In her article “The Problem of the Post-Secular,” Tracy Fessenden describes the post-secular as “an environment in which the categories of the religious and the secular no longer divide the world cleanly between them and signals the need for new ones” (156). She also interrogates this term, questioning whether stable categorization of secular and religious is even viable in a historical or ideological sense. Her definition is useful for underscoring a particular turn from explicitly religious or secular media frames and for questioning the stability of those frames in the first place.

I’d like to posit that contemporary science fiction films have taken a post-secular turn, using artificial intelligence to explore the divine. Now, by this, I do not neglect Freedman’s concerns about questions of categorization. I use post-secular here to mean that these films take up fluid, responsive approaches to religious questions that assume no definitive truths about faith or God, no discernable break between spiritual and material, but are nonetheless invested in religious questions. Films like Ex Machina, Her, After Yang, and the Creator frame their AI characters around questions of transcendence, sanctity, and divinity. These films use material posthuman bodies to explore questions cinema once directed towards God. In so doing, they also reject clear boundaries between the spiritual and the material.

Paul Schrader provides helpful language for analyzing this movement in his discussion of transcendental style, although he does historicize the style. These AI films borrow transcendental features like those in meditative cinema (the long take, the time-image, etc.) to confront their artificial characters through formal, narrative, and visual frames that are historically entangled with religion. To say that these films are post-secular is not to say that they break entirely from religion and the secular, but rather that they treat them as unstable and interrelated spaces. These films, I believe, do not simply ponder the divine, but rather they use the posthuman body and self to reconsider the presence of the divine in humankind. By building the technological self in a transcendental style, these films imagine a rediscovery of the sacred within one’s very nature, either rendered more clearly or more absently in a posthuman context. I’d like to briefly demonstrate my thoughts with just one of these films.

Kogonada’s After Yang uses memory to discover the titular Yang, an AI who dies, leaving his family in grief and instability. We discover Yang with protagonist Jake, who can look through Yang’s eyes. In one shot, we see Yang looking into a mirror and seeing himself. As we pore through his memories, we also see fragments, glimpses of nature. We see brief POV shots as Yang observes the natural world, like trees, the sky, and even his own family. His gentle gaze pairs with a light, crescendoing melody, imbuing these glimpses with an attitude of care, concern, and tender appreciation. Viewing through Yang’s eyes, we come to see his family and the wider organic world as sacred, their bonds and their experiences as beautiful and purposeful.

We also see the memory of Yang sharing in the ritual of drinking tea with Jake, both contemplating what the drink conveys to them. Jake asks Yang to try and taste the entire forest from which the tea leaves came. Yang replies, “I like watching the way you make tea. It’s very beautiful, the way the leaves bloom, and float, and fall. I wish I felt something deeper about tea. I wish I had a real memory of tea in China. Of a place. Of a time.” Yang questions his own capacity to embody those features we see so privileged in his memory, features like sensation, relationality, and experience.

After Yang is one contemporary AI film that asks questions of God by rebuilding man. The film suggests that the organic is imbued with a divine capacity for sensation, for appreciation, and for embodied memory. But the film also confronts the capacity of the posthuman to contain such qualities: even though Yang himself is failed by his own technological nature, it is through him that we (and Jake) are able to rediscover those qualities in the family. There are no clear divisions between the pure and the broken, the divine and the impure, the religious and the secular. And by stylizing these questions with transcendental frames, we confront a post-secular faith, a belief in the value of experience and the hope for restored personhood, a god within man, who is perhaps no more than an organic machine.