A Ghost Story

As if the macabre specter of a ghost, albeit in a white sheet with two black eye-holes, were not enough for a spooky film, David Lowery endeavored to shoot and edit his 2017 film, A Ghost Story, using a relatively fast 33 frames per second in shooting the ghost moving, and editing without music so the story-world’s supernatural element would be subtly apparent. Although a prognosticator delivers a long philosophical monologue at a party somewhere in the middle of the film, Lowery does not characterize the meaning of the film in terms of that monologue’s point that the universe will eventually end so a person should live each day as if it were the last day of one’s life. Of course, none of us need worry about the universe burning up any time soon, so from that standpoint we can expect to live full lives without being nihilist on a daily basis. Fortunately, the meaning of the film, Lowery states in an interview, is not to live each day as if it is your last day. A more interesting question is whether the film is an exponent of nihilism as the real, ontological state of existence, or whether human fulfillment can fill human hollowness with the fullness of experienced life. Moreover, does a supernatural dimension, such as a heaven, exist such that human souls can depart from the human condition and even loved ones while still existing (after death). In other words, does holiness transcend hollowness? The latter may pertain more to the phenomenal realm of lived human existence than to the noumenal realm of things as they are in themselves, and thus what each of us really is.

The full essay is at "A Ghost Story." 

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."

The Vatican Tapes

After The Omen (1976), which was released just two years after the sardonic U.S. President, Richard Nixon, had resigned in utter disgrace from the presidency amid much economic and political pessimism in the 1970s generally, moviemakers got busy on stories involving demon-possession. The 2015 film, The Vatican Tapes, begins as an apparent demon-possession case and thus seems not to stand out among other such films, but towards the end of the film, when the demon-possessed young woman suddenly breaches the bounds of the sort of supernatural feats of which demons are capable, the true significance of her case emerges with stunning clarity. For that which possesses and kills the young woman is none other than the Anti-Christ, and that figure is in a wholly different league than demons.

The full essay is at "The Vatican Tapes."

My Name is Bernadette

The film, My Name is Bernadette (2011), focuses, almost as an obsession, on the question of whether the girl “actually” saw the Virgin Mary in a series of visions at Lourdes. All too often, miracles are treated as ends in themselves, rather than as pointers to something deeper. Even the girl in the visual and auditory (albeit only to Bernadette) apparition identified itself only in terms of a supernatural miracle, the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception. I contend that Bernadette’s awe-inspiring spirituality visually conveyed on screen, and Monsignor Forcade’s spiritually-insightful advice to Bernadette as to her functions in her upcoming life as a nun is more important than the miracles, even from the standpoint of religion. In other words, the story-world of the film, which is based on the true story of Bernadette at Lourdes, is a good illustration of a what happens when everyone in a large group of people reduces religion to science and even metaphysics and misses the sui generis (i.e., unique) and core elements of religion. Such is the power of group-think that conflation of different, albeit related, domains of human experience can remain hidden in a societal blind-spot. Not even the film makes this blind-spot transparent.

The full essay is at "My Name Is Bernadette."

The Devil’s Arithmetic

The Devil’s Arithmetic (1999) can be classified superficially as a coming-of-age film, for Hanna, the protagonist, starts out being immaturely contemptuous of her family’s ethnic and religious heritage and current practice. She tries to skip the Passover Seder at her grandparents’ house. That her aunt Eva had been a prisoner at a Nazi death camp makes no difference to Hanna—that is, until she is transported back as her aunt’s cousin (for whom Hanna was named) and experiences the camp herself. Whether she is really transported back in time (and if so, how?) or is merely dreaming is answered in the end but not so blatantly as would insult the viewers’ intelligence. Then again, it’s not every film that has allusions both to theology and The Wizard of Oz. The different ways in which that movie is incorporated and alluded to in this film are actually quite sophisticated in extending the viewers’ sense of synchronicity beyond the film’s narrative.

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

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."