Although it is never recognized as such, the 1980 film Resurrection is a superhero story.
The serious tone of the film and the naturalism of the actors disguise the story’s underlying structure, which is at least as old as superhero comic books.
The heroine, Edna Mae Macaulay (Ellen Burstyn), suffers a tragic origin through which she gains super powers and rescues innocent people from dire fates. She must oppose evil forces drawn to kill her before her final triumph and fade-out.
The working-class protagonist scrimps to buy her beloved husband a new sports car, but on their first drive he swerves to avoid a boy on a skateboard, sending the car into a crash that kills both of them.
Edna Mae sees a powerful white light and the welcoming, beckoning figures of dead friends and family — then awakens on the operating table. Although she has miraculously survived, she is paralyzed from the waist down, and her estranged father arrives to carry her back to the family farm. On the way, they encounter a strange, funny, sage-like old man (Richard Farnsworth) who operates a lonely “last chance” gas station.
Little by little, back in her Kansas hometown, the incredulous Edna Mae discovers she somehow has the power to heal people. Given sufficient psychic effort, she can heal seemingly anyone, with any ailment, including herself. Subjected to a battery of scientific tests, she discovers she can bend a laser beam with her mind.
Puzzled, uncertain but essentially courageous and compassionate, Edna Mae brings joy and relief to the suffering. Meanwhile, the forces of religious fanaticism have their witch-burning instincts aroused…
“(T)his is a movie that really seems to have brought out the best in everyone who worked on it,” observed New York Times critic Janet Maslin. “Chief among them is Miss Burstyn, who gives the kind of performance that makes all the odd events in the screenplay seem perfectly plausible, perfectly sane. Her presence is radiant, and so steadying it lets the movie exert a tremendous emotional pull.”
Burstyn, who suggested the story to the producers, was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her performance. She’d originally been approached about the idea of playing Jesus as a woman.
“I really liked the idea of the script, but I didn’t like the script itself,” Burstyn recalled in an interview with The Guardian. “It was about this school teacher who went to Jerusalem and started bleeding from the palms. It just didn’t make an awful lot of sense to me.
“So I suggested that they did a script about a woman who was a very ordinary housewife in contemporary society who develops some of the abilities that Jesus had — like healing and so forth. At the time, I was doing a lot of reading about the re-emergence of the goddess and I liked the idea of reuniting sexuality and religion — a religious figure who was also a sensual being. I sketched out a rough story for them.”
The film remains moving, and an example of how deeply embedded the superhero story is in American culture. We can be watching it even when we don’t realize we are.
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