Come Follow Me
I’m in a controversial mood. In a mood to cause a little trouble. To rabble rouse and challenge the status quo. To set a couple pillars alight and maybe in the end succumb to the flames myself. Why do I feel this way you ask? Well for one, the world’s going incomprehensibly batty and is in need of a little shaking, but really it’s because I watched the brilliant Ken Russell film The Devils.
The devil does exist; He’s not red with yellow eyes and horns, sporting a tail with a point. No, the devil comes in all shapes, sizes and colours. Sometimes he’s feminine, other times masculine. He can rock flowing gold locks, a buzz or a carpet hat. He definitely has a heart and brain; basically he’s you and me. Other than Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, never have I come across a piece of performative art that so perfectly typifies the darkness of being human. Rather than the sex and violence, it’s this that makes The Devils a controversial film: a stark examination of what we humans do over and over in the name of personal greed. That the film is based on actual historical events makes it all the more poignant.
For every action that causes a ruinous reaction, it takes two to tango. The symbiotic pas de deux of the masculine and feminine is essential to a despot’s total grasp of power. The puppet master of this piece is Cardinal Richelieu, a man so adept at manipulation he finds the perfect pawns in Father Urbain Grandier—magnificiently played by Oliver Reed and the Abbess Jeanne de Anges—bizarrely portrayed by Vanessa Redgrave. Grandier is the ultimate man: educated, handsome, virile and of the cloth. He was—and even in modern times—is catnip, so that Jeanne becomes obsessed with him is no surprise. Technically as the representation of the perfect woman, Jeanne, cloistered and in complete obedience to a ‘man,’ should be more demure. Instead, she’s controlled completely by her libido, bringing about her’s and her nuns injurious end. That the inquisitors successfully sow dissension even when voices of reason protest, is testament to the strong relationship between sexual repression and political corruption. One of my favourite moments in the film is when the cynical Jeanne drops some knowledge on the innocent Madeline de Brou—future wife of Grandier: ‘most of us are nuns because our families didn’t have the money to pay for our dowries. The rest of us were either too ugly or useless to be considered worthy wives. So as burdens to our families we are sent here.’ I paraphrase, but what a statement: ‘valueless’ women in society are denigrated and locked away. Then when the time is right women’s bodies are used for political gain, specifically here, Cardinal Richelieu’s exploitation of a bunch of horny nuns to secure his absolute power. Why worry about your loss of autonomy when a brood of nude, fornicating women prancing about can entertain you?
Remember earlier I said I was feeling controversial and willing to burn for it? Well, again, you can thank Urbain Grandier for that. A fascinating man, so aware of his shortcomings that early in the film he foretells his fate. If we are to understand philosophy, we must come to terms with man’s eternal quest to comprehend his raison d’etre. That enlightenment comes just as the flames engulf us, is no mistake. A lech in the typically unapologetic French way, Grandier is proud in his privilege. By day he orates fiery rhetoric’s, by night he sleeps with the wives and daughters of noble men. He’s happy in his life until he inadvertently brings another into the world, and that’s when his conscience plagues him. A man of profound faith, he’s been able to keep the peace between the Catholics and Huguenots of his town Loudun by preaching the universal truth, not one that favours one denomination over another, but one that saves us all. A message that makes him instantly dangerous, not only to himself but to the powers at be. That he realises his conundrum during confession is a testament to the sacrament of purging one’s sins. The minute you acknowledge and accept your sins—in his case pride—is the moment you begin the fiery road to salvation.
As The Devils is a dramatised account of a real person’s trials and tribulations, what we know of Urbain’s remonstrations are those as written by John Whiting, Aldous Huxley and Russell. As interpreted by Reed, Grandier’s struggles with being a man of organised religion as well as a man of knowledge, reality and existence. His tortured, imperfect and deeply transforming thoughts, actions and feels, personify in performance the essential burden of being human. That Grandier once followed the crowd then stopped and turned against the tide is proof that change can happen in any one of us, and that just as much as we can be little devils, we can become little angels too. That is the great duplicity of man, that we have both good and evil in us, and it’s being wary of those who try to drive us in that dark direction that fuels the eternal battle. But is also our everlasting salvation.
Man is nothing more than a lemming who’s constantly being pushed of a cliff by the blind irrationality of his emotions. Fuck being nasty, brutish and short, man is just plain old dumb. The rare species that generation after generation eats from the same poisonous bush, rather than learning its lesson and instinctively steering clear of calamity. It is the farce of repetition that results in tragedy. The world is getting out of hand, everyone going in two opposite directions that head off the same precipice: total destruction. I think this conclusion is inevitable, there will be no saving ourselves as the walls of our fortifications get unceremoniously brought down. I for one am shit scared. It’s going to be frightening, an apocalypse that no writer has imagined. A barren wasteland of Sisyphean effect, where there’ll be plenty but a collective inability to satiate. Every time we’ll get close, the cookie will disappear. Hope lies with the few who’ll be left psychically alive. The bedraggled survivors who have remained steadfast in their empathy, self-awareness and spiritual generosity. The one’s who once succumbed yet found freedom from the cult of material currency. The one’s whose voices will echo long after the flames have turned them to ashes. I suspect these survivors will be from both sides, thus ensuring the maddening cycle of the human condition continues again and again and again. With hope never too far away.
Image: The Blind Leading the Blind by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
