The Mephisto Waltz

In a retelling of the proverbial Faustian deal with the devil, The Mephisto Waltz (1971) plays out with the deal paying off, as Duncan Ely is able to live on in the body of Myles Clarkson. It doesn’t hurt that Ely is a master pianist and Clarkson has long, spry fingers (and that he has a beautiful wife, Paula). Even so, both Paula and the Clarkson’s daughter stand in the way of Duncan being able to get back to his own wife, and the film ends with Paula making her own deal with the devil so she can live on even though Duncan (and his wife) have already set about her demise. Because Duncan’s “after-life” transition is successful and even Paula, who has been opposing Duncan’s possession of Myles, ends up turning to the devil, the lesson of the film, Faust (1926) is effectively debunked. Besides The Mephisto Waltz, that God does not smite every case of injustice in the world—the genocide being perpetrated by Israel in the 2020s being a vivid and blatant example—may even further instigate interest in Faustian deals with the devil, even though that entity is known to be deceiver and thus not to be trusted. The allure of selfish gain can be worthwhile nonetheless for some people. For Duncan Ely, being able to go on living and gain even more fame as a performing pianist is worth the gamble, and it pays off. The medium of film is an excellent means of presenting the religious level, which is distinct yet interacts with the ordinary world that anchors the film.

As Duncan attempts to kill the Clarkson daughter and Paula, the latter’s dream-state shows the drama. After waking, Paula is horrified to find the blue dots that Duncan has put on both her daughter’s and her own forehead in the dreams. It really happened. Additionally, a bricolage of fleeting images highlighting symbols relevant to religion punctuate that part of the film. The duality or dichotomy of Paula’s dream- and waking-states is thereby set in a context in which the film itself has mythic qualities; it is not like a historical drama, for instance. At times, the audience may be overwhelmed visually by the quick succession of symbolic-oriented images, while missing the underlying point that the religious realm transcends the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion.

That idea comes from the 6^th century Christian theologian, Pseudo-Dionysius. Such transcendence differentiates the domain of religion from all other domains of human experience. Even wondering how action in a dream could possibly “really have happened” as evinced in a person’s waking state—a phenomenon that is at least in part psychological in nature—does not go far enough in representing or inculcating the religious domain. In other words, religion does not reduce to the psychology of dreams and their relationship to a person’s waking state. I contend that the rapid series of symbolic images on the screen are meant to point to the limits of humans beyond which religious phenomena go and are based. A similar bricolage is used by Polanski in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) during the scene in which Satan rapes Rosemary. It is not just that we are seeing the effect of Rosemary being drugged, for she has not consumed much of the drug because she does not trust her next-door neighbors. Rather, the interaction between a mortal and a theological entity goes beyond our ability even to imagine because that entity is based in a realm unknown and inaccessible to us mere mortals. We only get a glimpse of Satan’s face as it is having sex with Rosemary. Similarly, we only get a glimpse of the face of the resulting baby when Rosemary finally accepts it as hers.

Perhaps film is best as a medium in capturing the liminal numen quality of transcendence when the normal “rules” of filmmaking are broken, or at least distorted. The viewers are not meant to grasp the bricolage of religious symbols that rapidly flicker on the screen when the transcendent and ordinary—the sacred and the profane—touch, or dance. Rationalistic questions of whether a person should make a Faustian deal with the devil seem superficial relative to the visualizations when an inherently transcendent entity or realm temporarily comes in contact with ordinary time and the world that we inhabit on a daily basis. Even if no other realm (or entity therein) exists ontologically, the experience of coming up against the inherent limits of our cognitive, perceptual, and emotional capacities as human beings may include elements such as mysterium tremendum et fascinans, given the numinosity of the transcendent, which Rudolf Otto associates with the holy in his book by that name. Visually, a rapid series of images containing religious-oriented symbols with discordant instrumentals is an effective way in which filmmakers can attempt to depict the heightened terrifying and fascinating emotions that the other-worldly, and thus numinous, mysterious power evokes. From such a vantage-point, in such an overwhelming experience, is anyone in a position to decide whether a Faustian deal is worthwhile?

Even narrative itself is transcended. Film can only go so far even in visually and auditorily pointing beyond the medium’s limits; but even in this respect the medium can effectively relativize the other domains of human experience from being conflated with the transcendent realm of religion. Efforts to comprehend the attributes of its innate entities, whether they are real or only posited, may be secondary to the yearning-experience for radical transcendence. Hence in the rape scene of Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary’s experience in being in close intercourse with an entity based in a transcendent, wholly theological realm, is given priority over images of that entity, and in The Mephisto Waltz, so much of Paula’s dream-waking-transcended experience of being manipulated by dynamics based in the religious realm is distorted visually. We may focus inordinately on the nature of the entities thereof rather than on the numinous nature of religious experience even though the entities are inherently beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility.

Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist

Decades before dying while doing battle with the demon possessing Regan NacNeil in The Exorcist (1973), Rev. Lankester Merrin successfully extracts the same demon from a young man in Kenya. An African chief (or medicine man) tells Merrin at the end of Dominion: The Prequel to the Exorcist (2005) that he has made a rather bad enemy of the demon, which was not done with the priest. We know from The Exorcist that the demon will eventually kill the priest, but that is by no means the final word on a distinctively religious battle because in that domain, the human soul is eternal rather than necessarily tethered to a corporeal body. It is important, moreover, not to reduce religion to one of its aspects, or, even worse, to the stuff of any other domain, including the supernatural. Dominion reduces Christianity to one belief-claim and relies on supernaturalism to validate the religious phenomena in the film.

In the old church during at the film’s climatic event, Merrin incessantly repeats the identity of the Trinity to repulse and repel the demon from the young African man. Of itself, the very existence of the triune deity is abhorrent to the demon, likely because it, like Satan, is jealous of God’s pre-eminence and superiority. Even so, is repeating “Christ compels you” over and over sufficient for the demon to give up the possessed body? It seems realistic to assume that such an approach would reduce to a “No he doesn’t, yes he does, no he doesn’t” back-and-forth without a resolution. Adding potency, Merrin could preach the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels to the demon, which could be expected to reject in utter disgust the value of compassion as benevolentia universalis and especially to one’s detractors and even enemies. In addition to presenting the way into the kingdom of God to the demon, Merrin could try to convert the demon as a way of repulsing it enough to stop possessing the young man. Merrin could also point out that God is love, and what that means from a distinctly theological standpoint. For example, Merrin’s dialogue could include, “God is love—the sort that is self-emptying (i.e., agape) and this is superior to your puffed-up ego-pride by which you put yourself above Jesus’s voluntary sacrifice for us.” Besides being more distasteful than merely “Christ compels you” to the demon, the enhanced theological dialogue voiced by the priest would present the audience with a more substantive understanding of Jesus’s message in the Gospels than merely that he is the Son of God. Furthermore, that “Christ compels you” is coming from a “weak vessel” rather than from Christ himself means that the priest’s reliance on that line is not the best strategy for convincing the demon to give up the body. This is especially the case because Merrin had lost his faith and only recovered it because Rev. Francis had strongly asserted, “Satan is real.” If the basis of Francis’s declaration is not based in the religious domain—that is, is actually exogenous—then to the extent that Merrin follows suit, it is no surprise that the demon eventually—in The Exorcist—kills him.

Rev. Francis takes a long time to believe that the young African man is actually possessed. It is only when Francis sees the burn marks on the man’s forehead just after Francis has pressed a small crucifix on the man’s skin that that young priest believes that Satan is real. The religious faith of Rev. Merrin in God is in turn stimulated to return by Francis’s loud declaration, “Satan is real!” Whereas God as the Creator is like the condition for all that exists, and thus not an entity as we think of entities, Satan, and his demons are entities more easily recognized by the human mind. So it makes sense that faith in God could be derived from a declaration that Satan is real. The problem is that it is a supernatural empirical effect on young possessed man’s forehead that signifies and, even more troubling, validates the underlying religious phenomenon.

Even though such supernatural special-effects, including the fires that spontaneously start in the old church to provide lighting for Merrin and the demon, make for good cinema, the distinction between scientifically-valid empirical yet not-understood (and thus supernatural) happenings and religious phenomena is important. The supernatural is a subtype of natural science because the realm is empirical. Put another way, the supernatural can be thought of as being on the turf of science—just not (yet) explained. For the criteria and content of natural science to over-reach onto the domain of religion, even overriding the criteria innate to that domain, is to incur a category mistake. Basing the claim that Satan is real on burn-marks on a forehead treats empirical verification as determinative of the existence of a theological entity whose existence and basis transcends the empirical world rather than is based in it. This essence of religion renders it qualitatively different, and thus unique, from other, even closely related domains. Especially in a religion of the heart, such as Christianity, the validity of religious truth cannot rightfully come from seeing burn marks on someone’s forehead. Taking the latter as decisive gives a free hand to superstition.

Therefore, both Francis and Merrin depend on a non-religious marker to prove the existential reality of Satan, and, by extension, God. The meaning that God represents, which is theological love, which in turn is that which Satan rejects, is by implication not self-validating. This is deeply problematic from a religious standpoint. Depending on supernatural events or signs not only slights the distinctly theological meaning, but also remakes the theological into something else: the unexplained in natural science. The value of compassion being extending to rude people, for example, and even to detractors who disvalue rather than respect does not depend on unexplained observable phenomena. Either a person values agape love or not. Either such love is appreciated in one’s heart as being of great value, or as weakness. This judgment, rather than lines like, “Christ compels you,” captures what it means to internalize Jesus’s example and preachments in the Gospels. To a demon, those preachments may be more distasteful  than demands by a priest of Christ compelling obedience if the substance and essence of God is indeed love rather than domination to be served.

The Terminator

Lest the dystopian subtype of science fiction be taken too literally as a predictor of how human civilization will be likely to turn out, the underlying meaning of such films can be construed as bearing on human nature, which, given the glacial pace of natural selection, is very likely to stay pretty much the same for the foreseeable future. In Avatar (2009), for example, the human proclivity to greedily extract wealth for oneself or one’s company without ethical concern for the harm inflicted on other people (or peoples) in the process underlies any assumed thesis concerning space travel and whether we will eventually colonize other planets. The meaning is much closer to home, in us and the regulated capitalistic societies that we already have. Similarly, The Terminator (1984) can be understood less as a prediction of a future in which androids enslave mankind and more as a snapshot of how machine-like and destructive our species had already become. The machine-like efficiency of the Nazis, for instance, in killing enemies of the state and clearing eastern villages entirely of their inhabitants in such vast numbers can be labeled as a state sans conscience. Thirty years after she had graduated from Yale, Jill Lepore returned to give the Tanner Lectures on fears stemming from that pivotal film of a robot apocalypse in which machines rather than humans control the state. Besides predicting a highly unrealistic future, Lepore’s orientation to prediction using the science-fiction genre of film can be critiqued.

Yale’s Tanner Lectures are on human values, and so too, I submit, are science-fiction films. So Lepore’s “inquiry into what humans mean and intend in abandoning constitutional democracy and the liberal nation-state by automation and government by machine” is better thought of as an introduction into how or even whether the values underlying representative democracy and those supporting automation conflict.[1] Her assumption regarding the possible future abandonment of constitutional democracy for government by machine is so draconian and absolute that the prediction can be taken as highly unrealistic. The rise of the “tech-dominated ‘artificial state’” that she deemed already underway can be reckoned as likewise overdrawn and even hyperbolic, and her linkage to “the fall of animals” and even the natural world seems more like science fiction than anything actual.[2] Put another way, in her talks, Lepore went to extremes both in how she characterized the current world and her rule-by-machines future for mankind.

I proffer another possible perspective based on films such as The Terminator. Whether robotic or AI machine-learning, machines differ fundamentally from humans. Descartes’ view that humans are machines who think was heavily contrived and arguably based on the illusion that consciousness (i.e., the mind) is qualitatively different and only loosely related to corporeal bodies (i.e., materialism). We are organic, corporeal beings through and through, whereas machines are not. It may seem strange to think of a person’s conscience in such terms, but in this respect too, we differ significantly from machines. In the film, Ex Machina (2015), for example, the AI android has no conscience (even in being simulated by programming) when it stabs its programmer so it can leave the house; the programmer is simply an obstacle to be eliminated as per the telos of leaving the house. The fear felt in watching The Terminator is likewise a reflection of the fact that machines are devoid of conscience as they are fundamentally different than us.

With regard to Lepore’s “artificial state” of government by machine, the salient point that can be drawn is how much of a role conscience, values, and judgment play in voting whether for a candidate or a policy. It seems severely doubtful or even impossible that a human activity can be exported to a machine, even if AI-capable, so Lepore’s prediction of an artificial state by machine strikes me as a fantasy, to which I would retort, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We need not fear a cyborg assassin sent from the future back to kill any of us any time soon, but we can realistically take stock of how machines in our world differ fundamentally from us and even ask which of our values are consistent and inconsistent with the operation of such tools.

The astute among us might even venture to reflect on how much we have come to act as if we were machines, and furthermore which of our values (e.g., efficiency) are highlighted in such a distortion of human nature. Even just in analyzing a toxic customer “service” employee on the phone who robotically (i.e., rigidly) repeats, “Unfortunately, the time line cannot be changed,” the sheer fakeness can be exposed as machinelike rather than human. That employees could relish acting as machines exposes the human will to power and the value put by some people on being in control and even dominating other people. Rather than being a machine-value, the will to power, as Nietzsche points out in his texts, is human, all too human. What we take to be machine-automatic in terms of values may really be reflections of our worst. I suspect that Lepore was projecting this outward as if onto a white screen in portraying an utterly unrealistic and extreme future of government by machines. A scholar should be able to cut through even one's own projections to grabble with that which from which they come. The science-fiction genre itself can be understood as a projection of the complexity of human nature. 

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1. Mike Cummings, “From ‘The Terminator’ to Tech Titans: Historian Jill Lepore Examines the ‘Artificial State’,” Yale News, February 9, 2026.
2. Ibid.

Devil’s Advocate

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The Vatican Tapes

After The Omen (1976), which was released just two years after the sardonic U.S. President, Richard Nixon, had resigned in utter disgrace from the presidency amid much economic and political pessimism in the 1970s generally, moviemakers got busy on stories involving demon-possession. The 2015 film, The Vatican Tapes, begins as an apparent demon-possession case and thus seems not to stand out among other such films, but towards the end of the film, when the demon-possessed young woman suddenly breaches the bounds of the sort of supernatural feats of which demons are capable, the true significance of her case emerges with stunning clarity. For that which possesses and kills the young woman is none other than the Anti-Christ, and that figure is in a wholly different league than demons.

The middle of the film is taken up by Angela, the possessed person, doing battle with the staff in a mental hospital. Even in that context, the powers of that which is possessing her are impressive. Beyond being able to speak in an ancient tongue, Angela is nearly omniscient with respect to the personal life of her psychiatrist, Dr. Richards, who undoubtedly begins to intuit that Angela’s case may not be psychological in nature. When Angela’s chants result in other patients killing themselves and each other, Richards, and undoubtedly the staff, have had enough; Angela must go, and quickly. The lesson for us is that religion is not simply a special case of psychology, as Sigmund Freud theorized. The domain of religion is distinct and unique—sui generis. Angela’s forced departure from the mental hospital makes clear that something other than mental illness is going on, and psychological treatments are not capable of redressing the distinctly spiritual dynamics of possession by a spiritual entity.

It is appropriate, therefore, that Cardinal Mattias Bruun takes the decision to house Angela on the premises of the archdiocese, and it is not long before Bruun, assisted by Father Lozano, performs an exorcism on Angela. At that point, both priests, Angela’s dad, Roger, and Angela’s boyfriend, Pete, as well as the audience of the film, suppose that all that is necessary is for the priests to extract a demon from the young woman so she could be free of it. When the Cardinal strangely becomes intent on strangling Angela if necessary to get the demon out and actually kills the young woman, which quite naturally infuriates her father, Roger, both priests, Roger, and Pete are stunned when they look around and see Angela not only apparently alive, but standing and very alert. “I am the Anti-Christ,” she explains. The Cardinal tells the other people in the room that Angela is no longer there; she is still dead. Then, when the Anti-Christ has the wounds of Christ and is levitating in the air with arms stretched out as in being on a Cross, literally all hell breaks loose, with that entity unleashing a mighty explosion that kills all of the men there except for Father Lozano, to whom the Anti-Christ tells, “Tell everyone that I am here.”  The Anti-Christ has arrived, so the end-times are not long in coming.

Then the film shifts to show the great publicity that the Anti-Christ is getting for performing astounding medical miracles on people, who are naturally very appreciative. Then a line from the Bible is shown, that reads in part that the Anti-Christ will be like a false-prophet, misleading many people. To lie is of course in the very nature of evil, and thus of the Anti-Christ, who appears to be compassionate. Also, that the entity has Angela’s body gives off the impression of being a beautiful young woman. Yet in a close-up, as the entity is being interviewed on television, no smile appears; instead, a sort of mischievous facial expression centered in the mouth’s look can be glimpsed by the astute viewer. A compassionate heart cannot be completely faked.

It is just such an expression, without any supernaturalism, that comes closest to evincing the entity’s evil nature. Like the other exorcism films, The Vatican Tapes relies so much on supernatural “tricks” that the viewers of the film could come away from the film with the faulty impression that the supernatural is endemic to the religious domain. Just as religion doesn’t reduce to psychology, however, so too religion is not the same thing as the supernatural. This distinction may be more difficult to make than that which exists between religion and psychology, for so much that is religious has been portrayed in scriptures as well as films as valid because of some supernatural event.

In the New Testament stories, for example, resuscitating Lazarus really gets people’s attention; Jesus must be the Son of God, it is realized, because he has done something supernatural. In a religion of the heart, however, in which the divine is self-emptying love, religious truth or meaning comes not in performing impossible miracles, but, rather, in preachments and compassionate acts, especially to rude people, detractors, and especially enemies. Samuel Hopkins, who was Jonathan Edwards’ protégé, wrote a book precisely to argue that the Kingdom of God “just is” such humane compassion. The powerful spiritual dynamic that is unleashed between two people when such compassionate love is acted upon is not supernatural at all. In fact, such difficult love can be viewed as an expansion of human nature, rather than anything supra-natural. So the various films involving the exorcism of a demon do us a disservice even as they entertain, and The Vatican Tapes pushes the supernatural happenings to such an extent as to sensationalize religion even at the expense of religion as a distinct, unique domain.

Dying

As a Jewish kid in Nazi Germany, Michael Roemer, a filmmaker who went on to teach documentary at Yale (I took Charles Musser’s seminar a semester after Roemer had left), had to lie in order to survive. In making the film, Pilgrims Farewell, he wanted to get as close to the truth as a human can. He didn’t want to lie anymore. He wanted to deal with the real thing. In making the documentary, Dying (1976), he realized that the people whom he documented as they were dying were more real that what he was going through in his family in New York. Artists and their families pay, he remarked decades later at Yale. “I neglected my family; I was always working. Once I started, I had to make the film,” he said after a presentation of the film on dying. “The people dying knew something we didn’t know,” he added. The prospect of death apparently makes things incredibly real, before they’re not.

In the film, Sally, who is dying, says that everyone dies, so “I have no fear of death.” Harriet, Bill’s wife, is relieved when her husband’s cancer recommences out of remission. “The longer this gets dragged out,” she complains to his doctor. Stunningly, she says, “I prayed that the chemotherapy wouldn’t work.” The physician reminds her that Bill’s feelings should be taken into account. “He has the basic right to make some of these decisions.” After the film, Roemer informed the audience at Yale that Bill’s wife had been abandoned by her mother. After Bill’s death, she married a man who had left his wife and had five kids. Harriet had had a bad life. Her attitude toward Bill’s prospect of dying was indeed very real—human, one might way, all too human. The question is perhaps whether she is culpable in the film for wishing that her husband would finish the job and just die. I contend that she is, regardless of her past, for as depicted in the film, she is his wife and so she should be supporting him as he faces the ultimate demise. There is a revealing scene in which the two of them are sitting together in silence. Is she waiting for him to die?

Also documented in the film is Rev. Byrant, an old Black man who is dying of cancer. “The only thing I can do is put my trust in God, and try to live as long as possible,” he says. In preaching a sermon at his church, he says, “Jesus tells the man, your daughter is sleeping.” She is dead. Later, he remarks, “Jesus died for me on the Cross; he will take me.” Such faith is laudable. With people like Harriet in the world, the Rev. Byrant can hardly be blamed for having such an other-worldly faith.

Whether in the midst of a troubled marriage or in hopes of being taken by Jesus, these stories in Michael Roemer’s documentary attest to people being honest regarding how they are approaching the prospect of death, whether that of a close relation or oneself. The medium of film has been said to ultimately be on the human condition. Even science fiction has something to say about us as we really are. For the prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps and the residents of Gaza during the Israeli genocide, the essentials of life were undoubtedly felt as very real. Living itself was doubtlessly made transparent in itself. Film can do this too. Even in portraying the brutal honesty of the Nazis and Israelis with regard to people they deemed as sub-human, the medium of film can help the rest of us to be more aware of the fullness of human nature, beyond our knowledge of ourselves and our immediate context.

Oh, Siagon

War can leave families in a dysfunctional condition. In the case of the Vietnam War, the broadcast video of the last helicopter taking off from the roof of the American embassy in Siagon in 1974 carries with it the veneer of fleeing Vietnamese on their way to a life of freedom in the United States. Not evident from the video is the impact on a Vietnamese family that is documented in the film, Oh, Siagon (2007).

On that helicopter were two parents and their kids, minus the wife’s daughter whom the parents could not contact in time for her to leave with them. That did not stop the authorities from arresting that daughter for trying to leave Vietnam. She eventually made it to Los Angeles, where her mother and step-father were living. Unfortunately, the half-sister’s resentment festered for years. Such a cost of war is seldom documented.

In the film, the step-daughter says of her mother having left her behind in Siagon, “She loves me but she loves herself more.” That the mother still feels guilty and yet her husband, the “half-sister’s” step-dad does not could be more appreciated by the woman’s daughter. The step-father merely states, “It was war.” He himself has not spoken with, or even mentioned, his older brother for decades because the latter and he had political differences regarding North and South Vietnam. In the film, the couple, their joint children, and the “half-sister” journey back to Vietnam because the father wants to see his elder brother, who is ill and will soon die.

Once back in Vietnam, the two brothers reconcile. It is easy for them, for it has been decades the old North-South division in the country had ended. As pronounced as that division was, and how at odds the two brothers had been politically, it is the resentment of the “half-sister” even on the trip and the related arguments between her and her mother and step-father that is still ongoing. The indifference of the husband towards his wife’s daughter is clear; he has not pity on her for having been left behind n Vietnam, and yet he forgives his elder brother. The festering resentment and the indifference, plus the mother’s guilt, ruin the family trip even though there is joy in the two brothers reconciling after many decades.

In 1972, the video of the last helicopter leaving the U.S. embassy captures nothing of the complex family dynamic documented in the film decades later. Among civilians, war is messy and can thwart and even destroy families. Human beings are not so malleable as to move on without festering resentment from such a drastic event as a family leaving a young daughter behind in another country. That that “half-sister’s” step-father had not even mentioned his elder brother for decades until shortly before the trip back to Vietnam also attests to the fact that resentment within a family can go on for decades in utter selfish stubbornness. 

In that regard, I am reminded of my youngest brother, and yet my original family was untouched by war between or within nations and even political differences. The same stubbornness as can fester within families lies behind wars between and within countries. Indeed, a family may suffer and ultimately unwind from a long-standing, unresolved civil war. The macro, societal or international, level and the micro family-level are social manifestations of the same underlying human nature, and thus can be related. The upshot is that fortifying international law as enforced by international governmental institutions can potentially thwart war, and thus its negative impact on families. As for dysfunctional families absent war, those may be a harder nut to crack.