Review

Culture

Film & TV

1 February 2024

6 min read

When Jesus walked in Leicester Square

As the The Chosen’s latest series premieres, Natalie Garrett analyses the TV show’s appeal.

Natalie Garrett

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

A group of actors walk together at a film premiere

Jonathan Roumie, centre, with the cast of The Chosen.

So, I’ve met Jesus twice before. Over 20 years ago, I joined the cast of The Life of Christ at Wintershall, the epic outdoor drama experience that takes you through the story of Jesus’ life (and it’s still going strong). As well as being Crowd Person 176, with glorified tea towel on head, I was cast as the bride at the wedding at Cana. Apart from Jesus, the rest of the cast were local, normal people (as in not professional actors) and I rather shyly attended the first rehearsal knowing no-one. I had been sitting on my own for a bit when Jesus walked in and caught my eye. He walked straight over to me and shook my hand, “You must be Natalie,” he said. For just a moment, I forgot that he was an actor and I thought, “You really are Jesus, you know me by name!” But then I remembered that I was the only new addition to the cast, and he was just a really nice guy welcoming me to the company.

Some eight or so years later, I was involved with the Oxford Passion, a Passion play written for and produced by Creation Theatre company in Oxford. I helped write the script and played the role of Mary Magdalene. The actor, Tom Peters, who played Jesus in that production was incredible. As an actor and as a Christian, it was an extraordinary experience, sharing some powerful scenes with Jesus. Each night for several weeks, I had to watch my beloved Christ being crucified all over again. I wept deeply, every night.

Then fast forward to Monday 22 January 2024, and I’m at the cinema UK cinema Premiere of season four of The Chosen in London’s Leicester Square and I see Jesus walk the red carpet. Surreal.

So, there I was, in all my finery, lurking about, hoping to get a selfie with Jesus.

In case you haven’t come across The Chosen, it’s a ground-breaking historical drama series. Created, directed, and co-written by filmmaker Dallas Jenkins, it is the first multi-season series about the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Primarily set in Judaea and Galilee in the first century, the series centres on Jesus and the different people who met and followed or otherwise interacted with him. The emphasis is on portraying the “authentic Jesus” through the point of view of the people who spent time with him, asking the question, what did it really look like to be a follower of Jesus? It has quickly become a highly successful crowdfunding project, with episodes viewed 700 million times and a big vision to reach a billion viewers by the end of season seven.

Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus in The Chosen, says,

“Our fanbase was entirely Christian at first, but because of its popularity the show has attracted people from all faiths and no faith to the character of Jesus. We’re trying to really portray his message of love and tender mercy.”

To raise awareness for the show, which can be streamed on Netflix and Amazon Prime (or for free on The Chosen app), season four was launched with a cinema release in Leicester Square. So, there I was, in all my finery, lurking about, hoping to get a selfie with Jesus. And I had to pinch myself. When did Jesus become a world-wide celebrity with people whooping and whistling and jostling for his attention? Well, it happened when he rode a donkey into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday, but not so much in the last 2,000 years, especially not in recent years in the West.

What have the creators of The Chosen got so right that millions of people tune in to binge watch the narrative of the gospel story?

First up, Jesus laughs. A lot. He smiles and he hugs people. He is intensely personable and bloke next door-y (he’s not very good at ball games for one thing). But he also, when necessary, exerts huge personal authority. There is a confident, courageous, generous, humility to him that is hugely attractive. When the going gets tough, you think, he’d be good to have around. But also, he’s great company around the dinner table, telling stories and listening, too.

Because of the way the story is told, through the eyes of those who knew Jesus, we get drawn into the personal dramas of the Twelve Disciples as well as a wider group, including several women. It even includes some Romans, who are clearly the “bad guys” but drawn equally plausibly as the other more sympathetic characters. In the lives of these people, we find the domestic reality of the human experience – working hard to put food on the table, relating to family members, suffering illness and even miscarriage. And then we see the difference that it makes to have the Son of God around. And that’s the hook, that’s what means the viewer becomes deeply invested in the show because it turns out the people in the Bible aren’t super spiritual giants, they are people just like you and me. They struggle with the day-to-day realities of life, they’re confused, and they mess up. And then they meet Jesus.

It’s a huge risk creating a show when everyone knows how it ends. As we watch, even the early seasons, we know where the narrative arc is going. And yet, somehow, we still want to find out what happens. Because: we are invested in the stories of the Roman Centurion who looks as if he might come over to the light side; we’re keen to find out how Simon Peter and his wife get over their marital difficulties; we’re cheering for the success of the olive oil business set up by Zebedee (that’s James and John’s Dad) along with the help of some shrewd businesswomen who are also numbered amongst The Chosen.

When I see a dramatized version of any book I’ve read, I usually get quite angry – “that’s not what he/she looks like! That’s not how they talk!” And dramatizing part of the bestselling book of all time, the four Gospels of the Bible, is quite a risky choice for a TV programme. But I recognise the Jesus in The Chosen as the Jesus I know and love. And there is no higher accolade I can give than that.

The extraordinary success of the show is that millions of people have watched it and been drawn in. Millions of people have invested not just their time and viewing commitment, but also their own money. The show is entirely crowdfunded, and the show’s makers are deeply committed to building community around what they’re doing. Fans are invited to participate in the crowd scenes (being the 5,000 who get fed, for example) and there is almost as much behind-the-scenes content produced as the show itself. There’s a buzz around what they’re doing and it’s spreading way beyond the homes of a Christian fanbase.

When Jonathan Roumie arrived for the season four premiere in Leicester Square, it was like a rock star had stepped out of the car, such was the reach and excitement around his portrayal of Jesus in The Chosen. For hundreds of years, Christian artists have used the creative arts at their disposal – stained glass windows, music, fine art – to try to convey the authentic Jesus to the world. In our time, TV programmes are the artform of greatest impact and the digital distribution now available to the makers of The Chosen affords unprecedented access to their material around the world, as they aim to dub it into 600 languages ensuring 95 per cent of people worldwide can watch it spoken in their native language.

Is it too soon to suggest that The Chosen may be the Sistine Chapel of our age? It’s certainly too early to try guess the impact that this cultural phenomenon will have on the world’s faith journey. But if the reaction on the red carpet at Leicester Square last Monday night is anything to go by, Jesus seems to be making a comeback.

Episodes 1&2 of season four of The Chosen are showing in UK cinemas from Thursday 1 February 2024 - with other episodes being released later in the month. This is the first time ever that a full season of a streaming TV show will be released exclusively in cinemas.

Article

Awe and wonder

Culture

Digital

Music

22 January 2025

5 min read

The rave: a last bastion of hope?

Was the Brat summer the last chance for rave culture?

Isaiah Morris

Isaiah is a visual artist and writer.

The anniversary party.

Rhythm Section.

The Rave is a site for communal epiphany, a burst of divine revelation. Illegal raves and alternative club culture seeps into the popular imagination, informing it in ways unbeknownst to most. But it wasn’t until last Summer’s Brat (Charli XCX) landed on the global charts that people began questioning the importance of Rave and Club culture again. Is our Brat the herald of a new golden Rave dawn? I think not.

However, undergirding the Rave is something far more profound, perhaps even religious. Raving suggests that the world might be otherwise, and it does this through a temporary release from this world’s demands. What might this say about our cultural moment?

Coordinating the Rave’s aesthetic is the dance between the DJ and ravers, accentuated by the practicalities of a decent sound system, lights, and a bit of fog. Inaugurating Rave’s epiphany, though, are the diverse motions of bodies to a singular beat. Techno reduces digital sounds to their basics and then pushes that to its boundary. Circumventing the rigidity of technology’s logic are the gestures of human spontaneity on the dance floor. The rave asserts that technology doesn’t have the last say over human life.

At the Rave, those traditionally on the margins of society become the center: a temporal expression of eternal longing, momentarily experienced as a shared catharsis and liberation. The dance floor is a bulwark against an increasingly de-ritualised and dehumanising society. It is a testament to the body being a medium for hope. Whether an intoxicated body or, in a growing trend, a sober one, it is the human fleshyness which takes priority. Both options respond to how one might cope with and confront the technological barrage.

Techno began as a language for African American youth, finding a future amidst the industrial ruins of Detroit. In our late modern moment, Rave culture acclimatises the body to the persistent sound of our technological age. It subverts the dehumanising tendencies of digital culture: mass impersonal media and abstracted global conversations. Instead, a momentary online connection is used to gather offline. When you’re there, you’re not concerned about telling the world. It is an attention to the present moment.

The Rave harbours a liminal threshold between appreciation for this life and the longing for some next one.

Worryingly, some have warned that clubs will dwindle to their knees this decade, squeezed out by neighbouring property developers or no longer economically viable amidst the cost-of-living crisis. The only thing being pushed out, however, is the possible resistance to a particularly greedy homogenisation of culture. In dislocating alternative discourses of ritual, we simultaneously assert that human bodies only have one particular “rhythm”: the rhythm of ceaseless economic expansion.

The Rave resists an uncomplicated acceptance of technology’s gift. Its goods are re-scaled to an embodied celebration of life.

In Raving (2023), McKenzie Wark expands upon this, saying, ‘Techno, not as genre but as technique, lets digital machines speak. Not unlike the way jazz lets analog instruments speak… Sounds at the limit of what the machine or the instrument can do to get free. Blackness in sound as the technique of making the thing free to sound off as itself and to take the human with it, into movement, into feeling, into sensation.’ Rave’s sound quite literally brings technology’s language to the end of itself.

For some, raving is what holds them to life. For others, it’s a momentary release from it. Whilst our bodies cannot exceed techno’s interchange with technology, we do learn how to harness the potential humanness within it. The Rave harbours a liminal threshold between appreciation for this life and the longing for some next one. In twisting its technological medium into a more human configuration, rave culture participates in hope.

Back in 1965, theologian Jürgen Moltmann wrote, ‘Hope’s statements of promise, however, must stand in contradiction to the reality which can at present be experienced. They do not result from experiences, but are the condition for the possibility of new experience… They do not seek to bear the train of reality, but to carry the torch before it. In so doing they give reality a historic character.’ While Moltmann is writing concerning Christianity and the crucified Christ, his framework for thinking about hope is helpful. Hope never occurs outside of history. The Rave embraces this historical moment and attempts to inhabit it as a contradiction.

Recently, I went to Rhythm Section International’s tenth-anniversary party at EartH, Hackney. Rhythm Section was founded as a music collective and is still curated by Peckham’s own Bradley Zero (BZ). Known globally, its parties and label imprint span techno, house, jazz, funk, spoken word, and RnB.

I first danced to BZ’s DJing at a record shop in 2018 while still living in Melbourne. The beauty of this particular community is that it provides a bridge for what Wark identifies: just as jazz brings analogue instruments to their limits, techno does the same for digital. As experienced recently at EartH in Hackney, Rhythm Section tries to push digital and analogue sounds to their threshold across the night. In contrast to the pure techno rave, BZ’s selection causes a polyphonic liberation. Joy is found through the instruments slapped just as much as in the DJ faders pushed.

This joy was evident in the diversity of ages and cultures present. “Mature heads” danced alongside students; some swayed, while others vogued. Without spaces such as these, where else can we celebrate the diversity of human responses to the same sound?

My concern with club culture’s demise is that those places of contradiction are swallowed up by a faux vision of “smoothness”. We replace spaces of alternative being with sameness. A diversity of aesthetics is converted into another apartment complex. We make room for the novelty of Brat but not the culture she draws upon.

Rave culture attempts to redefine the dominant technological language of our day, making the body its lens and not the periphery. By privileging the human body, Rave’s hope acknowledges profound discontent with the world but understands that all “escape” is temporary. This re-calibration enacted in Rave’s ritual de-escalates the supposed importance of technology’s ceaseless expansion. Thus, it exposes a more profound longing, one where it will be an eternal dance that deepens the love of life by going ever deeper into the particularities of individual bodies and their movements.

Because it offers a form of explicit hope, the Rave is a ritualised space filled with the belief that there can be “something more”. And this more-ness is, ultimately, encountered in the face of those we dance with; whether in a fleeting glance to ask, “Are you alright?” or the mutual smile that says, “I love this song”.

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