Modern Transcendence in Movies: Unearthing Lost Beauty in La Chimera – Christ and Pop Culture

The last two entries in this series on the search for transcendence in modern movies catapulted us into the far reaches of space with Interstellar and sent us into the bizarre, indescribable zone that fascinates the plot of Annihilation. Not every search has to wander to such far flung and interdimensional spaces, however. The quest for meaning may also turn upon a sense that something is missing, something we once had close at hand. Instead of outer worlds, Alice Rohrwacher’s enchanting La Chimera turns toward the underworld of our lost history, proposing that the meaning we long for is buried among the ancient tombs, waiting to be rediscovered. 

La Chimera is set in 1980s Italy and focuses on Arthur (Josh O’Connor) as he’s released from prison. The exact nature of his felony is unclear, but it probably has something to do with his chosen profession. “Archaeologist” would be too generous a term to describe Arthur’s field work. “Graverobber” is far more accurate, and “smuggler” could likely be noted on his resume, as well. Tombaroli is the precise term thrown around by the compatriots he reconnects with once he’s free.

Arthur is combing through the Italian landscape looking for that which has been lost—a search that bears both cultural and personal significance. The unearthed tombs dotted across the countryside house Etruscan treasures: busts and statues and relics of an ancient civilization. Much of the Etruscan culture has been lost throughout the past millennia, giving these artifacts added value due to their scarcity and the mystery surrounding them. Arthur’s methods for finding these treasures are almost as rare and mysterious. When his troupe finds a likely place for a hidden tomb, he picks up a tree branch to use as a dowsing rod, slowly combing the ground until he grows faint. They dig where he falls, take what treasures they can, and pawn them to Spartaco, an art dealer who hosts illicit auctions for rich history fanatics unburdened by the cares of conscience.

But there’s more in this endeavor for Arthur than just wealth: interwoven with his earthen excavations is a pained search for his lost love, Beniamina. Rohrwacher plays lightly and obliquely with the backstory, but it seems probable that Beniamina has died. The rest of Arthur’s gang seems convinced, as do all of Beniamina’s sisters. The only other person with a persistent hope that Beniamina will return is her mother, Flora (Isabella Rossellini), who becomes Arthur’s kindred spirit. So despite the unearthing of tombs, Arthur is far closer to Orpheus than to Indiana Jones: he wanders this world without his love as a man caught between life and death, and he ventures into the underworld praying for an impossible reunion. O’Connor subsumes his charm beneath Arthur’s wounded solipsism, casting a quiet, riveting spell on the movie that’s amplified by the occasionally disorienting camera work arranged by cinematographer Hélène Louvart. (An unintentional connection to an earlier film in this series that I can’t shake: Like The Green Knight, the reality of La Chimera is punctuated by slow tilts that invert the world, literally turning it upside down.)

Compared alongside the other movies we’ve considered as part of this series, Rohrwacher’s film traces a distinct path in the contemporary search for meaning. The first two—David Lowery’s Mother Mary and The Green Knight—foregrounded characters who were surprised and unsettled by powers that contradicted the modern, disenchanted world. These characters don’t expect transcendence, and they’re shocked when it knocks on their door. The next two movies in the series—Interstellar and Annihilation—symbolized how scientific reasoning, when it becomes a totalizing mindset, limits our receptiveness to any transcendence that is lurking out there. Here, transcendence is something undiscovered and unimaginable. La Chimera marks the first time in this series where transcendence is something that has been lost. It does not need discovery; it needs rediscovery.

Arthur’s Orphic journey points in a distinct direction for understanding modern consciousness. One of the axes that we’ve seen Charles Taylor trace in A Secular Age is the mindset dominated by scientific reasoning, a mindset that gains much in the way of understanding at the risk of a narrow materialism. In contrast with this path, Taylor also describes what he terms as the Romantic (and post-Romantic) path. This is not only a response to a world losing its sense of enchantment, but also a countermovement opposed to the scientific axis. The Romantic axis is dissatisfied with the way that “the modern identity and outlook flattens the world, leaves no place for the spiritual, the higher, for mystery.”¹ The Romantic voice takes umbrage especially with the instrumentalizing nature of scientific rationality. “The protest here is that the rational, disengaged agent [of the scientific outlook] is sacrificing something essential in realizing his ideals. What is sacrificed is… frequently identified with our feelings, our bodily existence.”²

Maybe what we’re seeking can’t be neatly compartmentalized in materialistic knowledge. Maybe that framework for knowledge fails to account for essential aspects of our human experience. Maybe there is a higher mystery, a spirituality understood in the broadest sense. Taylor clarifies that arriving at this point doesn’t necessarily “send us back to religious belief. There is another direction. The idea is: mystery, the depth, the profoundly moving, can be, for all we know, entirely anthropological.”³ So maybe that force isn’t to be sought out there—in the heavens or in the far reaches of the cosmos—but within the realm of human experience. We don’t need to venture out; we need to venture inward, so that we can locate and express the numinous. This is the Romantic posture that Taylor outlines.

The Romantic search for meaning is both alluring and difficult: it does not offer the systematized rigor of scientific reason, nor does it orient its compass by a fixed divinity as religions do. Orpheus is an apt figure for this impulse: he is by nature a wanderer trying to reclaim something that he cannot see, hoping that it will be beside him when he finally turns around but fearful that it will vanish into the air. If the astronauts, physicists, and biologists of our previous films represent the rational axis, Arthur’s a dyed-in-the-wool Romantic. As one scholar notes when discussing Rohrwacher’s film, “One meaning of the word chimera is an illusion or fabrication of the mind, an unrealizable dream.”⁴ To most everyone in La Chimera, Arthur’s wasting away under an illusive spell, but he continues to hope against hope to recover what was lost.

When materialist, instrumental reason evacuated the world of higher purpose, “the search was to recover a sense of the numinous in the human depths.”⁵ Specifically, Taylor observes that the Romantics and their descendants turned to aesthetic sources for (re)discovering lost meaning. “In the Romantic period, artistic creation comes to be the highest domain of human activity”⁶ and beauty is identified “as the key to restoring our lost unity.”⁷ This last phrase distills the heart of our sad grave robber. With the loss of Beniamina, Arthur has lost his shining light of beauty that oriented him. It’s a loss that he cannot cope with, and he loses his place in the world as a result. Arthur stumbles through his days, impervious to the cares of others, numb to any urgency. Despite living on, he ambles as though he belongs in the tombs himself.

The representation of beauty is actually doubled in the film. Beniamina’s beauty is glimpsed only in Arthur’s dreams, so the unearthed Etruscan treasures become the tangible access to such transcendence. For the citizens of a modern, disenchanted world, the artistry of these artifacts offers access to rediscovered purpose. But science is not the only instrumentalizing force that disrupts this unity—economics is quite adept, as well. Rohrwacher, who also penned the script, is explicit about this undercurrent in her film, diagnosing a connection between materialism and commodification. “This kind of materialism becomes deeply rooted” until everyone is “a product of the society that tells its children there is nothing that’s invisible anymore, everything is visible, and you can buy and sell anything and everything.”⁸ Arthur is longing for a time when “objects were still full of an invisible mystery,”⁹ but consumerism has effectively buried that world. The world that remains aboveground is alienating to Arthur—not only because it is without the love of Beniamina, but also because the ubiquity of consumerism has turned everything, even these pristine, ancient objects of beauty, into a means of profit.

This tension comes to a boiling point when Arthur and his crew uncover an unblemished statue head in one of the tombs. The artifact is stunning, perhaps the most exquisite example they’ve ever uncovered. Arthur is enamored with it; meanwhile, his compatriots are enamored by the promise of a major payday. They crash one of Spartaco’s auctions taking place at sea, using the discovery as leverage to earn a bigger cut. But as the financial negotiations turn into a literal growling match, Arthur separates himself from the group and gazes into the face of the statue. On an impulse, he heaves the bust over the side of the boat, watching as it sinks into the depths. This is a crucial moment for Rohrwacher: “Arthur takes away that bone from the world of commerce, from the world of the living, and he throws it in the water.”¹⁰ He removes the artifact from the whole world, this whole system that objectifies, reduces, and monetizes everything in sight, and he returns it back beneath the surface of the living, where it can exist for its own sake once more.

This simultaneously enacts a Romantic fulfillment and an Orphic turn. Arthur refutes the calculus of consumerism, latching onto the power and mystery of an ancient beauty. But to insist on this beauty means to make amends with the underworld, and this action also seals his ultimate fate. This Orpheus returns his lost love to the grave, and he seeks a place there with her.

La Chimera is a hypnotic portrait of a Romantic soul searching for transcendence in a world evaporated of it. Taylor notes that, while much of modern culture is structured by a materialistic calculus, the Romantic impulse is far from dead. We are perhaps seeing it to an even greater degree now than when A Secular Age was first published. As more and more of our lives become tracked, gamified, and reconfigured into data, a hunger is growing for a meaning that lies beyond numbers. We, as a culture, are more prone to question the goodness of those instrumentalizing forces that structure our society (even as they become more ubiquitous). And movies provide an eminent means of voicing these questions, for proclaiming a need for transcendence. As Taylor observes, this is not yet a return to religion, but it is a path along which modern seekers might just stumble across the meaning at the heart of Christianity. Arthur’s journey through Etruscan tombs, after all, makes us wonder if the beauty we thought we lost might just be rediscovered.

1. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007), 356. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 609. ↩︎
3. Ibid., 356. ↩︎
4. Emma Wilson, “Alice Rohrwacher’s Cinema of Poetry,” Film Quarterly 77, no. 4 (2024): 19–28. ↩︎
5. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007), 672. ↩︎
6. Ibid., 358. ↩︎
7. Ibid., 359. ↩︎
8. Marya E. Gates, “Female Filmmakers in Focus: Alice Rohrwacher on La Chimera,” Roger Ebert, April 2, 2024 ↩︎
9. Ibid. ↩︎
10. Ibid. ↩︎