Horror Fest VIII (Day Two): Prince of Darkness

 It’s been almost a decade since I last watched Prince of Darkness. In fact, the last time I did was followed by the first time I saw Visiting Hours, which turned out not to be such a good idea for Visiting Hours. I suppose I should watch the latter again now, because Prince of Darkness is pretty good but nowhere near as great as I remembered it being.

  For those of you who follow John Carpenter to any degree (or just read the end of the last recap), you are probably already aware that Prince of Darkness is the second part of what he calls the “Apocalypse Trilogy.” If you’re just a casual fan of his movies, you’ve probably heard of the other two films – The Thing (has not played at a Fest… yet) and In the Mouth of Madness (Horror Fest III) – all of which deal with the end of the world in some capacity. At the risk of spoiling both films, let’s just say they don’t end well for the protagonists. Prince of Darkness has the, shall we say, “happy” ending of the three, if you can call it that.

 Thematically, The Thing, Prince of Darkness, and In the Mouth of Madness deal with different aspects of the human experience: in The Thing, it’s the inability to trust one another, and with In the Mouth of Madness, it’s about notions of reality. Prince of Darkness is about the uneasy space between science and religion, and Carpenter poses some intriguing questions but doesn’t always get around to addressing them.

 Writing under the pseudonym Martin Quatermass (the first of several references to the British science fiction film series), Carpenter ties together quantum physics with religious prophecy and makes a somewhat uneasy mix, largely because of the uneven nature of the film. Donald Pleasance plays a priest invited to see a dying colleague, who passes holding a metal box. Inside the box is a key that unlocks the basement of the Godard Church, where the “Order of Sleep” has been keeping something ancient and almost certainly evil in a large glass container. Convinced that this green liquid is a physical manifestation of the “prince of darkness,” he contacts Professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong) to investigate its origins.

 Birack teaches quantum theory at Kneale University, and brings along his PhD students (including cast members Jameson Parker, Lisa Blount, and Dennis Dun) to help him study the cylinder.  (It’s worth pointing out that while Parker’s Brian Marsh says something to the effect of getting his “doctorate” in physics, there’s also a scene where Birack says “now I know none of you have your degree in this” which puts a puzzling  conundrum about how old these students are supposed to be). At the church, they set up equipment and meet a number of other scientists, including chemists and microbiologists led by Caler (Jessie Lawrence Ferguson) and Dr. Paul Leahy (Peter Jason), as well as a theologian (Ann Yen), there to help translate a book resting near the green liquid. Of concern to almost everyone inside is an ominous – and growing – contingent of the homeless outside of the church, including Alice Cooper (billed as “Street Schizo”).

 Undoubtedly there’s some creepy imagery (nature also seems to respond to the presence in the basement, so there’s a lot of creepy crawly business and one great scene involving beetles) and admittedly some novel combination of religion and science (one of the many discoveries in the book are a set of equations that go beyond what any of Birack’s students recognize). The hook comes halfway into the film, when a collective “dream” sets in: we later discover that it’s a transmission from the future (1999!) sent to warn people in the present that they have to stop the coming of Satan and the release of the “Anti-God.” It seems to change slightly every time we see it, but would be served better had it not been introduced so late into the narrative.

 The problem with Prince of Darkness is that there are so many good ideas swirling around that it’s disappointing when most of them go undeveloped. Blame it on a cast that keeps growing in the first thirty or forty five minutes, to the point that we’re continually being introduced to people and just barely aware of what purpose they serve, other than to (SPOILER) be possessed. The grand “plan” to release the “Anti-God” isn’t really clear until nearly the end of the movie and is resolved so quickly that it barely has any impact. Moreover, it’s meant to be a “tragic” ending for Marsh, but Jameson Parker has more of an impact for his rockin’ (if uneven) mustache than his chemistry with Lisa Blount’s Catherine. It’s also puzzling that the most obnoxious character ever – Dennis Dun’s Walter – makes it all the way through the movie when his “type” is usually marked for death from the first inappropriate comment.

 I don’t actually mind that Walter lives – it’s a good bit of misdirection for Carpenter – but the why of who is and isn’t possessed is unclear and the seemingly endless discussions between Pleasance and Wong about their respective fields don’t add any insight to either position. Prince of Darkness has some good ideas knocking around, but Carpenter (as he would later admit) doesn’t quite know what he wants to say about them. The end result is a very good premise that’s diluted in the execution, giving the film a somewhat earned cult status among John Carpenter fans. It’s certainly worth watching, but for my money the weakest entry in the “Apocalypse Trilogy.”

 Up Next: Speaking of Satan, how about Rosemary’s Baby?

Coen Brothers Final Day Five: Uncertainty

6. The theme of uncertainty or unreliability of human knowledge is central to the Coen Brothers' films. It is articulated prominently in The Man Who Wasn't There and A Serious Man by invoking concepts of theoretical physics - The Heisenberg Principle and Schrodinger's Cat. Explain these concepts and show how the Coens integrate them with the larger theme of uncertainty - not only in A Serious Man and The Man Who Wasn't There, but in their other films as well.

Despite introducing the concepts of uncertainty and Schrödinger’s Cat scientifically late into their careers, it is possible to trace the application of these theoretical models into their earlier work. In fact, uncertainty figures so prominently into the Coen brothers’ body of work that it is slightly surprising they waited until The Man Who Wasn’t There to comment on the theory and A Serious Man to introduce the exercise.

Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle was developed in 1927 while he was studying ability to measure the movement of atoms. In Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, the discovery is described as such:

What Heisenberg conceived that night came to be called the uncertainty principle, and it meant the end of strict determinism in physics: because if atomic events are inherently blurred, if it is impossible to assemble complete information about the location of individual particles in time and space, then predictions of their future behavior can only be statistical. (130)

Heisenberg realized that in attempting to examine the movement of a particle by shining a light on it, the light affected the particle and vice versa, changing both. Accordingly, it would be impossible to empirically observe something without changing both the observer and the observed. The Uncertainty Principle has been appropriated by philosophers in order to suggest that we cannot ever understand what is happening in the world because our engagement with the world changes us and the object of observation. To a much more simplistic degree, Freddy Riedenschneider applies it to law in The Man Who Wasn’t There in order to construct a legal defense that confuses the jury into reasonable doubt.

Schrödinger’s Cat, a thought exercise developed by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, expanding the ideas of the observer and the observed from Heisenberg. The exercise involves sealing a cat into a box with a Geiger counter, a vial of poison, and a radioactive source. When the Geiger counter registers an increased radiation level, a mechanism attached to the counter breaks the vial, killing the cat. Based on theory, it should be impossible for a being to be in two states at the same time (the exercise’s ability to theoretically disprove this is the basis for Quantum theory), so the cat must be dead. However, until an observer opens the box and sees the dead cat (and hence changes the state of the cat by observance); it must be possible that the cat is both dead and alive simultaneously. This paradoxical state reinforces the idea that we can never quite be sure of the status of unobservable phenomena / data / et al.

The theme of uncertainty figures prominently – albeit in a broader sense – throughout the Coen brothers cinematic output. In Raising Arizona, it is not until H.I. and Ed encounter Leonard Smalls that they mutually influence (and change) each other. Up until that point, Smalls impact on their lives is minimal as a character. After their confrontation – which ends fatally for Smalls – H.I. and Ed have a change of heart and return Nathan Jr. to the Arizona’s home. The film ends ambiguously, with H.I. explaining a dream that may or may not be the future of each character in Raising Arizona, including his own hazy future.

Uncertainty in motives is prevalent throughout films like Barton Fink, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, and even The Big Lebowski. The Coen brothers rarely end their films definitively, preferring ambiguity over explanations, but beyond that, character arcs are seldom brought to completion. The relationship between Tom Reagan and Leo, or why Tom behaved the way he did at any point during Miller’s Crossing remains uncertain at the end of the film, and perhaps the question is whether knowing Tom’s scheme was even the purpose of the film. While the story of The Dude that The Stranger is relaying to us ends during The Big Lebowski, it is clear that life goes on for Walter, The Dude, Maude, Jackie Treehorn, Bunny, and Jeffrey Lebowski that we cannot and will not know. Why or how the Big Lebowski’s kidnapping scheme came to be remains nebulous, despite Walter’s theories.

Which brings us back to The Man Who Wasn’t There, where the nature of Ed Crane remains uncertain; is Crane telling the truth about any of his dry cleaning murder scheme? If Crane is writing this story of The Man Who Wasn’t There for a men’s magazine, there is no guarantee that any part of Ed Crane reflects the man in prison. The Coen brothers present a film predicated on mistruths and uncertainty, only to add the final layer of subterfuge near the end; our narrator is potentially unreliable, rendering the plot uncertain, let alone the dream sequence that follows or Crane’s subsequent execution.

A Serious Man poses uncertainty as the only possible knowledge; from the opening parable, which introduces an Old World Jewish couple to a man that may or may not be a Dybbuk. The consequences of the wife’s actions (stabbing Treitle Groshkover) are unclear, and the parable’s bearing on the story of Lawrence Gopnik are comparably uncertain. While Gopnik stresses uncertainty to his students, his insistence that mathematics are reliable and can be counted on fail him repeatedly – including in answering the questions surround his doppelganger / brother Arthur, creator of the Mentaculus.

At the end of A Serious Man, Larry’s predicament is no clearer, and in fact closes with the implication that his “sin” of changing Clive’s grade is somehow causally linked to a call from his doctor regarding something serious. Nothing is resolved in A Serious Man; only uncertainty looms, a potent expansion of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, made all the more appropriate by Gopnik’s demonstration of Schrödinger’s Cat as the means by which to fully understand the uncertainty of the universe.