Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology

Challenges in Contemporary Theology

by Gerard Loughlin

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.

* 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sexuality, Bodies

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Ietrio]

loughlin is a man who has little to say. but he would push forward because he wants to use both subjects as a ladder for his career. low quality navel gazing.

[Matt Moser]

Brilliant but ultimately unsatisfying. I'm not sure that anthropological androgyny is the best way forward through the turbulent waves of the debate on sex and sexuality that the Church is facing. I fear that Loughlin unintentionally ends up denying the body altogether.

The analyses of films, however, are great (if pretentious) reads.

[Erica]

Incredible take on theological cinematography and how it relates to issues of body and space.