Screening Room: "Bacon & God's Wrath"
By Joshua Rothman , JUNE 14, 2016
Razie, the subject of Sol Friedman’s documentary “Bacon & God’s Wrath,” is a Jewish woman who’s about to turn ninety. She has also recently become an atheist and is about to try bacon for the first time. From that simple setup, surprises flow. Lying on a couch, like one of Freud’s analysands, Razie tells us about her strictly religious upbringing, which seems to have brought her little joy. As she describes how using the Internet led her to atheism (“Some of my most intimate thoughts and questions . . . were so common that the Google could anticipate it!”), a picture of her wry, inquisitive, unsentimental mind emerges. Something is at stake in her decision to try bacon: it’s a way of marking a transformation—of asserting that, even late in life, it’s possible to change. It’s also, one senses, a way of claiming independence from the fear of death that can haunt old age.
With its unbalanced nouns in apposition, the film’s title hints at the absurdity of the way human beings think. There’s something comic about linking bacon with the wrath of God: the film, recognizing this, includes whimsical animations. Yet the title also contains, at least for me, a hint of sadness. Religious faith is a consolation; if you trade it in for bacon, have you made a good trade? I’m an atheist, and I think I would give up bacon in exchange for the conviction that the universe has a purpose. By the same token, faith becomes vulnerable to skepticism when it links itself to more or less arbitrary decisions about diet or dress. Razie, of course, hasn’t traded belief for bacon; she has traded it for the freedom to follow her own conscience, to do and think as she sees fit. These, the film seems to say, are the signs by which we communicate, to others and ourselves, our ideas about the fundamental questions of existence. Look how small they are!
Razie reminds me of my own Jewish grandmother. They share a way of talking, an unpretentious intellectualism, and—judging from the art works and tchotchkes in Razie’s apartment—an aesthetic. My grandmother is ninety-three and, to my knowledge, has never kept kosher. I’ve never asked her about her views on religion. Now that I’ve watched “Bacon & God’s Wrath,” I will.
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/screening-room-bacon-gods-wrath
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