The Mephisto Waltz

In a retelling of the proverbial Faustian deal with the devil, The Mephisto Waltz (1971) plays out with the deal paying off, as Duncan Ely is able to live on in the body of Myles Clarkson. It doesn’t hurt that Ely is a master pianist and Clarkson has long, spry fingers (and that he has a beautiful wife, Paula). Even so, both Paula and the Clarkson’s daughter stand in the way of Duncan being able to get back to his own wife, and the film ends with Paula making her own deal with the devil so she can live on even though Duncan (and his wife) have already set about her demise. Because Duncan’s “after-life” transition is successful and even Paula, who has been opposing Duncan’s possession of Myles, ends up turning to the devil, the lesson of the film, Faust (1926) is effectively debunked. Besides The Mephisto Waltz, that God does not smite every case of injustice in the world—the genocide being perpetrated by Israel in the 2020s being a vivid and blatant example—may even further instigate interest in Faustian deals with the devil, even though that entity is known to be deceiver and thus not to be trusted. The allure of selfish gain can be worthwhile nonetheless for some people. For Duncan Ely, being able to go on living and gain even more fame as a performing pianist is worth the gamble, and it pays off. The medium of film is an excellent means of presenting the religious level, which is distinct yet interacts with the ordinary world that anchors the film.

The full essay is at "The Mephisto Waltz."

Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist

Decades before dying while doing battle with the demon possessing Regan NacNeil in The Exorcist (1973), Rev. Lankester Merrin successfully extracts the same demon from a young man in Kenya. An African chief (or medicine man) tells Merrin at the end of Dominion: The Prequel to the Exorcist (2005) that he has made a rather bad enemy of the demon, which was not done with the priest. We know from The Exorcist that the demon will eventually kill the priest, but that is by no means the final word on a distinctively religious battle because in that domain, the human soul is eternal rather than necessarily tethered to a corporeal body. It is important, moreover, not to reduce religion to one of its aspects, or, even worse, to the stuff of any other domain, including the supernatural. Dominion reduces Christianity to one belief-claim and relies on supernaturalism to validate the religious phenomena in the film.

The full essay is at "Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist."

Devil’s Advocate

In the film, Devil’s Advocate (1997), human free-will plays a very important role. It has implications not only for whether humans tend to be good or evil, but also on how culpable God is for the evil that committed by humans. One of the devil’s sons by a mortal woman, Kevin Lomax, must choose whether or not to impregnate his half-sister, Christabella Andreoli, to produce the Anti-Christ, which John Milton, who is the devil, wants so much. In Christian theology, both the extent of free-will and how tainted it is from the Fall have been debated. Even within Augustine’s works, his thought changes. The one thing that cannot be asserted is that free-will both does and does not exist. Also, that so many greedy people have been so destructive of democracies and even the planet does not necessarily mean that God is responsible or that humans are not capable of choosing to do good over evil.

The full essay is at "Devil's Advocate."

The Omen

Released in 1976, The Omen reflects the pessimism in America in the wake of the OPEC gas shortage and President Nixon’s Watergate cover-up, both of which having occurred within easy memory of the two notable assassinations in 1968. Additionally, the drug culture had come out in the open in the anti-Vietnam War hippie sub-culture, and the sexual revolution, which arguably set the stage for the spread of AIDS beginning in the next decade, was well underway, both of which undoubtedly gave evangelical, socially-conservative Christians the sense that it would not be long until everything literally goes to hell. The film provides prophesy-fulfillment of a birth-narrative (i.e., myth) and a supernatural personality known biblically as the anti-Christ, who as an adult will set man against man until our species is zerstört. It is as if matter (the Christ) and anti-matter (the anti-Christ) finally cancel each other out at the end of time. Economically during the 1970s, inflation and unemployment were giving at least some consumers and laborers the sense of being in a jet trapped in a vertical, free-fall dive of stagflation that not even fiscal and/or monetary policy could divert. The pessimistic mood was captured in another way in another film, Earthquake (1974), in which a natural disaster plays off the mood of utter futility throughout the decade. It is no wonder that Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” resonated so much as a presidential-campaign slogan in 1979 as Jimmy Carter was mired in micro-management inside the White House.  The optimism of a resurgence in political energy overcame the decade’s sense of pessimism. That Damien, the anti-Christ in The Omen, survives the attempt on his life by Robert Thorn, his adoptive father resonates with that pessimism. Satan’s plan is still “game on” as the film ends, and this ending fits the mood in America during the decade. With this historical context contemporaneous with the film laid out, a very practical, manifestation of evil subtly depicted in the film and yet easily recognized by customers frustrated with corrupt and inept management of incompetent employees will be described in the context of pessimism from utter frustration. Such frustration survived the squalid decade of the 1970s at least decades into the next century.

The full essay is at "The Omen."

 

Satan in Film: In Light or Darkness?

Released in the last year of the twentieth century, The Ninth Gate is a film about the use of a book to conjure up Satan. The book's title is The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows. Between three copies exist nine engravings appropriated from a book written by Lucifer. The person who gets all of those engravings can conjure up the devil. The Kingdom of Shadows presumably refers to Satan's kingdom. At the end of the film, Dean Corvo, a dishonest book dealer, rather than his client, Boris Balkan, is welcomed into a castle in which Satan is located. As the castle's main doors open, a blinding light shines outward into the night. Although Thomas Hobbes castigates the Roman Catholic Church as the kingdom of darkness in his text, Leviathan, Satan's realm has typically been depicted as dark in Christian art. Indeed, the film's own reference to Lucifer's kingdom as that of shadows follows this motif. Yet how can we account for the white light inside the castle? 

The full essay is at "Satan in Film."

Rosemary's Baby: The Supernatural in Religion

The film narrative centers on Satan impregnating Rosemary, a married woman in New York City. According to Roman Polanski, the film’s director, the decisive point is actually that neither Rosemary in the film nor the film’s viewers can know whether it was the devil who impregnated her. Beyond the more matter of being able to distinguish a psychosis from a more “objective” or external religious event, the importance of the supernatural to religion is also, albeit subtly, in play, according to Polanski.

The full essay is at "Rosemary's Baby."