'Conjuring' belief in demons

Forty years after The Exorcist made $441 million and lodged itself in the American imagination, the latest cast-out-demons based-on-a-true-story film hit theaters this weekend. The writers and director are hoping the $20 million production called The Conjuring makes some money -- and gets some viewers seriously considering demonic realities. 

"People should never be ignorant of demonic forces and think it can't happen to them," said Chad Hayes, one of the screenwriters. 

Chad and his twin brother and co-writer Carey Hayes have been adamant about the connection between their faith and this horror film, a connection which has pretty seamlessly blended with some of the studios' promotional efforts. The film's distributor, New Line Cinema, has subcontracted with Grace Hill Media for a specific faith-market campaign. The company arranged advance screenings for faith groups, including groups of priests, and has made the writer-brothers and the real-life exorcists available to the religious press.

The people behind this film hope those who believe in demons go to theaters and watch. Chad Hayes, for example, said, "Men and women of faith should see this film because they will see the power that only God holds to overcome evil. They can be witnesses to that moment of darkness that only the power of God can defeat."

The people behind the film don't only want believers to go and see it, but one way to market it to believers it to talk about how the product will be powerful and especially spiritually useful for those who don't believe. This is part of why there's all this talk about the reality of demonic forces. It's aimed at those who like their scary narratives to teeter on the question, "is it real?," and also at those who think it is real and want to believe that such a film could transform the beliefs of others.

That evangelical message is clear enough that some reviewers are reacting to it. At Salon, the film has been dubbed "one of the cleverest and most effective right-wing Christian films of recent years," which is not framed as a compliment.

At a recent screening, the director reportedly spent some time trying to persuade incredulous critics of the film's serious intent. The final words on the screen, too, from one of the real-life exorcists involved in the real-life version of the film's fictionalized events, emphasize this point:

Diabolical forces are formidable. These forces are eternal and they exist today. The fairy tale is true. The devil exists. God exists. And for us, as people, our very destiny hinges upon which one we elect to follow.

Whether or not they believe in The Conjuring, marketing a movie to people who believe in demons isn't a bad idea.

For one thing, there's a good number of them. There's not a lot of really solid information on exactly how many, but one poll reported that 41 percent of Americans agreed with the the idea that demons exist, and another, which just looked at self-identified Christians, put the number at 64 percent of Christians, which is about 48 percent of the general population. That works out to more than 150 million Americans as the potential market for this marketing campaign of this movie, plus, presumably, the people they know and think might be somewhere on the edge of possible belief.

For another thing, appealing to religious audiences has paid off in recent years. There are success stories inspiring this marketing drive: The Passion of the Christ, The Blind Side, Fireproof, and others. Add the successes of faith-"infused" TV shows that have fared so well lately, Duck Dynasty, The Bible, etc., and the people who decide what movies get made are going to pay attention. And they are: At this year's Annual Faith and Values Awards Gala and Report to the Entertainment Industry, a Hollywood affair celebrating films pitched as faith-friendly and making lots and lots of money for it, marketing strategists were saying they could sell anything that is faith friendly. It was reported that in the last 21 years the number of films classified as having "at least some Christian, redemptive content" has grown from about 10 percent of the movies produced to nearly 57 percent, but there is still demand for more.

It turns out religious right's efforts to demonstrate the economic strength of conservative Christians actually worked. If not with boycotts, then with theater tickets and big buckets of popcorn.

According to Carey Hayes, "the essence of this movie is, God wins."

One could say the same of The Exorcist, of course. That's what these movies do: God wins, demons are dramatized, some segment of the audience wonders if maybe that fictionally depicted reality is really real, and others say yes, yes!, and a bunch of money is made and more such stories are put into production.

The Conjuring continued that tradition this weekend, pulling in box office receipts worth $41.5 million,  earning more than twice what it cost with just it's North American debut.

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Coming soon

First official artwork for Left Behind (the remake), which is reportedly on schedule to start production this spring. 

The original book addresses the possibility of the story of the rapture being made into a movie, and is very skeptical of that possibility: "If somebody tried to sell a screenplay about millions of people disappearing, leaving everything but their bodies behind, it would be laughed off."

The question now is: what if they did sell it, twice?

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Partial & elusive truths: The aestheic values of Ron Hansen's 'Christian fiction'

Ron Hansen is a Christian fiction writer. Except, with him, the sense of "Christian fiction writer" is that he's a Christian who writes fiction and a writer who writes fiction that's informed by and shaped by his faith, not that he belongs to the genres or markets generally referred to by the term.

He has, perhaps to make that exactly that distinction, criticized the genres of Christian fiction with criticisms that are fairly broad, fairly sweeping. Hansen has said he dislikes Christian fiction because it "is often in fact pallid allegory, a form of sermonizing."

In another context, Hansen has expanded that critique, and challenged, even, the Christianness of Christian fiction. In A Stay Against Confusion, he writes: 

"So-called Christian fiction is often in fact pallid allegory, or a form of sermonizing, or is a reduction into formula, providing first-century, Pauline solutions to oversimplified problems, sometimes yielding to a Manichean dualism wherein good and evil are plainly at war, or offering as Christianity conservative politics. We cannot call a fiction Christian just because there is no irreligion in it, no skepticism, nothing to cause offense."

Whether or not that's a fair critique of Christian fiction, it does get at the sense of the aesthetic expression of Christianity that Hansen values.

Or rather, doesn't value: Pallid allegory, sermonizing, formula and over-simplification are the negative terms. On the other side, the positive terms of his specifically Catholic aesthetic measures are more ambiguous. Not that he doesn't or hasn't articulated them, but that they're still pretty vague, even articulated, and it's just not really clear what these values would mean in the context of a novel -- or how they work out in the context of his novels.

In a PBS segment, Hansen talks about how attending mass is part of his writing process and he views his fiction as sacramental, in a certain sense, in that "It's a witness to what God is doing in the world."

Speaking specifically of how one of his better known works, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, is a "witness," in this way, he says, "I wanted to have this sense of, how do you, once you've done that, how do you redeem yourself?" The PBS interviewer notes that there are allusions in the work to the Biblical story of Cain and Able, implying the work is religious at least in that sense, but asks, "Does Bob Ford really find redemption?"

Hansen says, "He doesn't, no."

That's true -- he doesn't. And it's exactly this ambiguity that undercuts the clearly articulated aesthetic of fiction that's Christian that Hansen holds.

The Assassination is a good book, but, as literature, is very open-ended, short through with ambiguities, and often rather uncertain, actually, about the possibility of redemption in human history.

Hansen holds that "Fiction shows you how to live a moral life or how to avoid an immoral life, and religion is trying to do that same thing, but fiction provides you models rather than lessons." In The Assassination, though, who the models are and what they show is not at all clear.

It's not clear, for example, why Ford killed James, what his motivation was.

Ford tells himself and those around him a continually shifting set of self-justifying stories. In one late scene, the aging Ford says he killed James because he had to, because James was going to kill him. Then adds that also there was the reward money, that that was the reason. Then adds that he "thought Jesse James was a Satan and a tyrant who was causing all this misery" and he thought he'd be hailed as a hero for killing James, and that that was why he did, because he wanted to be famous. "I thought they would congratulate me," he says, "and I'd get my name in books. I was only twenty years old then. I couldn't see how it would look to people." The reader, at the end of this, does not really know why Ford killed James, nor does it seem that Ford knows either.

If anything, the text endorses the idea that the human heart is mysterious, most especially to itself.

There's good Catholic doctrine backing up that idea, but it also leaves a lot of unanswered questions about where, exactly, Ford went wrong. It would seem he's to be the example of immorality, of what not to do, but what he does is conflicted and confused. He idolizes James, and that seems to be the error, but then he reverses course and goes after the outlaw like an iconoclast with a hammer. And that seems to be error too. In some parts of the story he is self-aggrandizing. In others, he supplicates and grovels. He uses violence. He eschews violence. He longs for glory. He accepts his lot. He accepts abuse. He resists abuse. He snivels and whines that the universe is just slated against him, and then attempts actually to take control of his life and his fate, and both courses of action, like everything Ford does in this story, take him further and further from redemption.

The character is prone to self-delusions, and the story, told in the third person, never offers the sort of omniscient account of the assassin's real reasons that a reader could latch onto. Even at the moment it seems like the reader is being offered a good explanation, a way clear of Ford's confusion, it's then framed as, most essentially, the way Ford is justifying himself. Hansen writes, for example, that Ford

"was ashamed of his persiflage, his boasting, his pretensions, his dispassion, his inability to express what he now believed was the case: that he truly regretted killing Jesse, that he missed the man as much as anybody and wished his murder hadn't been necessary."

What starts out as Ford's seeming moment of self realization, and possibly a kind of confession and moment of redemption, turns out to be only Ford offering another insufficient account of things. The moment of clarity turns out to be just another set of self-justifying delusions, more of the same shifting, shuffling confusion.

The same non-conclusion.Which, in the work, is presented as the better interpretation. It's contrasted with the cheap, false stories Americans told themselves about Ford, where

"Everything was exaggerated and magnified -- if he was not religious then he was slavishly in league with Satan; if he slept little it was of course the consequence of nightmares; and it was generally agreed upon by all that Bob was plagued by apparitions, by incorporeal voices, by grim imaginings of his own grave and stinging judgement of history -- even the indignant silence that he gradually adopted was guessed to be charged with meaning."

The same confusion is at work with the other characters. James is no less conflicted. No less confused a model or more a witness to anything clear.

This is not to criticize the ambiguity of the morality and immorality modeled by Ford. It's the character's confusion and self-delusion and subverted realizations and general messed-up-ness that make this book good.

Bob Ford is, here, human.

He's human precisely in the way that those promoting and making claims for literature would want a literary character to be. He is, that is say, human in a way that demonstrates important aspects of what it means to be human, that can show or teach readers "what it's like to be human." He has real psychological depth. It's these literary qualities of the character that make him a really terrible model for morality, though.

Because it's all so ambiguous.

In The Assassination, this is depicted again and again by contrast, as the story Hansen is telling references or repeats other stories of the era about the same situation and subject. The narrative without a clear moral or model for morality contains numerous representations of narratives with unambiguous points. These other stories are always clear. They have morals. They have pointed lessons, and the sermonizing Hansen will criticize as not really Christian in the aesthetic sense he wants to use that word, but also in the sense he'll make use of when wanting to argue for the right way for fiction to be Christian, as a "witness" and "model." Those stories that take James and Ford as models for morality, though, are consistently contrasted to the story Hansen is telling, which is about humans and the confusions of human life, priveledging complexity over the neatness of allegory. 

Hansen, one could even argue, takes the authorial position in this work as the antagonist, the opponent of the historical author who heroized Jesse James, John Newman Edwards.

Edwards was an avowed and unreconstructed Confederate who wrote up James as a folk hero, a savior and avenger of Southern whites, a model for moral resistance to the regime that freed slaves, undercut the "birthright" of white privilege, and supported the corporate interests of railroads and the burgeoning of capitalism over and against the agrarian and yeoman ideals of late fuedalism. In Hansen's account, Edwards is willfully blind to the complexities of humans and history, always casting his characters in terms of models and witnesses. Edwards writes, after the assassination, that James' only real transgression was that he "refused to be banished from his birthright, and when he was hunted he turned savagely about and hunted his hunters." Edwards, in Hansen's novel, writes that "such a cry of horror and indignation" at the way James died "is even now thundering over the land that if a single one of the miserable assassins had either manhood, conscience or courage, he would go as another Judas and hang himself."

In all this, Edwards is the prime example of the aesthetic of Christian fiction Hansen opposes, with weak and easy allegories and wrought-up sermons supplanting story. He is, however, also an example of the sort of aesthetic Hansen says he supports: Edwards is very interested in exactly the kind of "show[ing] you how to live a moral life or how to avoid an immoral life" that Hansen, though he affirms this, never really gets around to in The Assassination.

His aesthetic, in practice, in this novel, whether one considers it "Christian" or not, is different from the positive values he articulates to PBS and in essays on how fiction can be sacramental. If his work works as a witness, it's not a very clear one. If characters are supposed models from which to take lessons, Hansen failed.

It's possible, though, to put aside what he says he thinks he likes, and detect a different set of aesthetic values in The Assassination. Hansen values complexity and ambiguity. He prefers his themes oblique. He wants to render the humanness of characters, their confusions and self-contraditions, their intermingled wheat and tares. He represents them as, most essentially, born concupiscent and morally deformed and also bearing within themselves, at the same time, the divine. He values showing humans as creatures mystified by themselves, and the world as a place also thus mystified. History, for him, is best presented as a stage where humans act on their inveterate, incontrovertible belief in personal redemption and beatification -- redemption and beatification they do not easily find. 

Hansen will say, if you ask him, that fiction "helps us to know we believe," that it "holds up to the light, fathoms, simplifies, and refines those existential truths that, without such interpretations, seem all too secret, partial, and elusive."

In practice, though, in this book, his aesthetic seems rather to value the partial, the elusive, the truths that are not simple, so easy to turn into sermons. Whether that means his books, his aesthetic values and the fiction he writes, are more or less Christian than the genres that go by the name "Christian fiction" is probably a matter of personal tastes and definitions.

This is the alternative sense of "Christian fiction" one finds, though, in the worked-out aesthetic preferences of the faith Hansen has that shapes and informs his stories.

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The exorcist in the American imagination

What does an exorcist look like?

A Roman Catholic priest, if you believe the movies.

There are exceptions. The very recent Sam Raimi film Possession makes the unusual move of having the demons and exorcists be Jewish. In The Last Exorcism, from 2010, the exorcist was a white-suit wearing Southern evangelical. There are also demon films like the Keanu Reeves vehicle Constantine and the Denzel Washington vehicle Fallen where the hero isn't a cleric at all.

For the most part, though, exorcist movies depict exorcists as what sociologist Michael W. Cuneo calls "hero priests."

Pretty much the entire list of "best exorcism films" has Catholic exorcists. From The Exorcist and it's sequels and prequels to The Exorcism of Emily Rose, from The Amityville Horror to [Rec]2 and The Rite, the exorcists of the American imagination are Roman priests.

But why?

Max von Sydow, as the priest in The Exorcist.

It's not because there are, as a matter of fact, more Catholic exorcists than Protestant. A recent study of the practices of Christian exorcists surveyed 170 who are active, of which only 2.3 percent were Catholic.

Though the sample of the study may not be representative, it still offers evidence of wide variety of Christian traditions involved in what's sometimes called "deliverance ministry." The study found a wide array of Protestants involved in this activity that, when it's on film, is almost exclusively Catholic. There were various sorts of pentecostals and charismatics, but also evangelicals, and representatives from the Reformed churches, the anabaptist tradition, and even the normally liberal Mainline churches. That's not even taking into consideration the various non-orthodox and non-Christian sorts of exorcists.

As Cuneo writes in American Exorcism, there seems to be an across-the-board media bias in favor of Catholic exorcists. Protestant clergy engaged in spiritual combat with demons just, for some reason, doesn't do it for the American imagination. Speaking of the 1980s, Cuneo writes,

"While evangelicals and cahrismatics were expelling demons by the busload without attracting much more than passing notice, the slightest mention of an officially sanctioned Roman Catholic exorcism was all it took to bring the media scrambling to full attention. By almost universal consensus this was the genuine article, the truly epic struggle between the supernatural good and evil. Everything else was pale imitation."

There doesn't seem to be a clear answer as to why this is so. Four possible answers:

1) Catholic imagery is inherently cinematic. 
The material objects of the Catholic faith and the Catholic liturgy simply film well. Crucifixes and icons of saints and the Virgin Mary, chalices and wafers, collars and stoles: these objects immediately convey certain ideas. A concept of "righteous," "religious," or "holy" can be communicated without dialogue, merely by showing one of these objects in a scene.

Contrast a crucifix with a child in a nightgown and grotesque or creepy make-up, and one has, in a single frame, the entire possession-exorcism story.

By contrast, Protestant exorcists are less likely to use religious paraphernalia. There could, perhaps, be a big floppy Bible, or a bit of oil, but the "tools" of exorcism aren't, for the most part, visual but verbal. Kenneth D. Royal found, in his study, that most Christian exorcists use "the name of Jesus" as their primary tool, which would make sense given that 97.7 percent of them were Protestant. A man dressed in normal clothes, juxtaposed with a demonic-looking child, giving commands "in the name of Jesus," is not as cinematically powerful.

There's a point of comparison that can be made here to zombie movies. Garlic, which doesn't give one a power image on the screen, is much less likely to be significant to a zombie film than, say, sunlight, which involves an essential ingredient of film and lends itself to dramatic images.

One bit of evidence to support this interpretation of the predominance of Catholics among the exorcists of movies: in the one notable exception, The Last Exorcism, where the exorcist is an evangelical, there is prominent use of a crucifix in the trailer.

2) Catholicism appears pre- or anti-modern. 
As much as these movies are about battles between good and evil, they are also about a struggle between the modern and the pre- or anti-modern. The struggle between materialist culture (in both senses of "materialist") and the inherent distrust of materialism internal to that culture. Exorcism films specifically speak to the conflict within American culture between science and it's undergirding assumption that this is "all there is," consumer capitalism and its billboard proclamations of everything being for sale, and the enduring suspicion that there's something missing, something lacking, something, as it were, lurking underneath.

Catholicism, with its connection to the Middle Ages, serve as representative symbols of the anti-materialist position. Contemporary evangelicals, being linked more strongly in the American imagination to very recent history and being apparently much more at home with the logic of markets, and much more comfortable with an anthropology that imagines humans as most essentially consumers, don't mark as strong of a contrast with the contemporary cultural order.

Priests, on film, in the American imagination, are something like living dinosaurs, lumbering along in testament to the continued existence of a former, spiritual age.

Seeming in this way foreign, the Catholic priest may also carry the necessary exoticism for a believable exorcist. As religious studies professor John-Charles Duffy wrote, the

"problem with making a 'true story' movie based on exorcism among charismatic evangelicals is that it would be a movie about charismatic evangelicals. It would be a movie about people like those you see in televangelism. It wouldn't be about sophisticated Northeasterners or Europeans. For that reason, I hypothesize, producers would worry that they couldn't sell the story to audiences: audiences wouldn't be able to ... achieve the suspension of disbelief necessary to immerse themselves enjoyably in the story. The premise would just seem absurd, as televangelism seems absurd."

The contrast offered here is between a phrase uttered in Latin and one uttered in a Texas accent.

The fact that the Jewish exorcists in Raimi's film seem from the trailer to be Ultra-Orthodox Jews would lend support to this idea that exorcists must, to seem right to us, have some air of pre- or anti-modernism to them, to seem to be hold outs from another world against the movie-goers own familiar reality.

3) Catholicism carries an authoritative weight.
A Protestant -- and, particularly, evangelical -- exorcist would appear to be acting without institutional backing. Fundamentally individualistic, the exorcist would seem to be "out there," and essentially alone. He wouldn't have credentials, wouldn't be taken as having undergone extensive training or have inherited thousands of years of secret tradition.

He would have to vouch for his authority on his own authority.

The way many of the exorcist movies not only involve a priest but also make key references to "the Vatican" points to this. The Devil Inside, for example, is set in Rome. The Rite begins with a seminary student traveling to Italy to take a course on exorcism. They are, then, presented as part of a larger, deeper, broader thing, and thus markedly different from the standard paranoiac.

This relates, in a number of ways, to 2). The Catholic exorcist appears as a participant in an alternative way of life, and thus as offering an alternative to contemporary life, and so when he is also attuned of an alternative reality, he's seen as this representative of another lebenswelt, rather than just as himself mentally ill.

But where 2) could also be achieved in other ways -- a mysterious, Illuminati-like order of exorcists, say -- the institutional backing of a Catholic exorcists does other things as well. The institutional nature of the priesthood means that, importantly, in some sense, Catholic clergy have been vetted.

Whether one is a journalist or a movie-goer, this relieves a bit of the burden of credulity.

4) There's a tradition of Catholic exorcists in cinema.
It is possible that there's a very, very simple explanation for the Catholicism of our movie exorcists. Simple lack of creativity shouldn't be discounted as a real possibility, here. In Hollywood, the tradition of exorcist movies goes back to The Exorcist, in which the exorcist happened to be Catholic.

It's also the case that that movie borrowed a visual style from the Gothic horror genre, which extensively made use of Catholic imagery and visual references.

So maybe exorcists were imagined as Catholic because just exorcists had been imagined as Catholic.

But maybe there's a better, clearer answer? It seems that this is a fixed thing in the American imagination, where exorcists are almost always specifically Catholic exorcists. It's clearly not related to the reality of exorcism, or the experience of exorcisms, but to the cinematic and popular imagination. An answer, for that reason, would tell us little about exorcisms per se, but something that could be quite interesting about the relative cultural positions of Catholics and various Protestant groups, and about how Americans commonly imagine "religion," and what how they imagine an alternative, non-materialist reality would look, if it were possible.

Even in films with evangelical exorcists, such as The Last Exorcist, Catholic imagery is prominent. 

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Hard-to-sing redemption songs

It happens halfway through the hymn, between the second verse and the chorus. Walter, struggling with the key, looks at the white-haired congregants around him in the plain Protestant church, looks at the hymn book in his hands, and drops his voice a step to try and sing bass.

It's a familiar enough scene in congregational singing, though I don't think I've seen it in a film before. The hymn is pitched a little too high or a little too low -- I don't know the technical terms here -- and the singers struggle with high notes being too high or the low ones too low, and they switch, several times in the four or five verses, trying to get it right.

Trying to conform to the voices around them. Trying to find the right place in the community song.

This is also the theme of Small Town Murder Songs, a film which is ostensibly a moody, modern gothic crime story, but is really about a drama of the struggle of faith in the context of a community.

Walter, played by Peter Stromare with a very large mustache, is the aging police chief of a very small Ontario town. Most of his duties have been speeding tickets, illegal dumping, and escorting doublewide mobile home transports through town, but now he's faced with the first homicide of his career. A woman -- "not from around here" -- is found stripped and strangled between a highway and a lake. The news, and the subsequent faltering investigation, upsets the town, upsets the area's Mennonite communities, and upsets Walter's recently reformed life.

The crime narrative in this 2010, Ed Gass-Donnelly-directed film, which is showing, right now, in my local art house theater, is very linear. It's straightforward. The investigation and the plot act as the three, four, five verses of a  hard-to-sing hymn. The drama, the real heart of the story, is Walter trying to adjust himself to sing it right.

He changes course several times in the story. He attempts to transform himself, and to be transformed, and to fit with and be in right relationship with the community around him. Much of the tension of the film comes from the way the chief is always ill at ease, always not quite right with the people who are always in some real sense his people, and yet who won't, don't fully own him as a part of them. He's separated from his Old Order family, awkward with his church, distant from his one fellow officer, increasingly isolated from his wife, detached from the life of the town. Yet he desperately, desperately wants to fix it.

More accurately: he wants to be fixed. He experiences this alienation as his sin, and his sin as part of himself, his "nature." It's the part of himself and his vague, violent past from which he wants, desperately, desperately, to be saved.

The film does all this fantastically, making use of open, seemingly empty rural spaces, long silences, and a sound track of old hymns and folk music of the Alan Lomax field recordings style, re-created by Canadian band and choir Bruce Peninsula. The acting is excellent, with Peter Stormare and co-stars Martha Plimpton, Jill Hennessey and Aaron Poole each embodying, in different ways, supressed turmoil and surface tension.

In one of my favorite scenes, Walter is baptized. He stands arms crossed, fully dressed, chest deep in the baptismal tank. The minister holds Walter's nose, and dunks him. When he comes up his mustache is dripping and, for a moment, there's a look of rapture on his face. Then he starts laughing. And keeps laughing, in what's either relief and joy -- or hysteria.

This ambiguity is consistent throughout the film, and proves powerful.

Small Town Murder Songs not only gets religious details right -- a rare enough thing -- but also gets and portrays the sense of a struggle that's so often a part of being a part of a community, the struggle that's often a part of faith.

It is a crime story, and critics aren't wrong when they compare this to Fargo or Winter's Bone. At the level of viscera, though, this story is a story about wanting and struggling to sing along to a song everyone is singing, except you.

 

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