In Praise of Sister Paxton
and other underestimated women
Note: This contains shameless spoilers for the movie Heretic and also will make more sense if you have seen the movie, since I talk about important plot points but don’t explain the plot.
In 1991, Sister Ledet is the Gospel Doctrine teacher in Athens First Ward. The preparation must take hours, because each lesson is accompanied by typed, numbered quotes from scripture and modern prophets. There is a whole stack of them, and she hands them out as you walk in. Sometimes she changes is up slightly and includes what she calls a “readers’ theater,” which always involves Brother Fletcher reading the part of God. Or, well, Heavenly Father because this is Mormonism. You could call it that in 1991.
It takes me a couple of weeks, maybe a little over a month to figure out she is doing it. As I walk in, she rifles through her little stack of quotes for the shortest possible one. If it is close to the bottom of the pile that is even better, because then we might not even get to it. We often don’t get through all of them. She does this every time. Every time. Looks for the shortest quote, hands it to me. Is it because she thinks I’m dumb? Maybe that I am illiterate, or just bad at reading? I’m in grad school, at twenty-one, having graduated a year early because of AP Credit. I’m also great at reading. I won best actress in the Mission Viejo stake for my performance in the 1988 roadshow! I laugh about this with my then-husband and some of our friends, but I never say anything to Sister Ledet. It seems like a game, almost. I do pipe in one time to explain what “Goodwife” means in the seventeenth century context because what Sister Ledet tells the class is wrong. Sister Ledet blows me off. I am fresh from an undergraduate degree in History with a particular concentration in early American History, but okay.
Twenty-one is the age Mormon women could go on missions in 1991, but I am not on one. Instead, I marry two years earlier. I finish college, learn what Goodman and Goodwife are, and go to grad school. My insurance starts in September and I get pregnant with Scarlett in September. So, no mission for me. But thirty-three years later I watch Heretic and I feel Sister Paxton, feels her down to my very bones.
Sister Ledet would have handed her the shortest quote too. How easy it is, how cliche, really, to underestimate someone young, pretty, and trusting. Believing. Even in the very halls that form that belief. Sitting in a movie theater in 2024, I fall into it a little myself, underestimating Sister Paxton. And I already largely know what is going to happen in this movie. I am not particularly bothered by spoilers and have listened to three separate spoiler-filled podcasts about it. I know that Sister Paxton is the one who survives at the end.1
I am blown away by this movie, by Sister Paxton. I love that she figures it out, love that Mr. Reed underestimates her, because that’s his downfall. People who trust and believe are not stupid. People who are religious are not stupid. People who are young are not stupid, and people who are beautiful are decidedly not stupid. You know who I kind of do think is stupid? People who question that Sister Paxton could figure this out, people who find her detective hat unlikely. She’s come form a religion that co-opts intuition (especially women’s intuition) and calls it the holy ghost, but that doesn’t mean she can’t notice wet hair and a bike key in the wrong pocket. It also doesn’t mean she can’t play Mr. Reed right back when she figures out what is going on.2 Oh, did you think young, pretty, and trusting meant dumb too? Lots of people do.
But it isn’t just that Sister Paxton figures it out, not just that Mr. Reed underestimates her. It is that her belief is what saves her, that in the end it is the answer. She’s actually right about this one true religion.
You probably know that the ending is ambiguous and that it is not clear whether Sister Paxton does survive. Does Sister Barnes come back from the dead and kill Mr. Reed for good, leaving Sister Paxton to escape and presumably save the other women locked in cages in the basement? Is Sister Barnes the butterfly on her hand?
Or.
The butterfly glitches on her hand. Is it really there? People can’t come back from the dead. It’s all synapses firing in a dying brain, and Sister Paxton is herself the butterfly. Escaping the house through a window like some fever dream. Outside looks like the heaven that the “prophet” described. It isn’t real, she says.
A thing to know about me: I love an ambiguous ending where I get to choose for myself what to believe and what is real. I have, in fact, carved out a life doing this very thing.
A thing you probably already know about me: I pick the first option, the one where Sister Barnes shows up with Chekov’s gun on the wall and Sister Paxton wins. Where Sister Barnes is a butterfly and the women get out of the cages. Because one of the best things about believing is when it is a choice, and I will pick this choice every time. Also, have you ever seen things that are there and then…not there? Just out of the corner of your eye? It doesn’t mean they aren’t there there.3
It doesn’t actually matter which ending interpretation (iteration?) is real. Like life, you get to pick how you see things. You get to pick. You can even pick both! You make the rules. Religion and belief are what you make of them, even if you are raised in the Bob Ross Monopoly version of both. But believing the best in people does not make you stupid, no matter what anyone else says. A person who cheated on me once told me that it was easy enough to do because he knew I would not suspect, that I trusted him. Even at the time I knew this said a whole lot more about him than it said about me. I eventually got a really hot husband, so I guess all those times I took the stairs paid off.
Sister Paxton bests Mr. Reed in either ending, whether you believe she dies in the house or escapes and calls 911. She tells him what he wants to hear, that the one true religion is control. But she knows what the one true religion really is. You see it in a freezing cold room when she takes off her coat and gives it to a woman in a cage. Her beliefs, and her actions, are a choice. They always were. The one true religion? Love. Duh.
I leave Athens for New Orleans two years later, in 1993. This is the year Mike graduates from high school, but I don’t know yet that he is my husband. If we are lucky, life is long and being a young, pretty and smart is a long game. One day, you’re old, pretty, and smart. Maybe you’re even lucky enough to have a hot (if dead) husband, one who also played Bob Ross Monopoly. If Sister Ledet is still alive, she’s old. Those slips of paper have been in landfills long enough to disintegrate. They were all the words of dead men anyway. Pretty, middle-aged me writes her own words, not someone else’s, typed out and cut into strips. There’s a new God in this readers’ theater. And oh, is it just a bit petty to say?
I can fucking read.
Or does she?
I’ll let you in on a secret - women have been doing this all along. It’s part of how we survive.
Another fun fact about me: I prefer to think the tiger in The Life of Pi is an actual damn tiger. So sue me.