This month’s topic comes to us from the man of many names—Somewhat Summers, Tadpole, Harold Bleacher—none of which are his real name. Many thanks to him not just for the topic but for accepting this film as a substitute for an Antichrist film so that I could finally talk about Mormonism. Requests for 2027 are open.
In September of 1823, Joseph Smith, Jr., of upstate New York, made an astounding claim. An angel named Moroni had visited him in a vision and shown him the hiding place of golden plates purportedly containing a record of the history of the ancient Americas. With the help of a “seer stone” Smith had discovered some years before, as well as the “Urim and Thummim” which came bundled with the plates, he was able to translate this immense record from “Reformed Egyptian” into the English language.
What he did was this. Smith sequestered himself in a room of his house. He cordoned off part of the room with a curtain, where he sat down, tossed one or more of the magic rocks into a hat, and, while staring into it, dictated the translation of the golden plates to one of his scribes on the other side of the curtain. In 1830, the first edition of his translation appeared in print as the Book of Mormon.
This was just the beginning of Joseph Smith’s story, which took him across middle America to an Illinois prison, where his all-American life ended in an all-American way when he was cornered and killed by a mob. The journey westward was completed by his successor, Brigham Young, and it was in Utah that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints really began to thrive (though Emma Smith, the primus inter pares of Joseph Smith’s widows, stayed in Illinois as part of a splinter group).
For the purpose of this column, none of this matters. Mormonism is far too rich a topic to be covered in 3000 words, so I will be hyper-focused on the Book of Mormon itself, especially since the movie under discussion only deals with the Book. That means no polygamy, no magical underwear, no baptism for the dead, no Kolob, no caffeine bans, no spirit children, no poophole loopholes, no bubble porn, and no soaking. So let’s begin!
Scripture is not a genre. There are many ways to characterize the Hebrew Bible, but I tend to think of it as the surviving literature of a lost civilization, the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah, covering every conceivable literary genre. By contrast, the New Testament is mainly a collection of letters about a guy. I don’t even know how to describe the Quran. Many people raised on the Christian Bible have told me that reading the Quran was like slamming into a brick wall.
The Book of Mormon is like none of these. It is primarily a chronicle. In this respect it resembles the first half of the Hebrew Bible—but only the first half. In fact, as I worked my way through it, it struck me that the Book of Mormon was like the Hebrew Bible in reverse. It begins around 600 BCE, at the cusp of the Babylonian Exile that extinguished the kingdom of Judah. Refugees from that disaster make their way to the Americas, where they establish a monarchy that dissolves into a judgeship that, after a period of tranquility instigated by a lawgiver and savior figure, ends with the last man on earth. That man, Moroni (same as the angel, and the hero of The Oath), puts the finishing touches on the golden plates that are mostly the work of his father, Mormon.
Mormon, the erstwhile editor of the book, is abridging much longer records (the text makes frequent references to material that has been omitted). The work consists of fifteen smaller books divided into two broad sections. The first six books are the “Smaller Plates” of Nephi, the patriarch of the American settlers. They deal overwhelmingly with that first generation and the great speeches that were delivered at that time.
In the seventh book, the Words of Mormon, the editor intrudes for the first time and signals a shift to the more chronologically precise secular history, which only picks up after the displaced Israelites have split into two camps, the Nephites, named after Nephi, and the Lamanites, named after Nephi’s evil brother Laman. In short order, the Nephites join with a group of Judahites who escaped the Babylonians, and together they discover the writings of YET ANOTHER group of Old World voyagers, the Jaredites, who came to America in the days of the Tower of Babel. Their tragic story is appended to the end as the Book of Ether.
The account of the ceaseless conflicts between the Nephites and the Lamanites is stultifyingly repetitive. In part it resembles the repetitive and ultra-violent biblical book of Judges. But it also mixes in a little Acts of the Apostles. The Holy Spirit speaks to the American prophets in much greater detail about the coming Messiah, and good Nephites are expected to proleptically believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and even call themselves Christians. A bad boy named Alma is turned good by an angel and sent to missionize the Lamanites, much like Paul before…er, after him.
Eventually Christ shows up near the end, in 3 Nephi (not the same Nephi as in 1-2 Nephi but another guy named after him). Jesus speaks in a pastiche of phrases from the New Testament. He gives an encore performance of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) and fills in the settlers on some Scriptures they had missed out on while they were away, namely the last chapter of Malachi. He even reads portions of the in-progress Book of Mormon and makes editorial suggestions!
The contents of the Book of Mormon are not nearly as strange as its… well, I’m not sure what to call it. Its text-critical situation? It’s a translation, first of all. We cannot evaluate the translation because Joseph Smith gave the original back to Moroni. The book was written in “Reformed Egyptian” instead of Hebrew, for the questionable reason that Reformed Egyptian was a more compact language allowing one to get more stuff on those golden plates. We have no idea how much additional material was left out anyway. And what’s the deal with those plates? There are scrolls written on metal, like the Copper Scroll from Qumran, which is a treasure list. But we don’t have pages and pages of material written on precious metal, much less a book as long as the New Testament and the Quran combined.
The Book of Mormon is also the first major Scripture to be written in the age of copyright. The one I read was a reprint of the third edition of 1840, the last one to appear in Joseph Smith’s lifetime. The first edition was riddled with typographical errors (this is why you shouldn’t dictate your Scriptures), and even the third edition has different chapter divisions than the one you’ll find in your hotel room in the Salt Lake City Marriott. It has no verses at all. This, incidentally, will make it impossible for me to cite the work.
Now the OG Bible (Old Greek or Original Gangster; you decide!) didn’t have chapters or verses in it either. Chapters came late in the Middle Ages. Verses didn’t appear until the age of print. It’s not ipso facto strange that the Book of Mormon only later adopted versification, shorter chapters, and the sine qua non of all Scripture, dual columns. But it is a little strange that the first edition of the Book of Mormon looks more like a 600-page doorstop of a novel than a sacred text. If you are not Mormon, the best way you can convince yourself you are having a good time is by thinking of it as a great spiritual epic of the pre-Columbian Americas.
The Book of Mormon is not the only Scripture of the LDS Church. There’s the Bible, of course. There are also two other books: Doctrine and Covenants, originally published by Smith in 1835, which is exactly what’s on the tin. The most interesting thing about this book is that it is an open text, occasionally updated with new revelations from Joseph Smith’s successors. Logically, different LDS communities have different recensions of the text.
The final book of LDS Scripture is The Pearl of Great Price, a collection of Smith’s miscellaneous writings compiled after his death, including portions of Joseph Smith’s attempted (but never completed) rewriting of the entire Bible. The Joseph Smith Translation is the official Bible of the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), and was at the center of a copyright dispute between Emma Smith (who held it) and Brigham Young (who suspected Emma of tampering with her husband’s manuscripts). I wish I could talk at greater length about this, but we have a terrible movie to attend to.
The Oath recounts the final days of Moroni, who was entrusted with completing and hiding the golden plates after his father’s martyrdom. According to Book of Mormon chronology, he died around 421 CE, only a little later than the events of Agora. The coming of Christ healed the rift between the Nephites and Lamanites, which endured for around two hundred years. Then things broke down rapidly. An apocalyptic Battle of Cumorah took place around 385 CE, during which the Nephites were more or less annihilated. Mormon wrote a lamentation for his people on the eve of battle, and Moroni recorded the aftermath.
Pretty exciting stuff, right? I bet you can’t wait to see all that on film. You’re going to have to make it yourself, though, because The Oath picks up after all this, effectively after the Book of Mormon has ended. Moroni is a man on the run. He is being hunted by the Lamanites, who are unambiguously portrayed as Blackfoot warriors searching for the “pale face.” Having spent weeks and weeks reading through the Book of Mormon and trying to understand its chronology and geography, I was less than thrilled with this interpretive approach that nullified all my hard work.
I have received anecdotal reports that Mormons were pretty confused by this as well. I don’t know if there is any official account of what happened to Moroni after he buried the plates, but I take it that this film made it all up. It didn’t make up MUCH, though, because the film is light on narrative incident of any sort and mightily struggles to fill its 100 minutes.
Moroni is played by Darin Scott. I felt I had seen that name somewhere before. Then I remembered.
Which has overtones of this.
What can we do to confirm this hypothesis? Here is a nice public domain image of Moroni.
Now here is Darin Scott’s take on the character.
Make of that what you will. But this might be a vanity project.
It wasn’t a vanity project for everyone, though. I can imagine at least one participant who probably wants no one to know that he was in this movie. You’re going to have to sit down for this.
That’s not a namesake. That’s real actor Billy Zane. Phantom Billy Zane. Titanic Billy Zane. Kingdom Hearts Billy Zane. There are other real actors in this. I don’t blame any D-listers or members of the Blackfoot nation for taking that paycheck. I would blame Billy Zane, except he is blowing up the movie from the inside, so he is actually the hero. But that’s for the next section. I bring him up now because he plays Aaron, the king of the Lamanites mentioned only in passing in the final parts of the Book of Mormon. He is the last-named Lamanite king and so a natural foil for Moroni, the last Nephite.
Few of the other characters are found in the Book of Mormon. That is because they are women. The Book of Mormon does name a few women. For example, it names the biblical figures of Eve, Sarah, and Mary. On top of that we have Sariah, the mother of Nephi; Abish, a Lamanite girl from the days of Alma who converts; and Isabel, a girl one of Alma’s sons is fooling around with. And… that’s it. On the one hand, that is six times more women than are named in the Quran (one: Mary). On the other hand, the Quran is by and large not a narrative text. Six is not enough to fill a binder, even a very small one.
The Oath has two major female characters, Bathsheba and Mahigana, the sister-wives of Aaron. Bathsheba talks like a caveman. Mahigana talks like Michelle Rodriguez. One day, Bathsheba grows tired of the abuse she receives from Aaron because she can’t conceive, so she runs away and ends up in the arms of Moroni. Mahigana is then tasked to find her and bring her back.
Thus the plot. During the hour of the film where Moroni and Bathsheba overcome their differences and fall in love, Moroni gives her some Scripture lessons that I would normally find cumbersome except that I studied for EXACTLY THIS. Moroni talks about his older namesake, Captain Moroni, a figure from the time of Alma. My enduring memory of this guy is that, during a battle with the Lamanites, one of his soldiers scalps the enemy general. I suspect Mormons are more likely to associate him with the Title of Liberty, the banner he created from his own cloak as a symbol of resistance to Lamanite tyranny.
The older Moroni shows up as a Force Ghost at some critical junctures in the film. At least, I think it’s him. There is some dialogue to the effect that Mormon (unseen) named his son after the older hero with the hope that he would have the same courage and valor. This doubles as an explanation of why so many critical characters in the Book of Mormon have the same damn name—two Moronis, two Nephis, two Almas, two Helamans, two Aarons. Even Mormon is named after the “Waters of Mormon” where the first American baptisms took place—not a person but a place.
When I implied that Darin Scott is the Mormon Tommy Wiseau, I was not just referring to his total control over the making of the film. The Oath blows. It has a lot of sins typical of bad cinema. They found a gorgeous location (singular) for the shoot, but the camera won’t sit still, like the guy behind it was on a constant bender. The shoestring budget is on full display as Darin Scott runs away from literally no one and contends with offscreen bears and wolves. No one from these two urban civilizations goes indoors, EVER, unless it’s to Moroni’s hideaway cave.
The acting, of course, is bad, but in different ways. Darin Scott is ultra-serious and ultra-boring. Nora Dale as Bathsheba, whose broken English is supposed to stand in for the Lamanite language, has been handed an impossible task. The results aren’t pretty. Karina Lombard, as Mahigana, gets to ham it up with her onscreen partner, Eugene Brave Rock, playing the Lamanite warrior Cohor. At least they’re having fun. But the king of the hams is Billy Zane, who did all his scenes on Talk Like a Pirate Day. The proof? He talks like a pirate. Also, he looks like this.
In principle, I believe films should be judged solely by their artistic merits, but I’m human too, and there’s only so much I can take. I reserve half-stars for movies that manage to offend me, and this one got there easily.
For one, it is overtly racist. There are a lot of squabbles about what the Book of Mormon means when it refers (in several place) to the Lamanites becoming, upon conversion, “white and delightsome.” Does it mean that the skin of the Lamanites, who are genetically identical to the Nephites, turns from dark to white? Or does “white” here mean the same as when Rudyard Kipling writes of Gunga Din: “An’ for all ‘is dirty ‘ide/‘E was white, clear white, inside”? The Oath views the Lamanites as the ancestors of Native Americans, which is sort of the whole raison d’être for the Book of Mormon. What bothers me is that the film states that the Nephites, who are descended from the same group of people, and have only ever intermarried with each other, are pale, while the Lamanites are swarthy.
Excuse me, but what the fuck? Why does Moroni still speak Hebrew (quite badly), while the Lamanite language has metamorphosed into a wholly unrelated language (while still retaining unadulterated Hebrew proper names)? Why are the Lamanites so culturally distinct from the Nephites, when they have had no other cultures to interact with but each other? Why don’t Bathsheba and other Lamanites know even a little bit of their shared history with the Nephites, such as the divine revelation that momentarily brought the two communities together?
I could multiply questions like this, but the thing that really made me snap happened near the end of the film, where it abruptly transforms into a remake of Gladiator. One way that it gets there is by fridging its heroine. I have grown really tired of this exceptionally lazy trope. I barely tolerate it in movies I like (like Gladiator), and it pushes me over the edge in movies I don’t (like Gladiator II). So we have Moroni crying over his dead wife, as well as his newly stillborn son (as with Redeeming Love, Bathsheba’s fertility problems stopped the minute she decided to stop being such a whore).
Because this is following the Gladiator template, I already knew by this point that the movie would end with Moroni reuniting with them in heaven, and it didn’t disappoint. I guess that’s a spoiler, but frankly I would prefer to warn normal people off from ever seeing this movie. For all you sickos out there, you now know precisely what kind of movie this is. Go with God.
For more Sects, Lies, and Videotape, see the Index!
Gavin McDowell is a Hoosier by birth and French by adoption. He received his doctorate in “Languages, History, and Literature of the Ancient World from the Beginning until Late Antiquity.” He has recently achieved the terminal status for someone with a humanities degree, which is unemployment. He also runs a book club out of Alternate Ending’s Discord, where we read novels and short stories that were later adapted to film. For more of his unprovoked movie opinions, see his Letterboxd account.