The Violence of Redemption

Tonight I went to see Slumdog Millionaire with my roommates and a few friends. (It's actually the first movie I've seen in the theater all year, but that's a separate topic. Also, while I'm in these parentheses, I should mention that I'm going to give away some details about the ending, so if you haven't seen it yet, consider yourself warned.) After the movie we walked from Embarcadero to Union Square to get some late-night Thai food. On the way, Judy, who has a low tolerance for ambiguity and whom I love for the dogged curiosity inspired by this trait, was asking a lot of questions. One of them was, "Why does Salim fill the tub with money and lie down in it when they come after him at the end?" One person speculated that it had something to do with the luxury of it, of reveling in one last moment of wealth to spite all the destitution he had lived through. Another person posited that his death in that bath was a very literal representation of how bloodstained the money was. My take is a little different:

The money in which Salim meets his death is in some ways the very money that his brother Jamal was winning at that same moment. If Jamal had not been on the game-show, if he had not made it to the final question, he would not have used his last lifeline, and the bad guys would not have heard Latika's voice on the line or realized Salim's betrayal. Jamal's winnings are the undoing of his brother. Jamal's moment of redemption is causally linked to his brother's death -- they are in some ways the same moment.

I wrote a paper in college on the pairing of violence and redemption in Flannery O'Connor's stories. This aspect of her work shocked me at first, but now I see that it can be no other way, for O'Connor or for the world at large. Redemption, from the very beginning (and by that I mean going all the way back to Genesis) has always been a violent proposition. It is violent because it is transformational, and any force that creative carries destructive power as well. I could launch into examples here, but really my point is that the violence, the cost, is what gives the redemption its efficacy. The slumdog's triumph requires some payment, some failure, else it is meaningless.

This may seem grim to some, but I find odd comfort and hope in it. I find it hopeful because redemption without cost would seem too cheap; violence seals redemption's value and is evidence of its permanence -- both the judgment and the grace are equally irreversible. And then, of course, there is the reverse implication of what I'm proposing: if every redemptive act is a violent one, then all violence is potentially redeemable.