In today’s literacy of YouTube comments, ideas r abbrev’d 2 thr basest forms on the internet, on children’s TV, and in everyday colloquy. Words have become castrated: a sound byte at best, room noise at worst. When Christianity took a cultural back seat, choral music began a long transition to no more than an interesting background for epic movie scenes: Latin lost its meaning because there was no-one to sing to. Today, English is losing its meaning because there is no-one to speak to. After all, sociologists tell us that words don’t pass on ideas, they’re just part of the self-preserving herd instinct.

Fast forward X-hundred years, and you have the world of The Book of Eli. Denzel Washington is traversing a ravaged U.S. carrying the last King James Bible. If the loss of words did not cause the apocalypse in this film, then it definitely fueled the barbarism that followed. Eli wanders through grim, Road Warrior-ish scenes of desolation where little speech is required. Even when meeting bands of illiterate thieves, verbal exchanges are brief; it is kill or be killed. But Eli, while a man of few words, is never at a loss for them, quoting from his ancient book like an angel of destruction or a prophet of hope as occasion demands. His quest: obey the voice of God, which has told him to carry the Bible west. When Eli’s path brings him onto the turf of Carnegie, an enterprising businessman/pimp who already owns one town and would like to expand his operation, he is offered a price for his skills with a sword. But Eli’s martial abilities are not the most valuable thing he’s packing. Carnegie wants the Book, because if he has the right words, the masses will come for miles to bow to him.

Carnegie is a complex villain who deserves more development than the script allows him, though Gary Oldman’s performance, as usual, fills the character out nicely. “Men like you and me, as old as we are,” he says to the indefinitely aged Eli, “we’re the future.” Carnegie’s thugs are content to ride bikes, tear things up, relax with floozies and booze; eat, sleep, repeat. But the thuggery of Carnegie himself is more long-term. He employs these anti-societal buffoons precisely because he is the kind of man who most respects the power of society – and his aspirations to build and rule one require him to start from cultural scratch. In a world already civilized, Carnegie would have no opportunity to be a villain, but in the world of Eli, the slate has been wiped clean, and any vestiges of culture can be stamped out by the fear of Carnegie’s goons. The deserts that surround Carnegie’s town are far from barren; with the right tools, he can build whatever he likes there, and the tool he needs is not the recognizable bestseller presented to him by his triumphant, stupid scavengers, but the bestseller of all history.

The critics who scoff at the film by saying Carnegie could simply have founded his own religion, instead of spending the whole movie tracking down the Bible, clearly don’t understand the power of words, and haven’t looked very hard at history, either – perhaps the kind of illiterate barbarism portrayed in The Book of Eli is nearer than we think. (They are also unobservant critics; there are other things to scoff at in this production.) Lincoln complemented the little woman who made the great war, the last century killed thousands of counterrevolutionaries for possession of the wrong printed media, and the Lord spoke – did not imagine, did not sculpt – the world into being. We live in a world crackling with logos and when the Rortys of the world convince us otherwise, that world will be as empty as the deserts traveled by Eli – which are a symbol as much as a setting, making the concept for this film, if not the execution, uniquely smart in post-apocalyptic filmmaking.

Eli is Carnegie’s opposite. He too respects the power of words – immensely – and fiercely guards the book in his pack. “No-one touches it but me,” he says. Eli must not soften his ruthless exterior until he finds a place where the book can be kept safe, and, like a seed of literacy, be copied and spread.

Caught in the crossfire is Solara, whose beauty can go (usually) unviolated only because she is the daughter of Carnegie’s concubine. This character is a perfect middle ground – or battle ground – between the two titans of Carnegie and Eli: illiterate, she is one of the harried survivors Carnegie would like to tyrannize, but is also enough aware of the power of language that she falters in her first significant speaking scene – she is offering sexual services to Eli as part of Carnegie’s plan to coax him on board.

“It’s on the house,” she says, “You won’t have to pay…”

This syntactic sidestepping apparently works on most customers but Eli, as we know, is a man of words.

“Pay for what?” he demands, bringing the unspeakable into the open so Solara’s shame can be acknowledged and overcome.

Solara gets a positive lesson in spoken language when Eli, who allows her to spend a celibate night with him in order to escape Carnegie’s punishment, invites her to share his meal. Too young to remember supper as ritual and not merely a necessity, she grabs at the food like a wary animal, but Eli says they must sit. They must pray. Returning thanks to a Provider, and conversing with equals during such a quotidian practice as a meal, forces us to become cognizant of persons and ideas outside ourselves. Without logos there can be no mythos.

This scene is perhaps the center of the narrative. Eli represents a future where words create equality between male and female, slave and free. And, oddly enough given the Protestant bias of this film (“It happened before,” says Carnegie, speaking of the Bible’s power to rule illiterate masses, “and it will happen again”), this scene demonstrates the power of ritual – Solara, still only dimly comprehending Eli’s address to the creator, is eager to mimic it with her mother at breakfast; ritual is a way to take hold of an often-changing world and make it comprehensible.

The music, technological, grungy and frayed, fits the production well. The dull-colored costuming, harsh contrast, and desaturated lowlights create an image that looks as if it is color film of a black and white world. The poison-green clouds lend a sufficiently believable alien feel to the scene, but could even be beautiful to one who grew up there. The setting is clever, steeped in decay that is so buried in dust that a child of this waste, like Solara, could play among the rubble for years before realizing what it implies. Even the dialogue is worn out and debased, for the thugs who kill and rape glibly also have a vocabulary that’s not worth a damn – quite literally, such a long term concept as eternal destiny is so far from these ruffians’ minds that writer Gary Whitta, intentionally or no, places coarser curse words in their mouths.

The first criticism to be made is that, in spite of the epic trailer, the plot progression is more or less stuck in the rut of Carnegie’s town. Since the last Bible on the planet is portrayed as the salvation of that planet, I had hoped for a bigger supporting cast and a more road-weary array of locations: Lord of the King James. However, the “stranger comes to town” motif does invoke the Western in a not unsatisfying way, translating the feel of a frontier town to a world where the frontier between civilization and chaos extends no further than the town itself. For there is a degree of civilization in Carnegie’s realm; even rapists on motorcycles frown upon cannibalism – a sin for which Whitta dug up medical consequences so obscure that they have a monstrous and supernatural air.

At one point a conflicted Eli leaves a husband to bleed and a woman to be raped in the face of superior numbers. The script does not make clear whether this is the action of a good man who can only do so much, or whether it is in fact a lapse in Eli’s application of the good book. The movie suffers from this kind of ambiguity because, from the very first scene – where a slow motion hunting arrow clips through a falling leaf – its imagery stretches to be obligatorily badass. If there had been a few more minutes of development in place of some of Eli’s slow motion desert perambulation montages, we might have answers to a few more questions, one of which seems like it should have been central; while the barbarism of the degenerates is totally believable, what goes less developed is the effect of such barbarism upon a man determined to hold onto humanity. Perhaps exploring this more psychologically would have required insights more delicate than Whitta can muster – which, again, is why I love the idea of The Book of Eli more than its actual execution.

Leave the weaknesses to be picked apart by other reviewers. Much more fertile discussion can be fueled by its message, oh-so-timely in this age of “How is Babby Formed?” and of a news-viewing audience for whom words like “epidemic” go unquestioned. We live in a media culture where words are worn hollow by overuse and then cast aside in favor of the next greatest superlative. Eli is a movie in which the words of an articulate man, of the forgotten songwriters on Eli’s weary MP3 player, or, yes, of the Bible itself, have stable meanings that connect the present to past and future.

It is interesting and perhaps ironic that, while making the case against empty rhetoric, the marketing of Eli knows precisely how to maximize words’ hype factor; religious phrases sound super cool in this decade where Christianity has come out of the closet, and the movie’s “dELIiver us” posters and the trailer which badassifies Genesis 3 are no accident. Perhaps the filmmakers hope the power of words will attract an open audience, as Solara was both perplexed and transfixed by Eli’s prayer.

For all its flaws, The Book of Eli is incredibly timely as a film that dares to portray words, not guns, not even democracy, as the salvation of the world. Whether or not we acknowledge it each time we go online or turn on the tube, our culture is being overrun by anti-logianism, our national vocabulary crumbling like the weathered asphalt under Eli’s feet: and that’s, like, totally gay.

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