Released in 1976, The Omen reflects the pessimism in America in the wake of the OPEC gas shortage and President Nixon’s Watergate cover-up, both of which having occurred within easy memory of the two notable assassinations in 1968. Additionally, the drug culture had come out in the open in the anti-Vietnam War hippie sub-culture, and the sexual revolution, which arguably set the stage for the spread of AIDS beginning in the next decade, was well underway, both of which undoubtedly gave evangelical, socially-conservative Christians the sense that it would not be long until everything literally goes to hell. The film provides prophesy-fulfillment of a birth-narrative (i.e., myth) and a supernatural personality known biblically as the anti-Christ, who as an adult will set man against man until our species is zerstört. It is as if matter (the Christ) and anti-matter (the anti-Christ) finally cancel each other out at the end of time. Economically during the 1970s, inflation and unemployment were giving at least some consumers and laborers the sense of being in a jet trapped in a vertical, free-fall dive of stagflation that not even fiscal and/or monetary policy could divert. The pessimistic mood was captured in another way in another film, Earthquake (1974), in which a natural disaster plays off the mood of utter futility throughout the decade. It is no wonder that Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” resonated so much as a presidential-campaign slogan in 1979 as Jimmy Carter was mired in micro-management inside the White House. The optimism of a resurgence in political energy overcame the decade’s sense of pessimism. That Damien, the anti-Christ in The Omen, survives the attempt on his life by Robert Thorn, his adoptive father resonates with that pessimism. Satan’s plan is still “game on” as the film ends, and this ending fits the mood in America during the decade. With this historical context contemporaneous with the film laid out, a very practical, manifestation of evil subtly depicted in the film and yet easily recognized by customers frustrated with corrupt and inept management of incompetent employees will be described in the context of pessimism from utter frustration. Such frustration survived the squalid decade of the 1970s at least decades into the next century.
The film’s plot, briefly
summarized, begins with the adoption of Damian by an American diplomat and his
wife just after their own baby died (was murdered) at birth. Damian, it turns
out, was born of a jackal as foretold in the Bible. Followers of Satan
recognize Damian’s true identity, which the couple only come to grasp after it
is too late for them. Robert dismisses
the prophetic warnings by Father Brennen at the peril of Katherine Thorn, and
ultimately Robert fails to ritually kill Damien in a church. Robert is especially
slow to pick up on the signs; Katherine is more perceptive in coming to realize
that the boy she thinks is her own son is evil. Robert is clueless regarding
the “red flags” concerning Damien’s second governess, Mrs. Baylock, who is an “apostate
from hell” according to the man who gives Robert the set of ritual knives with
which to physically and spiritually destroy Damien. I want to focus on the
employer-employee relationship between Robert and the second governess to
render transparent a very realistic manifestation of evil that could otherwise
simply be reckoned as merely unethical. Although the supernatural elements of
the film are more dramatic, such as the hounds of hell attacking Robert and Jennings
in a graveyard outside of Rome, the role of the dog that Mrs. Baylock unilaterally
allows to live in the Thorns’ house is much more interesting from the
perspective of how the banality of evil can and does manifest in our daily
lives without us realizing how sordid such a manifestation of evil actually is.
Besides lying to the Thorns
that her “agency” proactively sent her to apply to be Damien’s governess when
in fact she was presumably sent by Satanists or even Satan itself to protect the
devil’s Son, she presumed to ignore Katherine’s order that Damien be dressed to
go a church wedding with his “parents.” Later, opening the bedroom door to let
Damien out into the second-floor hall corridor on his tricycle even though
Katherine is poised on a chair over a balcony in the hallway and then going to
the hospital to throw Katherine out of a high window extend so far beyond being
a bad employee that Mrs Baylock becomes unrelatable from the standpoint of
employer-employee relations. She is more relatable—more realistic even though
less titillating—in repeatedly ignoring, and thus disobeying, Robert’s order
that that dog-protector of Damien must go. It is in this that the banality of
evil shows itself.
In spite of having initially
told the governess to get rid of the hound from hell, Robert is stunned on the
night of the day when Katherine has her “accident” and is hospitalized, because
he finds the dog still in Damien’s bedroom. Days later, Robert sternly reminds
the governess that he had told her to get rid of the dog. “He’s gone now; they
took him away this morning,” she lies, for when Robert subsequently returns
from Rome, he sees the dog is still in the house! That the governess had
initially presumed to allow the dog in without asking the Thorns for their
permission is bad enough; that she repeatedly ignores Robert’s order is without
doubt a valid enough reason for Robert to end her employment, but strangely he
does not, and she even physically attacks Robert as he carries his boy out of
bed, as if that were suspicious.
The sheer presumptuousness of the
governess stems from what Augustine describes as the bad manifestation of
self-love wherein a person’s love is focused on one’s own superiority, importance,
or preeminence. Such sordid self-love, which is a sin rather than just selfishness,
which is merely unethical, because in loving oneself above loving God, a person
rebels from God in setting oneself up as a deity in self-idolatry. Pierre
Nicole, a Jansenist (i.e., strict Augustinian) priest who lived in the seventeenth
century in France, dismissed Augustine’s claim that self-love can also manifest
positively in loving God’s image in oneself as a part of love directed to God;
to Nicole, even enlightened self-love is still a sin.
The arrogance of self-entitlement
such as evinced in sordid self-love is of course the foremost sin of pride,
which lies beyond self-esteem, which is fine. In the film, Mrs. Baylock’s stubborn
refusal to act on her employer’s order that the dog must go immediately stems
from the sin. Seldom, if ever, do bosses or complaining customers realize that employees
who presumptuously ignore orders or customer complaints are not just willfully
stubborn, and even passive aggressive, but also manifesting a certain banality
of evil in the midst of our everyday lives. Too often, supervisors would rather
look the other way than expend the effort to fire and rehire, and even merely
to keep tabs on an incompetent or rude employee rather than naively and
conveniently assuming that giving an order is enough in such a case. Company
executives, and even customer service departments, in such companies understate
the severity of the managerial problem, which includes a faulty hiring process,
and the problem with non-supervisory employees, including those in customer
service.
The mass-transit company in
Massachusetts is a case in point. Too many bus and subway-train drivers operate
the respective vehicles aggressively in hitting the brake pedal so abruptly
that passengers are literally jerked around as the buses and trains abruptly
stop while still going too fast to stop without slowing down more. I recorded
video and submitted complaints to the subsidized company’s customer service
department over a period of months in 2025 only to find that even the same
drivers were going along as if their supervisors were looking the other way in
dismissing complaints of the reckless driving. The drivers, and I suspect their
supervisors, and perhaps even the customer-service managers, conjoined
incompetence to create the “perfect storm” of dysfunctional management (at
taxpayer expense). The syndrome was systematic at the macro level, as employees
of the mayors of Boston, Cambridge and Revere also dismissed the complaints
because apparently in Massachusetts, the cities are not able (i.e., willing) to
contact state-level agencies.
Even as the system from top to
bottom in Massachusetts was at least as of 2025 mired in laziness, incompetence,
and sheer stubborn passive aggression, it is the stubborn refusal of the bus
and subway drivers to stop jolting the vehicles by driving very primitively
that I submit resonates with Mrs. Baylock’s mentality in the film. Beyond
merely being incompetent and having an attitude problem, supervisors, lazy customer-service
managers, and aggressive employees can evince the banality of evil, which is
ultimately based on the sin of self-love, which is really rebellion against God
as superior to oneself. The aggressiveness and stubbornness of the bus and
subway drivers can thus be viewed as symptoms of something deeper.
Although by 2025, the societal
pessimism in American during the 1970s had passed, I would not be surprised to find
that the level of customer-frustration with incompetent managements and rude,
pathetic employees was sky-high. Not only had business schools failed in both research
and teaching on lower and mid-level management, but the depth of the problem was
often trivialized or overlooked entirely. The banality of evil may be as
difficult to recognize in the film as it is in our daily lives as customers.
The BART and MUNI subway
systems in the San Francisco metro area in California demonstrate just how incompetent
and aggressive Boston’s mass-transit employees had become by 2025, because the
operators in the Bay Area routinely stopped buses and trains normally. Managerial
competence along with good hiring rather than expedient hiring to fill openings
goes a long way. Following up with problematic employees should not be a
managerial luxury but an integral task of supervision. The banality of evil,
which transcends incompetence and attitude, does not extend supernaturally to
bus and train machinery. The Omen is more practical than the film appears to be
from all the titillating supernatural elements that promote ticket sales.
