Crucial Cross

The son of God always knows how to make an entrance.

"That cross is, as you say, an eternal collision; so am I. That is a struggle in stone. Every form of life is a struggle in flesh. The shape of the cross is irrational, just as the shape of the human animal is irrational."

— Father Michael, The Ball and the Cross

When a cross or crucifix is used to convey goodness or hope (especially that of a heroic character) in the face of suffering and evil.

In this trope, the cross is used in reference to the belief that Jesus came Back from the Dead soon after his crucifixion despite how brutal and humiliating it was. His death is seen as a willing sacrifice to atone for the sins of humanity, allowing them to enter into Life Everlasting, while demonstrating that even the most powerful weapons of evil cannot stop good in the long run.

Naturally, the Cross is most frequently used in religious Art, so the mediums most popular for religious purposes (think paintings, sculptures, and architecture) have far more examples of it than more secular mediums like Western Animation, Video Games, and Webcomics. You may have noticed those secular mediums are very modern, which is important because a secular media has drastically decreased the usage of the Crucial Cross. Still, visual mediums like Film can still get good mileage out of the image of the cross, while works that are either entirely in print or entirely in audio have to work a little more to incorporate the Cross without appearing unsubtle.

This is a sub-trope of Rule of Symbolism. Speaking of sub-tropes, the most popular sub-trope of Crucial Cross is the Crucified Hero Shot, where the image of the Cross is made with the arms and body of a heroic character as they die, showing their death was selfless and meaningful by visually paralleling it to the death of Jesus.

Contrast this trope with Creepy Crosses, where the Cross is used in a non-Christian context to convey a sense of the occult and supernatural. Creepy Crosses are mainly used in Eastern (especially Japanese) works where the Cross's significance is not as ingrained in the public consciousness as it is in the West. See also Holy Burns Evil, where cross are often used to combat said evil.

And lastly, this is not referring to the Cross's use as a generic symbol of Christianity. Only examples that connect the Cross with the reality of suffering and hope in spite of that are examples of this trope.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In the final episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig, Motoko and Kuze find themselves trapped under some rubble after a missile barrage. Desperate to dig her out by any means, Batou grabs a cross-shaped I-beam to start bashing away at the concrete and lift it apart, shouting her name into the sky in despair.

Art

• Played With in The Crucifixion of Saint Peter by Michelangelo Buonarroti, where St. Peter does maintain his composure and faith in Christ even as the Romans begin his execution on the cross. However, Peter's cross is flipped upside-down to show that Peter, Humble Hero that he is, does not equate his sacrifice with that of Jesus.
• Salvador Dalí's Corpus Hypercubus portrays Jesus exploding off a four-dimensional cubic cross. The painting portrays Jesus' suffering as those in Hiroshima did by Dali's nuclear mystic imagery while showing the victory of Christ's divinity by showing Christ's body without any wounds or blood to mar from his Angelic Beauty.
• Raphael Rooms: "The Disputation of the Holy Sacrament" subtly includes the cross-image by the arrangement of the Trinity (who overcame death and suffering at the crucifixion) in a vertical line while the saints (who had to die to get to Heaven) make up a horizontal line through the top of that. Together, the cross-image shows all those who overcame the earthly strife seen at the bottom of the painting to find happiness.
• Leonardo da Vinci: The Madonna of the Yarnwinder shows the infant Jesus holding cruciform yarn and smiling, holding onto it even as Mary seems concerned about his interest. Mary reminds the audience that the death of such a boy is a tragedy, but the infant's divine happiness is in response to the same gruesome, torturous, and sacred instrument.
• One guy took a photo of a crucifix in a jar of piss, bringing us Piss Christ. Most people were pretty pissed about treating a symbol of a the Love that Moves the Stars like toilet paper, but the photographer and at least one nun maintain that it shows the importance of Christ's sacrifice in spite of all the vulgarity and evil that obscures it.
• Seven Virtues: As a personification of the Christian faith, the titular "Faith" holds very recognizable symbols of it—a crucifix in one hand and a chalice (for the Blood of Christ) in the other.
• The altar painting of the Sistine Chapel places a dark, shadowy land of graves, hellfire, and corpses at the bottom of the painting, all below a cross with Jesus's corpse yet to be taken down. It is only from moving above the Cross do we see what this suffering has been transformed into: a Fluffy Cloud Heaven where a fully alive Jesus raises all the just dead into glory with his Father as they cling to his Heavenly Cross.
• The Triumph of Christianity Over Paganism by Gustave Doré sees an ocean of demons, false gods, and idols driven into the darkness by the light produced by Christ's cross.
• Digging beneath the rubble of the World Trade Centers, Frank Silecchia accidentally found a memorial in the rubble: a pair of steel beams that were left in the shape of a cross. Frank told a minister who was counseling those present at Ground Zero, Brian Jordan, and the two agreed that it was a symbol that despite the terror of the attacks, God had not abandoned them and that healing was possible. It's why the two had the cross lifted from the site, held Mass in front of it, and had it placed as a piece of art in the 9/11 Memorial Museum. The whole story is detailed in this USA Today article, which notes that it served as a sign not just to Christians, but too all that suffered from the attacks. In their own words:
  "Silecchia says that in the days after 9/11, people were drawn to the cross not as a symbol of Christ but something else: a sign that somehow, death, even the death of almost 3,000 innocents, was not the final word."

Comic Books

• In The Transformers: Combiner Wars, what does the seemingly defunct Matrix look like take when Optimus reveals that it still works? The shape of a shining cross, bringing hope to the Autobots when all seems lost.

Fairy Tales and Folklore

• "Florinda": The title character has venerated the crucifix from a very young age. When her father descends to madness and decides that he must marry his own daughter, the crucifix, acting on behalf of the Crucified Christ himself, aids her by making her vanish. At the end of the story, Florinda (who's been living as a man while on the run and now must prove her masculinity to her wife's father and godfather) is rescued by the crucifix, which flies over her and transforms her female body into a male one, granting a heterosexual Happily Ever After to Florinda and the princess.

Film — Live-Action

• In The Green Mile, as Paul Edgecombe wonders why God allowed two little girls to be murdered, his wife comes into frame and brings her cross necklace right into the center of the viewer's eye, almost as an answer to his question. Using the cross as an answer to evil foreshadows the nature of the significantly named John Coffee, a kind and gentle inmate on death row. John wants himself to be executed because he feels all the evils of humanity-he dies for our sins.
• The first shot of Hail, Caesar! is of Church with a crucifix in the middle of the frame, which is followed by a close-up of the face of Jesus. We then cut to our main character in a Confessional, and the rest of the movie concerns his conflict between whether to pursue his personal security or goodness for its own sake.
• In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indy and his father Henry find themselves at a literal crossroads, with the road sign shaped like a cross, arguing about whether they should go to Berlin to get Henry's grail diary back or go on to Iskenderun to save Marcus.
• Throughout On the Waterfront, every set of TV antennae is framed to look like a cross, putting into visual language that the Crucifixion did not just happen at Cavalry, but happens at every unjust and tyrannical murder. This informs the climatic sermon that Father Barry makes against organized crime and sets up a lot more symbolism.
• The Passion of the Christ is one of the most violent, unrelenting depiction of Jesus's death in the two millennia of constant artistic reinterpretation, but the film still holds the Cross up as something sacred and beautiful for its role in undermining Satan and all the forces of evil. In fact, the first thing Jesus does upon receiving his Cross is kiss it out of reverence.
• In Silence, the Japanese have Christians step on a cross simply as a renunciation of this Western way of life. Yet, for the priests forced to either destroy the cross or see their parishioners killed, stepping on the cross comes to symbolize a rejection of martyrdom and the sacredness of sacrificial suffering.
• Spider-Man 3 sees the Web-Slinger realize that he's fallen into pride and cruelty, only for the shot to move up to put a giant Cross atop a Church into focus. The camera then pans down to Spider-Man, who's ready to suffer for his evil and do away with it.
• The last shot of Stations of the Cross focuses on a giant white cross that contrasts with the dirt and grime of the rest of the frame, which gives a visual clue that despite the sadness and evil seen throughout the rest of the movie, the film's Christ figure has finally found her happiness. The white cross, by the way, is to be used as her tombstone, after she starved herself as a sacrifice to God.

Literature

• The Chronicles of Narnia: In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the heroes are led through darkness to safety by Aslan in the form of an albatross which "looks like a cross." This continues the series' unapologetic allegory for Christian theology.
• The Divine Comedy, a Christian epic, deliberately waits to depict a cross in Heaven until the protagonist reaches the realm of the martyrs, where the souls of the martyrs gather in the shape of a cross so brilliant with light that even the great poet Dante can find no simile to describe it. These souls go on to sing in perfect harmony about how their sufferings and deaths make no impediment to participating in the Love of God.
• The Redcrosse Knight from The Faerie Queene is so-named because he has a bloody cross painted onto his breastplate and shield. As part of the allegory of the work, Redcrosse represents holiness and his victories against vicious dragons, giants, and witches represent the steadfastness of God's grace in the face of evil.
• In Paradise Lost, the Archangel Michael comforts Adam in the face of his newfound mortality by prophesying that the Son of God will die on the cross and through that cross Death will be killed. Adam is awestruck and is able to leave Eden in hope of dying for something greater than Paradise.
  "Henceforth I learne, [...] that suffering for Truths sake Is fortitude to highest victorie, / And to the faithful Death the Gate of Life; / Taught this by his example whom I now Acknowledge my Redeemer ever blest."
• A Priest Goes to War is a collection of stories and pictures from Catholic chaplains during World War II, with one section focusing on the religious art created by the military. Naturally, this section focuses a lot on crosses and crucifixes, almost always a way that relates that suffering on the cross with the violence and pain soldiers go through during the war. Examples include:
  • A soldier kneels to a crucifix with the camera to his back, so his rifle and the executed Christ are right parallel to each other.
  • A soldier leans against the wall of a chapel surrounded broken branches, dirt, and rubble all while a bright white crucifix pops out of the grimy chapel wall.
  • On a naval vessel, three priests prepare the mass with a beautiful cross... made out of leftover Japanese shells.
    "There is no more poignant symbol of war than a bullet-scarred crucifix."
• In the dystopian science-fantasy That Hideous Strength, the event which convinces Mark to disobey the will of the ever-so exclusive N.I.C.E. is their command to crush a crucifix beneath his feet. Mark was never a Christian, yet he cannot find it in himself to stomp on the image of one so vulnerable. His vain desire to be part of something exclusive and powerful like N.I.C.E. is overwhelmed by the sheer evil of destroying something so helpless and by that helplessness, the hideous nature of N.I.C.E. is exposed to Mark.
• Inverted in The Hyperion Cantos, where priests find a cross-shaped parasite that gives its host Resurrective Immortality (but the host has to stay near the place it was found in or suffer constant, agonizing pain) and do not like the implications one bit.

Live-Action TV

• Daredevil (2015):
  • In the third episode of season 2, Matt dreams of a wooden crucifix with blood coming from Jesus' hand, with a nun washing Matt's wounds with the same blood. When he wakes up, Daredevil finds himself beaten and bound by the Punisher, who he will spend the rest of the episode trying to convince that there is still good in the sinners of the world and that they are even worth dying for.
  • Season 3: The first thing in focus when Matt wakes up in the "Resurrection" is a crucifix. Matt may not have literally died in The Defenders (2017), but he will spend the rest of the season reckoning with how to live after suffering so much in battle with the Hand.
• The earliest episodes of Once Upon a Time give the "real world" version of Snow White a cross necklace, a visual sign of the great love she feels for everyone. In fact, her true love and the sacrifices she made for her love are key in stopping the evil curse that provides the series's conflict.
• The Supernatural episode "Faith" at first seems to include a straight example in the cross a blind preacher uses to heal the dying. It seems his very disability has allowed him the faith to bring joy from people's illnesses, but it turns out the cross is a talisman of death drawing on human sacrifices. The protagonists destroy the cross, a symbolic refutation of the idea that faith in God can maintain meaning in a world of purposeless suffering.

Music

• Nautilus Pompilius:
  • In the song "Air", the man who escaped from the enemy, walking straight through the air, held in his hands a flower that looked like a cross.
  • In the song "Walking on the Water", the crucifixion gave Jesus the power to perform miracles and save people.

Mythology and Religion

• The Ur-Example of this trope is the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus, especially as described in The Four Gospels. The horror of his death on the cross was transformed by the belief that he returned to life into hope that all men might escape death and sin in the same way. Since the Gospels never describe the Cross itself as something hopeful, nor do they describe Christians using it as a symbol, St. Paul's reference^note in the Book of Galatians to "boasting in the cross" is the actual Trope Maker.
• The Gospel of Peter, a heretical text from around the year 150, exaggerates this trope by making the Cross so important that it becomes a walking and talking character. Good ol' Crossy somehow ended up in the tomb with Jesus, because he walks out of it with him and then goes on to answer "Yes" when a heavenly voice asks if they preached to "them that sleep."

Theatre

• The titular character of Hamilton prominently makes the sign of the Cross and sings about it in the song "It's Quiet Uptown," which sees the once brash Revolutionary come to terms with an unimaginable grief and pain through something impossible: forgiveness, what the Gospels say Christ offered to humanity through his death.

Video Games

• In Dante's Inferno, Dante fights his way down into the depths of hell to rescue his beloved Beatrice from Lucifer. As the game progresses, Hell's influences begin to corrupt Beatrice, and she loses her faith in Dante's attempts to get her back. Eventually she gives up entirely and tells Dante off. Feeling completely hopeless, Dante tosses to the ground the cross that she gave to him before she died, an instrument he's been using as his primary weapon this whole time. Only when she sees the cross, she realizes what he's been through, and the archangel Michael comes to free her from Hell.
• In FAITH: The Unholy Trinity, the crucifix is John's only weapon and a representation of his faith. As he faces a Crisis of Faith across the chapters, the color of the crucifix changes^{in order}from golden to white/silver to bronze/copper to match his waning belief. In the Golden Ending, when John finally exorcises Amy, the crucifix gets restored to its original golden sheen.
• The Last of Us Part II: A character is convinced to forgive a mortal enemy only after seeing them near-dead from a crucifixion. The biblical connections are downplayed, since the enemy doesn't have their hands impaled on a two-beam crucifix, but rather has their hands tied above their head on a single pillar as in most historically-attested crucifixions. There are still a few two-beam crucifixes in the area where the character is crucified, so the game gets to both supply powerful imagery and accurately depict a historical means of violence.

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