The other night I had a discussion which centered around how we as a country have gone about fighting terrorism. The focus of the conversation was the moral arguments for and against our actions, and, ultimately, whether it is more important to survive or to follow the moral code. Tonight I watched a movie that asked much the same question. “Carriers” follows two brothers and their girlfriends as they travel through a plague-ravaged Southwest. The group has instituted a set of rules for avoiding the disease and staying alive. The rules consist of things such as not touching an object that hasn’t been disinfected, and avoiding interstates and major population centers. The group’s chief rule is to consider the infected as dead, and not attempt to help them.
Apocalypse fiction is (or can be) and interesting genre. It puts its characters in situations that strip away the external controls and comforts of society and lets those characters either dissolve or grow into their true selves. The choices of everyday morality (‘Do I tell that lie or face a discomfort?’) are suddenly magnified (‘Do I let that person die or die myself?’). Ultimately, apocalypse fiction doesn’t bring us to a new place, it just more clearly shows us the place we’ve always been, the people we’ve always been.
But that’s when apocalypse fiction is at it’s best. More often than not it’s merely a gore-fest with no brains expect the ones the zombies are after. “Carrier” is not such an example. With relatively minimal violence, it this is a moral thriller in which the characters consistently choose (and consistently choose wrongly) between, to borrow a quote, “what is right, and what is easy”. As the movie progresses the choices become more and more horrific, with the friends turning their backs on each other in a desperate adherence to the rules. There are no heros here, and the one glimmer of heroic action results in death. But death, the movie seems to conclude, is better than a life that does not hold to a costly love.
The Christian, of course, should be defined by such a costly love. And stories like “Carriers” should cause us to reflect upon how we live. Do we hold to a type of legalism that will save us? Do we care more about ourselves than the people around us? Or do we reflect the love of Christ, holding on to that love for our salvation and showing that love to others despite a rather terrible cost?
