Textual Poaching - Living Scriptures Re-Imagined

I once read a quote online that really struck me: "The Book of Mormon is the greatest fan-fiction of all time." While I don't actually believe that statement, the idea still impacted me, in that the Bible has inspired so many variations of religious belief, myth, translation, etc. In our reading about textual poaching, Jenkins stated that "in order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship of the whole." By that definition, bible verses and books and stories have been interpreted and repeated so many times and ways as to make the Bible a truly immortal text, no pun intended.

One depiction those bible stories is the LDS Living Scripture animated series, which is personally relevant to me. I grew up watching episodes of Living Scriptures every Sunday after church. This LDS animated approach to the Bible became deeply influential to me, informing my early interpretations of the Bible not only in understanding, but emotionally, aesthetically, nostalgically. I watched them so many times that I can no longer even tell if they are good. As I got older, however, my tastes evolved. I sought artful and authentic representations of Biblical times, so much so that I felt disconnected with watered down church media. I found myself sometimes listening to the soundtrack from The Passion of the Christ, wishing for a similar interpretation from Mormonism.

Because of my connection with these each of these two retellings of the same story, I combined them for my Textual Poaching Project. The visual representation is from my childhood, and the musical is more recent. This re-scoring idea is not uncommon; I recently saw a Textual Poaching of The Shining, where someone created a fake trailer for the movie as if it was a family-friendly comedy just by changing the music. But I didn't re-score the Living Scriptures to be satirical, at least not entirely. I wanted to create a representative shadow of something I might actually enjoy.

Because the segment from the living scriptures I picked is actually a sing-along music segment, the audience is not missing out on any dialogue by hearing a different score, and is actually better able to feel the juxtaposition of the two art pieces. It is interesting for me to watch what the Living Scriptures would feel like with a Middle-Eastern influenced score and more dark and serious tone. To emphasize that feeling, I actually edited the color tones of the video to be a bit darker and desaturated.

Interestingly, I noticed that The Passion's score changes the emotional experience of the video, but at least in my case, not the religiosity. The same devotion is coming from two different places emotionally. By combining two different shades of the same color, and one that has been painted and repainted for generations, my hope is to imagine something that could actually become it's own interpretation.