Movie Review: Revelation (Starring Jeff Fahey)

What does The Bible say about Jeff Fahey? What does the so-called ‘good book’ (personally I prefer Kafka’s The Trial) expulse in terms of Faheyian culture?

Well, first there’s all that darkness in the beginning, darkness except for the shinning beacons of blue that are Fahey’s half-open crystal visual spheres. In fact the illuminating acknowledged on that first page was simply Fahey opening his eyes fully, and, such was the power of the light being radiated, the entire world became rescued from the darkness (except for night time, hush hush now, well he’s gotta rest those eyes sometime). Later on in that multi-authored pantheon of a book, Fahey saves nature from the ravages of a pile of liquid by building a large submarine to house all the land animals, not two of each as the legend tells us, but all of them, including those crap ones that no one really cares about i.e. stoats.

As we all know, The Bible is an edited collection of hearsay and myth (excluding the Fahey sections of course), and this is only once again reinforced when we look at how Fahey was childishly snubbed from inclusion into its last portion, that being the Book of Revelation. In an attempt to rectify this travesty, Fahey, and his rich egalitarian disposition, has went and made a film by the name of Revelation (not Revelations, as we all learned from Half Man/Half Biscuit).

The film concerns a society where all nuclear weapons, plus a bunch of people, suddenly disappeared one day, and consequently a man became famous claiming to be the messiah, the disappearances acting as some sort of rapture. Most people believe this guy to indeed be what he asserts, all except for a few rogue traditional Christian types who view him as the devil, which may be true considering his henchmen and such are often shown blowing innocent civilians away. Fahey plays Thorold Stone, a cop non-believer (in either) whose wife and child disappeared in the assumed rapture. He becomes locked up in a conspiracy by the big powers to unleash a mysterious computer program onto the masses, and has to ally his forces with a group of the ‘Haters’ (those who believe your man to indeed be Lucifer).

Well that’s the story, but I know what you’re really dying to know, how bushy are Fahey’s eyebrows? I’ll tell you this, those eyebrows are a twitching wonder of modern cinema, and they're no different in this. They move around like Miles Davis running the voodoo down. It’s balletic arabesques superimposed into a forehead paradigm. Perhaps not quite at the eyebrow pinnacle of Sketch Artist 2: Hands That See, but nevertheless they still command attention and respect.

Fahey’s real talent lies in bringing in disparate conceptions and notions all under one unilateral banner, and fusing them to run synchronically within that single medium. Here we get the kind of thought provoking discourse on the utopian vision that resulted in A Brave New World and 1984 each being regarded as high watermarks in literature. Indeed Fahey goes beyond each. He is able to maintain the treatise nature of Huxley’s ode to joy, and also the more balanced story basis of Orwell’s terrifying disquisition. Is mindless acceptance of the establishment, but while being happy, the only way to a true utopia? Is it total freedoms in speech and act? Who should have power to decide? Is institutional hegemony a scar on humankind? Fahey answers none of these fundamental questions in such an overt manner as to make those answers obscured by his own humanistic perfection. He realises that for true understanding and handling it is no good to hand the correct answers to the masses; it is only up to him to guide and mentor us in the right direction, a direction where the only absolute is that of Fahey.

The highlight of the picture is a scene where an ignorant peon strapped to the boot of Fahey’s good side challenges Fahey’s own atheistic sensibilities. It is a powerful plot point, just witness as our man elucidates on the absurdities of faith, and how he, through that glimmer in his eyes, develops a postulation of how the concept of god is but a humanly constructed idea taken, via great historical movements and many many years, to extreme lengths of belief to become the ultimate myth all in the name of a fear and rejection of mortality.

His eyebrows were alive with fire and the spirit of Feuerbach as he shouted repeatedly at the mystical deity to knock over his cup. Of course no reply was forthcoming, that is until Fahey himself knocked it over on his way past it. Now if this isn’t an overt reference to the divinity of Fahey, then I don’t know what is. However the fixity of Fahey’s integrity and talent should be evidence enough.

Revelation then. The big question for the plot is whether this self-labelled messiah is the god incarnate, is he? Or is he the dark lord Beelzebub? Or perhaps an extraterrestrial alien from a far off galaxy? Or is he just a twat?

If you really want to know the answer I suggest watch this flick. But even if you don’t want to know the query rejoinder, and I wouldn’t blame you, I would still suggest you capture this cinematic product in your mind right now, the presence of one Jeff Fahey, and his sweet omniscience, are firm reasons to join an ever increasing audience of those who will one day help to set the sun in the name of Jeff Fahey.