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 Scarlet and the Black

In the film, The Scarlet and the Black (1983), Gregory Peck and Christopher Plummer face off as Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty and Col. Herbert Kapper at the end of the film when the Nazi head of police in Rome abruptly changes his tune in challenging the Catholic priest no longer by threats, but by appealing to the priest’s faith of humble compassion applied even to one’s enemies so O’Flaherty will extend mercy to Kapper’s wife and children, who would otherwise fall into the hands of the Allied troops advancing into Rome. Before that dialogue, O’Flaherty and Pope Pius XII subtly debate whether the pope had been right in compromising with Hitler in order to keep the Catholic Church intact in Nazi Germany. The film can thus be viewed in light of the potential of the medium of film to convey and even thrash out contending theological ideas.

The full essay is at "The Scarlet and the Black."

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."

 

Mary

The film, Mary (2024), is pregnant with intimations of the theological implications of her unborn and then newly born son, Jesus. That story is of course well-known grace á the Gospels, and the theology of agape love associated with that faith narrative is at least available through the writings of Paul and many later Christian theologians. What we know of Mary is much less, given that her role in the Gospels is not central even though the heavy title, Mother of God, has been applied to her without of course implying that she is the source of God. The film, like the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church has done, endeavors to “evolve the myth” by adding to Mary’s story even though the additions are not meant to be taken as seriously as, for example, the Catholic doctrine that Mary is assumed bodily into heaven. The movie comes closest to the magisterium in suggesting that Mary’s birth is miraculous; the magisterium holds that Mary is born without sin, and that Jesus inherited this because of the Incarnation (i.e. God, rather than Joseph, impregnates Mary). Suffice it to say that the perception of myth as static is the exception rather than rule; it is natural for the human mind to work with myths such that they can evolve rather than take them as given in a final form or extent. This is not to say that we should focus on the faith narratives as if they were ends in themselves and thus unalterable; rather, as the film demonstrates, religious transcendence is of greater value.

The full essay is at "Mary." 

The Exorcist

One of the most iconic films of the horror-film genre, The Exorcist (1973) focuses on the duality of good and evil that the film’s director, William Friedkin, maintained is in a constant struggle in all of us. The dialogue between the two priests performing the exorcism on the one side and the Devil possessing Regan on the other not only reveal the duality, but also the essence of evil itself. Once this essence is grasped, interesting questions can be asked that are distinctly theological, as distinct from modernity’s trope of evil portrayed in terms of, and even reduced to, supernatural movements of physical objects. The decadent materialist version of the theological domain stems from modernity’s bias in favor of materialism and empiricism. In other words, highlighting supernatural physics as being foremost in representing the religious realm is how secularity sidelines religion, rather than how religion itself is. The bias of modern society is very clear in the film as the “professionals” go through alternative explanations first from the field of medicine, privileging the somatic (physical) and then the psychological domains of medicine. In other words, the narrative establishes (or reflects) a hierarchy of three qualitatively different levels of descending validity: the somatic is primary, and only then the psychological, and, if the first two do not furnish an explanation, then, and only then, are we to turn to the theological as metaphysically (i.e., supernaturally) real primarily shown by physical objects defying the laws of physics. Science, rather than religion, is thus still in the driver’s seat. The bias in favor of materialism is in the assumption that only after feasible hypotheses from modern medicine are nullified can theological explanations be considered (as credible). In this way, the film reflects the hegemony of materialism that has taken hold since the Enlightenment, and the relegation of the theological as “magical” supernaturalism, as in a bed levitating of objects flying around Regan’s bedroom. The essence of evil is instead interior. If religion is a matter of the heart, then how could evil be otherwise?

The full essay is at "The Exorcist."