American History Goes to the Movies

Hollywood and the American Experience

W. Bryan Rommel Ruiz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136845390
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Whether they prefer blockbusters, historical dramas, or documentaries, people learn much of what they know about history from the movies. In American History Goes to the Movies, W. Bryan Rommel-Ruiz shows how popular representations of historic events shape the way audiences understand the history of the United States, including American representations of race and gender, and stories of immigration, especially the familiar narrative of the American Dream.

Using films from many different genres, American History Goes to the Movies draws together movies that depict the Civil War, the Wild West, the assassination of JFK, and the events of 9/11, from The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind to The Exorcist and United 93, to show how viewers use movies to make sense of the past, addressing not only how we render history for popular enjoyment, but also how Hollywood's renderings of America influence the way Americans see themselves and how they make sense of the world.

1
EXORCISING THE DEMONS WITHIN

Gender, Race, and the Problem of Evil in American History and Cinema

At various moments in the first half of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973, 2000), a ghoulish, demonic cloaked figure randomly flashes between scenes, almost unnoticed, provoking the viewer to question its presence in the film. Moreover, the viewer is left pondering the filmmaker’s larger purpose of inserting these flashlit shots in a movie that centers upon the demonic possession and exorcism of a young girl in 1970s America. The answer, of course, is that William Friedkin’s jump-cuts of the cloaked demon have nothing and everything to do with his film about the problem of evil. The apparent incoherence and opaqueness of these scenes illustrate why these flashlit shots remain controversial among some viewers who argue that the film sends demonic subliminal messages.¹ Nevertheless, the flashing demonic figure is a critical narrative device that illuminates the movie’s central religious themes. Although not conventionally connected to the film’s plot, the flashing ghoul nonetheless embodies the symbolic horror of the movie: the randomness of evil. Viewers often comment upon the ways The Exorcist’s shocking pornographic imagery and vulgarity horrifies them, not to mention the ways the movie blasphemes sacred Christian symbols and rituals. But considering this film blasphemous would be nothing further from the truth. In a profound way, The Exorcist is a provocative, and some would say conservative, religious film that philosophizes upon the nature of evil in the modern world.² Indeed, the film’s major premise pivots upon Chris MacNeil’s (Ellen Burstyn) initial turn to medical and psychiatric science to resolve her daughter’s afflictions, only to reject rational science and empiricism because they fail to “cure” her daughter Regan (Linda Blair). With modern science unable to “treat” Regan, Chris appeals to Father Damien Karras (ironically a trained psychiatrist who doubts his own faith) and the Catholic Church to perform an exorcism in order to cast out the demon possessing her daughter. Arguably, Chris’s appeal is a validation of the power of Christianity and Catholicism to confront and defeat evil. This was evidently one way a Catholic newspaper interpreted the film.³ However, the apparent victory of the demon over Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), and Father Karras’s (Jason Miller) invocation to the demon to possess him actually reveal a much more ambivalent and terrifying conclusion that doubts the power of Christian faith and Catholic rituals to triumph over evil.⁴ To suggest that evil remains impervious to modern science and traditional religious rituals is perhaps even more blasphemous than the film’s graphic imagery and gore could ever be.

Throughout the film viewers are reminded of evil’s power. Although The Exorcist suggests reasons why the demon possessed Regan, the film ultimately remains inconclusive about why and how the demon specifically inhabited Regan. The movie begins with an archeological dig led by Father Merrin in Iraq that may have unearthed the artifact that unleashed the demon into the world, although the connection between the artifact and Regan’s possession remains suggestive. When the unearthed artifact finds its way to Chris and Regan’s home in Washington, DC, the viewer is left unsure of how it arrived there.⁵ Like the subliminal demonic figure flashing throughout the first half of the movie, The Exorcist maintains that evil is random, and efforts to derive its reason, causality, and meaning will always remain elusive.

In this respect, The Exorcist challenges our common understanding of evil and the function of religion as a cultural system. In one of the more enduring explanations of religion, Clifford Geertz notes that the concept of evil exists to help humans understand why bad things happen to good people.⁶ Evil thus provides a significant epistemological need: it offers a supernatural reason for causality in the natural world. Thomas Luckman maintains that causality is one of the essential components that shape our worldviews,⁷ and in this respect evil provides a critical cognitive framework for humans to understand the world around them by looking for explanations and meaning beyond the known natural world. Given the significance of evil and the epistemological function it supposedly serves, then, The Exorcist assaults and horrifies us precisely because it demands us to reject the idea that evil can be rationally understood: that is, the film posits that evil is beyond human comprehension. Nevertheless, the film also asks us to consider the historical context of 1970s America and the changing gender and family roles produced by the social transformations of the 1960s and 1970s. Chris is a single mother who works as an actress, making a film in Washington, DC about radical student politics and the Vietnam War, entitled Crash Course. While viewers observe Chris’s intimate and loving relationship with her daughter, they also see her throwing a lavish party that includes a Catholic priest, Father Dyer (William O’Malley), playing the piano and singing with guests. This is also the scene that introduces Regan’s aberrant behavior when she tells an astronaut he “will die up there” and proceeds to urinate in view of the guests. In another scene, we observe Chris bemoan the absence of Regan’s father in his daughter’s life (he will not even talk to his daughter on her birthday), and it is clear that the deteriorating traditional family structure has produced instability in Chris’s household. Although concerned, Chris does not seem to rebuke Regan for playing the Ouija board and provoking conversations with the supernatural. As much as she is a caring mother, she is initially blind to the malevolent forces enveloping Regan as her acting career and romantic relationship with the film’s director absorb her. Could her questionable career, licentious secular lifestyle, and broken family be as much to blame for Regan’s demonic possession as the mysterious demonic artifact?

From this perspective, The Exorcist engages in a classic historiographic debate among scholars of religious history: to what degree do we interpret religious life, ideas, and behavior from a functionalist perspective and to what degree from a substantive one? That is, how do we understand religion in terms of what it does (functionalist) and how do we understand it in terms of what it is (substantive).8 More often, scholars are simultaneously interested in functionalist and substantive approaches to religious phenomena, but usually one methodological approach emerges as the major heuristic approach that frames their research and analysis. Films such as The Exorcist offer interpretations of religious phenomena from a functionalist and substantive approach as well, and provoke us to ponder critical issues such as the purpose and nature of evil in the modern world. When we place The Exorcist in a broader context about religion in American history, it becomes part of a historical conversation about religious interpretations of power, gender relations, and social change in American society. In this way, Friedkin’s film connects to a historical trajectory that reaches back to colonial American history and the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, particularly in the ways in which people drew upon religion to help them understand changing social and cultural phenomena.

This chapter, then, examines films with religious themes and the ways they address the problem of evil. In particular, it explores how Christianity and its construction of evil operate as an interpretive lens through which some Americans comprehend social turbulence and the empowerment of women and minorities in American history. In many respects, these films reflect scholarly interpretations about the history of Christianity, Satan, and witchcraft. This chapter takes a decidedly functionalist approach to religious phenomena to help us understand how religious films and scholarship explain palpable anxieties about social and political transformations enveloping American society at particular moments in American history. Moreover, by comparing American religious history with similar non-Western religious historical phenomena, we will see the broader ways religion and its interpretation of evil offer explanations for people to understand the turbulence of social and political change across time and space. However, we will also see how the Christian construction of Satan as a model of, and model for, evil uniquely defines Western religious history. The ways in which people in the West, particularly Americans, identify Satan with supernatural power and malevolent forces has framed the way in which some people interpret how powerless and oppressed peoples have empowered themselves as historical agents to challenge more dominant power structures. Whether it is women during the Salem witchcraft trials of the 1690s or women and minorities during the women’s liberation and civil rights movements in post-World War II America, people looked to Christian eschatology and Satan to help them understand these social movements. In profound ways films with religious themes, particularly in the horror genre, reflect these anxieties and fears about tectonic shifts in American society.

However, as much as Christianity has offered an explanation for these social and political transformations, it also has demonstrated its limitations to explain these changes. As we will see, when Mel Gibson released his film The Passion in 2004, he faced public outcry for the film’s anti-Semitic themes.⁹ Significantly, the film is actually quite faithful to the Gospels as this chapter will demonstrate, particularly the Gospel of John. Nonetheless, changing views about Jews in American society in recent American history informed the reaction to the film’s anti-Semitism. Both the film and the firestorm it engendered reflect a broader historical transformation about racial ideology in America. Over the course of the twentieth century, particularly following World War II and the Holocaust, racial ideologies in America changed to such a degree that Jews went from being categorized as a distinct non-white race, to a distinct cultural, arguably “ethnic,” group included within a more elastic definition of whiteness in the post-war period.¹⁰ However faithful Gibson’s film was to the biblical Gospels, a segment of modern America would not tolerate his interpretation because his Passion recalled medieval Passion plays, and the violent assaults upon European Jews that sometimes followed Easter Passion reenactments. Still, that the film grossed over $300 million,¹¹ and spawned a relic cult clearly reveals that certain enduring racial ideologies and religious constructions of evil remain potent in modern America. As one church sign in Denver posted following the release of The Passion: “Jews Killed the Lord Jesus, 1 Thess. 2:14, 15. The Holy Scriptures.”¹²

Religion, Gender, and Witchcraft in Early American History

Few events have captured the American historical imagination as the Salem witchcraft trials of the 1690s. Since the nineteenth century, historians have debated whether the Salem witchcraft scare was reflective of similar scares in early American and European history or something that was altogether unique.¹³ Furthermore, since Arthur Miller’s 1953 play (and 1996 film adaptation) The Crucible, Americans have asked themselves whether the Salem witchcraft scare was a religious episode specific to Puritan New England, or a psychological phenomenon characterized by mass hysteria and paranoia, which under certain historical conditions could erupt again. Of course this was the parable of Miller’s 1953 play, as the Salem scare was an allegory for the post-World War II anticommunist “witch-hunt.” Miller’s The Crucible, and his adapted screenplay for Nicholas Hytner’s 1996 film, provides gripping drama even though the plot involving John Proctor, Elizabeth Proctor, and Abigail Williams is fictional. Nevertheless, the play and film are arresting in the ways they champion individuals such as John Proctor over the course of Miller’s narrative. Proctor and others accused of witchcraft become examples of courageous individuals who resist mass hysteria and its corrosive consequences, while vilifying those who capitalize upon it, such as Abigail Williams, who empower themselves at the devastating expense of others in their community.

Although Arthur Miller offers a disclaimer that The Crucible is historical fiction, he nevertheless did historical research and drew upon Marion Starkey’s then classic, The Devil in Massachusetts.¹⁴ While researching for the play, Miller immediately recognized that the Salem witchcraft trials were connected to a broader American narrative to which he only provided dramatic emplotment and interpretation to this seemingly provincial story. As Miller noted, “Salem is one of the few events in history with a beginning, middle, and end.”¹⁵ Admittedly, Miller fictionalized historical data (the historical John Proctor was about 60 at the time of his trial and Abigail Williams was about 11) in order to emplot his narrative, but taking these dramatic licenses empowers his larger historical interpretation that seeks to find meaning and significance in this tragic historical episode. And though some may see Miller’s play as an historical artifact grounded in 1950s America and McCarthyism, the 1996 film adaptation still demonstrates its historical and literary potency by reminding us of the tragic human drama associated with the Salem witchcraft outbreak. Viewers do not need historical reminders of the anti-communist crusade that may have made the play prescient when it was originally presented in 1953. The struggle for John Proctor to find human dignity in the travesty of mass hysteria and injustice (and also the powerful performance given by Daniel Day-Lewis as Proctor) continues to give us historical insight into events like Salem throughout American history.

In this regard the film The Crucible reflects this book’s recurring theme that narrative fiction can articulate grander historical truths while rendering historical details and context marginal. Rather than dismissing cinematic histories as historically deficient, we need to remember their historical value to tell stories about the human condition in the American past. Nevertheless, recent scholarship in Early American history reveals how historical context remains critical in order to understand the Salem witchcraft craze of the 1690s. Where Miller’s play and Hytner’s film represent these adolescent girls as opportunists who unleash mass hysteria, recent scholarship has raised questions about gender, Anglo-Indian military conflict, and Salem’s struggle with the Anglo-American political economy. Collectively, this scholarship complicates Miller’s characterizations of the accusers and those accused of witchcraft in his literary adaptation, requiring us to consider numerous factors that enabled the Salem witchcraft scare to possess New England in the 1690s. And though much of this scholarship was published after the initial dramatization of Miller’s The Crucible in 1953, Hytner’s cinematic adaptation incorporates some of the scholarly themes explored in these academic histories while retaining the integrity of Miller’s play. Where scholars and Hytner may disagree about historical detail and representation, they fundamentally appear to agree that Salem was not “actually” about witchcraft per se. That is, they agree that religion may have been the vocabulary and cultural script deployed by the Salem community to interpret what afflicted their Puritan world, but ultimately it was other political, social, economic factors that created the “perfect storm” that erupted into the Salem witchcraft scare of the 1690s.

Determining “what actually happened” in Salem during the 1692 witchcraft hysteria remains widely debated among colonial American historians. Historians of gender in early America have brought to our attention the marginal social positions of women in seventeenth-century New England, particularly the afflicted adolescent girls, and how this factored considerably in the history of the Salem witchcraft episode. Indeed, Carol Karlsen argues that the social marginality of the accusers influenced the ways they directed their accusations at certain prominent women in the Salem community.¹⁶ In a different interpretation, Mary Beth Norton has described the ways Anglo-Indian colonial warfare was critical to the Salem witchcraft scare, especially in terms of the ways the consequences of these military conflicts affected New England’s social demographics and who emerged as the accusers and the accused in Salem.¹⁷ Norton contends that some of the accused girls had limited social prospects as orphans of frontier wars, remaining socially marginal members of the Salem community. As accusers, these girls assumed powerful positions and intensified the hysteria. They in turn inversed the community’s social structure, enabling them to maintain positions of authority in a patriarchal and theocratic society that otherwise would never have allowed them such power. Finally, historians such as Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum argue that the eruption of the witchcraft craze in Salem was the consequence of Salem’s internal social and economic struggles as it became integrated into the transforming Anglo-American Atlantic world.¹⁸ Collectively, these historians demonstrate how the Salem witchcraft outbreak was unique to its historical context, thereby challenging Miller’s parable that the Salem witchcraft episode was a historical phenomenon connected to other moments of mass hysteria in American history.

Historians have long recognized Arthur Miller’s literary brilliance in his historical rendering of the Salem witchcraft trials. As Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum state, “When Arthur Miller published The Crucible in the early 1950s, he simply outdid historians at their own game.”¹⁹ In part, Miller’s success rests on the powerful story he tells, but the play is also successful because Miller presents a historical interpretation about a gripping human story in early American history that continues to remain elusive to us. Moreover, Miller recognizes that the Salem witchcraft craze requires a level of historical imagination and interpretation since key legal documents regarding depositions and testimonies are lost. The Salem witchcraft trials, thus, necessitate emplotment and interpretation precisely because so many critical documents are missing, and Miller’s The Crucible masterfully provides this historical narrative. But the absence of important documents has not detracted historians. Indeed, historians have produced their own historical narratives as well, including constructing emplotments and interpretations tha...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 EXORCISING THE DEMONS WITHIN
• 2 REDEEMING THE SOUTH, REDEEMING THE NATION
• 3 ENVISIONING AND RE-VISIONING AMERICA
• 4 HISTORICIZING TRIUMPHS AND TRAGEDIES IN THE AMERICAN WEST
• 5 IMMIGRATION, THE AMERICAN DREAM, AND THE PROBLEM OF THE IRISH AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
• 6 THE EUROPEAN AMERICAN AND MEXICAN AMERICAN IMMIGRATION EXPERIENCE
• 7 BEYOND DALLAS
• 8 “WE ARE ALIVE IN HELL”
• NOTES
• INDEX