The Omen (2006)

Exactly 30 years after The Omen (1976), The Omen (2006) was released. An older boy plays Damien in the remake, which means that the actor is capable of acting facial expression-reactions; even so, what really distinguishes the remake as having more depth than the original film is the explicit use of a poem that undergirds the veracity of the narrative—that Damien as indeed been sent by his father, Satan, to usher in the apocalypse in a way that will fill hell with human souls. The poem is a Christian prophesy that functions in the film’s narrative as a thread. I contend that the poem partakes of several domains, rather than being exclusively religious in nature, and thus “muddies the water” in terms of answering the question of how the religious domain is distinctive, rather than to be read psychologically, historically, or scientifically.

Robert Thorn remembers and repeats the poem—which as a cinematic device subtly tells the viewers that the poem is important in the film. The poem goes as follows: “When the Jews return to Zion, when the comet fills the sky, when the holy Roman empire rises, then you and I must die. From the eternal sea he rises, creating armies on either shore, turning man against his brother, till man exists no more.” It is the Antichrist, Damien, who will set man against man until everyone is dead, and presumably in hell for having fought rather than loved one’s enemies. The poem goes from religion to astronomy to the political domain (the Holy Roman Empire was a political entity in history), and thus runs the risk of conflating qualitatively different, albeit related, domains of human phenomena. This risk is a bit like treating different genres of film—fiction, nonfiction, westerns, sci-fi, and horror—as interchangeable. Closer to my point, the risk is like assuming that genres of literature—religious myth, historical accounts, novels, nonfiction, and academic treatises—are interchangeable, such that a myth could legitimately be taken to be a historical account. That which is distinct about myth would be lost, even though the writers of myths did not view themselves as historians and thus subject to that genre’s criteria.

In what follows, I subject the first few subordinate clauses of the poem to critique in line with my thesis. By the way, my intent is to support my thesis with arguments, rather than to convey or prescribe my own religious beliefs; this holds for the books I’ve written too. Applying Hume in the concluding chapter   of Godliness and Greed, which is on the history of Christian thought on greed in relation to profit-seeking and wealth, and then altering that interpretation by incorporating the divine Logos in the final chapter of God’s Gold do not reflect my own religious beliefs. Hence scholarship can be distinguished from opinion pieces.

The phrase, “when the Jews return to Zion” raises the question of whether Zionism is primarily religious or political; if both, then the concept can be regarded as messy. The risk is that a portion of a myth could be misconstrued as translating directly into the political domain. Exactly twenty years after the remake’s release, weaponized Israeli settlers in the West Bank presumed the political right to walk into the houses of Palestinian homeowners, declare that God gave the house to the Hebrews, and kick out the residents. One video shown on social media shows a settler removing a refrigerator from a house owned by a Palestinian family in the West Bank, as if the Jews’ deity declares in the Bible that God has given the refrigerator to that particular settler. The genocide then still going on in Gaza illustrates how atrocious misconstruing the genre of myth as valid in the political domain can be.  Life can give art added significance and clarity, and art can inform how geopolitical events are interpreted and situated paradigmatically.

The association of the return of Jews to Zion with the apocalypse can be interpreted in religious terms as ushering in the Antichrist’s role in turning man against man. That is to say, theologically the return (and stay) would be a bad rather than a good thing. In 2026, the International Court of Justice declared Israel to be illegitimate because that state’s government had refused to exit Gaza and the West Bank. A UN commission had determined that Israel was guilty of committing a genocide in Gaza, and the International Criminal Court had issued arrest warrants. Any of these determinations would have been out of line had they been based on the theological interpretation that the Jews returning to Zion is a bad thing in religious terms. Jurisprudential and political judgment is properly made on political grounds even if personal religious belief is related.

Turning to the poem’s second phrase, “when a comet fills the sky” jumps from myth to astronomy, and thus science, as if these domains were continuous rather than discrete. In the Nativity Story in the gospels, efforts by scientists to find a comet misconstrue myth as a distinct genre. The inconsistency of a star being in that myth and a comet being associated with the birth of the Antichrist is not a problem in the genre of myth because the point is not astronomical or historical, but rather in signaling heightened religious meaning. Put another way, even if no star could be found to have occurred over the Middle East, this would not detract from the meaning that the star plays in the Nativity story. A star determined empirically to be over a particular town and thus serving to locate the town from a distance is not possible, but this is not a problem as long as myth is construed as myth rather than as astronomy or history). The phrase, “when a comet fills the sky” risks being taken as empirical astronomy rather than as in the religious genre. To be sure, myth can incorporate empirical events, natural as well as human, but changing those events to make religious points is totally acceptable in the religious genre, which thus cannot be assumed to contain historical accounts.

In the film, the next phrase, “when the holy Roman empire rises,” is erroneously interpreted, which can be expected when geopolitics is conflated with religious myth. Historically, the Holy Roman Empire was primarily geopolitical rather than ecclesiastical; it was not a religious organization. In the film, the European Union is assumed to be the new holy Roman empire because of the Treaty of Rome, but the Maastricht Treaty is arguably more significant to that political union, and the E.U. state of Italy can hardly be said to dominate at the federal level; the state of Germany has arguably been the state with disproportionate influence, especially during the debt crisis in which the Commission sided with German creditors over the E.U. states of Greece and Spain. So to refer to the E.U. as Roman—not to mention holy!—is ludicrous. The adjectives holy and Roman may alternatively lead to the conclusion that the Roman Catholic Church instantiates the Roman Empire in a new guise. Such an interpretation would resituate the phrase properly within the religious domain. The Crusades, selling indulgences, the Inquisition, prosecuting Galileo as if the criteria of religion were hegemonic over scientific criteria in the domain of science, making a treaty with Hitler, and covering up rapes committed by pedophile priests on children, and social prejudice within the Vatican against Blacks, gays, and even women, and even the obsession of the identity of Christ over preaching and practicing humane compassion especially when doing so is least convenient (e.g. to detractors and enemies as well as to people who have been rude, arrogant, or subject to one’s prejudices—we all have them) have at the very least compromised the legitimacy of that religious institution even though the religious and ethical domains are distinct. This is not to minimize the actual worship of the divine in the Mass, or the faith of the faithful who yearn to transcend the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion to the beyond, whether personified and thus anthropomorphic or not.

Self-idolatry on a collective scale—rather than an astronomical event or the formation of a political empire such as the E.U. or U.S.—and the tremendous harm unleased by such selfishness at the expense of other people can be regarded as the Antichrist personified in us. In the film, Wonder Woman (2017), Mars, the Greek god of war, tells Diana (Wonder Woman) that he doesn’t have to do much to facilitate man turning against man in war; aggression is very much in the nature of the beast, according to that god. Diana, on the other hand, refuses to view humans as beasts, for she has come to love the species (and Steve Trevor in particular). She sees our better nature, whereas her nemesis sees no positive worth in our species existing at all. The complexity in human nature itself is personified by deities in that film; in general, polytheism reflects our non-simplistic nature that can be analyzed into parts.

In both versions of The Omen, Damien survives being murdered physically and spiritually by Robert Thorn, so evil ends up with the upper hand. The god of war would be pleased, but human nature is more complex and thus may forestall the final verdict of extinction, even though climate-change, Russia invading Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, and the U.S. and Israel bombing Iran (and Lebanon) evince a troubling trajectory. In the economic and political domains, however, selfishness (stemming from self-interest) rather than self-idolatry (a sin) is pertinent even though the two concepts can be related to each other. For example, Adam Smith’s economic theory of the competitive market is premised on economic self-interest. Even though the latter can be related to self-love, and thus self-idolatry, the claim that Smith’s theory of capitalism is based on self-love would be based on a category mistake even though self-interest is arguably sourced in self-love taken as a sin. In terms of navigating in a certain domain of human experience, it is important not to drift or swerve into another lane as if in driving on a road no lanes can be discerned. The poem that undergirds The Omen (2006) swerves between lanes as if none exist, and thus invites erroneous category mistakes and thus flawed interpretations.

The Omen

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. 

 

The banality in Boston's mass-transit company can be grasped even from the sheer repetitiveness of the aggressive braking in spite of ongoing customer complaints:

Only some of the visible recalcitrant repeat-offenders in the system are pictured below, and of course their abjectly incompetent supervisors are hidden from the view of the paying customers but are no less culpable: