Gnosticism in Hollywood: From European Academia to American Popular Culture

The thesis investigates the intellectual history of the concept of
Gnosticism in twentieth-century Euro-American philosophy, religion, and
popular culture. It proposes three major arguments, each building upon the
preceding one. First, through a critical approach to historiography,
chapters one to four uphold that thinkers such as Hans Jonas, Carl G. Jung,
Eric Voegelin, and American writers indebted to their work, utilized
Gnosticism as a diagnostic category to articulate the crisis of Western
modernity and to devise new intellectual projects to overcome it. Second,
chapter five employs intertextuality and cognitive theories to bypass
essentialization and ahistoricization, two key problems that rendered the
results of the examined authors’ projects untenable in light of subsequent
developments in Gnostic studies; it concludes that Gnosticism and modernity
debates can be effectively advanced within the framework of reception
history. Third, adopting the terminology of neoformalism, chapters six to
eleven show that seven selected millennial Hollywood “mind-game films”
contributed to the debates by imaginatively diagnosing the crisis of
Western culture and proposing the lens of Gnosticism to overcome it.