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 6th
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.
