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The Devil as Doppelganger: Instinctual Faith and the Exhausted Rant of Evil in LAST DAYS IN THE DESERT (US 2015)
Yergensen, Brent (2023) , S. 157-171
LAST DAYS IN THE DESERT (Rodrigo García, US 2015) portrays the devil as Jesus’s doppelganger, demonstrating the rivalry between good and evil as the two compete over the efficacy of Jesus’s faith. With Jesus assessing himself as he responds to the devil, the film offers a self-reflexive evaluation of faith as it is challenged by skepticism. By analyzing the film using the idea of an evolutionary faith instinct, the article presents Jesus’s trust in God as empowerment that allows him to endure elements of nature and find signs of divinity. The devil’s eventual exhausted impatience and his loss of his wager with Jesus bolster the applicability of a faith instinct. Ultimately, the film is an opportunity for this rendition of Jesus to be articulated in terms of evolutionary discourse.