The Devil’s Party
Hollywood & the Creation of a Counterfeit Religion, Part Three
“In a country where the Protestant work ethic doesn’t seem to have worked out too well, it makes sense that directors of Catholic background . . . speak to the way Americans feel now. These men have grown up with a sense of sin and a deep-seated feeling that things aren’t going to get much better in this life. They’re not uplifters or reformers, like some of the Protestant directors of an earlier era, or muckraking idealists, like some of the earlier Jewish directors. [Their films] combine elements of ritual and of poetry in their heightened realism. The Catholic directors examine American experience in emotional terms, without much illusion—in fact, with macabre humor. The western heroes faced choices between right and wrong; these directors didn’t grow up on right and wrong but on good-and-evil—and then they lost the good.” —Pauline Kael, “Fear of Movies” (a famous piece which I first quoted in the intro to Blood Poets), When the Lights Go Down, p. 202-31
In “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” William Blake wrote the following of Milton’s depiction of Lucifer: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”
When I first quoted this line in The Blood Poets, in the chapter on Brian De Palma (“Pinball Wizard”), I believed that all good art was inevitably drawn to represent the darkness. I thought that attempts to show goodness and virtue inevitably ended up being asinine, anemic, and boring.
And there were plenty of crappily pious Hollywood movies I could cite as irrefutable evidence for this argument.
Still, this now seems an odd belief to hold. Why should goodness be boring?
Is it because the people who create movies—and modern, or postmodern, works of fiction, maybe from Shakespeare on—aren’t equipped to depict goodness? That they don’t know, or care, enough about angels to do them justice?
Do such culturally-elevated creatives then go with their weaknesses and find a way to maximize them, by creating, over the centuries, a medium in which a deficit is converted to a virtue, in a world where weakness becomes strength, violence heroism, and evil good? (Not good in a moral sense, but in a purely aesthetic one.)
If movies, over time, develop the means to render evil, unlike good, compelling, persuasive, and profound; and if they thereby validate their own essentiality as “the ultimate art form” for addressing “reality”; how self-fulfilling, and how self-serving, might that developmental curve turn out to be?
Does the fool who persists in his folly become, not wise but fully deluded?
And is he, in some sense, thereby placing himself in service of evil?
https://childrenofjob.substack.com/p/the-devils-party?