Pietà
Patrick Madden
*
There's a scene near the end of the last episode of Midnight Mass that, the first time I saw it, evoked from me an involuntary sob, a kind of bubbling up of weeping emotion, sadness and joy together, from an instantaneous recognition of the visual allusion that I was unconsciously sure writer/director Mike Flanagan intended. The sound I heard from my own mouth can best be rendered in text as one of our simplest words, "O!," a word that precedes and resists resolution into meaning, a sound of which Rebecca McClanahan asks, "Is there a vowel more heavy or sad than the long o? It hollows out the mouth, intones the deepest sorrow."
There's a scene near the end of the last episode of Midnight Mass that, for fifteen seconds, between cuts of the climactic breakdown of Crockett Island's society via mass vampire conversion, centers in a vast frame of apocalyptic fire the recently rejuvenated Monseigneur John Pruitt and his long-ago lover Mildred Gunning, kneeling on a bridge caressing their daughter, Sarah, who's been mortally wounded by a bullet just moments before in the midst of the chaos, shot by a confused Sturge, who'd not yet realized that it was time to give up the misguided quest for eternal life.
There's a scene near the end of the last episode of Midnight Mass that struck me pre-linguistically, pre-consciously, as an homage to the many sculpted and painted Western representations of a moment unreported in the gospels: of Mary the mother of God caressing her son, who's been crucified unjustly but necessarily, and who's died just moments before and is now again in his mother's arms in echo of the days decades before when, wrapped then too in swaddling clothes, he nestled in her bosom, just moments after he was born.
There's a scene near the end of the last episode of Midnight Mass that seems so clearly a pietà in its arrangement and prefacing, though there are two parents present, and the dead child is a daughter, a doctor, a lesbian, one of very few people on the entire island uninfected by vampire blood, which Monseigneur Pruitt has been slipping his congregation in the Communion wine, unwittingly, or foolishly not wanting to know the true nature of the grotesque "angel" he's shipped back from the Holy Land. The family has gathered in mourning on a wooden bridge over a creek with Father Pruitt sitting on our left, Mildred to our right, and Sarah slumped across them, head resting in her father's lap, legs lying inert in front of her mother. John holds Sara's head; Mildred her hand. The scene's clearest referent is Michelangelo's 1499 sculpture, so prominent among similar artistic representations that it merits the definite article: The Pietà. Unlike so many stiffer, indefinite-articled and lowercased pietàs I've studied, Michelangelo's Jesus seems truly dead, subject to gravity: his long, lithe body slumps, supported only by his mother and the rock she sits on. Despite the inflexible medium of marble, the muscles and sinews and fabrics ruffle and flow in pyramidal grace from his arched head on the left to his languid legs on the right and centered with Mary's eternally youthful visage above it all.
There's a scene near the end of the last episode of Midnight Mass that follows and fulfills so much else that it's impossible to convey the intricacies of the story. But let it be said that, as in the gospels, the proud get their comeuppance and the humbled and the outcast come to a peace and understanding, and that earlier themes of sin and forgiveness and earnestness and hypocrisy resolve in satisfying ways as Sarah dies setting fire to the island's shelters where the vampires might escape the sun, and her conspirators likewise die in noble, painful ways, including Erin Greene, who, beneath the Ur-vampire, her lifeblood draining as he suckles, slices his leathery wings and returns outside time to a conversation with her friend Riley Flynn, in which she now re-members her answer to the question "What happens when we die," narrating her revelations as she experiences death, as a legato piano touches a simple melody: "Were you there when they crucified my Lord," a soundtrack beneath all the burning and Erin's soliloquy until we reach a moment of transitionary silence and a shift in the spirit as the remaining townspeople, repentantly aware of their hubris and resigned to their fate once the sun comes up, sing aspirationally, "Nearer, My God, to Thee."
There's a scene near the end of the last episode of Midnight Mass that evokes the meaning of pietà: "pity," most cognatively, or "sorrow," "compassion," maybe, shared feeling. Maybe it takes a whole series to get here, or maybe it takes centuries of intricate Christian stories told and taught, repeated and recreated, inculcated, indoctrinated. Maybe it takes something both intimately personal and culturally repeatable. But for me, this brief scene meant, not even meant something, just meant. And I’ve been sitting with its meaning for years now, sometimes content to leave it unexamined, uncriticized, and other times, like now, eager to seek a dinghy of words to take me somewhere from it, or towards it. I know, of course, that the whole of my response to my response is assembled in its aftermath; it is not what happened, or what I understood. I don’t know if I can be said to have understood anything, in fact. But I felt something. There was my sudden unbidden utterance, then a long while to think on whats and whys. There is now a memory of what happened, but not what happened. That is gone. But there’s the lingering conflict: a reluctance to trouble the innocence of the response, a resistance to resolving “something” into some thing, but also a hearty desire to untangle and share what I felt, which is not, never was, a thing I could point at or label, no matter how many words I try out toward that end. So maybe the best response was my first response, a genuine, unpremeditated, unpretentious "O!" Or maybe there is just the scene of John and Mildred anguishedly holding their daughter in similitude of Mary holding her son. Sometimes it causes me to tremble.
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