The grassroots and popular media in the past few days have been saturated with the polemic of the "haramization" of the Hollywood blockbuster 2012 by some chapters of the National Ulema Council (MUI), condemning the film as a heresy to religious teachings.
While many discussions would right off the bat dismiss this polemic as "just another acting out of the MUI" (to cite one of the most polite responses for the sake of decency), a question nonetheless lingers in our hearts: What is happening today in the social field of religion that allows such a polemic to take place?
The more progressive Muslim intellectuals from all over were quick to point out how such cases as this one are the reason Islam gets a bad name, while other scholars would argue (although most, at this point, are already too cynical to care) that actions like these are an exhibition of backward thinking.
Those more inclined to conspiracy theories begin to develop the possibility that this was all orchestrated simply to make the movie 2012 sell more - and of course, which polemic of a movie ever makes it sell less?
A similar case of paranoid reaction from the MUI took place several weeks earlier when the public got wind of Raditya Dika's plan for his new comedy Menculik Miyabi (Kidnapping Miyabi), which entailed inviting Japanese porn star Maria Ozawa (in Indonesia more commonly known by her old stage name "Miyabi") to star in it, albeit just in a minor, absolutely nonpornographic scene.
The question that pops into most of our heads is the same: Why so paranoid?
2012 is marketed as a fictional movie, not some kind of "futuristic documentary". Maria Ozawa is not here to shoot a porn movie.
What, then, is the reason to be afraid? The answer cannot but invoke a denial: "We know very well, but nonetheless ." We know very well that Maria Ozawa is just another human being, here to visit Indonesia and make a simple, innocent movie, but nonetheless there is something more about her, some kind of sinful erotic fantasy that would somehow turn society into uncivilized sexual predators .
The latter statement throws us into a problematic situation. If 2012 was easy to dismiss, Maria Ozawa is a little more complicated: we know very well that she is just another human being, but nonetheless we also feel that, somehow, her presence cannot be innocent. In a sense, we are all already caught up in the fantasy.
And is this not the very fact exploited by Raditya Dika - why else would he make such a movie? The catch is that whenever we are caught watching the movie, we can all safely pretend that there was nothing pornographic in the movie, while deep inside we all know that we have been fantasizing all along.
That being said, perhaps there is indeed something more about 2012. Has not the fiction of our world coming to an end been circulating in the fabric of our pop culture for years now?
Has not the resurgent popularity of zombies, the pessimistic discourse on global warming, and the scientific television series on the apocalypse attest to the same fascination? What the MUI is saying is simple: those fantasies exist, we have too much of them, and they are sinful.
Herein lies the complicity between religion today and pop culture, and herein lies the reason why we should not be so easy to dismiss the MUI's "acting out" as another absurd act, condemning them as an obsolete, overly zealous religious institution.
Because in the end, we see a certain truth from them: not that 2012 is "really" a heretical movie, not that Maria Ozawa is "really" a sex goddess destined to corrupt us all with her very presence, but that there is something wrong in the way religion and pop culture interact today.
The polemics initiated by the MUI are but a social symptom: in it, we see not the truth of a discussed object (a movie, an actress, etc - "objectively", we all know, they are innocent), but the truth of ourselves (how we desire and how we try desperately to hide, repress, and lie about those desires). Rather than being dismissive of our own country's chaotic management of desires, perhaps a little reflection is needed.
The author is a writer, designer and psychoanalytic media researcher. He works as a creative director for annizola.com.
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