able to bring about “inventiveness” in the racoon. It is as if he is blindly and badly creating, and though he knows that something in Rocket is the key, he is not able to figure out what that something is. He kills all of Rocket’s friends, but Rocket is, due to his superior intellect, able to harm the High Evolutionary and escape from the prison he was kept in. One cannot help but think of the gnostic man or women who has awakened the divine spark in him or her, who is able to escape the dreadful mortality imposed by the demiurge on the material body, and escape from this earthly prison.

There are two scenes that are particularly important for this interpretation of the movie. The first is the scene concerns the High Evolutionary. When the High Evolutionary is losing the battle against the Guardians of the Galaxy, one of the members of his team invokes God. And the High Evolutionary becomes livid. “God?” He spats. “There is no God: that’s why I stepped in.” That is, the High Evolutionary sees himself as the one who brings the universe to its fulfillment. Like the Demiurge in certain of the Gnostic myths, he is so self-deluded, he misunderstands the misery he brings by his creation so much, that he considers himself to be the closest thing the universe has to a god. It is this line that makes it clear that James Gunn is thinking along religious lines, this line that warrants us giving Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3 an in-depth theological interpretation. The High Evolutionary is at once a self-divinizer and an atheist. In this way, he is a Demiurge in all but name–the false god of the artificially-constructed cosmos.

The second extremely important scene is when Rocket himself dies. He finds himself in a completely different realm than the material one. While he’s there, all his friends meet him and he has a long conversation with Layla (whose name, of course, means “night”—the place of revelation). As Rocket converses with the night in all its mystical overtones, Layla discloses that Rocket still has a purpose in the material realm. Rocket disagrees with her: “A purpose for what?” He exclaims. “They made us for nothing. Just stupid experiments to be thrown away.” That is, the High Evolutionary only made Rocket as a simple stepping stone on the path to something else. He made him unskillfully, ignorantly, and simply badly. Yet, Layla is ready for the objection. She indicates that Rocket does not know the full picture. “There are the hands that made us,” she says quietly to him, “then there are the hands that guide the hands.” And then she gives him some seemingly bewildering advice: “My beloved racoon. The story has been yours all long. You just haven’t known it.”

Two ideas here come to light. The first is that there is a higher plane of reality than Rocket has hitherto expected. “There are the hands that made us; then there are the hands that guide the hands.” That is, there is the High Evolutionary, who made you—but there is another plan at work, the plan of some higher power who actually knows what he is doing. This is the great gnostic hope, isn’t it? That even though the maker of this world is as cruel and crass as what he’s made, there’s something out there, beyond the stars, who is ultimately in control, where our ultimate home and destiny is? This is exactly the hope that the mystical vision of the night gives to Rocket, as she initiates him into the full mysteries of gnostic esoterica. And then, she cryptically adds, “The story has been yours all along. You just haven’t known it.” That is, this same power resides within you. The very one who is in control is also at work in you: you are part of him. This is the gnostic divine spark, the orthodox image of God—that God’s story is also our story, that in him we live and move and have our being.

In the end, the High Evolutionary is unmasked both figuratively and literally. Literally, Rocket removes the High Evolutionary’s mask and shows him to be just as imperfect as the world he has created. The demiurge and his creation deserve each other, and both deserve the same fate—total annihilation. And then Rocket figuratively unmasks the High Evolutionary’s project. The High Evolutioanry groans, “All I wanted to do was make things perfect.” But Rocket retorts, “You didn’t want to make things perfect. You just hated them the way they are.”

This is the sum of the demiurgic power on the earth, according to James Gunn in Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3,is that demiurgic power is full of hate. The Demiurge is the first among egoists, who takes divine power he does not understand, who creates creatures with hateful intentions and makes them violent and rageful like himself. The Gnostic, Rocket, has unmasked the lord of this world for who he really is: the complete antithesis of the true God, the God who is full of love. In this sense, the third installment of the Guardians of the Galaxy is a gnostic cry to pursue not the god of this age and his misguided powers, but rather the God who brings to a good end all those who are found in him.

Christians can learn so much from this film, as I hope that this analysis makes apparent. The gnostic drama unfolds beautifully before us and challenges us to think about our world differently. It first and foremost challenges our conception of God: in whom do we put our trust, a God of love or a God of selfishness and hate? And further, what is the basis for our relationships with one another? Are we content with beauty that only goes skin deep or is there something within our neighbors that is fundamentally valuable, fundamentally loveable? And finally: how do we think about ourselves? What gives us our value? What is the foundation of our being? We desperately need answers to these questions, and I hope this review demonstrates that we can find our conversation partners in surprising places—like among the ancient Gnostics or the in the origin story of Rocket the Racoon.