by Kristian Lin

One of the best movies of 1999, Dogma might seem like a radical departure to followers of writer/director Kevin Smith. Stylistically, Dogma is recognizably of a piece with Smith's three previous films, Clerks (1994), Mallrats (1995) and Chasing Amy (1997). These movies share low-rent production values and an ironically hip, querulously intelligent sense of humor.

However, whereas his first three movies are small-scale comedies about personal relationships, Dogma takes on the apocalypse and the struggle of good and evil. Smith's religiosity isn't new, though, but has continually been present under the surface of his work.

Dogma begins with an overzealous Catholic cardinal (George Carlin) who promises forgiveness of all sins to those who pass through the arches of his church in New Jersey. This catches the eyes of two outcast angels (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) who see this loophole in canonical law as a way to return to Heaven. But if the angels successfully defy God's edict that cast them out of Heaven, they'll render God fallible and obliterate human existence.

As the above plot summary would seem to indicate, Kevin Smith is as heavily influenced by Catholic theology as Martin Scorsese. Scorsese's Catholicism, though, is reflected through his concern with suffering and redemption‹Bringing Out the Dead is his latest treatment of this theme. Smith is after other game. Clerks can be seen as a somewhat heavy-handed reworking of The Divine Comedy, with its protagonist named Dante meeting sinners in Hell, i.e. the convenience store where he works, before emerging into the light of day. Many of the male characters in Chasing Amy have Catholic backgrounds, and the film studies how the sexual repression of their upbringings keeps them from true love.

(Writing in The New York Times in 1997, Terry Teachout also detected Smith's religious impulses at work, interpreting Chasing Amy as "a parable of grace and redemption, framed in secular terms" and demonstrating how the movie revolves around the theological concept of grace.)

Smith draws more than thematic material from Catholicism. The discursive nature of his dialogue is informed by the tradition of rhetorical argument practiced by Catholic scholars. Through conversations about subjects from whether lesbian sex constitutes loss of virginity in Chasing Amy to which eateries at the mall are part of the food court proper in Mallrats, his characters are constantly trying to suss out the rules of life and how they operate. These discussions are reminiscent of medieval dialogues about the workings of the cosmos (and their comic value emerges from the expense of so much energy on insignificant subjects or personal fixations). Dogma ties the rhetorical chatter to huge dramatic consequences; Smith hangs the fate of the universe on whether two renegade angels can beat God in a debate. The mix of drama and philosophy is downright Shavian, but one could argue that even George Bernard Shaw never pulled off this trick so successfully.

Smith's faith also helps explain his otherwise inexplicable hostility towards the Easter Bunny, who gets dissed in both Chasing Amy and Mallrats. It's one way to handle a grotesque symbol of the commercialization of a holiday devoted to Christ's rising from the dead. It reflects his disdain for consumerism, rare in such a pop-culture-obsessed artist. The renegade angels in Dogma march into the boardroom of an entertainment empire built on a cartoon character called Mooby the Golden Calf and massacre the executives, on the grounds that Mooby is an idol and the suits are idolaters. The place of religious sentiment in this increasingly materialistic world might well prove to be a fruitful subject for a future movie by this unique comic genius.