Alien Sex

Uses cinema and the films it shows to think about the church and the visions of desire it displays. This book discusses various films, including "The Alien Quartet", Christopher Nolan's "Memento", Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange", Nicolas Roeg's "The Man Who Fell to Earth" and Derek Jarman's "The Garden". Gerard Loughlin is one of the leading theologians working at the interface between religion and contemporary culture. In this exceptional work, he uses cinema and the films it shows to think about the church and the visions of desire it displays. In the figure of the alien, Loughlin finds a metaphor for that which is both most feared and desired: the body and its cravings. Secular culture follows St Augustine in thinking sex an alien force within the body. But the ancient church also found in sex the presence of a yet stranger desire that secularity forgets: the divine eros that is always other to us even as it draws us into its embrace. In God we find that which is both infinitely alien and intimate to ourselves. Alien Sex explores the Christian tradition of 'sacred eroticism' – from Gregory of Nyssa to Hans Urs von Balthasar. Through a close reading of such films as The Devils, Breaking the Waves and Derek Jarman’s The Garden, Loughlin shows how Christianity calls us to view sexuality from the perspective of heaven, not in order to escape the body but to encounter it more intensively. Through desire of the body we regain paradise. Gerard Loughlin is one of the leading theologians working at the interface between religion and contemporary culture. In this exceptional work, he uses cinema and the films it shows to think about the church and the visions of desire it displays. Discusses various films, including the Alien quartet, Christopher Nolan's Memento, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth and Derek Jarman's The Garden. Draws on a wide range of authors, both ancient and modern, religious and secular, from Plato to Levinas, from Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar to André Bazin and Leo Bersani. Uses cinema to think about the church as an ecclesiacinema, and films to think about sexual desire as erotic dispossession, as a way into the life of God. Written from a radically orthodox Christian perspective, at once both Catholic and critical.