Another fucking story of redemption: "Get out of yourself and come live to our mythical Nirvana"

• Lionel Shriver "I am very sympathetic to men. I know they feel abandoned, helpless and degraded."
• Carmen Mola "We are not prudish writers. If we're writing about evil, we're going to reflect it at its extreme."

There is a dotted line that connects Fleabag with the White detective of Carmen Mola's books and that goes through the superhero movies that will arrive in September, by the rehabilitation of Will Smith, by the Manual of resistance of Pedro Sánchez and by Amadeo Llados, the coach who came out of alcoholism to create a new elite of muscular Spaniards, millionaires and customers of their services. "People just want stories of redemption," says a character in Lionel Shriver's novel The Movement of the Body Through Space (Anagram). And how to take the opposite if there is everywhere that scheme of the sinner who becomes virtuous after hitting bottom, of the fat man who, thanks to the force of will, runs marathons and of the juvenile delinquent who ends up Law and opposes a judge.

"Redemption is a Christian concept that has been used a lot in the fundamentalist communities of new Christians, because that being born again and becoming a different self, that way of salvation of oneself adapts well to what many people are looking for," Shriver explained to EL MUNDO in a recent interview. "It's the same message that the business world sells constantly. Buy this shirt that will make the world see you as a different person. A better person. Wear this perfume and you will be attractive to others. Get out of yourself and come live in our mythical Nirvana. Many people are selling that idea of redemption as entering a whole new self, free from the disappointments and tortures we all suffer. The fitness world offers it through physical transformation: suffer in the gym and you will earn your way to a new self that will be strong, beautiful, self-owning and capable of everything, instead of this petty, weak and sad creature that you are now."

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What does this obsession with redemption mean? "I think it has to do with the relationship we have today with the idea of evil. Or more than a relationship, with the attitude of denial we have towards the idea of evil, just as we deny death," says writer Gabriel Albiac. "The understanding of evil has become a central problem for our world," adds screenwriter Isabel Vázquez. "We have passed from pure evil to the longing to understand evil. In my craft, there are a lot of people who have Wicked as a reference. Wicked was a 2001 musical that took the witch from the fairy tales and invited her to explain why she was so. It's a change of perspective that we don't feel entirely confident about yet. Let's say redemption is a low-risk approach to confronting evil right now." And one more opinion to expand that idea: "Within the Catholic Church there is a more or less progressive vision that says that we are all saved from the death of Jesus," says biblical scholar Jaime Vázquez, author of The Dead Sea Papers. "That's the line that leads to saying, for example, that hell doesn't exist." So what do we do with evil? Turn it into entertainment, into a step of the dance we call redemption.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Andrew Scott, in 'Seabag'.

Vazquez explains that redemption is represented in the Bible in two central figures, Jesus Christ and Moses, but that it has a collective meaning. Moses redeems the Jews, frees them from Egypt, just as "Jesus frees men from the bondage of sin." They do not save themselves but their people. "That idea of individual salvation is, inany case, in Paul's letters to the Romans and the Corinthians and, perhaps also somewhat, to the Galatians." Vázquez's thesis is that this vision of redemption as a meritocratic individualist club has to do with the intellectual halt of Protestant theology, after decades of leadership. Impoverished in their thinking, many Protestant congregations have specialized in a literal, pragmatic interpretation of religion, an easy-to-sell view by which people are sinful or virtuous. "I don't think it's a very interesting conception. I prefer to think of the relationship between good and evil as a Platonic dialectic."

The model of redemption that fascinates us in 2023 has not so much to do with Jesus Christ as with Lord Jim, the character of Joseph Conrad: a graceful boy with every imaginable charm who, in negligence (or perhaps it was a stroke of bad luck), sinks a ship of which he was captain and becomes, at least before himself, in the cause and unfortunate survivor of the tragedy. From that moment on, Jim devotes his life to making merits that erase his dishonor. "It's just Jim never gets to feel like he's redeeming his guilt. And it ends very badly," explains Albiac, an attentive reader of Conrad. And that is the great difference with contemporary redemption, almost always directed towards the happy ending.

There are exceptions. "Do you know which current series has a very complex vision of redemption? Fleabag," says Isabel Vazquez. "Phoebe Waller-Bridge's character comes from a tragedy for which she is responsible, and when she breaks the fourth wall and addresses the viewers, us, she mocks the expectation we may have that she redeems herself. In fact, he keeps doing whatever he wants, repeats himself again and again and makes jokes about all the codes he breaks." Of course, as the series progresses, viewers begin to suspect that this rebellion against guilt is a way to reach a moral acceptance of itself by the longer way. "Fleabag becomes a redeemed sinner for a contemporary viewer who can't stand moralistic characters."

It does not seem easy to reach that path of redemption in which the pain for the evil done or self-inflicted is not resolved through some epic story a little easy. In which running a marathon validates 10 years of erratic life. We all intuit that there has to be a less self-righteous and more radical way of thinking about what embarrasses us, but how to look for it?

Because, in general, we all think that the evil we have done in life is due to carelessness or weakness rather than because we are horrible people, right? "That's partly true, but only partly true. And it's a very comfortable posture," Albiac replies. Evil must be considered courageously, because without evil there is not even freedom. Freedom is the ability to face evil, to choose against evil. Without evil there would be no ethical content."

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