Fight or flight: Faith

I just watched Quatermass (aka Quatermass IV and, in its edited theatrical version, The Quatermass Conclusion, made in 1978) and I was struck by Joe Kapp, the second male lead, the "sidekick" scientist to Professor Quatermass's hero.

If you haven't seen it, a brief recap may be in order. At the end of the 20th century, order broke down. The cities are dangerous to live in, particularly in smaller countries such as the UK but even in the US and USSR (it still exists). Armed gangs rule the cities - in the UK they're the Blue Force (interestingly, all of them are white and male) and the Baders (or possibly Badders), based on the Bader-Meinhof gang (and, interestingly, multiethnic and containing both sexes) - and huge groups of young people wander the countryside chanting and looking for their new home. These are the Planet People, and they believe they're going to another, new and unspoiled planet, though they're unclear on how. Quatermass comes out of retirement to appear on a program celebrating a US/USSR space hook-up, but all he's really interested in is finding his lost granddaughter. He's attacked by a gang - he was so out of touch he didn't know they existed - and is rescued by Joe Kapp, who's to be on the same program. But what they witness is the destruction of both space ships. Planet People begin congregating at Neolithic sites and are, one might say, raptured away - the "lovely lightning" descends from the sky and they are all taken off. A second occurrence at a small stone circle near Kapp's observatory results in his wife and children being taken, which causes him to break down for a time. The sites begin expanding, the vanishings get huger, and Quatermass decides that some alien force is harvesting the youth of the world for its own purposes. He, assisted by a recovered Kapp, the government of Britain, a Soviet scientist, and a handful of elderly - thus immune - Brits, set a trap - a 35 kiloton focussed nuclear bomb (35KT! Oh, the 70s... couldn't they imagine a bigger bomb than that?) - to warn the reaper away from Earth. SPOILER - highlight to reveal:At the end of the film, the trap works, and Quatermass is killed in the blast along with his subplot missing granddaughter.

Joe Kapp (played by Simon MacCorkindale in a tousled dark wig) is a young radio-astronomer with a wife and two daughters. In this picture, he's confronting a Planet Person, with Quatermass in the background (still confused).

An IMDB commenter from Australia describes Kapp thus:

Simon MacCorkindale, an actor who seemed to be on top of his game at this time, ably plays Quatermass's sidekick, Joe Kapp. Never the safest thing to be in any Quatermass serial, Kapp is taken through the emotional wringer in ways too horrible for a husband and father to bear, before facing the fate of sidekicks before him.

("This is one liftoff I really want to see," Kapp says to the Planet People, but he does see it, and of course wishes he hadn't...)

But what I found fascinating about Kapp was that he is a Jew.

He identifies himself as a Jew, to start with, and he wears a Star of David around his neck. Other than that, there's not much to suggest his Jewishness. Only in three scenes does it come out, though it's not to be missed when it does.

At one point his wife brings out the menorah, though they don't say anything while she lights it, or afterwards. It's not a feast - his Clare is trying to comfort them after the first touch of dread - and in fact, it's hardly a religious ritual at all. Entering the house after the events at Ringstone Round, Kapp sees the menorah on the table. He says to Quatermass, "Candles... she's got the candles out. We're not very religious, but every once in a while... Yes, tonight. The old Jewish thing... Always concentrated on the home - a cozy ritual to make everything safe... There should be wine set ready. My old man was always a stickler for the details." She lights the candles, and then they eat. A cozy ritual, not a real religious one, but certainly grounded in religion. Still, no prayers, just the small symbolism of the candle...

Once he uses a Yiddish word - when Quatermass says the bomb is, of course, not powerful enough to kill the reaper, but only to give it sting to drive it away, he observes "You're going to give it a zetsn, halfway across the galaxy." - but only once, and only under extreme circumstances. Towards the end of the show, after losing everything he cares about, he calls the alien enemy "Satan", but in what seems a rhetorical rather than literal way - and it's a reference any Christian (or Muslim) could make. All in all, he's a pretty secular Jew, but no one else in the miniseries seemed to have any religion at all.

Except the Planet People, of course. And one could argue, I suppose, that they didn't have "religion" but were reacting to the realities of the world. After all, when they went to Ringstone Round (or the Stumpy Men, or O Papos, or wherever) to go away, they went. As Quatermass puts it, "They wanted something to come and take them, and something did." But we get no religion from Quatermass, from Kapp's coworkers at the observatory, from the Americans(!) (okay, the one singular American), the government people, the gangs, the tv crew, the old folks and old scientists ... Only Kapp and the Planet People have faith at all.

And their faiths are the flip sides of each other.

In the first episode, from the first time we see them, we can clearly see that Kapp hates the Planet People. It's a puzzle, since they don't seem to do anything but wander around, chanting. Quatermass is our proxy (his long seclusion means characters get to explain things to him so we, the audience, understand), and he's puzzled too. On first seeing them, contrasting them favorably to the armed gangs, he observes:

Q: They've got some strange belief.
K: Magic. It's always magic.
Q: At least they don't seem violent.
K: Oh, they're violent in a different way. To human thought.

That last line is delivered in an angry tone, almost itself violent, though we (and Quatermass) don't understand it fully. At this point Quatermass tries to talk to the Planet People, hoping one has seen his granddaughter, but he gets no help. They tell him they're going to another planet, but when Kapp demands to know where, and how, they have no answer - just that they are, and soon. As Kapp says to Quatermass as they drive off:

K: They can't explain because they don't know. Their mystery is a zero. Their mouths are switched off because their brains are switched off.
Q: So many of them...
K; They infest the land, like lemmings in search of a sea.
Q: Well, I thought you'd understand them.
K: Oh, I do.
Q: You're not that much older.
K: It's enough. I want a generation gap between me and them. I hate them because they've - given up.
Q: It's not a world to be young in.
K: Was it ever?
Q: Not like this.

Kapp's anger has been building, fed as much by Quatermass's inability to comprehend as by the Planet People themselves. So now comes the money line - the first reference to his religion and the way he defines it, and thus himself:

Bernard, I'm last in 200 generations of learned Jews. Oh, I mean not all so perfectly learned, but, my God, they tried. They knew it was the only way - to beat the dark.

Beating the dark: that's what learning is for. Although Kapp wonders at times if his radio-astronomy is whistling in the dark, or perhaps fiddling while England burns, he doesn't really believe that. He believes it's "worth it" to keep trying to learn.

In contrast, and why he hates them, the Planet People are explicitly against science. "Stop trying to know things!" they shout at Quatermass and Kapp before the first disappearance. It's not that they don't see the dark, or that they embrace it; on the contrary, those who were too far away to be 'saved' shout, defiantly, "We're coming too! We won't be long. We're coming out of all the blackness of this world."

Kapp sees them as having giving up the fight against the dark and as "sit[ting] and wait[ing] for the end of the world"; in contrast, they see him as causing the dark. They have given up the fight, but their surrender isn't total; in fact, they haven't surrendered, really, they're trying to escape. They do, in fact, turn violent by the show's end, but only after they've seen their worldview validated, their way off the world proved true - and then been kept from it. And then their violence is directed at those in their way - or, in one telling case, deserting from their cause. They are entirely goal-oriented - a tragically but rationally misunderstood goal, perhaps, but not an evil one.

Towards the end of the show, Kapp is seen desperately seeking a way to contact whatever it is has taken his wife and daughters so that he might get them back, or, failing that, join them. He's so fixated on that goal that when Quatermass comes to the observatory to scavenge equipment Kapp sends him packing. His goal has become to contact whatever took his family - some alien intelligence, he's sure - and make it understand. This doomed task has taken over his life; he can think of nothing else. Planet People waiting for the next gathering destroy his equipment (he's making things worse) and injure him when he resists. When he regains consciousness, he's confronted by Kickalong, the leader of the Planet People, and the following conversation takes place:

Kickalong: You wanted to be with them? Go after them, find them? That was no way, science man, all them silly wires. Planet don't want none of that. It takes you if you're fit to go.
Kapp: Fit?
Kickalong: Your woman and your kids - were they fit to go? Or did you spoil them? Too much think and talk, that'd spoil them. Got to know it all. If you done that, daddy science man, they're no good. They just get spilled away.
Kapp: Spilled?
Kickalong: See the sky, all sick? What that is, is spillings. All them, now they're fit to go. I picked 'em.

And this is where we get Kickalong's money quote, his self-definition:

I picked you, I guard you, I guide you, until it comes for us.

Kickalong is not just some random vandal. He has a mission - he is the priest to Kapp's scientist, both trying to keep people out of the dark. Kapp tries to beat it back, Kickalong to flee, but there is a point of view from which they're on the same side. And we see that play out almost at once, since the next line is from a girl among the Planet People who asks if Kapp can come too.

Instead of rejecting the notion out of hand, Kickalong looks down at Kapp and asks, "Are you a Jew?" You can tell that Kapp isn't sure what he should say. It's a question that has haunted Jews down history, one that surely resonated in the dark places in Kapp's mind, but on the other hand there is the menorah in Kickalong's hand - and Kapp's essential honesty. So he answers, and the conversation doesn't go where he - or we - expects it to:

Kickalong: Are you a Jew?
Kapp: Yes.
Kickalong: Okay. That's a start. That's believing. But you don't do it right. You got too much sin.
Kapp: Sin?
Kickalong: All this is sin. Your sin is to know things. If you want to come with us, you gotta get it all out of your brain.
Kapp: Get it out?
Kickalong: All the muck you learned, every bit.
Kapp: But you can't unlearn.
Kickalong: All them words in there -
Kapp: The words?
Kickalong: That's it.

And such is Kapp's desperation that he asks the question: "How?"

What follows is Kickalong and the Planet People's attempt to teach Kapp to "unlearn ... all them words". And for a few moments, he goes along with them - reciting nonsense syllables instead of actual nouns - until he just can't. It's not in him to not try "to know things", and even less is it in him to "unlearn" what he already knows. This is where Kapp hits rock bottom, and even his desperate (I keep using that word, but at this point in the story that is Kapp: pure grief and desperation - loss of hope) desire to be reunited with his lost family can't blind him for long to the truth: they are dead, and he is left behind.*

It's important to realize here that Kickalong is serious about trying to help Kapp. But Kapp can't unlearn, he can't abandon his knowledge, not even for the offering of Heaven. He simply cannot believe in it.

So they leave him. Later Quatermass arrives to make use of the little stone circle next to the observatory as his trap (he needs a place he knows the reaper will come to), finds Kapp back to reasonableness, and the astronomer joins the team in the attempt to trap and drive away the reaper. His heritage, his tradition, has redeemed his life. Yes, his family is dead, but he isn't, and he will regain his humanity before he dies.

Because of course he dies. He's the sidekick scientist in a Quatermass movie. And more than that, he's a hero. His entrance is the rescue of Quatermass from a gang, and he dies rescuing the planet. Or at least, just before that. His actual death is much braver, much more in character, and yet, in keeping with his tremendous loss, much more futile. Despite his hatred for the Planet People, Kapp dies trying to save them - not by the bomb to save the whole planet, as he was prepared to die, but running across the observatory yard yelling at them: "Get away, get away, you'll all die, that's a bomb!" In the end, is it his innate decency that drives him across that yard, or the Jewish reverence for life? Not two minutes after denying the power of faith or magic to bring back his family, he's calling the alien "Satan, the enemy" and Evil with a very obvious capital E.

Kapp: You can just make out that little hut. Not much of a home, was it?.. Oh, yes it was. It was... I can make them exist, you know. Oh, not by magic or faith, but by thinking. ... I know what Evil is. That's Evil.
Quatermass: Perhaps evil is always something else's good. Perhaps it's a cosmic law.
Kapp: Satan. The enemy.

I think the writer made Kapp a secular Jew so he could explore the combination of reason and faith. Kapp is the bridge between Quatermass's pure reason (who tells a man in Kapp's position to think that "evil is always something else's good"? Even if it is, is that the time?) and Kickalong's pure faith ("you gotta get it all out of your brain"). Grounded in the cozy rituals of a religion that honors learning, Kapp suffers the most, loses the most, and yet emerges from the story as the most human, and heroic, of all the characters.

* It occured to me as I was writing this that Kapp is Left Behind. The taking of the Planet People is like the Rapture, especially since, as Kickalong says, "there's always some left behind to cry." (It also occurred to me that, unlike anyone in the Left Behind books, Kapp does cry...)