Monthly Archives: September 2019

  • Hail Satan?

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Penny Lane (2019)

    The Satanic Temple (TST) started life in America in 2013 with a handful of founder members.  By the time Penny Lane was making this documentary about the movement and its development, TST had grown to around 50,000 people.  While Hail Satan? indicates the inception date and current membership numbers, it’s frustrating Lane doesn’t supply more facts and figures.  Perhaps TST is now so high-profile in the US she thinks them unnecessary.   Armed with a good supply of scandalised, worrying but laughable representatives of the Religious Right and well aware of how easily entertaining her material is, perhaps she wants to avoid anything that might interrupt the flow.  Though, as Ava DuVernay showed in another recent documentary, 13th, it doesn’t take long to put key statistics on the screen.

    Whatever Lane’s reasons, the result is lack of clarity about TST’s geographic scope and exactly when certain events are taking place.  She makes clear that, and how, the Temple’s political activism has expanded in the few years since it began.  She gives little attention to how much this was influenced by, or whether membership rose exponentially in the light of, Trump’s election.  An interview with Lane used as the BFI programme note, in combination with the Wikipedia entry for The Satanic Temple, filled in some of the gaps:  I’ve had to draw on these sources to piece things together for this account of Hail Satan?

    As with 13th, a particular clause of the US Constitution is central to Lane’s film.  In this case, it’s the First Amendment[1].  As the question mark in the title suggests, TST doesn’t believe in Satan as a supernatural entity; nor, for that matter, does the Church of Satan (CoS), founded in California in the mid-1960s, from which TST definitely distinguishes itself.  Although they make use of traditional Satanic iconography and rituals, both constituencies are largely atheistic, or non-theistic.  They view Satan, rather, as the archetypal adversary to the powers-that- be.  TST soon grew however, to espouse a more political programme than CoS.   It was created in reaction to what its co-founders, Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry, saw as the theocratic tendencies of the George W Bush administration.  Although its first initiatives seemed jokey, it always positioned itself as a faith-based organisation that, in Jarry’s words, ‘met all the Bush administration’s criteria for receiving funds, but was repugnant to them’.  The Temple has taken, and continues to take, a stand against the increasingly evident convergence of politically right-wing and fundamentalist Christian agendas.

    According to Wikipedia, TST has chapters in 13 US states and Canada.  The film’s settings are entirely North American, except for one brief, puzzling detour to London.  This could be London, Ontario (the screen indicates just ‘London’) but the young man interviewed in the group there has an English accent.  Confusing as his presence in the narrative is, what he says touches on a central issue.  He explains that he was born and raised a Muslim, became an atheist, then decided that atheism ‘wasn’t enough’.  His remark anticipates what lawyer Stu De Haan, the most seemingly honest TST spokesperson among Lane’s talking heads, says when she asks him why the movement doesn’t present itself as non-religious.

    De Haan replies that he’s reluctant to define himself in terms of something he’s not.  He acknowledges too that, in order to claim the religious equality rights enshrined in the First Amendment, TST has to be a religion.  Its official branding has certainly proved effective in securing its financial position.  In April 2019 (three months after Lane’s film premiered at Sundance), TST ‘officially received tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service, being classified as a “church or a convention or association of churches”’ (Wikipedia).  Whether TST has risen above defining itself in terms of something it’s not, is more arguable.

    Controversies covered in the film revolve largely around the installation of Ten Commandments monuments.  In 2012, one was erected in the grounds of the Oklahoma State Capitol.  In 2015, TST campaigned successfully for its removal on secularist grounds, invoking a provision of the Oklahoma Constitution prohibiting the use of state resources to promote particular religious views.  According to Lane’s narrative, this wasn’t, however, the Temple’s original plan.  They first sought to erect their own Satanist monument in the form of a statue of the demon lord Baphomet.  After Oklahoma, the Ten Commandments were installed in Arkansas State Capitol grounds, with Republican State Senator Jason Rapert a prime mover in the project.  In the climax to Hail Satan?, TST’s Baphomet statue is unveiled in close proximity to the Arkansas Commandments, albeit for a very temporary stay.

    It’s understandable that TST has opted for headline-grabbing tactics to raise public awareness of its mission, and that Lane gives much attention to Baphomet, with its strong visual impact.  (It’s also amusing to learn the sculptor of the angel-winged, goat-headed demon based its torso on Iggy Pop’s.)  But the focus on Jason Rapert reflects one of the film’s most striking features:  the minimal disparagement by TST of religions other than Christianity.  Beyond the evidence of a clip from the Cecil B DeMille movie, there’s no suggestion that the Ten Commandments derive from Jewish scripture – just as there’s virtually no acknowledgement that Satan is a figure in the Abrahamic religions generally.  TST member Mason Hargett, having declared himself an atheist, goes on to say he’d like to see emblems of many different faiths erected in public places.  At first, I wondered if Hargett was a loose cannon within the movement.  The picture that Lane proceeds to build up gives the impression that he’s not.

    In order to major on the confrontation between TST and the Religious Right, Hail Satan? largely skates over other secularist casts of mind.  A brief clip of a TV discussion programme shows David Silverman, then president of the American Atheists association, inveighing against conventional religious objections to the Temple.  It would have been helpful to hear from other practising non-theists, though:  it’s hard to believe they’re all comfortable with an outfit whose modus operandi depends on the continuing prominence of organised religion and takes issue with only the Christian version of it.

    When the Arkansas Ten Commandments was first installed, it lasted no more than a day:  a man called Michael Tate Reed rammed his car into the monument (live-streaming what he was doing).   Lane skimps on information about Reed in a different, more surprising way.  The film mentions that he claimed to be a theist but disagreed with the public promotion of particular religious beliefs that the monument represented.  It doesn’t mention that he’s been a serial destroyer of monuments of this kind and that, ‘According to … mental evaluation by state doctors, Reed has regularly acted out [sic] at the direction of various voices that he has believed to be divine, among them God, angels, saints and spirits, although some of the voices came from demons and false prophets’ (Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 1 June 2018).

    Two Christian women interviewed in Arkansas have sharply differing views of what The Satanic Temple is up to.  The first woman refers disapprovingly to its attempts to preserve the separation of church and state – a perfectly respectable objective and not a battle that TST is fighting alone (although Lane doesn’t allude to this).  The Arkansas Ten Commandments monument ‘was challenged by the ACLU as being a violation of clauses in both the Federal and State constitutions prohibiting the government from favoring any religion’ (Wikipedia).  The second woman interviewed says, ‘They’re just doing it to annoy’.  Her dismissive tone does no justice to the energy and diligence with which TST members promote their cause but you see why she thinks what she does:  the particular imagery of their initiatives is calculated to offend Christian sensibilities.  In spite of which, the press and TV report excerpts included in Hail Satan? suggest that plenty of Americans, rather than being alarmed by the Temple, persist in seeing its members as a bunch of pesky anarchic hoaxers.

    The documentary is at its most instructive in describing the historical context of TST’s struggle against a Christian monopoly.  It seems the Ten Commandments installations of today have their origins in political and commercial phenomena of the 1950s.   The affirmation of national Christian values in public places assumed a new urgency in that fearfully anti-Communist era.  Cecil B DeMille promoted his 1958 movie by placing Ten Commandment monuments in American cities as a publicity stunt.  An epidemic of anti-Satanic hysteria in the last years of last century – which railed against, inter alia, Harry Potter and Dungeons & Dragons – has also made and left its mark.

    Hail Satan? does well to show too how TST, in spite of its subversive cachet, is, like any organisation, having to deal with dissidents within its own ranks – thereby risking accusations of itself suppressing freedom of expression.  This has led to the expulsion from the movement of Goth motormouth Jex Blackmore – a main contributor to the performance art side of TST activities.  On the evidence of the film, Blackmore’s creative output is noisy, boring and sometimes bizarrely confused.  At an anti-anti-abortion event, adults wearing nappies and foetal masks are led round on chains.   Blackmore sees this as a vivid illustration of the Pro-Life campaign’s fetishisation of the unborn child.  In effect, the sight of enchained foetuses is ambiguous, to say the least.  Blackmore’s expulsion, however, is the result of a performance rant that advocated various aggressive action, including killing the President.  TST is fundamentally opposed to violence, as reflected in its codification of seven basic tenets, which blend humanism and humanitarianism[2].

    In the end, though, you have to wonder how fairly Penny Lane represents the Temple of Satan.  In her interview with David Morrison reproduced in the BFI note, she says she sympathises with the views its members hold and the things they do:  ‘I felt like here’s a religion that I really believe in,’ she says.  Lane is taking ‘religion’ to mean ‘an interest, a belief, or an activity that is very important to a person or group’ (Merriam-Webster) rather than ‘the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods’ (OED).   Fair enough, except that, in doing so, she ignores the question of what ‘religion’ means in the context of the First Amendment.  After all, it’s the ‘prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]’ part of the clause that TST have homed in on, rather than the broader freedom of speech part.

    If Lane doesn’t convey the political seriousness of TST, perhaps Lucien Greaves is complicit in this.  Greaves, who looks to be in his forties, is by some way the most interesting character in the story told here.  His identity and appearance encourage the idea that he’s the leader of a crazed insurgency – but as if to make fun of the idea.  His pseudonym (not, he says, his only one) is a few letters away from Lucifer Graves.  His somehow damaged right eye emblematises a sinister occultist.  But he talks quietly, reasonably and often humorously.  A quick look online at some of Greaves’s pronouncements, including his statement on the (for him) vexed question of religious organisation tax exemption for TST (quoted on Wikipedia) confirm his high intelligence.  At the same time, you get the sense that all-publicity’s-good-publicity thinking led him to go along with Lane’s entertaining but shallow approach, signalled by  Brian McOmber’s jocose music, which opens and closes Hail Satan?  Neither Lane nor Greaves (in the film, at least) is prepared to wrestle with the irony that TST, for all its resourceful opposition to Christianity, is parasitic on it.

    28 August 2019

    [1] ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievance’

    [2] In January 2016, the online publication Progressive Secular Humanist asserted that, as moral statements, these tenets compared favourably with the Ten Commandments.  It’s worth adding that, as noted by Stephen Brown in his perceptive Church Times review of Hail Satan? (22 August 2019), ‘The organisation’s Seven Tenets comply closely with what many a liberal Christian would subscribe to: compassion, justice, respect, etc’.

  • Pain and Glory

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Dolor y gloria

    Pedro Almodóvar (2019)

    Pain and Glory is the best film of the year so far and Almodóvar’s best film in many years, his finest work since Talk to Her (2002).   After a series of exciting pictures during the first two decades of his career, his more recent work has, without losing its way, lost its singular momentum.  Declining energy, a manifestation of his last movie Julieta (2016), has become the central theme of this new one and the effect is transformative.  Pain and Glory probes the psychosomatics of the solitude and creative stasis of the protagonist Salvador Mallo, an internationally famous Spanish film director.  As if that wasn’t autobiographical enough, Salvador (Antonio Banderas) made his name in the 1980s, also the heyday of his social and love life in Madrid.  He still lives there but alone now, except for his aches and pains, his medication and memories.

    In Pain and Glory‘s present, Salvador is in no position to create new work but ‘Sabor’ (‘Flavour’), a movie he made thirty years ago, has been re-mastered and is about to be re-released.  Salvador pays a call on Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia), ‘Sabor’’s lead actor.  The pair fell out at the time of the film’s original release, when Salvador publicly criticised Alberto’s interpretation of the main character, and they haven’t spoken since.  The meeting results in a rapprochement of sorts but doesn’t exactly clear the air:  a persisting wariness between the men hangs heavier in it than the fumes of the heroin Alberto smokes and that Salvador now takes up.  It makes a change from the cocktail of other drugs required for his back pain, migraines and depression.

    The story’s past tense comprises Salvador’s flashbacks, more or less obviously triggered by incidents in the present, to his disadvantaged childhood in rural Valencia and Catholic schooling.  As a boy (Asier Flores), Salvador moved with his parents (Penélope Cruz and Raúl Arévalo) to a colony of cave dwellings. His feckless, ex-soldier father couldn’t afford anything else.  His resourceful mother Jacinta is determined to make a home of the place.  She arranges for her precociously bright young son to teach Eduardo (César Vicente), an illiterate young labourer, to read and write.  In exchange, Eduardo will decorate and carpenter the cave space.

    Salvador loses his nerve and fails to turn up for a Q&A at a screening of ‘Sabor’.  The event’s anxious host (Julián López) makes phone contact and Salvador, at home with Alberto at his side, hears the film audience’s enthusiastic applause. A remote Q&A gets underway but soon leads to a renewed outbreak of hostilities between Salvador and Alberto:  the director reckons the actor’s performance has improved with the passage of time but is still more expansive on what he thought was wrong with it in the first place.  This isn’t the end of their renewed contact, however.  Alberto discovers ‘Addiction’, a piece written by Salvador some time ago, describing his life in 1980s Madrid and passionate affair with a young man who was a heroin addict.  Alberto wants to perform ‘Addiction’ as a stage monologue.  Salvador, offering the piece as a kind of olive branch, agrees.

    Up to this point, Pain and Glory is a gracefully melancholy, dramatically modest film.  It’s suddenly elevated by a typical Almodóvar device:  a chance event that is melodramatically improbable but which, within a few screen minutes, feels emotionally inevitable and compels belief.  When Alberto performs ‘Addiction’, the theatre audience includes the real-life model for the young addict.  This is Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), who now lives in Argentina but happens to be in Madrid on family business.  He also happens to see the play’s poster, bearing Salvador’s name, and buys a ticket.  After the performance, he goes to Alberto’s dressing room and explains who he is.

    A couple of phone calls later, Federico is in Salvador’s apartment.  What follows – the meeting culminates in an ardent kiss but goes no further physically:  Federico doesn’t stay the night and takes his leave – is as extraordinarily tender as the scenes between the two young men in the last act of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight but more verbal on both sides of the conversation, and funnier.  Federico, the father of two sons, is divorcing his first wife but has a new female partner.   When he adds that the affair with Salvador was his last with a man, Salvador replies, ‘I’m not sure how to take that’.  They both laugh before Federico assures Salvador he should take it as a compliment.

    Beautifully played by Antonio Banderas and Leonardo Sbaraglia, this exchange is – for Salvador, as for the film as a whole – a shot in the arm, although that injective phrase is hardly appropriate.  The reappearance of Federico, brief as it is, and the discovery that he overcame his addiction, are revitalising enough for Salvador to seek medical help for his own increasing dependency, and for the frightening choking bouts to which he’s increasingly prone.  The prospect of his own treatment seems to spark memories from Salvador’s more recent past and the last days of his elderly widowed mother (Julieta Serrano), who tells him, affectionately but firmly, that he’s not been a good son.  Jacinta stays with him in Madrid before being hospitalised there. Salvador wants to make amends for having (as she sees it) abandoned her years before but he fails again.  His mother dies in Madrid before he can take her back to the country, where she wanted her life to end.

    Another amazing coincidence is the trigger for Salvador’s remembrance of a pivotal incident in the growth of his sexual awareness, and for Almodóvar’s creation of another masterly sequence.  At an art exhibition, Salvador sees a portrait of a young boy.  He recognises the boy as himself and the work as that of Eduardo, who painted pictures as well as walls.  He recalls the day when Eduardo tiled the kitchen area of the cave house, breaking off to make the sketch for the portrait of Salvador, as the boy sat reading a book, in blazing sun.  Jacinta was out at work and her husband, as usual, drinking in a bar.  After finishing the tiles, Eduardo says he needs a wash while Salvador, suffering from the heat, lies down on his bed.  As he drifts in and out of consciousness, he’s aware of Eduardo’s ablutions a few feet away.  The young man, who has stripped, calls to Salvador to bring him a towel.  The boy does so, finds himself facing the naked Eduardo, and faints.

    From start to finish, the film’s colouring is exhilarating.  The opening credits appear against a changing background of marbled papers, each differently patterned and animated.  The imaginatively co-ordinated tones of the characters’ clothes are a recurring delight.  The art work on the walls of Salvador’s apartment (if Wikipedia is right, this is Almodóvar’s actual home) inevitably takes the eye but, along the bookshelves, even some of the book spines are picked out to vivid effect.  The visual achievement of the key episode involving Eduardo is more subtly powerful.  There’s a shot of Salvador, as he sits reading, in which José Luis Alcaine magically seems to show the sun penetrating his hair.  As he lies on his side drowsing, Salvador’s left cheek is flushed.  How much this is down to the heat and how much to the image of Eduardo of which he’s intermittently conscious is hard to tell.

    Federico insists he’ll hold Salvador to his promise to visit him and his family in Buenos Aires, they exchange contact details but you don’t feel another meeting is likely to happen.  The sense that, for Salvador, this would be too good to be true chimes with a moment later in the film.   Salvador buys Edoardo’s portrait of him and finds inscribed on the back a letter from the artist, thanking Salvador for teaching him to read and write, explaining that he now works as a store assistant.  (It seems Eduardo sent the painting and letter to Salvador’s home after the boy had gone to boarding school but Jacinta got rid of it.)  When his assistant Mercedes (Nora Navas) says that he could, if he tried, track Eduardo down, Salvador dismisses the idea as far-fetched – although, he says, searching for and finding Eduardo would make a good script.  Mercedes’s suggestion will resonate with anyone who feels they have emotionally unfinished business in their past that they’d love the chance belatedly to sort out, impossible as that may now be.  Salvador’s response confirms a central idea of the story:  Almodóvar is in effect acknowledging that improbable things can be made to happen in fiction that can’t happen in fact.  Yet an artist of fiction can make them true, as Salvador’s reunion with Federico proves.

    Salvador isn’t suffering from the oesophageal cancer that he and Mercedes fear:  the choking is caused by a benign growth that is surgically removed.  He gets a new artistic lease of life too.  In the last scene of the film, the child Salvador and his mother, en route to the neighbourhood of cave houses where they’re to meet Salvador’s father, have to sleep on the floor of a railway station while the village they’re passing through holds a festival.  The boy is enchanted by the fireworks in the night sky; his mother is worried and upset.  Almodóvar pulls back to reveal a sound engineer; then a camera; then, behind the camera, Salvador directing.  There’s nothing ‘meta’ or anti-climactic about this.  A conclusive illustration that Pain and Glory is all about creating cinema, it’s a perfect ending.

    As usual in Almodóvar, the casting and acting are close to impeccable.  Having Antonio Banderas incarnate his alter ego could be said to amount to wishful thinking on the writer-director’s part but this isn’t enough of a literal autobiography for the physical dissimilarity to matter, let alone detract from the film.   Besides, the actor’s own health problems of recent years resonate in his playing the ailing Salvador.  Banderas has always been a good-natured screen presence.  After highly successful work in early Almodóvar, this has tended to limit the range of roles in which he’s been effective:  he has seemed rather lightweight for serious drama.  Almodóvar exploited his mildness interestingly in The Skin I Live In (2011) but Banderas’s work in Pain and Glory has a new depth.  He expresses regret and vulnerability with economy and penetration.  In the outstanding scene with Leonardo Sbaraglia, Banderas reveals Salvador’s enduring affection for the man who, decades ago, inspired such passion in him.  It’s not too fanciful to think that, in conveying this affection, he’s drawing on his own fond gratitude towards Almodóvar, to whom he owes so much professionally.

    As the child Salvador, Asier Flores is a fine blend of stubbornness and receptivity to new experience.  César Vicente captures Eduardo’s ingenuousness very naturally.  Her star beauty makes it easy to underestimate Penélope Cruz’s acting, whose characterisation of Salvador’s mother Jacinta is sharply convincing.  It links well with octogenarian Julieta Serrano’s eloquent version of the mother – as a responsible, strong-willed woman, rightly irked by her son’s assumption that, because she’s not highly educated, she’s therefore imperceptive.   Except for Jacinta and the exasperated but loyal Mercedes, female characters aren’t as prominent as they’ve traditionally been in Almodóvar’s cinema, a feature of Pain and Glory both mitigated and emphasised by the fleeting appearance of Cecilia Roth, the lead in All About My Mother (1999), as the acquaintance who puts Salvador in touch with Alberto Crespo.

    Asier Etxeandia is an unusually versatile actor.  In each of the three roles I’ve seen him play – Alberto here, the gynaecologist in Ma Ma (2015) and the fashion designer in the daft but enjoyable Spanish TV series Velvet available on Netflix – he is remarkably transformed.   The change from one part to the next goes beyond obvious character differences, clothes and hairstyle:  Etxeandia becomes an entirely new creation.  In Pain and Glory, it’s these protean gifts that sustain interest in an amusing but shallowly conceived part.  Almodóvar jettisons the smouldering, thin-skinned Alberto once he’s served his plot purpose and he leaves no emotional residue – unlike Federico.  In terms of his function in the story, Salvador’s wiry, hangdog father seems to be the latest paternal nonentity in the Almodóvar oeuvre but Raúl Arévalo makes such a strong impression during his brief time on screen that you don’t forget him either.

    Salvador reflects on his past; the audience recalls the preoccupations of, and the faces from, other Almodóvar pictures.  This dual operation of memory is essential to Pain and Glory.  (Each time I type the title I have to stop myself calling it ‘Pain and Desire’, and I can see why.   This is, as usual, an ‘El Deseo’ production.  The movie that Salvador is eventually seen to be making is called ‘The First Desire’.)  Although technically self-contained, the film and its attributes are enhanced by associations with a larger body of work.  José Luis Alcaine’s cinematography and Alberto Iglesias’s score, admirable in their own right, are enriched because both men have collaborated so often and fruitfully with Almodóvar before.  It’s difficult to imagine what viewers seeing their first Almodóvar will make of this, his twenty-first feature.  For those of us familiar with plenty of its forerunners, Pain and Glory is a film to treasure.

    28 August 2019

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