Review by Andrew Swafford
With neon lights, glittering cosmetics and shimmering sequins, Disco begins as a glitzy and impressionistic dance film. Its protagonist, Mirjam, is a competitive solo dancer, and she spins like a whirling dervish, putting herself in a trance-like state of higher consciousness through movement only to be hrown off her groove by needling thoughts. But Disco isn’t really a dance film, and only ever returns to the dancefloor once or twice throughout its runtime. The ever-shifting focus of Disco could be seen as a type of dance, however, as the film spins in a circle around its true subject – three different realms of contemporary Christendom – and ultimately collapses to the floor in a state of despair.
First, the film occupies a bizarre space constructed by Mirjam’s youth pastor father: a vaporwave-aesthetic church illuminated by triangular pink neon lights and energized by Christian EDM. (There are also a lot of television screens, plus a particularly sleek coffee bar.) This is easy to see through as clout-chasing gimmickry in an effort to shapeshift evangelicalism into whatever’s most marketable, basically making this church a physical manifestation of this meme made for the purposes of furthering God’s kingdom:
Speaking of marketable, though, the second realm of contemporary Christianity Disco explores is televangelism, as Mirjam’s maternal uncle hosts exorcisms / laying-on-hands-ceremonies on live television. This is similarly easy to see through as an obvious scam, what with the call-in number to donate money flashing on the bottom half of the screen at all times.
Like many Christian teens her age, Mirjam wants to hold strong to the faith she’s been raised with – some of the film’s most affecting sequences are those in which she listens to podcast devotionals in an attempt to stay connected to this part of herself – but both her father’s youth group and her uncle’s televangelism present surface-level, unfulfilling versions of Christian doctrine. Outside of just their marketing ploys, these men are also morally repugnant to various degrees: her father being a controlling, manipulative patriarch (especially when it comes to micromanaging his daughter’s media intake, as is often the case in evangelical homes) and her uncle being a raging homophobe.
This is where the film steps in to offer a third alternative: an old-fashioned mahogany church with a congregation that is seemingly humble and reverent. There are no bells-and-whistles and no intrusive music here: just a serene space in which to practice prayer and fellowship. One interesting shot in this section – posing the congregation like Da Vinci’s Last Supper before an enormous set of stained glass windows – simultaneously suggests pure faithfulness (by the shot’s symmetrical beauty and hushed tone) and heresy (by the pastor being seated in the place of Jesus).
I won’t spoil exactly what happens when Mirjam goes on a spiritual retreat with this church in order to escape family drama back home, but rest assured: Disco purports that churches like this are not what they seem. The film frames this group as vicious and aggressive in their demands for submission, making the other two realms of Christendom explored here look tame by comparison. According to the comparative study presented by Disco, all Christian institutions are suggested to be fundamentally malicious in nature, existing solely to brainwash others into supporting evil power structures.
The quality of the film aside (it’s done perfectly well), I’m torn on how to feel about this: on the one hand, it is absolutely true that evangelicalism has invaded so many parts of public life that it can feel inescapable – and Disco gives viewers the tools to identify this type of brainwashing when they see it, which is unquestionably valuable. On other other hand, I’m troubled by the ultimately reductive way Disco places all of contemporary Christianity – the most widely practiced religion in the world – into a single box labelled “bad.”
I’m not a practicing Christian myself, so I’m probably not the one to write the apologia this film provokes – but I know from so many friends and public figures I admire that Christianity can absolutely be a radical force for liberation and social change. This is the religion centered around the guy who said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” (I would also point readers toward the writings of David Dark, a Nashville theologian who speaks the language of evangelicalism to fight back against what he calls “White Supremacist Antichrist Poltergeist.”) Although Christendom’s organized institutions may have largely ignored Christianity’s more radical implications in order to graft themselves onto secular social hierarchies, I do strongly feel it is painting with too broad of a brush to imply that that every road paved by faith is a dead end.
Disco may be, on another level, representing the view from the inside of a goldfish bowl: Mirjam is a character who, like many young people like her, can only see the options that her sheltered community chooses to allow her to see. If this is indeed the case, I might have appreciated a little more distance to show the audience that this perspective is limited, not absolute. Doing so feels important, because while the fate of Mirjam by the film’s end is not completely clear, earlier, skimmed-over scenes showing her disordered eating and suicidal ideation suggests that she can do nothing else but spiral into self-destructive hopelessness. From the perspective within the film, what else can she do?
Disco is not a dance film; Disco is an argument. And maybe I’m projecting (it hits a bit close to home), but if I’m reading this thing right, it’s an argument for why a world driven by religion (our world) is so fucked that suicide is the only rational response to it. And to me, that sounds like a reductive reading of our present situation that both ignores a lot of reasons to live and lets the bad guys win. Deeply uncomfortable with this one.