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."
