Starring the Devil: Hollywood's Uncertain Grasp of Evil

Richard Alleva

THE Devil has had his ups and downs in the last two millennia, but it's fallen to Hollywood to dream up the final diminishment of the Adversary, to turn him into a hoodlum, a psychopath, a cannibal, a tough. On movie screens nowadays he no longer menaces our souls, merely our bodies. And, as he does so, the Devil wears a leering mask, a grimace of twisted joy. He's now a mugger spieling like a stand-up comic even as he sticks a revolver in your face.

To be sure, there is a very old entertainment tradition of infernal fooling and it begins in the very theater that was dedicated to propagandizing religion: the medieval miracle play. When the Christian Devil makes his appearances there, he and his assistants caper and gibe. Here's Satan and two of his merrier aides, Beelzebub and Tulfric, as they triumph over their newest acquisitions, the body and soul of the suicide Pontius Pilate at the conclusion of the fifteenth-century Cornish play, The Death of Pontius Pilate:

SATAN
And thou, great cursed body,
To hell, with thy soul,
Shalt thou be dragged by us;
Thy song shall be "Woe is me!"

BEELZEBUB
Now everyone lend a hand
To drag him in this same boat.
And thou, Tulfric, a plain-chant
Begin to sing to us.

TULFRIC
Yah, kiss my rear!
for its end is out
Very long behind me.
Beelzebub and Satan,
You sing a great drone bass,
And I will sing a fine treble.

Considering that the authors, actors, and spectators of miracle plays believed quite literally in a horned devil who could torture sinners with thumbscrews and fire, whence the merriment? A.C. Cawley, editor of J.M. Dent's edition of miracle plays, suggests "that the merriment of the spectators probably had an uncomfortable edge to it." Is it also possible that such foolery somehow mitigated the terror that the Devil could inspire? Or was there a perception shared, however inchoately, by performers and audiences alike that Satan and his minions, being self-divorced from God and shut out from bliss, are therefore infernal dunces and, despite their meddlesome powers, essentially comic?

Curiously, it is just when playwrights move away from overtly religious subjects during the Renaissance that they begin treating the Devil more somberly, with scant buffoonery, indeed with an awe that borders on personal terror. But this is accomplished by denying him direct access to the stage. In the plays of the great Elizabethan and Jacobean poet-playwrights the Devil is no longer an external adversary, a hornÈd grotesque. (He does appear, of course, in Dr. Faustus but is quite dignified, even silky.) Satan has slipped under human skin and turns his human host into an occupied country. When the witches see the still virtuous Macbeth approaching at the beginning of the tragedy, they simply state, "Macbeth doth come." But, when they greet the murderer's appearance in act 3, they chant, "By the pricking of my thumbs / Something wicked this way comes." Infernal pots calling an infernal kettle black? No. The witches are right to greet the Scottish tyrant with such approving calumny for, by this time, he is more formidably evil than they are; he is a host of Satan while they are merely agents.

Many of the great villain-heroes of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama—Beatrice and DeFlores in The Changeling, Iago in Othello, Vendice in The Revenger's Tragedy, Vittoria in The White Devil—are like Macbeth: they begin as merely fallible human beings and end as human vessels of devilish evil. I do not say they are possessed, for that would imply that a helpless and innocent human being's body had been commandeered by Satan. Rather, the heroes of these tragedies have, of their own free wills, become collaborators with the Devil, taking him into their hearts as a temporary boarder before they themselves become permanent residents in his mansion.

Not only theologically but dramatically, the Devil thrived in his relationships with the heroic evildoers. His agents display such dignity on the job! Macbeth first walks on stage as a conscientious and courageous general, and his martial vigor continues to imbue him with seriousness even when (or especially when?) he gives himself over to Satan. Iago begins as a rough-hewn soldier, and perhaps what's most frightening about him is the way he gives satanic enterprise the face of bonhomie and take-it-or-leave-it honesty. In Webster's The White Devil, Vittoria's courage and physical beauty lend force to her malevolence, while DeFlores (of The Changeling by Middleton and Rowley), an ugly bravo, achieves stature through his steadfast love for Beatrice.

In short, the Elizabethan-Jacobean playwrights did handsomely by the Devil. At their hands, he capers and snarls no longer. They give evil compelling, nonfarcical human shape. And it is human shape, paradoxically, that makes satanic doings all the more devilish.

But after every artistic flowering comes decadence. Late in the Jacobean era Satan more and more extrudes his grinning medieval countenance from the human face. The villains begin to caper again. By the time of Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts in 1625, evil has become a matter of wisecracks, lowering frowns, and thunderous threats; villains don't provoke shudders but only boos and hisses. When both the playwrights and the audiences lose their conviction of damnation, the Devil's work on stage comes to seem merely facetious.

The nineteenth century, the era of naturalism, banishes pure evil from the serious drama into melodrama, where it becomes entirely facetious. And comforting. The melodramatic villain was easily recognized in his black frock coat, his handsome, swarthy countenance, and black mustache. To spot evil so quickly gives comfort just as it is reassuring to know that a malignant disease can be classified and diagnosed. The melodramatic villain is a descendant of the stage devil, but he is a clown who has no kingdom.

In the twentieth century the melodramatic villain migrated to the movies. He has lived there for a hundred years, ever since filmmakers began to adapt or imitate stage melodrama in the same way that they carried over the hijinks of vaudeville and the English music hall into screen comedy. The mustachioed oppressor of widows and maidens was essentially the same as his stage counterpart, but more physically dexterous. If, on stage, he could only issue threats and indulge in limited fisticuffs and swordplay, the screen's greater capacity for stunt work and shifting locations allowed the villain to threaten feminine virtue and battle heroes on castle walls, on railroad tracks, on top of boxcars, near the edge of cliffs, on rafts racing downstream.

But if evil became more and more violent at the movies, it also became even more comforting than it was in stage melodrama. For if villains fought more violently, they were also beaten more violently. They were biffed on the jaw, thrown off saloon balconies and cliffs, shot repeatedly in the stomach, mauled by loyal German shepherds, sometimes even trounced by the more athletic heroines. What a comedown for the theatrical Satan! On the medieval stage, though he may have provoked laughs and catcalls, he ultimately triumphed in his immediate designs since he was always fed the souls of sinners. Even in the nineteenth-century melodramas he was usually left upright though defeated and in handcuffs. But now, on screen, his poor body got hurled about like a rag doll.

As for the serious cinema of Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, etc., it simply continued in the humanistic tradition of modern serious theater (Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, etc.) by ascribing evil to social, psychological, or political causes—for example, nationalism, oedipal fixations, or (in the Soviet cinema of Eisenstein and Pudovkin) capitalism. Nothing that a good social engineer couldn't fix. This is even more comforting than the blow to the melodramatic villain's jaw.

Of course, in film, as in theater and the novel, there have been characters whose evil is neither a matter of melodramatic convention nor sociological maladjustment and who really do seem to give off a whiff of brimstone. Most readers can recall their own favorites but at the top of my list is the cast-off mistress played by Maria Casares in Jean Cocteau and Robert Bresson's Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, who calmly destroys an innocent girl as part of a plan to punish a lover who jilted her; and Robert Mitchum's methodical rapist, Max Cady, in the first version of Cape Fear. These villains get under your skin because their evil seems to be at the roots of their natures and, therefore, is ultimately unfathomable. You can neither laugh them off (as you can a melodramatic villain) nor explain them rationally (as you can a villain of secular-humanistic cinema). Though not possessing the magnitude of a Shakespeare creation, these characters at least would have been recognized by the bard. Their malevolence is timeless and irreducible.

But in the past two decades something new has happened to the portrayal of evil in commercial American movies. Something new and rather unsavory.

Today's filmmakers, the best and worst of them, grew up in the sixties watching the debut films of the French New Wave and the climactic works of veteran directors such as Antonioni, Fellini, Kubrick, and Kurosawa. These enamored young viewers embraced the idea of cinema as the most important art form of the twentieth century, the only major artistic medium to belong exclusively to the twentieth century. They knew film could explore human nature with a subtlety and lyricism that could equal the best passages in great novels, poems, music, and painting. And, naturally, they dreamed of attaining such subtlety and lyricism in the movies that they longed to make.

Then came the devolution. By the early eighties, these same young cinÈastes found themselves hustling to raise money from movie studios and other backers who couldn't care less about poetical subtleties and lyrical flights, whose only concern was to make zillions of dollars, and who knew—since videos and computer games threatened to keep people home—that it would take extravaganzas of some sort to get people out to the multiplexes. The extravaganzas of the fifties and early sixties were spectacles such as Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur, and El Cid—movies that would each cost $200 million if made today. The only extravaganzas now possible are those that take advantage of the wonder-technology that can make bullet wounds and firepower and explosions and eviscerations and decapitations and corpses look very real, yet which cost relatively little (30 million bucks per film instead of 200 million). And so, instead of the grandeur of Rome and the thunder of thousands of extras, we get geysers of blood and the cascade of dead bodies. We get serial killers recast as demons and demons portrayed as serial killers. We get latter-day Grand Guignol. (Non-Grand Guignol spectacles, Gandhi and Reds, etc., still occasionally get made but are financially risky and therefore infrequent.)

And making these gruesome films are the formerly young, formerly ambitious cineastes who can't allow themselves to believe they have sunk so low. Thus they are giving us a Grand Guignol laced with hints of profundity, that pretends to provoke thought in the viewers rather than merely thrill them. In short, these directors are freighting popular entertainment with cargo it cannot carry. They are producing shockers with pretensions instead of genuinely chilling portrayals of evil. One is tempted to call this type of filmmaking Megamalevolence. The pioneering movies of this genre were The Exorcist and Halloween.

Les Keyser, in Hollywood in the Seventies, describes the spectacle of The Exorcist, written by William Peter Blatty and directed by William Friedkin: "Rooms shake, heads turn full circle on bodies, wounds fester, vomit spews forth in bilious clouds besmirching a saintly priest, a possessed adolescent girl masturbates bloodily on a crucifix as she barks blasphemies and obscenities, and hoary demons freeze the soul." I suppose these sights could be defended as the high-tech equivalent of those moments in medieval miracle plays when the members of the cooking and innkeeping guilds of Chester, England, rushed in and out of the jaws of hellmouth and clashed pots and kettles while acting The Harrowing of Hell. Except for one thing: the Chester guilds knew what the Devil wanted: to get us. Their medieval Satan has what veteran Hollywood scriptwriters have always demanded: clear motivation. But what is William Peter Blatty's Satan after? To damn the little girl? How? While she's possessed, she's not responsible for what she does and therefore cannot sin. Is Satan's motive to bring about a confrontation with the exorcist played by Max von Sydow? Then why bring him all the way from his archeological job in Iraq to minister to the girl in Washington, D.C.? Was the Devil hoping to wear the old priest down with jet lag? And why, in the middle of the movie, does the Devil get the girl to chuck a bibulous British family friend out of her bedroom window? Since when does the Adversary polish off old sinners instead of letting them live to sin again?

Ken Russell, himself not the most tasteful of directors, spotted the central dramatic fallacy of The Exorcist right away. If the Devil wants to win people over, Russell pointed out, he presents himself in an attractive light. Surely he wouldn't go in for all this head revolving and pea-soup expectoration? (By contrast, the exquisite children in any version of The Turn of the Screw could be taken as believable cases of possession.) Perhaps the fairest comment came from the New Republic's film critic, Stanley Kauffmann: "The Exorcist makes no sense, [but] if you want to be shaken, it will scare the hell out of you." Exactly. And it does that by capitalizing on the aura of evil and the aura of sanctity. This movie is like an atheist who attends Mass because he gets high on the aroma of incense. It turns the Devil into nothing more than a murderer with supernatural powers.

The reverse happens in John Carpenter's Halloween: a murder is invested with an aura of the supernatural. Here, a serial killer goes around town on the evening of October 31 dispatching a lot of teenagers before he himself is shot to death by his own psychiatrist. But is he shot to death? The rescued heroine looks out of a window at the patch of lawn where the corpse fell and... gasp! it's not there!! The End. Halliwell's Film Guide very sensibly opines: "Very well done if you like that kind of thing, though the final suggestion of the supernatural is rather baffling." Yet it is precisely that "baffling" touch that indicates what Hollywood would soon be doing in its depiction of evil and horror: inflating and mystifying.

Inflation. Ever since the arrival of television, Hollywood has been inflating everything: bigger screens, louder sound, the special effects more grandiose, the bloodletting oceanic, the gunfire digitally layered. This didn't automatically ruin everything. Monster movies (such as the Alien or Terminator series) gain from having more formidable monsters, and Coppola did give the gangster movie sweep and new vigor by making the Godfather films long and complicated. But something goes wrong in the depiction of sheer evil when filmmakers try to make a spectacle of evil. Trying to make the invisible visible by making what's visible bigger leads to....

Mystification. As noted, filmmakers, desiring to pump up the significance of their movies, now give basically ordinary villains an aura of supernatural evil.

The best example of Megamalevolence wrecking a movie is the Martin Scorsese remake of Cape Fear. As I've said, the portrait of a vengeful rapist by Robert Mitchum in the 1962 version is masterly, and part of its success comes from the way Mitchum makes Cady "an utterly self-enclosed personality, meanly taunting and self-satisfied" (as I wrote in the December 20, 1991 issue of Commonweal). But the obsessive Scorsese turns the obsessive Max Cady (as played by Robert De Niro) into the true hero of the story, making him not only a physical superman but a first-rate legal scholar, a reader of Henry Miller, a student of psychology, and, yes, a religious mystic. To quote myself again, "De Niro turns Cady into a character out of Flannery O'Connor: full of fire and brimstone and a murderous desire to fulfill the will of an utterly vengeful, loveless, pitiless God." By contrast, the family members this psychotic is threatening with rape or death seem pusillanimous and stupid—the father criminally irresponsible, the mother spiteful, the daughter easily seducible. God's will, of course, turns out finally to be against Cady, and the Deity summons a hurricane to defeat the criminal. But what kind of movie is it in which only a rapist-murderer has stature, and that elevates that monster only because he is an obsessive? As Terrence Rafferty wrote in his superb New Yorker review, "The veneer of moral seriousness and psychological complexity that Scorsese brings to the enterprise feels like an attempt to convince himself that he's not doing what he's doing."

Sometimes Megamalevolence produces a good enough film. The Silence of the Lambs—acclaimed at its release as an instant classic and going on to win the 1991 Oscar as Best Picture—is certainly effective and sometimes admirable. Its heroine, the FBI agent Clarice Starling, is a strong avatar of goodness pitted against the evil of the serial killer nicknamed "Buffalo Bill," and if the movie focused only on Clarice's hunt for the murderer, The Silence would be nothing more or less than an effective police melodrama. But the real heart of the movie is the relationship of Clarice and Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the imprisoned cannibal-genius with whom Clarice strangely bonds in order to benefit from his insights into the criminal mind. Her interviews with him, and his subsequent escape from his asylum, provide the scenes that everyone remembers, while the actual hunt for Buffalo Bill recedes in importance. As I wrote in Commonweal on May 5, 1991, "There's no profound psychological revelation in the dialogue, but the staging, with Lecter's reflected face (on the glass barrier of his asylum cell) superimposed on Starling's, makes you feel that there hasn't been such a diabolical/human confrontation since Mephisto strolled into Faust's study."

But, as I also noted, "This evil Houdini, this malefic Punch, is launched into a story that is supposed to be as grimly serious and as compellingly veristic as an old Dragnet episode....Who cares about the original criminal Starling was supposed to catch now that Lecter is loose? Dragnet has turned into Alien or Predator or The Exorcist."

The Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins's virtuoso performance won him the American acclaim and box-office success that had eluded him up to then. Hopkins/Lecter's appeal to women was particularly amazing. When he went on the Tonight show to publicize the movie and playfully snapped his teeth at the audience, the female shrieks of delight may have startled Hopkins himself. "Hannibal the Cannibal" as dreamboat? Diabolic evil made sexy?

Serial killers don't usually make good film critics but, in connection with The Silence of the Lambs, there may be an exception. The British murderer Dennis Nilsen viewed The Silence in prison and confessed he was appalled by what he saw. Not, of course, by the carnage (Nilsen had left the heads of his victims boiling on his stove while he was out walking his dog Bleep), but by the film's suggestion that Lecter was exhilarated by his own evil. When asked how he felt when the police finally came calling, Nilsen said he felt relieved, as if he had been released from a spell. This wasn't, I think, disingenuousness on Nilsen's part, for he had already been sentenced to life imprisonment with no hope of parole. In its glimpse of a murderer in the grip of compulsion, Nilsen's statement exposes the pop-Mephistophelean hijinks of The Silence of the Lambs, Cape Fear, The Shining, the Halloween series, The Exorcist, and many other movies for what they are.

European films can still occasionally portray evil without such hijinks and, when they do, the effect can be startling. Such was the case with the Dutch/French movie The Vanishing, released in 1988. Written by Tim Krabbe and directed by George Sluizer, this minor masterpiece locates evil in the all-too-human hunger for knowledge. A seemingly ordinary Frenchman, a college chemistry instructor, becomes obsessed with finding out exactly how much evil he is capable of. As if daring himself, he devises a plan for abducting young women, and then executes his scheme by snatching Saskia, the lover of a young Dutch journalist. But where has he taken her and what has he done with her? Naturally, the journalist is burning to know because, at first, he simply wants his sweetheart back. But after three years of hunting he begins to realize that if he were faced with the choice between getting Saskia back without knowing what had happened to her in the interval and never getting Saskia back but learning exactly what had happened to her, he would take the latter option. The need to know has outlasted his capacity for love. Recognizing a fellow obsessive, the abductor reveals himself to the journalist, and the two men embark upon a trip together that has a bloodcurdling conclusion but which leaves both men completely satisfied as to how far each will go in the pursuit of dreadful knowledge. If ever there was a movie that explains why a prohibition on eating from the tree of knowledge was God's first test of humankind, this is it. It is the greatest movie about original sin ever made and the finest cinematic exploration of the devil lurking inside the human heart.

What Krabbe and Sluizer know, and what only a handful of other filmmakers have known, is that the face of evil is not a laughing one, nor is it witty or expressive of demonic brilliance or self-satisfaction (though of course evil people may be, at times, witty or brilliant or self-satisfied). The grip of evil hurts; it hurts both the victims of evil and the perpetrators.

When Dante and his guide, Virgil, reach the last ring of the circles of hell, the Italian poet at last beholds Lucifer. He is devouring sinners. He has three faces and six eyes. And all six eyes are weeping.

Visit Richard Alleva as Image Artist of the Month for November '99

Issue #13 • Spring 1996