“It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.”
-Jorge Luis Borges, 1941
“The cinema is a technology without a future.”
-Louis Lumière, 1895
We are a very long ways away from 2002.
That was the year of The Singles Ward—an independently produced romantic-comedy that delivered a solid hour-and-a-half of inside jokes for the incredibly niche audience of Mormon young single adults living and dating in the greater Intermountain West. This unapologetically odd little film was somehow profitable enough to spark a minor Mormon cinema renaissance of sorts (in the most generous use of the term), leading to a flood of like-minded films in its wake for close to a decade after. Vastly-varying in quality, they were consumed voraciously in Utah, Idaho, and in scattered LDS households across North America.
In retrospect, that minor film-trend hay have been a kind of victory lap; there was, at the time, a major study published by a Harvard-trained statistician predicting that Mormonism was on its way towards becoming the next world religion (with a quarter-billion congregants by the end of the century), and all demographic trends at the time seemed to confirm this secular prophecy. Church leaders within the LDS hierarchy declared that the future challenges of the faith would not be persecution, but explosive growth—nay, that such would be a sign of the One True Church.
Such, to put it simply is no longer the case: the Mormon church is nowadays not even close to meeting those once and future membership projections. Now, to be fair, it’s not entirely their fault; the much-ballyhooed rise of the “nones” has cut into religious growth-numbers across the board (indeed, compared to the membership-hemorrhaging of certain U.S. congregations, the LDS church’s mere treading of water looks downright impressive). News of Mormonism’s imminent demise have been greatly exaggerated.
But the faith is also no longer in self-congratulation mode, as even the orthodox faithful have come to temper their expectations. It is no longer a time for whimsical japes and inside jokes.
This is the peculiar atmosphere within which Neither Hot nor Cold comes to us. In what can only be described as an LDS arthouse film, Neither Hot nor Cold is that strangest of beasts (especially for a proselyting religion like Mormonism): a religious film that does not preach a faith, but also doesn’t deconstruct or challenge it, either. Rather, it matter-of-factly takes religion to be a given quantity of the universe—neither especially meaningful nor retrograde—as not a journey one takes, but merely a place one resides. In many ways, it is entirely besides the point that the religion portrayed herein happens to be Mormonism.
But the particular facets of the Mormon faith the film chooses to explore are indeed unique to the faith: namely, the doctrine of the Spirit Prison.
For the uninitiated: one of Mormonism’s chief selling points is its rejection of the simplistic heaven/hell binary. Taking as axiomatic Jesus’s saying that “in the kingdom of my father is many mansions”, Joseph Smith diagramed out an entire multi-tiered afterlife, the destination of which is dependent upon each individual soul’s levels of faithfulness, commitment, and devotion. A Universalist by nature, Smith’s “degrees of glory” explains how Mormons are able to simultaneously believe that theirs alone is the one true faith while still believing that members of all faiths will reach heaven—since there is more than one heaven.
An important point of order, however, is that one reaches these kingdoms only after the Resurrection of the Dead and the Great and Final Judgment after the Second Coming of Christ and the Millennium of Peace. This is not the moment in eternal history that Neither Hot nor Cold focuses upon, however, but on the interim, where the vast majority of spirits reside in the meantime: Spirit Paradise or Spirit Prison. The former is where the righteous reside until the Resurrection—and it is a peculiar point of Mormon doctrine that their proselyting activities continue in this afterlife, visiting the spirits of the departed in Spirit Prison, continuing to preach unto them repentance and faith in Christ.
Whew, did you catch all that? Because here’s the most important element for understanding Neither Hot nor Cold: it actually concerns neither the Paradise nor the Prison, but someone who is caught in between. In this case, the film follows a young, non-descript member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints named Cameron Pratt who, after a freak cheese-grater accident (don’t ask), was deemed too decent—or perhaps more precisely, too harmless—to merit consignment to Spirit Prison, but also not particularly righteous enough to merit a mission assignment, either. (Though the film doesn’t cite it, he is arguably among those whom Nietzsche once said, “Verily, I have thought to laugh at those weaklings who thought themselves virtuous cause they lack claws”).
Hence, while his more enthusiastic LDS peers proceed onward through a Dante-esque Divine Hero’s Journey across the Mormon afterlife, Cameron is left with nothing to do but wait around for the final judgment. He enjoys neither the companionship of the Almighty to counsel and comfort him, nor the presence of the Adversary to tempt and torment him; as the scripture says, “Neither hot nor cold I spew thee from my mouth”.
The film’s action (or more accurately, it’s extended non-action) comes from how Cameron mopes about the earth—unseen and unnoticed by the living—as he awaits that final day of which even the angels know not the day nor the hour (not that the angels appear to take much interest in speaking with him, anyways). And as his various flashbacks to his almost aggressively mundane mortal probation indicate, remaining unseen and unnoticed is not exactly something new to him.
Here is where the film will live and die by your patience for the, shall we say, meditative pace of most arthouse fare: Because Cameron Pratt is neither a ministering angel nor a demon, he can not travel any faster than normal human walking speed; hence we are treated to extended shots of him, say, walking across the Great Plains, far from any freeway or township; and whenever he sees another soul wandering through these same immense wastes, it is left ambiguous as to whether this other lost soul is living or dead. Perhaps it does not matter.
In the extended scenes where he wonders through cities, the film could be any sort of slice-of-life Brooklyn narrative—though with the all-the-more-uncanny-for-being-understated detail that we never see his reflection in a storefront window, nor his shadow on a sidewalk.
Not that the film is all futile walking scenes (though it sometimes feels like); if for no other reason than to break up the quasi-eternal monotony, Cameron sometimes begins in on a one-sided, mumble-core conversation with a fellow denizen of a park bench, or bus-stall, though it is not clear as to whether he is actually attempting to speak with the person next to him (he never even tries to make eye-contact, though that may also just be an old habit from his living life) or simply monologuing with himself (for that matter, it remains unclear whether he remains unseen or ignored). These sporadic discursive moments are the closest that Cameron gets to exercising some real agency in this purgatorial next life: for while in the early going he expresses his regret for how he wasted his life in such trivial pursuits—never doing his home-teaching, playing computer solitaire when he could have been studying his scriptures, watching college football instead of helping someone move, skimming memes on his phone during Sunday School—as the film progresses, Cameron become more…well, angry is probably too strong a word, but he does become just a tad more belligerent, philosophical even.
“It’s not really fair,” he begins to mutter (and again, whether to God or himself, is never really clear), “To be really good…” he gradually begins to articulate roughly half-way through the film, “Or even really bad, ya gotta have a chance to…” And in equally sporadic flashbacks, we see him as a BYU student going home-teaching with a companion who talks over him the entire time, and flagrantly tries to either egregiously flirt with the young women or recruit the young men to summer sales; who can’t concentrate on his scriptures while the neighbor’s baby is crying; who arrives at an Elders Quorum move to find all the moving boxes empty; who scrolls his Facebook feed while a Sunday School teacher drones on (in an especially cringe-worthy scene) about black people and the Priesthood—and the unstated implication is that the wonder isn’t that his engagement with the Church was so lackadaisical, but that he remained engaged at all.
It is important to note that Cameron rarely if ever makes excuses for himself: as his quiet ramblings slowly gather steam, he readily acknowledges in his more lucid moments that nothing was preventing him from studying harder, speaking up in Sunday School, serving people on his own, joining an NGO, volunteering at a soup kitchen, or a million other things he could’ve done instead; he knows that, as a college educated American in good health, his impediments were strictly spiritual, not physical. But that is still to underemphasize the importance of the spiritual. If he never quite rises to the level of accusing God, he never quite lets the Almighty off the hook, either. He is neither Job nor Judas. Whether he is justified in his hazily-articulated feelings is entirely left up to the viewer to decide.
There is of course nothing unprecedented about this particular vision of the afterlife; Dante Alighieri explored such infinite malaise in his Purgatorio, the forgotten middle-child of his Divine Comedy (especially compared to the blood-and-guts of the Inferno); Jean-Paul Sartre also explores such existential boredom in No Exit with its oft-abused line of “Hell is other people”. In fact, it’s tempting to read Neither Hot nor Cold as a type of rejoinder to No Exit, positing that hell is not other people but nobody else at all. But even that glib reading I feel is not quite right: hell is not other people nor one’s self—indeed, it is neither presence nor absence, whether of God or of the fellowship of humanity or what have you—it may, in fact, not be hell at all.
For what Neither Hot nor Cold’s frankly excessive run-time manages to accomplish (if you can white-knuckle it through some of the longeurs), is create a sense of religious experience out of the experience of boredom itself. Other religious thinkers like Kierkegaard have claimed that boredom is holy, but even then only insofar as it impelled ones towards action—what this film posits is that perhaps the boredom itself is holy. For it is not just this slow-moving film’s gorgeous cinematography that seems to stave off the total bleakness; it is the growing sense towards the finale that amidst the immense boredom of the Spirit prison, God has been there this whole time as well. Indeed, the film’s fade-out ending over the swelling strains of Brian Eno’s “The Big Ship” apparently invites the reader to consider that God was ever-present during his most bored moments in Sunday School, on his dullest hometeaching visit, on his most rote game of Solitaire—even in those empty moving boxes. Not that God is empty or that emptiness is God—but that in our quietest moments, we were finally still enough to feel him and experience him.
This of course has none of the stirring triumphalism of some swelling missionary epic or even an overly-confident romantic comedy; and it is highly unlikely to produce new converts (either to the Church or to Mormon cinema), to say the least. But it does appear to be a Mormon film crafted for this particular historical moment, to help us find the divinity in our quietest moments–individually, institutionally, historically, cosmically.