Alien Sex The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology [Hardcover]

Gerard Loughlin is one of the leading theologians working at the interface between religion and contemporary culture. In this exceptional work, he uses cinema and the films it shows to think about the church and the visions of desire it displays.

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• Discusses various films, including the Alien quartet, Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth and Derek Jarman’s The Garden.
  
• Draws on a wide range of authors, both ancient and modern, religious and secular, from Plato to Levinas, from Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar to André Bazin and Leo Bersani.
  
• Uses cinema to think about the church as an ecclesiacinema, and films to think about sexual desire as erotic dispossession, as a way into the life of God.
  
• Written from a radically orthodox Christian perspective, at once both Catholic and critical.

List of Figures viii

In the Lobby ix

Part I Introduction 1

1 Desiring Bodies 3

Part II Cavities 33

2 Seeing in the Dark 35

3 Visionary Screens 65

Part III Copulations 103

4 Alien Sex 105

5 God’s Sex 133

6 Sex Slaves 173

7 Want of Family 201

Part IV Consolations 227

8 The Man Who Fell to Earth 229

9 The Garden 257

Index 295

Absolutely brilliant. Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University

“Alien lC'