If the Christmas Movie could be construed as a genre, its catalog is underwhelming to say the least. Stories draw strength from conflict, but most Christmas movies keep tensions to a minimum lest holiday cheers be dampened. The assumption is people watch Holiday Movies for uplift; they want to be blissed out, not pissed on. Expressions of Christmas are merry, affirming, aglow with warmth. Yet, what works for Christmas carols, cards, dinners, parties, and gift-giving doesn’t work with a story. A story that is mostly cheerful would be a dull affair, like a Stepford Christmas, too ‘perfect’ and ‘flawless’ to sustain interest over time. Then, it’s hardly surprising that most Christmas movies are utterly forgettable. The Hallmark formula works as greeting, not narrative.
Besides, for all the happy celebration(and commercialism) of Christmas, its observance is of a religion as dark as it is bright. The myth says Jesus was born in exile, spared Herod’s sword(that slaughtered many a first born), and birthed in a manor(or was it a manger?) after his parents were turned away time and time again. And even though Christianity offers hope, a glimpse of Heaven, it was only by way of the torturous struggles and deaths of Jesus and the Apostles. The Son of God was destined to die at the age of thirty-three.
Given those considerations, a fuller appreciation of Christmas requires a degree of darkness and agony. It’s no wonder the Peanuts Holiday Special, A CHARLIE BROWN SPECIAL, is one of the exceptions in the mostly miserable Christmas ‘canon’. Charlie Brown, the social pariah, knows something about persecution, and Linus is just eccentric(or oddball) enough to see what others don’t see. HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS and FROSTY THE SNOWMAN also work their (dark) magic by blending hope with horror. Despite their obligatory happy endings, they push to the edge of the abyss before light prevails over darkness. (FROSTY is especially disturbing. A little girl risks her health, indeed endangers her life, by traveling to the cold north to save Frosty, and Frosty risks his ‘life’ by entering a greenhouse to save the girl. Magic finally intervenes and saves the day, but it’s somewhat reminiscent of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Match Girl”.)
Frosty the Snowman
Then, it’s hardly surprising that the most memorable Christmas movies and Christmas-season movies(where the relation to Christmas is incidental, secondary, or even non-existent) tend to be plenty dark, even disturbing. Scratch the surface of Christmas/Christianity and there’s as much hell as heaven, even if it’s a hell frozen over with snow and frost around the shortest day of the year.
For some reason, despite having originated in the Middle East(and having first spread to the warmer climes of Europe), the festivities of Christmas became most closely associated with the dark frigid North, what with even the myth of Santa Claus with his residence in the North Pole with elves and reindeers.
In the modern era, most of us don’t fear the cold with our heaters and cheap gas(and plenty of food and cheap winter-wear), but one could imagine what the cold meant in the pre-modern world when freezing and/or starving to death was a real possibility. Even the idea of going to the outhouse in the middle of winter sounds worse than in hell where, at the very least, the toilet-seat is warm.
Still, one can appreciate the attraction of Christmas lights in the deepest and darkest recesses of winter. Or, the reassurance of Christmas carols in the frosty air over a landscape blanketed in snow. The contrast between the birth of Jesus, aglow with the promise of eternal life, and the dark North, barren under frozen fields, makes for a special formula. No wonder even those celebrating Christmas in warmer climates without snow nevertheless go for snowy tropes of Christmas. Furthermore, death has a cleansing quality. In the jungle, death is always followed by more life in an endless incessant cycle; what need for ghosts in the jungle when life of all kinds are over-abundant? The ghostly gains clarity in the forlorn world of death where one’s imagination is apt to conjure apparitions to approximate the semblance of life, like the ghosts that fill up the empty Overlook Hotel in THE SHINING. Cold dark winter kills but also halts decay and lends of promise of a blank slate(symbolized by snow), a new beginning, and indeed, what is Christianity without the dream of Year Zero, the day when all spiritual debts are wiped clean and all could attain their place in the eternal hereafter through the life-death-life of Jesus?
The most famous Christmas story is undoubtedly A CHRISTMAS CAROL by Charles Dickens. Tim Burton’s THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS(a pile of garbage) was lauded for its clever juggling of Halloween and Christmas tropes, but A CHRISTMAS CAROL is no less a work of horror than DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE(and THE SHINING). My introduction to the story was by way of the movie musical SCROOGE(with Albert Finney, 1970), which, to the eyes of a child, was pretty frightening. Even the moments of nostalgia are painful and depressing, reminders of what was lost or betrayed.
The twisted irony of A CHRISTMAS CAROL stems from the comfort, cold but real enough, of being a stingy and wretched bastard without a care for the world. Ebenezer Scrooge may be an A**HOLE, but he needn’t lose sleep about the world because he’s made peace with the humdrumness of everything and everyone, in a way, including himself. With all the money he’s accumulated, he even denies himself a decent meal.
One might even argue there’s a kind of integrity to his stinginess as he isn’t into blings and things, indulging an ostentatious life. In a way, he’s no less severe on himself as on humanity. He’s like an extreme version of the Protestant Work Ethic, all work and no play(or pay). If “All work and no play” drove Jack Torrance crazy in THE SHINING(even though one could argue it was really “all play and no work” that really did him in), it made Scrooge what he is, a success if judged strictly on economics.
He’s a living cliche, the ultimate embodiment of the nose-to-the-grindstone. Why should he get soft and sloppy about others when he’s been hard on himself all his life? He could afford sumptuous feasts but consumes just enough morsels to keep ticking. He could afford all the heat in the world but keeps the temperature to a minimum in his office and his bedroom.
Scrooge is horrible, but it shields him from the horrors of the world, as a sense of horror begins with caring. Elemental low-intelligence cold-blooded creatures know no horror. They lay thousands of eggs and don’t care if their spawns are devoured by other creatures. But warm-blooded mother-creatures do care about their young, and so, there’s the horror of a mother-moose watching her calf torn apart by wolves or the horror of a mother grizzly watching a male grizzly kill her cubs. The more you care, the greater your sense of horror.
It’s no wonder that the horror genre owes a cultural debt to Christianity, one of the most caring religions. Judaism cares about Jews but not about goyim. So, when Yahweh destroys countless goyim to advantage the Jews in the Exodus out of Egypt, we feel no horror. It’s all about the Hebrews, not the goyim. Who cares if goyim die of pestilence, famine, fire, or sea water? As long as Jews, as the Chosen, inch closer to the Promised Land, the hell with the goyim regardless of horrors they suffer at the hands of Jews(backed by Yahweh).
In contrast, Christian Mythology preaches that Jesus has a profound love for all humanity, carrying the cross for the suffering of all peoples in all places at all times. It’s no wonder the Jesus-character is seriously neurotic in THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. It’s a burden enough to care about one pair of dog and cat, but imagine if you had to care about all the dogs and cats in the world. Consider all the dogs and cats living in misery around the world. Imagine all the dogs used in dog-fights by ghastly Negroes or all the cats boiled by ghoulish Chinese. Think of all the dogs abused by Muslims on account of what Muhammad said. Think of all the stray dogs freezing in the cold or awaiting sure death in Anti-Cruelty Societies.
In our time, some of the people driven most crazy are those who’ve come to care most about the Planet, especially in regards to ‘climate change’. In Paul Schrader’s FIRST REFORMED, one guy even commits suicide because he can’t face it anymore. Once one begins to fret about the world, the concern can grow into an obsession, a full-blown pathology. Then, it isn’t difficult to understand the unclear boundary between Christian morality and pathological puritanism.
A Christian believing in Heaven and Hell(where the unsaved are condemned to burn for eternity) may feel compelled to save as many souls as possible from the horrors of hell. Such zealotry against the horrors can be horrible in its own way, which explains why many Christians through the ages have been a thorn in the arse, not least during the Prohibition Era.
In that sense, Ebenezer Scrooge’s horribleness rather limits the extent of his personal contribution to the horrors of the world. He’s horrible for not lifting a finger to help his fellow man, not for wielding a cudgel to set the world straight(and very possibly doing even more harm in the bargain). He certainly won’t turn into one of those radical socialists prone to by-any-means-necessary ruthlessness to create heaven-on-earth.
At the very least, he’s free of the illusion of ridding the world of ineradicable horrors. Indeed, suppose the story had been reversed: Scrooge is a compassionate and caring man who weeps for the world and does his utmost to care for his fellow men and women. He’d be like the missionary family in HAWAII(with Max Von Sydow and Julie Andrews) living in self-denial in service to humanity, a bunch of childish savages into volcano worship. If indeed Scrooge were so compassionate and generous, people would take advantage of him left and right.
Compassion in A CHRISTMAS CAROL is worth its price in gold because it was written during the Industrial Revolution when many people were deprived of what-we-now-take-for-granted; people were without much in the way of social services, much of which were provided by the church and charity organizations.
But, with the advent of the Welfare State in the West, as well as philanthropy and public largesse, what’s happened to the masses? One of the main problems among the black underclass is obesity, even wanton obesity of hippo magnitude.
In a revisionist version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL, the compassionate Scrooge might be haunted by more horrors than the stingy Scrooge is in the original tale. At least in Dickens’ time, the poor had a sense of fear & shame and were reluctant to make outright demands, like when Oliver Twist pleads if he could have a little more. Contrast that to A CLOCKWORK ORANGE(directed by Stanley Kubrick) and SID & NANCY(directed by Alex Cox)? What hath the Welfare State wrought? With the loss of dignity(by way of dependence + shameless hedonism), the working class lost self-respect(compensated by rage and resentment), which had been a moral capital for the have-nots and have-lesses, like in Norman Rockwell’s paintings of the Simple Man. Likely, the kindly and compassionate Scrooge of the revised A CHRISTMAS CAROL would have turned Thatcherite and kicked everyone’s butt at the end.
If A CHRISTMAS CAROL is the most famous piece of literature on Christmas(and served as the basis for several decent movie adaptations), IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE became the most beloved Christmas movie(as, for awhile, it entered the public domain and was aired almost non-stop near around Christmas time). Unlike the main character of A CHRISTMAS CAROL, George Bailey of Frank Capra’s movie is a good guy(and his adversary, Mr. Potter, is the Scrooge-like cold-hearted bastard), but Bailey’s Christmas Crisis is as jarring, if not more so, as that of Ebenezer.
In certain respects, IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE is darker because, whereas one could argue Scrooge got his just desserts for humbugging Christmas, George Bailey is driven to ruin despite his good deeds. His story is like the song by the Animals that goes, “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good, oh lord please don’t let me be misunderstood.” If Scrooge is punished for not caring enough, Bailey is ‘punished’ for having cared too much, which seems all the more unjust.
Like the Dickens tale, IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE veers into areas resembling the horror genre. Bailey is granted his wish by Clarence, a guardian angel, but ironically things turn out to be worse(though some people might disagree and prefer Pottersville, with its cheap liquor and easy women, to Bedford Falls where the only show in town seems to be THE BELLS OF ST. MARY).
At any rate, as in A CHRISTMAS CAROL, it’s the dark and even terrifying aspects of Frank Capra’s movie that make it so powerful, a classic case of No Pain, No Gain, or no triumph without tragedy. Unlike in most milquetoast holiday movies, the emotions in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE are put through a wringer, and the happy ending is fought for and won, like an honest buck. Nothing is taken for granted.
And even though Bailey has been a standup guy all his life, it’s the journey through the dark soul of the night that truly awakens him to the blessings of his life. For all the good he’s done for the community, a small town of ‘nobodies’, there was always the burden of obligation and self-denial, a repressed resentment of missed opportunities and the sacrifice of his true calling. He wanted to ‘see things’ and ‘lick the world’ and rub shoulders with the winners, especially as he exhibited from childhood all the hallmarks of a natural leader, someone born to win.
As a young man, he had the ambitions of Howard Roark(of Ayn Rand’s THE FOUNTAINHEAD, though Roark is also met with adversity, albeit for different reasons) but had to settle for communitarian obligations.
According to Jesus, it isn’t good enough to do good; one must do it from the goodness of one’s heart, and this was only half-true of George Bailey because, deep down inside, he’d always resented being stuck in nowhereville. Despite his attachments and affection for the people of the community, he really wanted to leave them behind and go be with the success, fortune, and/or power, the Manhattans and the Hollywoods of the world.
Privately, he resented the townsfolk, seemingly ungrateful at times, for whose benefit he sacrificed his ambitions, even his honeymoon. He also carried considerable load for his lovable but bumbling uncle. Then, it’s hardly surprising that when the scandal looms over the missing money, he takes it out on the whole community, including his wife and children. They all held him back, and now what does he have to look forward to but scandal, loss of reputation, and even prison time? All the repressed bitterness over the years bursts forth, in part revealing that, for all his decency, he’d never been truly pure of heart. It is then that his wish, granted by Clarence and the Boss Angels, serves as ‘punishment’ by clearing his vision to the wonderful things in his life, what he’s always underappreciated as, at best, modest compensation for what he really could have gained in life. (Akira Kurosaw’s IKIRU certainly owes something to the Capra touch.)
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE is likely the darkest Christmas movie, but it’s also the greatest with nothing coming even remotely close. It isn’t merely the best in the ‘genre’, hardly much of a praise in and of itself given the lousiness of most holiday movies, but one of the greatest movies ever. Most people have forgotten movies like WHITE CHRISTMAS(with Bing Crosby), which play it safe and ‘inoffensive’. Likewise, most Biblical movies tend to be dull because they go for middlebrow respectability. In a scene in the Coen Brothers HAIL, CAESAR!, we see how the studio is eager to gain the seal of approval of various Christian factions(and the Jews too). It’s almost like a work-by-committee, filtered of all the elements that might make a movie challenging and thought-provoking.
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE was something of an oddity as it was made with relative artistic liberty by a short-lived company controlled by the film-makers themselves. Its great success was THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, and one of its undoing was IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, which was maybe too dark for Christmas(and postwar attitudes). Over the years, however, the Capra movie has come to tower over William Wyler’s, perhaps overrated for its timely subject and theme.
Of course, the element of struggle is relative, and even a molehill can seem like a mountain in skillful hands. Take the 1983 movie A CHRISTMAS STORY(incredibly by Bob Clark who was previously responsible for an abomination called PORKY’S) where the main conflict revolves around a boy’s dream of a BB gun as a Christmas gift. The other conflicts involve daring a kid to stick his tongue on a steel post, decoding a secret radio message, punishment over having said something naughtier than ‘fudge’, writing the perfect class essay, fleeing the local bully, and meeting a department store Santa. None of these is a matter of life and death, but A CHRISTMAS STORY works wonders because its author, Jean Shepherd, never forgot what it was to be a child. What adults regard as silly or trivial could be the gravest matter to a kid, as if the fate of the universe hangs in the balance. The local bully could be the face of the worst evil imaginable. Santa and elves could make dreams come true, and radio shows & comics could fire up the imagination of minds yet to yield to jaded cynicism. And some item or toy for Christmas could be like the holy grail, an answer to one’s prayer, the source of eternal happiness. And of course, a routine punishment could be like the worst persecution ever, as when Ralphie’s imagination goes into an overdrive of self-pity and guilt-fantasy upon the soap-in-mouth punishment. A CHRISTMAS STORY captures the ridiculousness of childhood that becomes apparent only in hindsight.
Because most Christmas movies are generic and forgettable, individuals have their personal picks of seasonal favorites. I wouldn’t be surprised if THE GODFATHER is on many people’s list, not so much because of a few scenes of Christmas but of the celebration of family and tradition. Another favorite may be DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, a wintry epic. In some cases, a certain movie may be associated with Christmas because of its release. Brian DePalma’s SCARFACE for instance. Woody Allen’s RADIO DAYS, though Jewishy, also makes for a good holiday movie. There’s also FANNY AND ALEXANDER, framed by Christmas festivities, even though it’s a nasty piece of work, an artistic vendetta against his father and a confused mystical mumbo-jumbo about Jewish magic.
Among my personal picks for the winter season are EYES WIDE SHUT, MERRY CHRISTMAS MR. LAWRENCE, THE SHINING, WICKER PARK, METROPOLITAN, EMPIRE OF THE SUN, PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED, MCCABE & MRS. MILLER, SECRET GARDEN(1993), CARLITO’S WAY, MAKIOKA SISTERS, ZATOICHI MEETS YOJIMBO, and THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES.
Most of the movies listed above aren’t about or only incidentally related to Christmas, but a good number of them were released in the winter season and/or are evocative of moods of that time of the year. It’s certainly true of THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, though it could qualify as a genuine Christmas movie, albeit a twisted one. Like A CHRISTMAS CAROL and IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, its impact owes to the darker aspects, and it could also qualify as a Halloween Movie. It is categorized in the Horror genre after all, though its release in late January of 2002 failed to capitalize on either.
Still, it’s a different and unusual kind of horror, and some may argue it belongs more in the mystery genre despite the occultism. It might even be categorized as science-fiction as the mothman, to the best of our speculation, could just as well be a force of physics(or psycho-physics) as of the spiritual realm. An expert in paranormal phenomena explains that the ‘mothman'(and similar or related manifestations) are REAL enough but, as yet, beyond the means of man’s ability to predict and measure. The mothman(or mothmen?) may freely intrude into and manipulate our worlds(physical and psychological), but we cannot enter theirs; and if some individuals caught glimpses into something extraordinary, it was only because they were allowed or ‘invited’, a double-edged sword that heightens awareness, threatens madness, or both. Or, the glimpse of the mothman can come by way of tragedy, past or future, that places a person, physically or emotionally, in the gray zone between the living and the dead. In the case of the protagonist, it’s as if his psyche was dealt such a severe blow from a personal trauma that it edged toward the netherworld.
Unlike most in the horror genre, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES isn’t about victims of what are clearly evil spirits. Rather, the mystery that seems to gradually gather into critical mass seems rather ambiguous, wise and beneficent as well as menacing and sinister. Furthermore, the protagonist is an active seeker, in pursuit of than in flight from the mysterious force, though he may be less interested in the phenomenon itself than what it may reveal about his trauma.
While there have been movies about paranormal investigators and the like, most stories in the horror genre aren’t about asking for trouble but trying to escape or seek refuge from the madness. Like people hiding from flesh-eating zombies, running from the pod people(of the BODY SNATCHERS movies), or seeking a loved one’s release from demonic possession. In CARRIE, the heroine’s paranormal powers are neither good nor evil. If channeled and used for the good, she could have been like a superhero-type, but she’s shy and awkward and represses her talents, especially as her mother deems them a demonic force. Real evil in CARRIE isn’t supernatural but all-too-human, embodied by the religious craziness of Carrie’s mother and the slutty-bitchy-nastiness of Carrie’s schoolmates. It all ends in tragedy when Carrie, in a state of shock, releases her power in the most destructive way, cathartic but going off like a bomb.
Unlike most horror story archetypes, the two male characters of THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES find themselves tantalized by the ‘messages’, much like the unlikely hero of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND with his growing awareness and even pride as one of the special ‘select’, a ‘chosen’.
Thus, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, though creepy and unsettling in parts, isn’t meant to scare you out of your wits. Rather, it’s to prod the viewer’s curiosity and challenge his/her familiar range of perceptions and emotions. In confronting the deeper and darker truths beyond the comfort zone, there’s the danger of panic, even madness. One needs to break free of conventionality to see and feel more but faces the danger of losing one’s mind, even life. Plenty of artists who pushed the envelope ended up mad, and the history of spirituality is rife with half-mad seers and gurus.
Indeed, Willem Dafoe’s Jesus in THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST seems as repulsed as attracted to the great calling. At times, it isn’t certain if the ‘message’ is from above or below, not least because God works in mysterious ways and the Devil isn’t above playing the angel, even feigning the voice of god, to lure men, even the possible ‘Son of God’.
The spiritual cosmology of the Torah and the New Testament insists on the Good and Evil, with God as the good(indeed the absolute and perfect good) against Satan as the absolute in evil. By some accounts, Talmudic Judaism disfavored such spiritual ‘binary’ in favor of a more fluid and spectral interpretation, i.e. instead of Good vs Evil, a spectrum whereby one ebbs and flows with the other. Such a mindset could have influenced the late modern Jewish view of sexuality that eschews the ‘binary’ of man and woman in favor of ‘fluid’ definitions, leading to ever more ephemeral categories of hair(or air)splitting nuttery.
If the spectral conception turns sexuality into a joke, it nevertheless makes for a fascinating approach on spirituality and cosmology. After all, even science says energy and matter are really two sides of the same coin. The idea of opposites is useful(and necessary) for mankind, but what may appear diametric on the surface may be integrated underneath. (For sure, both political parties in the US, for all their superficial spats, work as the ‘uniparty’, the strings of which are pulled by the dark forces of Jewish Supremacism).
To sum up the plot of the movie, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES follows John Klein(Richard Gere), a star reporter of Washington Post(and TV pundit), who mysteriously finds himself in the small town of Point Pleasant(West Virginia) where he learns, from the police officer Connie(Laura Linney) and various locals, of strange sightings and occurrences that have some folks worried. From several(and increasing number of) accounts, something strange seems to be afoot, but they are still too far between(if not exactly few) to warrant widespread panic, let alone national attention. Though certain patterns have emerged as to the nature of the ‘events’, none has been discernible as to the when and where it might happen next. Despite the increasing number of eyewitnesses, it’s clear most people in town remain clueless and just go about their daily routines. And even most people who’d experienced the phenomenon did so only once and treat it like a freak accident that likely won’t recur, a matter of past tense. In most cases, it affects people at the individual level, which could be a credibility issue but for the fact that a good number of reputable people have reported similarly strange happenings that may or may not be interrelated. Still, Connie, having lived there all her life and knowing most townsfolk to be good decent folks, has no reason to doubt them. She cares about them and has pride of community.
In the 19th century and early 20th century, when many urbanites had migrated from or were only one generation removed from the countryside, they felt a connection to the soil, from which all humanity sprung. But now, with so many urbanites and suburbanites separated from the soil by several or many generations, something essential has been lost. When people become alienated from the soil, they lose a deeper sense of reality, which partly explains the degeneracy that has gripped the modern world.
Klein turns amateur sleuth and utilizes all his investigative skills to gain a better grasp of the strange events. Among the locals, he uneasily but eventually befriends a working class fella named Gordon Smallwood(Tom Patton) who comes to believe he has been specially chosen as a medium to receive certain messages.
Throughout the movie, the messages or ‘prophecies’ remain ambiguous and could be interpreted as warnings or threats, blessings or curses. The ‘name’ by which the entity makes itself known to Klein the urbanite and Gordon the townie is ‘Indrid Cold’, but then, Mr. Cold says his(or its) essence depends on the who and the why of those he(or it) chooses to interact with. A part of John Klein wants to drop the whole thing and return to his routine(as a Washington Post reporter), but another part of him just can’t let it go and feels this great need to know.
Klein even contacts an ex-specialist in paranormal phenomena, Alexander Leek(Alan Bates), but is advised to stay away from Point Pleasant as something tragic is about to happen there. Leek says he abandoned the field as it destroyed his family life and career. As tantalizing as the ‘messages’ may be, Leek warns Klein that they will be misinterpreted, possibly doing more harm than good. But such warnings only strengthen Klein’s determination to solve the mystery and perhaps save the lives of townsfolk by averting a disaster, be it natural or man-made.
When his boss at the Washington Post, sounding agitated over Klein’s prolonged absence, calls his motel and assigns him to interview the governor who’s about to visit a local chemical plant, Klein connects the dots and is absolutely sure that something terrible is about to happen there, as one of the ‘messages’ warned of a great disaster on the Ohio River, along which the plant is located. But as things turn out, nothing happens, and Klein is as disappointed as relieved. Then, he receives another ‘message’ that his dead wife Mary will call him at home, and Klein leaves Point Pleasant, probably never to return, for D.C. It’s Christmas Day as Klein waits for the phone call, but right before the designated time, Connie calls and convinces him to return to Point Pleasant to spend Christmas there. Klein finds many cars stalled on the bridge due to fault traffic signals. It dawns on him that the great tragedy on the Ohio River is about to happen just then — the ‘mothman’ was right, after all — on the bridge, which soon collapses and takes thirty six lives. But in the melee, Klein spots Connie whose police car falls into the river and pulls her out of the river.
THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES is a movie of ideas, at least by genre standards. It’s about the subjective nature of reality, not so much in the conventional sense of everyone having different perspectives and backgrounds. Rather, the subjectivity is of a peculiar kind, a rare gift or curse of awareness by way of factors arising from within and without. The ‘visitations’ by the ‘mothman’ clearly affect the lives of individuals of Point Pleasant, West Virginia in the movie. Whether these ‘encounters’ could be deemed as good or bad is anyone’s guess.
Still, one gets the impression that the nature of most of these experiences were external, i.e. people going about their ordinary lives suddenly ambushed by weird phenomena. The explanation provided by Alexander Leek(Alan Bates), a specialist in the paranormal, is that strange sightings usually occur in an area about to be met with disaster, and that may account as to the various inexplicable activities around Point Pleasant.
The case of John Klein(Richard Gere) is somewhat different. He’s never been to Point Pleasant before, but an odd set of circumstances led him there where his car broke down in the middle of a road. He is a cosmopolitan urbanite, very much an inside-the-beltway creature whose specialty is national news and political commentary; he’s also a regular on political news shows. He’s the type with little interest in flyover country, of which Point Pleasant is emblematic. Much of America is a passing blur to a man like Klein whose focus is on prominent figures of power & wealth and the big issues of the day. Even as a critic whose articles and commentary sometimes ‘make them sweat’, he swims in the same pool, a sea of sharks than a river of minnows. A man of some success, in the second scene of the movie he’s house-searching with his wife despite living in a nice house already. They’re very much in love and perhaps hoping to raise a family in a more spacious nest.
Even though most of the movie takes place in Point Pleasant, it begins in Washington D.C., the center of the world, a point of commonality with THE EXORCIST. For those with a passing knowledge of what the movie is about, based on or inspired by actual accounts of strange phenomena in Point Pleasant prior to a bridge collapse, the obvious question would be, what does a story set in Point Pleasant have to do with D.C., two places that are worlds apart by just about every metric.
The simplest answer is one of audience identification and the fish-out-of-water scenario. The average moviegoer, especially for a work such as this, a kind of horror-art-film, is more likely to be an urbanite(or suburbanite) than a small town resident. Besides, people like to identify with the smart and successful than with a bunch of ‘losers’(though, to the movie’s credit, the townsfolk aren’t depicted as a bunch of toothless simpletons).
Tail lights like eyes of a moth
Also, it’s more interesting to watch a worldly and skeptical person be challenged by mystery than an ignoramus who is less likely to raise interesting questions and just fall under its spell. (That said, even though educated urbanites scoff at idiots who fall for Televangelists, they’ve become suckers for even stupider cults like Negrolatry, Globo-Homo, and ‘trust the science’ calling for endless booster jabs in the arse.)
And, there is instant tension, the meat-and-potatoes of drama, in watching a big city professional in a small-town setting, much like in GROUNDHOG DAY, IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, INSOMNIA, WICKER MAN, LOCAL HERO, and other such movies. Even in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE as George Bailey(James Stewart), though a small-town man all his life, has the spirit of an adventurer and conqueror. (One wonders if the alternative-reality nightmare in the Frank Capra movie was one of the inspirations for the plot of THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES. Remarkable is how Capra balanced abject horror with doles of humor.)
As it turns out, however, Point Pleasant in the movie is sufficiently up-to-date on social trends and cultural matters due to the ubiquity of electronic media all across America, indeed the world. (It certainly explains why so many new immigrants in the US arrive already ‘Americanized’. They grew up on American pop culture through TV and media.) The townsfolk aren’t really hicks in the conventional sense, and Connie, the town’s woman cop, instantly recognized Klein as a TV news personality.
Still, the difference between the two worlds is palpable as everything in Point Pleasant seems somewhat lagging, shabby, and run-down, especially as this is small-town America remade by socio-cultural degeneracy and globalism(though at the time of the movie’s release, the fruited plains had yet to be planted with fruity flags). It’s not exactly Bedford Falls of IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, if ever such a place really existed as something other than Americana.
One thing for sure, if small towns in old Hollywood movies were portrayed, even idealized, as heart-and-soul tributaries feeding into urban lakes, later they were increasingly depicted as peoples-and-places forgotten by time(despite the fact that rural folks became more connected to the global center via electronic media, satellites, and the internet).
One reason is that the US used to be more of an agricultural and manufacturing economy, in which small towns played key roles in production and as supply chains. But with the rise of globalism, industries once based in small towns have been outsourced to other countries. Even though THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES doesn’t dwell on such matters, the socio-economic details of Point Pleasant don’t paint a pretty picture. It looks like a town just barely holding on to a semblance of stability. Indeed, if not for the real-life disaster sensationalized by accounts of ‘mothman’ sightings that led to a book and a movie, it’s likely most people would never have heard of Point Pleasant. Most of the movie, to be sure, was shot in Kittanning, Pennsylvania instead.
Kittanning, Pa
For all of the town’s problems, Christmas festivities are cause for celebration for the community, if only for a few weeks of the year. Even though entire blocks of the town seem nearly vacant in daytime, a large enough crowd assembles in the town square for the lighting of the Christmas Tree. But then, strange sightings continue to occur, even increase, as the holiest day of the year approaches.
The Christmas setting is as integral to THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES as to EYES WIDE SHUT, though for less perverse reasons. Still, it’s twisted enough, at once subverting and affirming the themes associated with Christianity. Even if we remove the ‘mothman’ and related mysteries from the equation, it’s profoundly odd that an entire civilization has been founded on myths that became more real than reality for countless people, even to the point of fueling wars and conquests in the name of Christ.
And, think of the socio-cultural transformation in the West during the Christmas season. The various decorations and ornaments, along with the glimmering lights and enchanting carols, generate something more than mere pleasantness and bliss, a feature of all holidays; they conjure up a magical dreamscape, whether as a reminder of the miracle birth of Christ or the anticipation of Santa on his sleigh(or appreciation of Clarence the guardian angel in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE).
Christmas time is more than a holiday as, especially true of children, it’s a season when one is allowed to suspend the ‘humbug of reality’ and believe, at least for a week or two, that humanity(or at least Christendom or Christmas-celebrators) can regain a state of renewed faith and grace. It is as much an altered state of mind as an elevated state of joyousness. Something strange happens, akin to a collective hallucination. The Christmas Tree adorned with shiny & colorful objects and lit up with electricity has become one of the most magical and iconic images around the world, even in non-Christian lands. And, traces of the Spirit-of-Christmas linger long after people grow out of childhood, and many try to recapture the magic for their own children.
Observance of Christmas goes well beyond remembrance, celebration, and good times associated with, for example, the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. It means to be touched by the holy spirit(in the literal sense). The same could be said of Halloween, except that for all the spooky costuming and whatnot, no one takes any of it seriously, whereas Christmas is associated with what is still the world’s biggest religion. Whereas Halloween is merely demon-play, Christmastime has a way of inducing people to renew their faith. It is the one time of the year when good many souls drop their guard and are receptive to the holy grace of God.
But then, from the perspective of paranormal theorizing, couldn’t such an openness of the soul during Christmas create vulnerabilities, portals for less hospitable spirits to slip through as well? These darker spirits need not be demonic as there’s plenty in the mythology of Christ that is dark and unsettling. Take bringing Lazarus to life from the dead. A miracle to be sure but unseemly, like some zombie-voodoo.
And, in order for the mythology to be complete, Jesus had to be tortured and crucified, as harrowingly depicted in Martin Scorsese’s THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST and Mel Gibson’s THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, where Jim Caviezel’s Jesus gets whupped real bad, even worse than Tuco in THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY. The holiness comes by the way of horror.
And in their purity spirals, certain sects of Christianity are prone to condemning anyone and anything who isn’t Christian as demon-possessed, i.e. all the world is a house of horrors without the grace of God as they define it. Such a mindset may explain Christian culture begat some of the greatest works in the Horror genre. And of course, there are Jews who, to this day, regard Jesus as a sorcerer and emissary of Satan than the Son-of-God, a ludicrous and demonic notion to the Jews.
THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES conveys the various dark ambiguities inherent in Christianity(especially around Yuletide) and in its perverse mutation, the Western Horror Genre. Not only does Christmas open up portals to magical spirits, often pagan(therefore ‘demonic’)-in-origin masquerading as Christian icons, thereby allowing passage for the dark, along with the radiant, spirits, but its cheerfulness is based on a childlike denial of reality, a protective mental shield against the world that is what it is.
There was the famous case of the Christmas Truce in World War I where the two opposing sides, which had been slaughtering one another, made belief for a day that they were all brothers under the skin in their faith in Christ.
There was the 1984 cultural event of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” by Band-Aid, rather silly question to ask about a part of the world where Western-style celebration of Christmas would have been rather alien. Moreover, there was the ridiculous conceit that a bunch of self-absorbed, vain, and narcissistic pop idols could make a difference in a war zone and alleviate the suffering by rhapsodizing about Christmas while ignoring all the grim realities of the situation(as well as the unresolved problems at home). Still, at the emotional level, it was understandable given the state of mind induced by the spirit of Christmas, in equal parts, hopeful, caring, faithful, infantile, yearning, dreamy, magical, a kind of return to innocence by way of the reenactment of the birth of Christ and anticipation of Santa coming on his sleigh to eat cookies and fill socks.
All the more reason why Christmas can be the saddest time of the year. Its hallowed festivities and aura of sanctity, albeit much of it via commercialism, remind people, even lapsed-Christians, some Europeanized/Americanized Jews, and pagans(who believe the magic is really of indigenous European origin), that they should share in the ‘tidings of comfort and joy’. But, what if one is alone, by circumstance or even by choice, perhaps in fidelity to and/or ‘guilt’ over a lost one, in which case the joy could be a distraction from the fact that a loved one’s absence?
John Klein is such a case. His success and good looks(though middle-aged) would easily make him the life of the party on any occasion, and yet, a part of him fears that renewed happiness may drive a wedge between himself and his wife’s memory. Even two years after her death, which is when the bulk of the movie takes place, Klein limits his social interactions, especially of the romantic kind, outside his professional life. We sense that, between the time of Mary’s death and his ‘accidental’ arrival at Point Pleasant, time has stood still in his private life. It’s sort of like Noodles’ answer in ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA when Fat Moe asks him, “What have you been doing all these years?”: “Been going to bed early.” Klein has kept busy for those two years with his job but has been unable to move forward in his personal life. It doesn’t help that, just prior to the auto accident that led to the discovery of her brain tumor, they couldn’t have been happier in their love and future prospects. But then, it all fell apart during Christmastime. Despite his success and good looks, the middle-aged Klein may have thought himself fortunate to have met a woman like Mary(obviously a Christian reference)as the love of his life, a meeting of souls than merely of bodies. Success and true love, followed by family, what more can a man ask for?
But, it all vanished in an instant, which, however, casts a long spell on Klein who, for all his secular-rational understanding of reality, subconsciously clings to a vestige of hope that he may somehow be reunited with Mary, faintly similar to the Disciples holding Jesus in their hearts after His death.
Even though the main body of THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES concerns Klein’s role as amateur sleuth(albeit with journalistic instincts) into the ‘mothman’ phenomena, at the emotional level it is essentially a love story, albeit a strange one at that because the great love of Klein’s life, Mary, dies fifteen minutes into the story, not even lasting as long as Janet Leigh’s character in Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO.
There are echoes of VERTIGO, but there, ‘Madeleine’, the object of desire, disappears after the halfway mark, whereas Mary, so central to Klein’s sense of completeness, fades almost as soon as she appears.
In this, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES is similar to OLIVER’S STORY, a rather underrated follow-up to LOVE STORY. The sequel is about Oliver(Ryan O’Neal)’s myriad efforts to put the past behind but the inability(and unwillingness) to do so. Alternately helping matters and making things worse, Oliver meets Marcie(Candice Bergen) who becomes problematic precisely because she has the looks, intelligence, and charm to supplant Jenny, something he cannot allow. Something similar is at stake in THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES between Klein and Connie(Laura Linney) as genuine affection grows between them but which Klein isn’t willing to let blossom into anything more than ‘friendship’.
The romantic aspect of THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES may go underappreciated because the plot is so heavily invested in the spooky stuff. Unlike the camaraderie that develops between Roy(Richard Dreyfus) and Gillian(Melinda Dillon) in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, romance(and its tragic dimensions) is the key to THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES. For all the fondness between Roy and Gillian, his ultimate quest is to greet the Aliens and her obsession is to reunite with her child(taken as temporary ‘star child’ by the extraterrestrials). In contrast, for all the fascination and suspense, the strange phenomena in THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES ultimately serve as backdrop for what amounts to a tragic-romance, a modern retelling of the Orpheus-and-Eurydice story.
Even though THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES touches on some big ideas, it is the dramatization(and mythologization) around those ideas that make it special. Just as stories feed on interesting ideas, ideas are enlivened by stories. If ideas are what counts, there’s little need for fiction, be it theater, novel, film, or TV. Why not just stick to books on science and philosophy?
Even as ideas have the power to inspire people, they on their own have limited appeal, mostly to a relatively small circle of intellectuals, and hardly any currency with the hoi polloi, as well as with those who’re too busy in their endeavors for time and energy for anything else.
Ideas gain in power as ingredients of storytelling whereby they come alive through the adventures and struggles of the characters. It’s no wonder Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Ayn Rand, Anthony Burgess, and other intellectual writers chose fiction to lend body to the spirit of their ideas. Through storytelling, ideas come to life in the visible manifestations of idealism, heroism, inspiration, sacrifice, nobility, and/or tragedy. A dry academic treatise could expound on the problems of totalitarianism, but could it compare with NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR in impact? The moral and spiritual thesis of Christianity could be distilled into a set of principles, but could it have conquered the world without the mythic drama of Jesus, God manifested in human form? Likewise, Islam isn’t merely the Koran but the stories of Muhammad and his spiritual heirs.
More often than not, a lesser idea brought to life through storytelling is likely to have greater traction than a bigger idea that remains an abstraction. Plato understood, as the ideas of Socrates became inseparable from the way he carried himself, ultimately unto death.
The storytelling could be on the macro level, as in the case of Marxism. Unlike communists before him who merely theorized the organizational principles of socialism, Marx, with ideas borrowed from Hegel, told the story of mankind to demonstrate that class dialectics are the key to understanding the past, the present, and the future. This sense of historical destiny and inevitability, more than the proposal of an ideal communist system, captivated so many hearts and minds. And of course, as time passed, figures such as Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Trotsky(especially among Western intellectuals), Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and etc. became characters in mythologized narratives.
For most radicals, it was the STORY of communist struggle than DAS KAPITAL or the Collected Works of Lenin, Stalin, and/or Mao that fired up their commitment. Most probably, more Western Liberals know about the October Revolution from Warren Beatty’s REDS than from any scholarly text. John Reed, the subject of the film, was apparently one hell of a storyteller, and later, Edgar Snow did something similar for the Chinese Communist movement with RED STAR OVER CHINA. And Che Guevara’s adventures that came to tragedy transmogrified him into a Christ-like figure for the international left. Few read Guevara’s tracts, letters, and essays, but many were inspired by his example of putting theory into practice, even to the point of self-sacrifice.
And even though the idea of democracy has spread around the world, with so many countries practicing(or claiming to practice) some form of democracy, it is still mostly identified with 1776 and the French Revolution that staged the idea into grand historical epics with memorable cast of characters, suspense, and lots of action. And even though the British began the gradual process of ending slavery around the world, the abolition of slavery is still most famously associated with Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, one of the great events of the 19th century that ended slavery in a bang than in a whimper.
Likewise, even though MLK never came up with an original idea, it was his personage and movement that came to re-define and ultimately own the American ideals of liberty and justice. How did a man who borrowed(and even stole) every idea from others come to own the values inherent in those ideas? He became the dramatic center of attention, the magnet of controversy, the figure of hope, and ultimately the martyr, especially with the power of storytelling in the hands of those who valued his utility as the new symbol of America’s highest ideals.
History teaches us that facts and ideas aren’t enough. Ultimately, people identify most with the characters who embody the ideas, indeed to the point where the character becomes the very embodiment of the idea(s). The characters could be historical, like Jesus or Che Guevara, or fictional, like Howard Roark(of THE FOUNTAINHEAD), Gatsby(who became synonymous with that peculiar blend of innocence and corruption in the American character), or Willy Loman(whose disintegration exposes the delusional side of the American Dream).
Some ideas are meant to serve as proposals or guides for success or better understanding of the self(and its limitations and untapped potentials). Some ideas are meant to be big, even prophetic, a call to commitment and collective action than mere understanding. Other ideas are smaller and humbler in scope; they don’t pretend to have all the answers but rather serve as critiques of existing systems or dominant ideologies, pointing out their flaws or infeasibility over the long haul. There are the realists, the utopians, and the satirists. There are also the nihilists who exult in rather than despair of dystopian visions, perhaps the closest conceptual-dramatic approximation of which in the last several decades was FIGHT CLUB(directed by David Fincher).
It is in this light that THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES has interest as a movie of ideas. The ideas in and of themselves don’t amount to much, the kind audiences have grown familiar with from a whole host of movies, TV shows, novels, and investigative journalism(usually of the sensationalist kind) about meta-reality and the like. THE X-FILES, which I never watched, explored such notions, and of late, there’s Butt-Tucker Carlson and others going on about U.F.O.’s, which suggests that even or especially the most rational and skeptical minds are partial to mysteries, if only as emotional compensation for their lack of religious faith, i.e. if the human mind is essentially ‘spiritual’ as they say, the non-religious crave and often seek an awed sense of mystery in some other way.
The ideas in THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES run the gamut from literal belief in the paranormal to the nature of spirituality to the psychology of trauma and depression. One might even take the movie allegorically, contrary to, as far as I can tell, to the intention of the makers. Within the movie’s domain of suspended disbelief, the paranormal is certainly a possibility as it’s ascertained that a good number of sound-minded people have observed or encountered strange occurrences. And John Klein goes from skepticism to doubt to a measure of acceptance. Still, even having accepted the phenomena and the forces behind them as true enough, he remains in the mode of a journalist and inquirer, in contrast to the townsman Gordon Smallwood(Will Patton) who falls into a religious-like trance, as if he has been specially ‘chosen’.
As different as Klein and Smallwood are in their backgrounds, circumstances, education, temperaments, worldviews, and perhaps intelligence, they share in common(with Alexander Leek as well) the frustration yet also the exultation of being privy to some secret denied to most people.
Clearly, judging by the various accounts of townsfolk, the ‘mothman’ phenomena aren’t limited to the three men, but a relative few have been intruded upon by the entity, and fewer yet have felt compelled to either pursue or surrender to the mystery. Similarly, only a select number are actually contacted by the Aliens in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and, among them, only a tiny few finish the journey.
The reactions of characters in THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES are akin to those in the ‘conspiratorial’ community, ranging from the cautious to the outrageous. The true believers in the conspiracy and/or paranormal community, being so sure of their secret knowledge hidden from everyone else, find themselves in privileged exultation but also in a state of exasperation at being rejected by the powers-that-be(with their iron-grip on the Overton Window) and the hoi polloi who, in their somatic state, refuse to wake up and see the truth.
No wonder Gordon feels increasingly alienated from the townsfolk, his wife included. And Klein reaches a crisis point when desperately trying to persuade a state governor of potential dangers at a chemical power plant based on ‘messages’ from a source he cannot reveal. To those untouched by the phenomena, it just sounds crazy.
Leek, in his second meeting with Klein, recounts how his attempts to notify the authorities about impending disasters based on cryptic ‘messages’ nearly led to his arrest(as the prime suspect in the explosions), dissolution of his marriage, rejection by his children, and a few years in a psychiatric ward.
To the despair of many(and not just scientists), plenty of people take the occult seriously. Very likely, more people are into paranormal stuff than into real science, just like more are into astrology than astronomy. That said, even those who wholeheartedly endorse Carl Sagan’s arguments in THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD find themselves drawn to stories where the ‘crazy’ person is really telling the truth, i.e. he or she comes across as ‘insane’ and ‘loony’ only because he or she knows what others don’t know(and can’t know).
Take TERMINATOR 2 where it’s understandable why the doctors and experts believe Sarah Conors has more than a few screws loose in her head. Time traveling killer android? Sinister corporation exploiting dangerous technology from the future? Nuclear Armageddon? Organizing a post-apocalyptic militia to take on the killer robots? Even as such types in the real world are reduced to pariah-status, they are often heroes in fiction. Perhaps, it’s a manifestation of our repressed hankering for prophecies: The crazy man who proved to be not-so-crazy when the prophecy was finally fulfilled. It goes back to Noah and his ark. People who mocked him weren’t laughing when the rains came. And Western Civilization beheld as its spiritual bedrock the mythology of a Man rejected and executed in His time as crazy but was resurrected in the eyes of the faithful as Christ the Savior.
In THE TERMINATOR and STALKER(by Andrei Tarkovsky who liked James Cameron’s sci-fi action flick), our troubled fascination with the ‘madman’ is allowed space to wander. Sarah Conors wants to disbelieve Kyle’s ‘crazy’ talk of the future, that is until she has no choice but to trust him when the Terminator eliminates an entire police force. And, the two men who accompany the stalker for their own ulterior motives can’t help sensing, on some level, that the ‘madman’ isn’t so mad.
To a degree, however, all these ‘mad men’ who turn out to be not-so-mad are nevertheless somewhat mad. Indeed, it’s that very half-mad quality that has allowed them to see more, hear more, and know more beyond conventional limits. Total madness is like schizophrenia or psychosis, a danger unto oneself and others. But total normality rarely thinks or feels outside the box with the official seal of approval. Normal psychology is more a state of mind than a state of equilibrium with natural norms. In a society run by madmen, the abnormal can be made ‘normal’ and adopted by most normal-minded people, whose very normality is to go-along-to-get-along than to cause problems by raising questions. This could be problematic if society comes under the control of demented people, like the current order where the New Normal says a fat hairy man is a ‘woman’ if he toys with his ‘gender pronouns’; or George Floyd was a saint-martyr deserving of canonical status in the pantheon of virtue.
Given what’s deemed ‘normal’ is defined by the powers-that-be, what is socially normal isn’t always naturally normal, let alone factual or truthful. And as most normal-minded people conform to the prescribed ‘normality’, it sometimes takes the half-mad type to damn the torpedoes and speak out against the craziness(mandated as ‘normal’ by the authorities), but then, it’s so convenient for the Power to discredit the maverick on account of his John-the-Baptist-like eccentricities, convincing normal-minded people even more to stick with the official truth lest they end up ‘crazy’ like the ‘lunatic’. The conventions of any order will deem as ‘crazy’ or ‘dangerous’ any person who challenges the consensus.
As such, truth-tellers, especially if there’s a steep price to pay for their defiance stigmatized as deviance, tend to be a bit nutty if not psycho. Paul Gottfried said that E. Michael Jones is crazy, and there’s some truth to that, but it’s that bit of craziness that gives Jones the devil-may-care conviction to unload what’s on his mind, some of which is very true. But, such craziness, though useful against power, is dangerous when it comes into power.
It’s long been documented that many great artists were half-crazy, that is crazy enough to commune with the muses but sane enough to steer clear of the sirens. It might apply to science as well, especially with the creation of the atomic bomb, an assemblage of the greatest rational minds to unleash the ghastliest monster upon the world. The utility of madness is like walking the tightrope, i.e. being just mad enough to imagine the unimaginable but careful not to fall into the abyss of abject madness.
It’s the difference between conspiratorial minds that suspect something is up, daring to ponder the unthinkable, AND those that go overboard with wild conjectures that lead one astray into funny farm fantasies.
Andrei Tarkovsky, especially in the loneliness of exile, explored this conundrum in NOSTALGHIA(made in Italy) and SACRIFICE(made in Sweden), both of which have characters(played by the same actor Erland Josephson) verging on madness who, nevertheless, are clairvoyant of the impending doom of civilization. (No wonder Tarkovsky thought he found a kindred spirit in the creative force behind THE TERMINATOR where the ‘crazy’ guy turns out to be right.)
Some people are naturally prone to be eccentric, oddball, or ‘mad’. For others, it comes by way of trauma that violently, physically and/or emotionally upends their most deeply held assumptions and expectations. Such a trauma could lead to cold cynicism(of lost delusions) or a desperate attempt to shore up or substitute one’s illusions.
In THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, Gordon Smallwood seems a troubled soul with emotional issues, though contained within the semblance of a more-or-less normal life, whereas John Klein first appears as a model of a well-adjusted individual who’s found his ideal niche in life, a man for whom everything is going swimmingly well. An investigative reporter and TV commentator, he knows what pastures to graze on. Most happily of all, he can’t imagine a better life partner than his wife Mary.
However, he’s met with the sudden tragedy of her illness and death, and the trauma tears a hole in his psyche that refuses to heal.
He was informed by doctors that his wife was a victim of a rare brain cancer known as glioblastoma, but facts are no consolation for a fate denied? Mary wasn’t just an organism killed by disease but someone whose body and soul had become one with Klein’s. With her death a part of him died as well. No less true, another side of him, however dark and disturbed, comes ‘alive’ with her passing. He finds himself contemplating the Big Why?
Few days before her death, Klein says to Ed, his friend and colleague, “One day you’re just driving along in your car… and the universe… just points at you and says… ‘Ah, there you are, a happy couple. I’ve been looking for you. I’ve been looking for you.’”
In the two years between Mary’s death and Klein’s ‘accidental’ visit to Point Pleasant, we may surmise that he has kept busy with work and routine but a part of him keeps asking the unanswerable question. He can’t undo the past, but he can’t accept the present either, as it requires him to close the book on Mary.
At a more mundane level, the exasperation of Gordon Smallwood and John Klein when met with disbelief or distrust could be credited to the fundamentally subjective nature of reality. Even without the paranormal mumbo-jumbo and metaphysical ruminations, the fact is all realities are subjectively experienced. Even what we deem to be objectively real based on perceived consensus can only be known at the subjective level. And no matter how real or true, what we experienced on our own is known only to us. And even in the company of others, what people really feel at any given moment is known only to each and every person. Everyone knows the frustration of being disbelieved on a matter so obvious to oneself but cannot be ascertained for others. If I did something on my own for sure and told you about it, you would have only my words to go on no matter how true my account may be. The film THE HUNT directed by Thomas Vinterberg grappled with that very issue. No matter how true something may be and how certain one is of what happened, its truth can only be a matter of trust or distrust for others who weren’t then and there. We don’t need paranormal stuff or strange phenomena to understand how it feels to be distrusted, even suspected, despite one’s absolute knowledge of what really happened and of one’s own innocence. It was the subject of the film, THIN BLUE LINE by Errol Morris, as well.
By officer Darren Wilson’s account, he shot Michael Brown the monstrous Negro who charged him like a wild gorilla, but the world wouldn’t listen to him. Activists and the Jewish-run media packed with white cuck-maggots ran wild with the rumor that a Gentle Giant who had his hands up was shot by some ‘racist’ and ‘white supremacist’ cop. Without video evidence, the only ‘truth’ is the account of the cop and the witnesses, and for a time, the media and politicians chose to ignore them in favor of the Narrative. Ironically, it was the fervent investigation into the case to charge and convict Darren Wilson that ended up exonerating him as the final picture of what likely happened emerged with bits and pieces of various accounts. Kyle Rittenhouse had an even tougher time, though, luckily for him, he shot white guys than a black guy. In the case of George Floyd, there was ample video evidence of what really happened, but (1) much of it was kept from the public, especially the footage of Floyd’s erratic behavior prior to being laid on the ground and (2) the images were curated in such a manner as to suggest that Floyd died from asphyxiation under Derek Chauvin’s knee than from an overdose, as was powerfully suggested by autopsy reports that were distorted or hidden under pressure from the Jewish-controlled deep state that, furthermore, seems intent on having Chauvin killed in prison lest further investigation and a retrial expose what really happened, which could only lead to (1) further erosion of trust in the deep state agencies and legal institutions, not to mention the duplicitous media and (2) mass riots by BLM, Antifa, and ‘woke’-tards who no longer care about facts & evidence and will not tolerate any narrative that deviates from Floyd’s canonization as one of the top ten saints of all time.
At any rate, the ideas in THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES are far less interesting in and of themselves, especially in their lack of originality, than in the way they impart certain truths about the conditions of the human soul. In the end, it doesn’t matter if the paranormal(in the form of the ‘mothman’ or whatever) is real or unreal as the movie admits to the limitations of man’s knowledge, regardless of what may or may not be out there.
More compelling is the exposé of the psychology of trauma, one so unbearable as to yearn for myths to alleviate the cold facts of reality where the dead are simply buried and gone. David Lynch explored similar themes in MULHOLLAND DR. and TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN, indeed more artfully and ingeniously. And then, there’s the mother of all such films, Alfred Hitchcock’s VERTIGO.
Death is measured in volume but felt in distance. A million dead strangers mean less to us than the death of a near-and-dear one. The impact of PET SEMATARY, the Stephen King movie adaptation, owes as much to sentiment as to the violence, making the horror all the more twisted as the product of an inconsolable love for a dead son. It shows how a good man is willing to summon dark ‘magic’ to regain what was lost. But the resurrected body, either dead of soul or soul-corrupted in the hellish realm, can never be restored to its original state, reiterating the futility and spiritual profanity of bringing back the dead in the horror genre.
Of all the themes of life and art, the heady blend of tragedy and romance have inspired some of the most memorable and beloved works. In history, there’s the Taj Mahal built as a mausoleum for the king’s dead wife. There’s the haunting tale of Tristan and Isolde, retold through the ages and the basis of Richard Wagner’s opera. The Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. And Shakespeare’s ROMEO AND JULIET. In Rock, there’s Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper”. In 2012, Hitchcock’s tragic-romance VERTIGO finally knocked CITIZEN KANE off the perch as the greatest film ever. Many critics say MULHOLLAND DR., another tragic-romance, albeit a twisted lesbian one, is the greatest film of the 21st century. LOVE STORY, though hardly a great work of art, was a sensation in the era of New Hollywood. Of all the ‘monster’ genres, the vampire story has had the greatest impact owing in no small part to its element of romantic tragedy. And CHINATOWN and TESS, both directed by Roman Polanski, wouldn’t be so powerful without the element of romance and tragedy. And the formula certainly did wonders for DOCTOR ZHIVAGO directed by David Lean despite critical disdain. What accounts for the intoxication of romance on the rocks of tragedy? Even though THE GRADUATE has a happy ending, a mood of melancholy pervades much of the film. It’s a comedy that feels like tragedy. FAREWELL TO ARMS is probably Ernest Hemingway’s most popular novel. And, JULES AND JIM is the most beloved French New Wave film. And despite their happy endings, many fairytale romances are first met with tragedy whereupon the lover thought to be dead or forever lost is miraculously restored.
While most attachments operate at the level of affection, one of fondness and comfort, something about romance creates a dream world between the lovers. The object of romance is more than a companion or partner. Keep in mind that most sexual unions, in or out of wedlock, aren’t romantic in nature. It’s usually a case of easy sex or settling down with someone reliable or good enough. Most spouses aren’t dream lovers. True romance is a rare thing indeed, a kind of dream come true.
It’s no wonder fairytales have had such a hold on the imagination of countless generations. From a young age, girls intuitively grasp the magic between the prince and the princess and the promise of happily-ever-after. Adults grow out of fairytales, but in romance they can dream again. Mere affection is finite, whereas romance is infinite. In VERTIGO, Scotty(James Stewart) might have married Midge(Barbara Bel Geddes) and loved her well enough, but she’s not the kind to make him dream in an open space. In Oliver Stone’s NIXON, John F. Kennedy is invoked by none other than Nixon as that rare breed who embodied the dream of America. In contrast, Nixon is merely a man of necessity or the last resort when all else has failed, the one to restore order in a country coming apart at the seams. As Pat Nixon says, it was difficult to fall in love with him but she did, but it was never the kind of love that makes one see the stars. But Kennedy could make people see the stars, as Manolo(Nixon’s butler) explains. Nixon and Kennedy were like ‘Midge’ and ‘Madeleine’ in VERTIGO. Nixon’s death, however tragic, could never have spawned the myth of Camelot. Good or bad, Nixon only came across as a politician, whereas Kennedy, rightly or wrongly, was someone an entire generation hanged their hopes and dreams on.
At the very least, the death of a public figure can lead to a construction of a shared myth to lend comfort and inspiration. But what about the loneliness of romantic tragedy? Scotty would have grieved over Midge’s death had they been a couple, but it could never have fired up the kind of psychodrama that envelopes him following Madeleine’s death. Indeed, even at the hearing, he seems less anxious(about a potentially damning sentence) than aggravated over not being able to go off on his own and sink into a tragic trance. Madeleine made Scotty feel for the first time the dream of romance, and her presumed death sends him spiraling into the nightmare of romance that, for all its horrors, is no less a dream, no less beautiful, perhaps more beautiful as tragedy has depth that happiness lacks. Romantic passion is more than emotional or affectionate; it is mythic, the kind that makes life seem like lucid-dreaming. Consider the difference between the two female leads in THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel. Newland Archer(Daniel Day-Lewis) feels considerable affection for May(Winona), but it’s a conventional courtship, one as much of obligation as of attraction. She is someone he can do with or without. Had she chosen another man, he could easily have chosen another woman. It is only when Newland meets Ellen(Michelle Pfeiffer) that he feels, perhaps for the first time, what it truly means to fall in love. She makes him see the stars, and increasingly he finds it unbearable to imagine a future without her. Had he never met Ellen, he might have led a life of contentment with May, but having known her, May seems an obstacle and hindrance to his dream, almost an object of revulsion, a bit like the mother in LOLITA who stands between Humbert Humbert and her nymphet daughter.
The question becomes on what cross does Newland die(or live) on? Does he die on the cross of true romance, going off with Ellen and burning bridges with respectable society, without which he will be greatly diminished in fortune and reputation? Or does he die on the cross of domesticity, sacrificing true love for what is dutiful and honorable? Either way, he has to sacrifice something big, and he chooses the cross of domesticity. (To be sure, Pfeiffer’s portrayal of Ellen Olenska is so lackluster that it’s hard to believe Newland sacrificed much by choosing May instead.)
To lose a dream is to gain a nightmare, which is also a dream but of darker beauty. In a way, the loss makes the nightmare all the more potent as the only place the lost dream can be found. Consider Scotty’s obsession with Madeleine growing stronger after her presumed death. His dark dream-world becomes an altar to her memory. Almost as a sick cosmic joke, love reaches its apex only with loss. Even when you think you can’t possibly love a person more, you find there’s even more to love upon his or her passing.
In the opening part of the movie, Klein has obviously found his ‘soulmate’. It’s as if the cosmos rolled the dice in their favor. Two strangers who were made for each other somehow crossed paths. Mary may not be a great beauty or a woman of mystique, like Madeleine of VERTIGO or Ellen Olenska of THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, but she makes Klein feel complete. His love is such that he’d rather skip the Christmas Party and go house-hunting with her. It’s as if the cosmos is predisposed to be in his favor, playing matchmaker between him and Mary, just the kind of woman he’d been waiting to meet his entire life. Then, why would fate suddenly work against him? Why give, only to take back?
At the very end, it’s suggested that Klein may form a bond with Connie, who could be the other true, perhaps even truer, love of his life. If indeed his ultimate fate is to find happiness with Connie, then sadly but necessarily, Mary’s death was part of the ‘plan’. Sometimes, what we take to be our destination turns out to be a waystation.
It raises the bigger question as to the nature of happiness. Wasn’t the happiness between John and Mary the end-result of so many sad events and ‘accidents’ outside their purview? It’s the nature of man to ‘pursue happiness’, or filter bliss from misfortune, but, given the way of the world, happiness is inseparable from the horrors. For one, Klein’s success in his profession feeds on world crises. How many people met and found happiness because of great tragedies? Taking the most obvious, consider World War II that turned the world upside down; but, it also made countless people meet someone they otherwise would not have met. If not for World War II, Oliver Stone’s Jewish-American father would not have met his French mother. (On an even grander scale, the ‘happy’ evolutionary paths that led to the rise of humans as the dominant species would never have happened if not for the massive horror unleashed by an asteroid strike that closed the chapter on the dinosaurs.) So, if we were to trace all the events and circumstances that led to John meeting Mary, there would be no lack of misfortunes, big and small. But then, people in love would rather not think about such things. It’s as the words of Yeats, by way of A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, say, “Come away, O human child, to the waters and the wild… with a fairy hand in hand, for the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.” The pithiest summation of this is perhaps, “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away”, the corollary to which is “The Lord taketh away, the Lord giveth.” Mothman seems to operate on a similar gameplan. It reminds us of the line from “Not Dark Yet”, the Bob Dylan song: “Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain.”
The theories of THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES surrounding paranormal phenomena are only superficially interesting within the genre framework, and their real value is as a sounding board to a barrage of human emotions. The movie is most memorable for its portraits of personal angst and personality types. Genre often stands in the way of art or truth but may, in inspired hands, enhance it. Even though genres, with their set conventions(usually melodramatic or fantastic), often overlook complexity in favor of formula, the heightened sense of conflict can make for a more intense awareness of our dreams and fascinations.
At the literal level, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES weighs the possibility of mysterious entities manipulating the world around us, sometimes in our favor, sometimes not. Many other movies(and surely countless books, both fiction and nonfiction) have dealt with this subject and in more detail.
Personally, I have no interest in the paranormal and believe all eye-witness accounts to be bogus or delusional. Besides, what’s the point of pursuing an idea if the conclusion is invariably, “It’s too mysterious for us feeble-minded humans to understand”? So, it’s out there, but we’ll never really grasp its essence, how hard we may try. Unlike science, which goes from theory to practice to better theory, paranormal pursuit remains mired in mere speculation as, by its very admittance, it reaches for what cannot be reached.
Closet made mothlike
The ‘spiritual’ implications of THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES are more interesting in challenging our long-held Manichean vision of Good vs Evil, God vs Satan. In the dominant monotheistic religions of Abrahamic origin, God is God, always was and always will be regardless of what we think or wish. He is the absolute truth that created and rules the world.
In contrast, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES delves into the subjectivity of spirituality(if indeed the ‘mothman’ is a kind of divinity). Unlike the strict conceptualization of God in the Abrahamic religions, the manifestations of the ‘mothman’ spirit or spirits are subject to the particular experiences, anxieties, and/or obsessions of those who are ‘looking’. Unlike the Christian God who is always the same God regardless of who, where, and when, the ‘mothman’ is more fluid and fungible in ‘his’ or ‘its’ essence. Instead of demarcating the spirit world as a war zone between God’s domain(Heaven) and Satan’s lair(Hell), what if ‘god’ and ‘satan’ are the opposite ends within a shared spectrum, as Hinduism suggests?
When John Klein flips the pages of a notebook in which Mary left illustrations of what she saw, the images go from light to dark. He was alerted to the notebook by a gargantuan Negro orderly who, standing by the door, ominously bellows, “She knew.” Then, in a lighter tone, he points to the book and says, “She was drawing angels.” Perhaps, the man was trying to comfort Klein, i.e. Mary saw angels and the gates of heaven as her death drew near. The images on an earlier page are indeed angel-like, like ornaments on a Christmas tree. But, each successive page reveals something darker, blackened figures shaped like a cross between a man and a moth. Another page is scribbled with ‘ruin, ruin, ruin’, a sense of guilt that she ruined everything for John. Yet another page shows an anguished demonic face, quite terrifying. Even the Negro, as presented, goes from intrusive to kindly. (As the strange ‘logic’ of the movie progresses, we become less sure of him as a real person than as yet another manifestation of the ‘mothman’.)\
In Klein’s first meeting with Alexander Leek, the ex-paranormal-specialist reads the following lines from a book, “The nocturnal butterfly. In ancient cultures, the moth represents a form of the psyche, or the soul immortally trapped in the hellish death realms.” It’s one way to approach the phenomenon but only one, as so much depends on who’s doing the ‘looking’.
In Klein’s case, his involvement with the mystery is both social(or humanitarian as a means to alert the town of an impending disaster) and personal(in the odd hope that this mystery may, on some meta level, reconnect him with his dead wife); furthermore, the two motivations are intertwined as the social justification lends cover to his private motives. Furthermore, his personal anguish could be seeking redemption, even catharsis, through ‘good work’, i.e. he couldn’t save his wife but maybe he can save a community. In the end, he does save Connie from the bridge disaster.
Even though Abrahamic religions insist on a single all-knowing immutable God, as Yahweh(Jehovah) or Allah, the fact remains that even He underwent changes, even sea changes, through the various interpretations, revisions, and heresies(that later became canonical for certain sects), accounting for the contradictions in the Torah(and contentions among the various Jewish schools), the heretical offshoot that led to Christianity(and its various sects with their different interpretations of God and Jesus), and the rise of Islam and its disputes. So, even though all Abrahamic religions and sects all agree on the same eternal God, His character has been altered and reshaped to validate their own visions, interests, and peculiarities.
Thus, contrary to conviction, the nature of God has always been a two-way street, not just a case of God imparting His design, purpose, and meaning onto mankind but mankind molding and re-molding God in its own image and needs. God has been defined as everything from a healer of boundless compassion and forgiveness to a judge and executioner of unquenchable wrath. Depending on the individual prophets, scholars, and anthologists of varying cultures, temperaments, knowledge base, and political circumstances, the nature of God became malleable despite the refusal or reluctance to admit as much on the part of the faithful. (It’s no different today. A Christian-Zionist Evangelical and a Mainline Christian claim to believe in the same God, but the former believes that god intends for Christians to praise and serve Jews as the Chosen Master Race while the latter believes god and jesus bow down and kiss the feet of Harvey Milk and George Floyd.)
THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES plays with this subjective aspect of spirituality, and at times it’s as if we’re witnessing the baby steps in the birth of a new spiritual consciousness, its molten state before materializing into something more concrete. It’s akin to Martin Scorsese’s approach in THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST that dwells on the agonizing birth pangs of a new consciousness, one of the messiah-complex that could be emanating from the divine or demonic side of Jesus. It’s a raw and messy story, but then, the point is Jesus had to drag himself through the ‘mean streets’ of his world to realize his true calling. Thus, bearing the cross began long before the crucifixion as he had to struggle from uncertainty to certainty. Miracles don’t come easy. Birthing an idea is painful like birthing a child. Even the great Zeus suffered from serious migraines before ‘birthing’ Athena, an advancement in mythological consciousness, from his head.
Extreme migraines precede Gordon Smallwood’s burgeoning awareness of a nascent spiritual consciousness that may or may not be related to Christianity. Initially, upon relating his troubles to John Klein, accompanied with freaky illustrations that resemble those found in Mary Klein’s notebook, the two men and Gordon’s wife Denise consult a neurologist who detects no problem in the X-ray. Perhaps, Klein and Gordon distrust the diagnosis as the doctor isn’t based in fancy New York, Chicago, or L.A.
Gordon and Denise appear to have been married for some time, but they have no children, perhaps casting a shadow over their lives. John and Mary might have had children, but she ended up on the deathbed than the maternity ward. It’s as if John is holding eggs that can never hatch.
Initially, Gordon is terrified that he’s afflicted with some terrible disease, like the one that killed Klein’s wife. Why else did he hallucinate in front of a mirror? Why else did he hear a strange message from the bathroom sink, “Denver 9… 99 people will die”? Why else did he find strange illustrations upon waking, why else the excruciating headaches, why else the blood from his ear that looks like menstruation? His life doesn’t seem to have been a bed of roses, and now this thing.
But, returning from the doctor, at the local restaurant Klein notices something strange about the TV news and raises the volume, whereupon the reporter says 99 people died in the crash of flight Denver 9, jolting Gordon out of his gloom. His eyes close and he mutters, ‘wow’.
What he had feared as a brain tumor or onset of madness is maybe something else, a kind of gift or blessing. The wall of the restaurant is painted with American Indians at hunt, possibly an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING or Michael Wadleigh’s WOLFEN, or a suggestion of Klein and Gordon’s psychic linkage to the spirit world — not for nothing do PET SEMATARY and TWILIGHT invoke or incorporate Indian culture as gateways to the spirit world.
John Klein and Gordon Smallwood make for stark contrasts in just about every respect but develop an uneasy but real camaraderie through encounters with the ‘mothman’ in the figure of ‘Indrid Cold’, who contacts Gordon in ‘person’ while reaching Klein only through the phone. ‘Smallwood’ could be a joke name, as in ‘micro-penis’, but more likely suggests that Gordon has always felt small and insignificant as a man. But then, ‘klein’ means little in German, hinting at John’s weakness and fragility in the face of a great mystery.
Paradoxically, however, what makes you feel smaller can also make you feel bigger. It’s a common feature of demagoguery where the masses feel small before the Great Leader but also bigger through him. Il Duce and Der Fuhrer towered over their minions who nevertheless shared in the grandeur through adulation of and identification with the ‘great man’.
The Abrahamic religions make their adherents feel humble before the One True God of infinity and eternity but also proud in His blessings. Likewise, the ‘mothman’, in the form of Indrid Cold, makes Gordon feel smaller but also bigger than ever. He feels as one of the privileged few slated to receive the secrets.
The way Gordon is introduced, he comes across as a rather unpleasant individual. Klein, stranded on the road in the middle of nowhere when his car suddenly dies, walks to the nearest house and asks if he can use the phone. Gordon greets him with the barrel of a shotgun and holds him captive in the bathroom while waiting for the police to arrive. Connie, the female police officer, is thus introduced and listens to the accounts of both Gordon and Klein. Klein says he was just traveling through, and his car broke down. He has no idea what is happening and why. Gordon’s account is radically different. He insists that Klein has been ‘stalking’ him for the last two days, knocking on the door on both occasions at exactly 2:30 in the morning. To the audience that’s been with Klein from the beginning, Gordon sounds disturbed and unbalanced, to say the least, but his wife Denise confirms that someone did indeed knock on the door on two earlier occasions even though she didn’t have a good look at his face.
It all sounds crazy to Klein who is not only new to these parts but arrived purely by accident. Indeed, Connie asks what he’s doing in a place that is ‘not on the way to anyplace’. She recognizes him as a TV personality, someone with no reason to be lurking about town to harass people in the wee hours of the night. (Ironically, near the end of the movie, Klein seems nearly as disturbed as Gordon in their first encounter.) Klein is convinced Gordon must have some mental issues, but Connie assures him that Gordon and Denise are ‘good people’. Besides, given some strange occurrences about town, Connie isn’t so quick to dismiss Gordon’s account as false or delusional. But, how could both Klein and Gordon be right?
Naturally, we’re inclined to side with Klein, the attractive and sympathetic hero, especially as virtually the entire movie is seen through his eyes. And in accordance with movie tropes, Gordon could be marked as one of those ‘redneck’ or ‘white trash’ hick-rubes. But, Connie, instantly recognizable as a smart and sensible person, assures Klein that Gordon is no psycho.
Indeed, when Klein bumps into Gordon the next day and apologizes, Gordon says he’s willing to drop the whole matter. In other words, just go away and leave me alone, and all is forgotten. Gordon doesn’t seem to be such a bad guy. Besides, even in the tense night before, Gordon said, “You’re lucky I’m a Christian, because I had the right to shoot you on my porch.”
Even so, we can’t help feeling that he’s a troubled soul. He wears a countenance of dejection and resentment. He has a house, a job, and a wife, but he’s not a happy man. He is the very opposite of John Klein’s impression in the opening scene, a man of success and fulfillment, liked and respected by the right-kind-of-people. Klein is a star reporter for the Washington Post, highly valued and perhaps even a bit indulged; later, despite his prolonged stay in Point Pleasant, he doesn’t lose his job(whereas Gordon is fired almost immediately for his absence at work). Klein not only has a job and a wife but the ideal versions of them. He can’t ask for a finer woman than Mary. He couldn’t ask for a better job. And, Mary and he are about to embark on a new chapter in their lives with a new house. He’s surely traveled all over the world and seen the best of everything.
In contrast, Gordon strikes us as a nobody stuck in nowhere all his life. He’s a blue collar worker who counts for little in the age of globalism. He has a decent enough house, but it’s nobody’s idea of a dream home. He loves his wife, but Denise is no beauty(though more attractive than Shelley Duvall in THE SHINING). Gordon is a Christian, a man of faith, but has the look of someone who feels abandoned by the universe.
If Klein once had a contented life — just prior to the car accident, Mary said to him, “I kept thinking that it felt like a dream come true” — but lost it with his wife’s death, it seems Gordon never knew real happiness. Nothing in his life could be construed as a dream-come-true. Klein’s depression is the result of tragedy, whereas Gordon’s gloom is a feature of his condition: He wasn’t born with looks, intelligence, or a special knack. He certainly wasn’t born into money.
None of this would be a problem if Gordon is the kind of person who is happy with what he has, heeding the words of Stephen Still’s “Love the One You’re With”: “Well, there’s a rose in a fisted glove/ And the eagle flies with the dove/ And if you can’t be with the one you love, honey/ Love the one you’re with”. Plenty of people are satisfied with what they have, a glass that is half-full. Others see a glass that’s half-empty, and Gordon goes about life like a man cheated by fate.
Given his state of mind, it’s understandable why Gordon is more profoundly affected by the ‘mothman’ phenomenon. In religion, some are content with faith, tradition, and community, whereas others want to be closer to God. It’s the difference between Jesus in THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST and most Jews who are satisfied with dogma and tradition. Jesus, the eccentric Jew, wants to be nearer to God(and according to Christian mythology, He wasn’t only nearer to God but the Son of God, making Him the very essence of God).
Gordon may have always been of a temperament or disposition, albeit repressed, that yearned for significance or greatness. Something of the hick-prophet just dying to come out. So, when the eerie ‘voices'(from the sink drain) turn out to have been a prediction of an airplane crash, it is a defining moment for him. Feelings of dread(about a possible brain tumor) give way to sudden rush of exultation.
Soon after, Gordon recounts to Klein his further initiation into the mystery, obscurity growing into an illumination of sorts. The meeting of the two men is deftly juxtaposed with fragments of the night before when, at the cement factory on the way home from work, a strange entity encircled and closed in on Gordon(in his pickup truck) who, panic-stricken, felt hot and could barely breathe as lights flashed all around him. But then, there was an air of calm, and a figure began to coalesce in the distance with the fleeting suggestion of wings. As ‘it’ drew closer to Gordon, it looked ‘human’ enough by Gordon’s account(though for the audience it either remains out of focus or outside the frame). Gordon’s fear grew into fascination. Then, ‘it’ or ‘he’ said to Gordon, “Do not be afraid. My name… is Indrid Cold. In a place this size. Equator. Three hundred. Three hundred will die. Wait for me. I will return. I will see you in time.” ‘He’ assured Gordon not to be afraid and even revealed ‘his’ name. ‘He’ imparted another secret meant ONLY for Gordon. And before departing, ‘he’ promised to return ‘in time’, as if a special bond had formed between them, leaving Gordon in a peaceful and meditative state. It’s as if Gordon found his own burning bush and overcame not only his fear but his doubts about life.
As Gordon recounts the incident, he appears transformed somehow, ruddy and proud, even a bit boastful, as if sunlight finally broke through his chronically overcast state of mind. Though same in height as Klein, he looms larger standing on a grave-like mound, either an allusion to the Sermon on the Mount or an intimation of death, which is never far behind as portent or possibility when the entity makes itself known.
Gordon says ‘Indrid Cold’ revealed yet another message about a looming disaster and then hands to an incredulous Klein the day’s paper that confirms the prediction: A disaster in Ecuador did indeed take 300 lives(or possibly a few more, hinting that the accuracy of the messages may not be absolute).
Gordon, who felt small and insignificant in nowhereville, now beams like a bootleg prophet. He feels connected to world events in distant countries. He may even feel inklings of cosmic consciousness. Being a Christian, he may regard ‘Indrid Cold’ as an emissary of God. Or maybe, he’s moving past Christianity, which never did much for him.
In any case, Gordon’s illumination represents a facet of Abrahamic religions, the centrality of the prophet(and the even greater and rarer messiah-figure). As a mere Christian, Gordon was just another churchgoer praying to a silent God. But via Indrid Cold, he feels touched, even chosen, by a strange powerful force, divine or demonic, it doesn’t matter. Like Roy(Richard Dreyfus) in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, he wants to make the most of it.
No one else appears to have been visited by this ‘Indrid Cold’. Gordon serves as a conduit between ‘Cold’ and Klein who soon receives a phone call. Klein’s initial reaction is to dismiss the call as a prank(by Gordon), but ‘Cold’ knows too much, not only of the objects in Klein’s motel room but of the personal details of Klein’s biography. More eerily, it’s as if ‘Cold’ has access to not only everything around Klein but within him as well, even anticipating his thoughts and feelings before they occur.
Klein asks, “You’re reading my mind, aren’t you?”, whereupon ‘he’ or ‘it’ says, “I have no need to, do I?”, suggesting ‘he’ or ‘it’ is less an alien or parasitic entity worming into Klein’s psyche than an all-knowing(or at least anything-knowing) ‘being’ that has been around forever. When Klein asks, “What do you look like?”, ‘Cold’ answers, “It depends on who is looking.” Whatever it is, a singularity or an unstable flocking of discordant forces, its manifestation at a given moment depends on the psychological makeup of whomever does the ‘looking’.
At the most basic level of phenomenology, even a tangible object appears differently depending on the angle of view and keenness of sight. And, the significance of the object depends on the biography and/or culture of the observer. What is sacred in one culture could be demonic in another. What may have sentimental value to one person has no such for another.
Non-tangible stimuli, such as music, elicits even more subjective responses. For all that, the arts nevertheless come in definite forms of words, textures, shapes, and sounds.
But what about spirituality? Religions come with sacred texts as manuals and guides for believing and living, for pursuing the righteous path. That said, religions can only point the way to the Truth, which is ultimately God, and it is up to each individual to choose his or her own paths towards Him.
That said, the great religions offer powerful assurances as to the nature of God. He is said to be such-and-such and not-such-and-such.
But what about spiritual experience outside the perimeters of established religions? Granted, even religions first originated in a tangle of fear and frustration bordering on madness. Awful as it is, Scorsese’s THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST did capture the chaos and tumult inherent in the emergence of a new paradigm. Those who came to faith as a finished product duly sense its order and balance, its completeness. But, the struggle of its creation was a different story. It’s the difference between the trouble Michelangelo went through — ‘the agony and the ecstasy’ — to paint the Sistine Chapel and our ease of appreciation of it. Andrei Tarkovsky ruminated on the artist as akin to a christ-like figure who bears the cross of creation to bring beauty and joy to others. Scorsese, who, from a young age, became obsessed with the film-making process, likewise noted parallels in the contrast between how religions are worshiped and how they came into being in the first place. THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST is sort of like a Christian version of 8 1/2. The feverish process through which the volcanic magma crystallized into the rock of ages.
A similar idea pervades THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, especially in the story of Gordon Smallwood. We sense in his transformation the kind of mindset present at the outset of a new belief system. Gordon has the heart of a true believer. Still, Gordon can only interpret and make sense of the mystery in his own way.
As ‘Indrid Cold’ murmured over the phone, “It depends on who’s looking.” In any spiritual quest, the window to the Truth is also a mirror, i.e. even as one peers beyond the self, something of the self gets reflected back(as well as projected forward). Is it any wonder that the Jewish God has some of the traits most prominent among Jews? It’s no less true of Allah(for Arabs), Jehovah(to Northern European Lutherans), and the various gods of the Hindus. The god is the father of the man but also his child.
Gordon shapes the mystery and its supposed revelation in the image of his own soul. Gordon, though a small town nobody and a ‘good Christian’, wanted more from life. The reason for his initial suspicion and hostility regarding John Klein could be that Klein is the kind of man Gordon secretly wants to be: Handsome, intelligent, successful, sociable, and worldly. Gordon has long been licking his wounds, and he probably isn’t the life of the party with the locals either. He tells Klein at one point that he stopped drinking, suggesting past issues at home and work. It then makes sense why the ‘mothman’ takes the form ‘he’ does in Gordon’s presence.
For most eye-witnesses or ‘victims’, the ‘mothman’ phenomena never escalated beyond short bouts of terror or paralysis, like a momentary lucid nightmare. For some, like the chief of the fire department, it remained at the elementary level of strange noises over the phone. The ‘mothman’ takes on ‘human’ form only in relation to Gordon and Klein, possibly because of their strong reactions and stubborn refusal to let it go, tendencies stemming from their psychological profiles. It’s almost as if the ‘mothman’ arranged their paths to cross because, for all their differences, they cannot find peace in their present conditions.
Eventually, Gordon comes to believe he’s close to finding that peace through the mediation of ‘Indrid Cold’. Ironically, even as his life begins to unravel, losing his job and his wife, he seems to have found the happiness that had always eluded him.
His last meeting with Klein is on the bridge across the Ohio River that leads into Point Pleasant. For those aware of the ‘true story’ and the movie, the bridge turns out to be the site of the disaster, but there they are, Gordon and John, cluelessly standing on the very ‘answer’ to the riddle. In their first acquaintance, mutually tense and suspicious, Klein had the advantage by every metric. But, even conceding that the ‘mothman’ led Klein to Point Pleasant, the first person that ‘Indrid Cold’ revealed himself to was Gordon Smallwood. Henceforth, the advantage leans in Gordon’s favor. Gordon, not Klein, was ‘chosen’ first.
Indeed, it is through Gordon that Klein is connected with ‘Indrid Cold’ over the phone, though, strangely enough, when Connie drives to check up on Gordon, the latter says he was asleep and didn’t call anyone.
What is going on? Did Gordon really make the call but forgot about it, or did the ‘mothman’, as ‘Indrid Cold’, fake or mimic Gordon’s voice? Or, is it a case of multiple planes of reality whereby something in one plane of reality leaked into another plane of reality?
If Gordon’s account is true about John Klein knocking on his door at 2:30 am two nights in a row, how can it be explained? The mysterious force, as ‘mothman’ or whatever, conjured up a figure in Klein’s image and sent it knocking on Gordon’s door in the middle of the night? A more radical explanation could be that all three John Kleins, the two who arrived at Gordon’s house the previous nights and the one who arrived on the third night(and is the hero of the story), are real but lodged in different planes of reality, i.e. what we call reality is merely one possibility among others happening simultaneously in parallel universes.
There are subtle suggestions of the multi-plane or inter-dimensional reality throughout the movie, as when Klein’s body is briefly out of sync with its mirror reflection. In another scene, it’s as if we’re watching Klein from the other side of the mirror, an echo of Alice-in-Wonderland. It’s as if our ‘reality’ is only one of the many, perhaps countless, possibilities.
Could it be that fissures appear among these dimensions in THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, whereby the reality in one dimension intrudes into another? One implication could be that Mary is alive and living happily with Klein or another man in another dimension. Or, maybe there are regions of ‘dark matter’ between the dimensions, the nether zones where dead souls become trapped. Why trapped? Could it be that Klein’s undying love is actually an obstacle to Mary’s journey to the Other World? As long as his heart tugs at her memory, her spirit cannot finish journey, leaving her trapped in a kind of hell. If so, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES is somewhat similar to JACOB’S LADDER where a soul is put through the wringer for refusing to give up the ghost and make peace with death.
The crossing of Gordon and Klein’s paths turn out to be complementary. Despite Gordon’s initial hostility, a part of him is drawn to Klein. It’s telling that, of all the townsfolk, it’s Klein the outsider whom he consults about the unbearable headache of the previous night. Why Klein? Is there an aura of superiority about him, a sign of higher intelligence and empathy that might better understand Gordon’s problem? Or, having experienced hallucinations along with the headache, does Gordon have second thoughts about his accusations against Klein. Maybe, HE was in the wrong, and Klein was right all along, and a kind of apology is owed to him.
The ‘mothman’ ultimately grants Gordon a sense of oneness with the mystery. It makes Gordon feel the power, even though the power can never be his. A person controls his intelligence but cannot command inspiration, which comes and goes of its own accord. Gordon doesn’t seem very bright, not an achiever through intelligence, providing a clue as to why his ‘inspiration’ via ‘Indrid Cold’ means everything to him. A power not his own has nevertheless chosen him as the ‘one’. He’s overcome with a heady mix of humility and arrogance. His feel of the ‘power’ is entirely at the whim of the mystery that ‘chose’ him, but having been ‘chosen’ is a reason for pride.
As for Klein, it is through Gordon that the ‘mothman’ takes on a more discernible ‘personality’ and whose ‘messages’ become less ambiguous(before becoming more ambiguous, as ‘he’ or ‘it’ sure works in mysterious ways). Other eye-witnesses of the phenomena, perhaps having fewer issues, were less perturbed by strange happenings. Shocked and shaken, to be sure, but no compulsion to pin it down, thus less of themselves projected onto the mystery.
As ‘Indrid Cold’ said, “It depends on who’s looking”, and Gordon overcame his fear, the reaction most people were stuck on, and exposed his inner-self to the power of the entity. In contrast, the entity remained at the primal level, a creature resembling a bat or moth, for most observers. Gordon projected more onto the mystery, which apparently processed his anguish and yearnings into a fever dream of shared prophecy. Others did not or could not ‘mold’ the ‘mothman’ to reflect their deepest desires. Only Gordon could do so, of his own volition or by the entity’s design, and it is this ‘Indrid Cold’ that plays games with John Klein who, like Gordon, has issues gnawing at his psyche. Thus, two different men, the kind who would otherwise never have met, become indispensable to one another.
Other than the multi-plane or multidimensional theory of reality, another possibility of THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES is the implication that all of reality is just an illusion, a ‘scientific’ notion aligned with certain tenets of Buddhist ‘psychosmology’. A pop version of this ‘philosophy’ is found in MATRIX where the hero grows cognizant of the false reality maintained by a parasitic giant computer A.I. It’s a vulgarization of the idea in physics that energy and matter are two sides of the same coin and that we and everything around us are made up of empty space amidst the buzz of electrons. In other words, what we call ‘reality’ is a whirl of electronic impulses. Just as TV or computer images are really pixels organized into patterns, reality is an illusion created from packets of energy. Because the world around us is sufficiently stable, reliable, and predictable, at least at the level of human perception, we take for granted the reality of reality, with little time or aptitude for anything beyond those assumptions. Things get weirder at the subatomic level, the laws of which, the layman has been told, operate differently from the laws of the dimension that we assume to be ‘reality’.
THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES only winks at the weird science, as its heart is elsewhere. It is about the limitation of man in being condemned to project his own reality, objective or subjective, onto the unknown or unknowable. Two years after Mary’s death, we see John Klein on a news program on TV screens arranged inside a shop window display. It suggests at the power of mass media as a kind of electronic ‘mothman’ haunting our world, the full implications of which remain unexamined. Electronica has become a ‘reality’ in its own right, one taken for granted by most people, one where Jews control the ‘gods’ and have the power to bless or curse whomever and whatever on the basis of their own agendas, sometimes a matter of life and death, as in the ‘Neocon’ wars. Klein on TV says, “I think that these parties are demonizing each other. They’re projecting our own personal fears and anxieties… onto the national stage.” In other words, we often don’t want to see things as they really are but as we wish to see them. (Even though Klein comes across as reasonable and moderate on public matters, events in Point Pleasant show he suffers from the very problem he airs on TV. A part of him cannot accept the reality of Mary’s death and projects his fears and anxieties on the cosmic stage.)
In politics, there’s the tendency to see the other side as demonic, and thus, our vision of evil is projected onto the other side. There’s also the yearning to find god and see angels, which is projected onto the world, as when white cuck-maggots imagine the divinity of George Floyd or Matthew Shepherd OR as when Evangelicals project their dream of salvation onto Israel as God’s chosen, without whose blessing(LOL) goyim cannot be saved.
Still, even as we project our fears and hopes onto others, we recognize them as human, i.e. ‘good people’ or ‘bad people’ but people just the same. But, what about when we are confronted with the mystery? In the evolution of myths and religions, mankind projected its familiar forms and feelings onto the cosmos. So, the gods were made human-like or animal-like. Or, even as God became increasingly abstract in the Jewish religion, He was said to be like the ‘Father’ or ‘Lord’, recognizable human archetypes. Gazing up at the night sky, people connected the stars to form shapes of peoples, animals, and familiar objects.
In Stanislaw Lem’s SOLARIS, mankind finds itself incapable of pondering the mysterious ‘mind-reading’ planet without its preconceptions, i.e. try as he might, man is trapped in manhood.
Likewise, the entity in THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES appears insect-like(or moth-like) or humanlike given the limited vocabulary in our mental toolkit. Faced with the seemingly formless, we mold them into familiar forms. It’s no wonder that popular science books explain things with metaphors than with math.
Even as pre-existing categories fail to unlock the mystery and new keys are forged, we have better keys but never The Key. To make the mystery accessible, it invariably becomes ‘humanized’, if not figuratively than by the strictures of human cognition, but with the corollary that man becomes somewhat de-humanized. The mystery is molded in the image of man, and vice versa. This is certainly true in religion. In trying to know God, God is made more human-like, as in the case of Jesus, literally God-as-Man according to Christianity. But in pondering Heaven, the great beyond, man aspires to be godlike, taking leave of his familiar senses.
Even though Gordon Smallwood serves as the bridge between ‘Indrid Cold’ and John Klein, as well as embodying the ‘Abrahamic’ side of the ‘religious experience’, the story is more about the poetic than the prophetic. Gordon represents a crude version of the Hebraic mindset, that of faith in the all-knowing Deity that holds the answer for mankind. Under the spell of the ‘mothman’, Gordon becomes fixated on the big questions and awaits the answers. He believes he’s on the precipice of ‘understanding’.
In contrast, Klein’s psychodrama resembles the mythic expressions of Hellenism. It’s hard to think of a more poetic mapping of the human psyche than Greek mythology that, far from claiming absolute truth, expresses the full range of human experience through tales of great poetic imagination. Christianity makes us dwell on the big questions of Heaven and Hell, the salvation or damnation of humanity. In contrast, Greek mythology follows the lives of individuals whose struggles and quests highlight the beauty, in all its comic and tragic forms, of man’s brief but dramatic existence. Klein’s woe is like the modern retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. The prophet strives to redeem mankind, the poet to recover a loved one. It’s no wonder Hebraism won out over Hellenism as the grand theme of the West, but people never stopped pining for icons.
With their many gods who are far from all-powerful and all-wise, the Greeks settled for epiphany than prophecy, a concept too big for poetry. Gordon wields a staff, Klein holds a scalpel. For all his concerns about saving the town from disaster, his growing obsession can all be traced back to his yearning for Mary.
Furthermore, his frantic attempts to persuade Connie to stay away from the chemical factory, where she is assigned and which may well be the site of the impending disaster(as forewarned by ‘Indrid Cold’), betrays the personal aspect of his investigation. He has developed certain feelings for her, even if repressed or unacknowledged, and his main fear is that SHE might lose her life in the accident. Indeed, at the very end when the bridge collapses, Klein tries to warn as many people as possible, but it’s Connie he’s committed to saving. In a similar vein, in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE George Bailey realizes it’s Mary who holds the key to his place in Bedford Falls. In the nightmare scenario, he could tolerate much about the alternate-reality of Pottersville, a world in which he wasn’t born, but not the possibility of never having known Mary.
In some corner of his psyche, he cannot accept that Mary is gone forever and nothing can be done about it. For all his rationality and secular state of mind, his ‘psychic’ attachment to Mary is such that a part of him simply cannot leave the past behind. Initially, he investigates the mystery in Point Pleasant out of journalistic curiosity, his bread and butter as a professional. But, somewhere in the back of his mind, his growing fascination has something to do with the hope, faint as it may be, of being reconnected with his dead wife. Indeed, the reason he ended up in Point Pleasant had something to do with Mary. His colleague at the Washington Post, Ed, tried to set him up with a woman. It’s been two years since Mary’s death, and Ed gently nudges John to get on with his life. Ed tells John, “Look… she’s not Mary. Not by a mile. But you know what? No one ever will be.” THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES is rather pithy, if not minimalist, in dialogue as a prime example of less-is-more. Ed’s few lines speak volumes.
With Christmas approaching, the time of the year when Mary died, John simply isn’t up for it — despite her last words being, “I want you to be happy” — and leaves his house at 1:00 am to drive all through the night to his destination(where he has been assigned to interview a governor). It is on that night that he finds himself in Point Pleasant. Later, when shown an illustration by a local of the strange phenomenon, it rings a bell as Mary left similar drawings before she died. And when John inspects a tree next to the house of one of the eye-witnesses, there’s a Y-like marking like the one found on the car driven by Mary on the night of the accident.
The Why of ‘Y’.
Unbeknownst to others, Klein has private motives for his involvement in the mystery. In life, the personal often outweighs the social. John Klein informs a few people, like Connie and Gordon, of his wife’s death, but they have no way of knowing(and Klein has no wish to divulge) its full impact on him. The only solution for certain problems is to burn itself out or to rely on some outside intervention, divine or otherwise. The cartoonish version of the rule is when a character suffering from amnesia due to a blow on the head finally recovers his memories only through another blow on the head.
Gordon, as it turns out, isn’t a bad fellow, though unschooled in manners(unlike Ed, for example, who is measured and considerate), as in his blunt mentioning of Mary’s brain tumor, but then, how could we expect him to appreciate the full extent of Klein’s pain? No less true, there’s surely something about Gordon, which holds the secret as to why he is the way he is(other than being not-too-bright and ill-educated), that we(and Klein) have no way of knowing either.
A key scene is when Klein finds Gordon on the bridge facing the river. Gordon’s hands are clasped as in prayer. Gordon stands in the cold without a coat but seems at peace. He says people, his wife included, look at him as if he’s crazy, but he seems more proud than dejected. He ‘understands’, they do not. He has been ‘chosen’, they have not. When Klein says he doesn’t believe Gordon is ‘crazy’, Gordon reminds him, “You talked to him too, John.”
The clanging of metal joints on the bridge sound like distant church bells; it’s as if Gordon has finally met his ‘maker’. The vibes are soothing, like the chords of angels. (Later, however, the sound becomes ominously foreboding as the bridge teeters towards collapse.) Few objects have been as invested with symbolism and metaphors as the bridge, and THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES is a continuation in this vein.
Klein approached Gordon to console him, but oddly enough, Gordon seems hardly in need of comfort or assurance. He is in contact with a great power that helps him ‘understand’. Though disheveled and falling apart to a casual observer, Gordon feels complete and fulfilled. He says, “I’ve been lying awake at night. I feel… like I’m sleeping… but I’m awake. That’s when I hear him. And lately, when I hear him… all at once… I understand. Everything.”
He goes so far as to ask Klein, “John, do you remember the last time you were happy?”, implying that he has never been so happy in his life.
Gordon’s question intended no harm but sinks like a dagger into Klein’s heart as the last time he was happy was when Mary was alive. Worse, just when they were about to embark on a new chapter in their life, it was rudely interrupted by an accident and death. She said on her deathbed, “I want you to be happy”, which Klein cannot be without her. On the bridge, there’s a moment of hushed solidarity between the two men, only to be interrupted by Gordon’s question that resurrects the wall between them.
For a ‘horror’ movie marketed as an unremittingly scary rollercoaster ride, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES is surprisingly subdued for the most part and even comes with moments of subtlety usually reserved for Art Films. Running counter to expectation, it may be to horror what BLADE RUNNER is to science-fiction, accounting for its box-office failure due to word-of-mouth that it’s not frightening enough. Diehard horror fans might have been disappointed, while others might have skipped it as just another knockoff of THE EXORCIST.
THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES is essentially a tragic-romantic drama with horror elements than primarily a horror movie, one where character development is secondary. The performances bear this out. It features what is likely Richard Gere’s finest performance, owing perhaps to his fascination with mysticism. Certain moments are as good as anything he or, for that matter, any other actor has ever done. There are moments not only of conflict but conflict within conflict, and who would have thought Gere, always a limited actor, was up to the task of displaying so many contradictory emotions?
Same goes for Laura Linney as Connie whose balance of strength and sensitivity supports the community and later serves as a reality check for John. She’s like a more accomplished Vera Miles. John and Connie make an interesting pair, at once casual and formal in their interaction. She comes across as smart and well-adjusted, but something is slightly off about her. Why did she choose to be a cop? Why is she living all alone, without a husband and family? Is she in some way dissatisfied with life, not unlike Gordon? Is no man in town good enough for her? That she’s a regular viewer of Klein’s TV show, DC Review, suggests an aspiration for something fancier than what Point Pleasant can offer. Like George Bailey, however, her life is committed to serving the town she grew up in.
Connie is a small town girl and a modern woman, and Linney’s fine-toned balancing act avoids falling into either stereotype or counter-stereotype(which is just another stereotype). And, despite her obvious attraction to Klein, she treads carefully in his space that is still haunted by Mary’s ghost. She’s a woman without guile and presumption, the very opposite of Linney’s role in THE HOUSE OF MIRTH(directed by Terence Davies). If Klein and Connie are meant to be together, it will have to be through some outside force as neither is prepared to disturb the arrangement between them. They can look into each other’s heart but through an invisible barrier.
Arguably, the most remarkable performance in THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES belongs to Will Patton as Gordon Smallwood, one that could easily have fallen into stereotype(hick) or archetype(prophet) in lesser hands. Gordon is a fully realized character. It’s so lifelike that the role almost seems typecast, but in fact, Patton was a seasoned veteran in arts & performance when he joined the cast. Though not possessed of movie star magnetism, Patton has been a remarkable actor with amazing range. In the 1987 political thriller NO WAY OUT, Patton played someone completely different but with equal mastery. His character of Scott Pritchard is a preppy political insider, a homosexual to boot(with the ‘gayest’ mouth I ever did see), composed but compulsive, driven by loyalty and capable of anything in service to his boss and country. He’s by far the most interesting thing about the movie, an arresting profile of political psychology at its most obsessive and extreme, all the more unnerving as Scott is by far the most dedicated and professional character in the movie, a good man to have on one’s side.
A true psychopath, he is capable of anything, even cold-blooded murder, all the while maintaining his composure as a valued insider. The fact that he’s attached to a politician who’s pushing back against the military-industrial complex even suggests a bit of idealism and principles. But in his total devotion to his boss(Gene Hackman), the Secretary of Defense, he will go to any length to protect the man’s reputation faced with ruin because, for all his sound political instincts, his weakness for a certain woman led to her accidental death. The startling implication of NO WAY OUT is that psychos like Scott Pritchard need to be weeded out but also make best custodians of the empire in their absolute dedication and ruthless lack of moral inhibition. He’s a Boy Scout with a knife behind his back, reliable to a fault and utterly remorseless.
NO WAY OUT got something right because the Deep State is full of psychos, though not always as capable. Scott is a villain but a multi-dimensional one, an evildoer with admirable and even good qualities. The role was likely one of the last of its kind as it became increasingly taboo to portray homosexual characters in a negative light. While making homosexuality synonymous with psychosis or sickness wasn’t fair or factual, the culture lost something by pretending that homosexuality is the ‘new normal’, unrelated to certain psychological proclivities toward nihilism. Homos may well be attracted to power more than the average person because (1) faced with disdain and even disgust in a natural-normal order, they need to gain power or the favors of the powerful for protection & privilege and (2) their higher degree of narcissism identifies with the rich and powerful who are awash in vanity and conceit.
As the snotty and elitist Scott Pritchard in NO WAY OUT and as the gruff small town man in THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, Will Patton hit the bull’s eye on both occasions, and he may well be one of the best supporting actors since the 1980s. And given his wide range of performances, he’s much more than a character actor.
In art, ideas matter less than the power with which they’re conveyed. Thus, the abstract is made actual, the cerebral hits us at the gut level. Like the soul needs a body, an idea needs a story. No story can be the final fulfillment of an idea, but some are more definitive than others, just like certain images are more iconic as emblems of beauty. Will Patton’s role as Gordon Smallwood is a worthy addition in the film canon of a certain personality type, one predisposed to ‘spiritual’ convulsion.
Mark Pellington the director in cameo as bartender
Mark Pellington as the director deserves much credit, but Richard Hatem the screenwriter seems to have been the project’s guiding light. Given their bodies of work, however, neither qualifies for ‘auteur’ status. Mark Pellington’s filmography has mostly been underwhelming; he can’t save a bad script, which usually came his way. Some of his films are well-made but ludicrous, and one of them, I MELT WITH YOU, is certifiably insane. Richard Hatem’s record as a screenwriter isn’t impressive either, and we’re tempted to regard THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES as one of those happy accidents(like BLADE RUNNER and MIDNIGHT RUN), a lucky convergence of just the right ideas, inspiration, and talent. While great directors are expected to hit several balls out of the park, the lesser directors on occasion hit the odd homerun.
Even though Mark Pellington did a very good job, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES could have been much more in surer hands. Partly, it was a generational issue as Pellington honed his skills making pomo music videos for MTV. Postmodernism in pop culture usually meant tossing everything together without rhyme or reason.
Even though some directors of note(especially David Fincher) emerged from the MTV school, the MTV aesthetic has generally not been conducive to good filmmaking. What works for petulant pop does not for patient narratives. Terry Gilliam’s similar background in sketch-animation certainly did no wonders for him as a filmmaker. On occasion, Pellington just couldn’t resist reaching into the MTV bag of tricks. Technique is most effective when invisible or seamless. It’s the difference between Steven Spielberg holding a wand and Michael Bay wielding a hammer. Compare Roy’s first contact with the unknown in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WITH THE THIRD KIND with Gordon’s in THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, and it’s the difference between the ease of mastery and the strain of effort. One smiles, the other sweats. Spielberg, channeling John Ford, cuts only when he needs to. He’s like an expert swordsman who knows exactly when to thrust, when to slash, whereas Pellington tends to flail away, rather like the burly Scotsman who is killed by Tim Roth’s character in ROB ROY.
To be sure, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES’ over-reliance on editing could have been due to economic constraints, especially in the bridge-collapse scene where fast-cutting could obscure some of the inadequacies of the effects. But, the excessive editing in some scenes also betrays a degree of confusion and uncertainty, a grabbing for straws. Bull-necked Pellington, whose father was a famous football player, certainly has an athletic approach to film-making, especially apparent in I MELT WITH YOU, which is one hell of a bang-up-job. Still, he can be a remarkably subtle director when he wants to be, and some of the key moments in the movie couldn’t have been done any better.
Now, some mention of the soundtrack by the Tomandandy(Tom Hajdu and Andy Milburn) is in order. They or it sure knows what button to push, what sounds to tweak. They understand the power of aura. The composition is more about mood than on melody, not a bad thing as cinema has too often been marred by excessive scoring. Horror or paranormal soundtrack is especially challenging because its conventions have been so firmly and narrowly established, usually of the gothic strings and chalk-on-board school. The score for THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES may not be great but is certainly unique.
THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES could have been just another spook-house movie, except that Hatem used its haunted spaces for character studies, ably reflected in the look and feel of the movie by the director and brought to life by a fine cast of actors. One of them is Alan Bates, a difficult role(as Alexander Leek) as it could easily have derailed into parody. One suspects Bates took the role for money and, in his first scene, seems to be barely containing his laughter with lines about supernatural mumbo-jumbo. What an actor has to do to put food on the table! Leek’s (non)explanations will come across to many as intellectual copout, pseudo-profundities about metaphysics and the like, the kind of stuff repeated in a thousand horror movies. Later, he compares the man’s relation to the mystery with a cockroach’s relation to man. It’s all so beyond us. “You’re more advanced than a cockroach. Have you ever tried explaining yourself to one of them?”
But, in the second meeting with Klein, Leek begins to come into his own as a full-blooded character than merely an obligatory dispenser of mumbo-jumbo. This time, the conversation is less about what it all means than how it affected Leek’s life, a worthy lesson for Klein about how the seeker can be consumed by what he seeks. The role of Leek, perfunctory at first, gains gravitas.
Though a minor character, Leek is part of a triangle with Gordon and Klein. Klein, a reporter by training, is always on the chase, which is reflected in his interaction with ‘Indrid Cold’. “It depends on who’s looking”, as ‘Cold’ said, perhaps a vulgarized take on the Heisenberg principle, i.e. the observer alters the nature of what is observed, or something.
Leek is a scholar by training, formerly a physics professor, and his approach to the mystery was intellectual and philosophical; he even wrote a book on the subject, which is how Klein got to know of him.
As for Gordon the Christian, he approached the mystery as a kind of rapture or revelation, a matter of faith. At some point, he stops caring about clues or evidence. He simply believes and accepts.
In all three cases, madness and even death are the price of admission. Earlier in the investigation, Klein jokingly asked Connie, “Am I going crazy?” but later begins to exhibit signs of mental instability. Gordon ends up dead though he may have died ‘happy’. Did the ‘mothman’ lead him to death, effectively ‘murdering’ him? Or was Gordon mentally and emotionally unfit to handle the mystery, like some people cannot handle alcohol?
Even though Klein tries to maintain a distinction between himself and Gordon the rube despite their similar experiences — indeed, Klein is most offended when Connie seems to imply that he’s becoming like Gordon — , something seems to pass from Gordon to Klein after the former’s death. On the day of Gordon’s funeral, one to which Klein doesn’t seem to be invited(as Denise can’t help feeling that Klein’s arrival in town led her husband astray), we see Klein sitting in a bar with hands clasped, rather like Gordon earlier on the bridge. He seems in prayer even if not.
Does the ‘mothman’ have a mind and agenda of its own or is it like a paranormal occult A.I. that feeds on the energies of the world and remolds them into visions, messages, warnings, or blessings depending on who’s ‘looking’? Reportedly, A.I. is doing amazing things, but it lacks consciousness and has no agency. It’s a question posed in SOLARIS by Stanislaw Lem. Does the ocean-planet know what it’s doing or does it do without knowing? Is it thinking or dreaming?
Does the ‘mothman’ have an agenda or is it a warped projection of our collective psyche? If the latter, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES can be approached like THE SHINING by Stanley Kubrick, an allegory of the will-to-power. Still, whereas THE SHINING dispenses with plausibility and proceeds like a mind-experiment, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES doesn’t quite work unless, on some level, we accept the real possibility of the occult. It is, after all, ‘based on a true event.’
Arguably, it is on this literal level of the paranormal that THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES is most problematic in its ever shifting goalposts. John Simon wrote dismissively of THE SHINING: “Except for the mystery film, no genre requires more rigorous logic than the horror movie. The supernatural forces may be as weird as they like, but they must play by some set of rules… Rigorous consistency provides that modicum of credibility that allows for suspension of disbelief; without belief in it, the horror merely strikes the mind as horribly silly.” If so, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES is guilty as charged. If vampires can only be killed by a wooden stake to the heart, it’d be ridiculous to see one be taken out by three silver bullets instead. The ‘logic’ of THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES is all over the map as there seems to be no limit as to what the ‘mothman’ can do. It’s hinted that the ‘mothman’ usually appears when death is just around the corner, which explains Mary’s vision of it. In the hospital, she asks John, “You didn’t see it, did you?” As for the sightings around Point Pleasant, Alexander Leek warns something terrible is about to happen there.
But the ‘mothman’ appears to interject into people’s fecund inclinations as well. When John and Mary make out in the closet of their prospective new house, a moth suddenly appears above. Later at Point Pleasant, youngsters C.J. and Holly recount the sudden appearance of a dark entity just when they were about to get it on in the car. So, does the ‘mothman’ have as much to do with natality as with fatality, both being two sides of the same coin?
Even more puzzling by the rules of genre logic is the ever-shifting nature of the ‘mothman’. To some, it appears as flashing lights or an insect-like creature, sometimes tall and with red eyes. Others only sense its effects, especially via electronic equipment. And despite emanating from the Other World, its voice can be recorded and analyzed. It seems to thrive on man-made electricity, like yeast in a vat of sugary liquid, as if the advent of modern electronics ushered in the era of ‘ghosts’ as a normal part of our everyday lives.
Electronic media habituate our minds to process signals not so much as a representation but as an extension of reality. However realistic a painting is, we know it’s merely a representation. But, TV and movies are routinely experienced as more-real-than-reality. One of the strange effects of cinema, as Andrew Sarris pointed out, is that they make ‘living’ of the dead. It’s like ghost world made real. Moments in time not merely recorded but preserved for posterity in their pristine state. Time captured in a bottle. Watch old movies, and dead actors come back to life, old actors appear in their youth. Billy Wilder’s SUNSET BOULEVARD conveyed the nature of this new kind of madness of the 20th century.
Before electronic media, people only had one sense of reality, one rooted in community and nature. And there was the clear distinction between the real and the representation of the real(or the fantastic) in books and the arts. Even photography, for all its exact replication of people and things, lacked motion integral to reality. Of course, there was always the power of imagination and belief in the spirit world.
Spirits in such a world would have a limited playing field to ply their tricks and trade, manifested only through the private world of the imagination, hallucination, or the collective ecstasy of rapture(usually in churches or maybe in covens for those inclined toward the demonic).
Now, ghosts and spooky stuff don’t exist but suppose they do. Just think of the opportunities availed to them for messing with our minds owing to the electronic media, which would provide for them what sewers did for rats. It’d be a field day for the supernatural as electric signals and ghostly spirits operate in a synonymous manner. How would we know which is which?
Prior to the telegram, who would have imagined that a message from one part of America could instantly be transmitted to another part of America? Infinitely faster than the fastest horse. Initially, it was just electric signals, a series of clicks that, however useful, no one would have mistaken for any kind of reality. But then, the telephone could send not only signals but fairly accurate approximations of the human voice. Thus, people divided by hundreds, even thousands of miles, could converse as if next to one another. Still, it wasn’t fully ‘realistic’ as the other person could not be seen, i.e. the reality of unbridgeable distance, except in voice, was a constant reminder. Then, cinema added motion to photographic images and created the illusion of life before our eyes. Then came the talkies that fused image and sound, thus removing the last barrier to the illusion of reality before our eyes. Finally, a Frankenstein medium that looked and sounded real.
Then, radios began to transmit sounds in real time, a power that Orson Welles ran with in his WAR OF THE WORLDS broadcast. Then came the TV that broadcast sound AND image in real time, and the masses instantly became transfixed, indeed so accustomed to it as a near-extension of reality that the warnings of the deeper implications of this transformation mostly fell on deaf ears.
If ghosts and dark spirits really do exist, they would surely take to the electronic pathway with abandon, and indeed, plenty of movies have been premised on electricity and ghosts acting as kindred spirits: VIDEODROME by David Cronenberg, POLTERGEIST by Steven Spielberg & Tobe Hooper, SHOCKER by Wes Craven, the RING movies from Japan, and etc.
Even without belief in ghosts, electronic media have often been denounced by religious and secular critics alike as either a devilish or dumbing-down influence on society. Who needs ghosts when we’ve conjured up our own demons out of electricity. As Simon and Garfunkel sang in ‘Sounds of Silence’, “And the people bowed and prayed/ To the neon god they made…” The ‘poltergeization’ of the media is complete.
John Klein may regard himself as a truth-seeking reporter, but as a member of the electronic media, the very nature of which is to distort and manipulate mass-perception, he too is a specter haunting America. In a way, the movie is about a mothman pursuing the mothman.
THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES jumps around so many hypotheses of the paranormal that none is examined to any degree; it isn’t an immersive experience like THE SHINING by Kubrick or STALKER by Tarkovsky.
It certainly has no use for John Simon’s dictum on the inviolability of logic in the horror universe. Just how did the ‘mothman’ transport Klein’s car across 400 miles in one and half hours? If Klein has never been in Point Pleasant before, who was the man who looked just like him and knocked on Gordon’s door two nights in a row? It’s one thing for the ‘mothman’ to play ghost but quite another to play man. Furthermore, the ‘mothman’ antics increasingly go from subjective to objective. It’s one thing for ‘Indrid Cold’ to have appeared before Gordon or spoken to Klein on the phone. We can still conceive of the ‘mothman’ as an intensely subjective phenomenon that appears to some but not to others. But what about when the figure of ‘Mary’ suddenly appears out of the blue and leaves a message for Klein with Connie at the police station? How did Klein’s subjectivity materialize into objectivity? And why would ‘Mary’, who haunts Klein’s psyche, appear before Connie but depart just before his arrival at the station? Is Klein’s hurt so extreme that the ‘mothman’ can mold and project its power into ‘reality’? Or was this ‘Mary’, by contacting Connie but not him, sending him a message to let her go and start a new life with Connie?
In the movie’s defense, one could argue it’s not really horror and, as such, not bound by genre logic. Rather, the movie is about the infinite layers of mystery and their ultimate unknowability, i.e. every new clue leads to yet another riddle, more enigmatic than the one before. Granted, the ‘mothman’ is something of a hustler, luring people in with clear messages, such as “Denver 9, 99 people will die”, only to follow them up with ever more cryptic or outlandish ones.
As Leek said to Klein, “You’ll never understand their messages. You’ll misinterpret them. I did. It almost destroyed me… We’re not allowed to know.”
Now, let’s consider some scenes that highlight why THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, for all its insufficiencies, is a very special movie. We might as well start with the ingenious opening scene. The key elements are introduced in the most offhand manner. No heavy symbolism or portentous omens, just casual details and gestures that, in hindsight, anticipate the movie’s events and themes. The best signifiers leave it up to the audience to notice or not notice than pressed upon them as pregnant with meaning.
THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES begins with John Klein’s final minutes at work. It’s just another day at the office, but look closely, and so many things are happening all at once or in quick succession, as if Klein is simultaneously juggling several realities. Modern people have become so accustomed to this, sometimes called multi-tasking, that they don’t realize how hectic their lives have become. We see Klein recoiling from buzzing on the phone, then trading information with someone at the other end, making a call to his wife(who happens to be in the shower) and leaving a message, marking the ‘y’ in ‘Mary’ on a notepad, and answering a question by a colleague, Ed. The buzzing noise on the phone foreshadows the ‘messages’ from ‘Indrid Cold’. The winglike(or vaginal or ovarian) ‘y’ becomes a central motif throughout the movie, suggesting that the trajectory of Klein’s life is part of a larger cosmic pattern. Next, there are fleeting glimpses of the in-crowd(so different from the people we later meet in Point Pleasant) and an angel ornament. Mary’s failure to answer John’s phone-call foreshadows their separation, and her wet body in the shower may be linked with Connie’s descent into the watery depth. Ed asks, “The Balkans peace council is ‘comprised’ or ‘composed’ of ten members?”, to which Klein offers a correction, “Twelve members”, to which Ed responds, “Oh right, thanks”, to which Klein provides the answer he was asked in the first place, “‘Composed’”, to which Ed gives a befuddled response, “What?”
The exchange elegantly hints at the multi-plane theory of reality. Ed asked a grammatical question but was corrected on a political detail, which superseded his original inquiry and left him clueless as to Klein’s answer.
As Klein walks away, a TV news report of an accident narrates, “You might want to avoid that route coming home from work”. Klein’s life soon becomes consumed with detours and disasters. The image then turns into static, as if reality is made of packets of energy and the universe is the TV show of God. The static gives way to the inside of a computer with complex wiring and cylinders evocative of moth eyes. The image is followed by a park bench on a snowy night. The streaking street lights add yet another layer to the notion of reality as an illusion of energy and spirits. (Later, following Mary’s death, we find Klein sitting alone on a park bench — the frame approaches him from behind, as if stalking, a stylistic reprise of the frame moving closer to the window in which Mary alone is visible despite being accompanied by John in a kitchen as the realtor makes the pitch.)
Before leaving the building, Klein drops in on the editor-in-chief who tries to persuade him to stick around for the Christmas party. Klein’s simple answer, “I can’t. Mary’s waiting for me” is oddly poignant, as if an unwitting premonition of what lies ahead.
Snippets of Mary glossing herself with lipstick and fashionable dress alternate with Klein’s final moments at the office(and will later stand in stark contrast to her pitiable condition on the deathbed). As Mary turns off the light and readies to leave the house, there’s a wistful foreboding of farewell. She picks up two items, her notebook, later to be filled with drawings of the ‘mothman’, and her keys, evocative of Klein’s later obsession to unlock the mystery.
Indeed, there is a ritualistic quality to her prepping for the evening. The showering and grooming seem meant for something other than what Mary has in mind.
One of the more discernible, even obvious, strategies in the movie is to either dwell on objects with moth-like resemblance OR to arrange perspectives to render objects into moth-like patterns. There are plenty of connect-the-dots clues for people who are into such things.
One particular scene could be an allusion to a historical tragedy. When John and Mary drive home after committing to purchase the house, the manner in which the car weaves down the road is reminiscent of John F. Kennedy’s motorcade at the Dealey Plaza; and when Klein returns to the scene of the ‘crime’, even more so. Even though it’s revealed that Mary’s brain tumor is unrelated to the accident, whatever ‘shot’ through her eye on that particular night seems to her fate and to John’s as well. Had her tumor been discovered without the event, things might have turned out differently for Klein. Despite the medical explanation, Klein can’t help thinking that some strange force is at work. If it took Mary from him, then perhaps it could bring him to her.
One fine scene takes place near the midpoint of the movie before things really heat up with Gordon’s account of having met ‘Indrid Cold’. Klein sits on the sofa with Connie at her house, which somewhat resembles his. (Both houses seem rather too big and empty for a single person.) It’s the first time Connie opens up to Klein. She’s in civilian dress, and her hair is done differently. In response to Klein’s account of Gordon’s visit to the neurologist and apparent hallucinations, Connie says she had a dream like that. In the dream, she was sinking beneath the waves in what she took to be an ocean. It sounds more like a nightmare, but her fears soon gave way to peace and acceptance. She knew she was dying but also letting go. It stuck in her mind, especially the voice that whispered into her ears, “Wake up, number 37”. Still, it was a dream, not a vision or hallucination, which might call her sanity into question.
Yet, as she recounts the dream, she’s overcome with emotion, which she usually holds back. For all her cool-headedness and composure characteristic of her profession, there is another side to her, and perhaps it was the first time she shared her dream with anyone. Tears begin to form in her eyes. There are subtle touches here. Klein’s hand just barely glances her cheek to wipe away a tear, and her head just barely tilts to feel the touch of his hand.
If Mary’s tears were those of horror, Connie’s are those of grace, tranquility in the face of death. Perhaps, Connie, having seen the bad side of life as a cop, is more inured to the misfortunes of life. She is the one major character who remains resolute in preventing the strangeness to affect her thoughts and actions. As she says later in the movie to Klein, “Listen to me. Planes are going to crash. Earthquakes are going to happen. People you know and love are going to die… and no matter what that voice tells you… there’s nothing you can do about it.” The world may or may not be a crazy place, but all one can do is just go on living. (At the very end, however, upon hearing that 36 people died, she realizes the significance of the voice in her dream. She would have been victim 37 if Klein hadn’t pulled her out of the river. It’s as if they’re born anew through the experience. So, was it more than just a dream? Is she too part of the grand design, one that giveth and taketh? She lives, but the young townie C.J. isn’t so lucky, tragic for Holly, his prospective bride.)
An eerily touching moment follows the aforementioned scene on the bridge, one where Gordon’s remark about ‘happiness’ touched a raw nerve in Klein’s psyche. Klein, half-asleep in his motel room, turns in his bed and finds Mary lying beside him. Her image is crystal clear but gone in an instant. She smiled but didn’t speak, but he heard the words: “I want you to be happy”. Was it a dream or yet another ‘mothman’-induced hallucination? It’s in moments like these, quiet but disquieting, than in loud brazen ones that THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES comes closest to intimating the possibility of other dimensions.
The emotional climax of the movie comes right before the big final scene of the bridge disaster. After Klein’s apparent misinterpretation of Indrid Cold’s message— ‘great tragedy on the river Ohio’ as prediction of a major accident at the chemical plant — peters out, he’s relieved but also disappointed, as his ego was so heavily invested in being right, even going so far as to warn the governor to cancel the inspection tour of the chemical plant. It’s become a question not only of reputation but of sanity, and indeed, the governor orders his aid to phone the editor of Washington Post as to Klein’s state of mind.
Even though it appears Klein misread Indrid Cold’s message, did he really? Could it be the misreading was part of the larger ‘plan’, a roundabout way of leading him back to Point Pleasant by way of D.C.?
Sitting at the bar at the Marriott’s watching the news, Klein is handed a letter from a hotel clerk(actual or yet another figure conjured up by ‘Cold’, we have no idea) that promises Mary will call him on Christmas Eve at noon at his house. Klein is ready to take Alexander Leek’s advice and leave Point Pleasant behind. He’s no good at this prediction business. Yet, the main reason he’s headed to D.C. is not to resume his old life but to receive a phone call from his dead wife. He’s still under the spell of the ‘mothman’. Connie comes to visit him at the hotel, and it could be their last moment together. Connie seems saddened it has to be this way but is more concerned about Klein’s mental health. “John, do you realize what’s happening to you?”, she asks.
Klein returns to an empty house and sits by the phone the next day, which is Christmas Eve. Just before noon, the phone rings, and it’s Connie. In an ironic twist, even though she speaks the hard truths about reality, she’s playing the role of an angel. We’re used to thinking of hard truths as cold but hers are warm. Earlier, we saw the tears in Mary’s eyes and Connie’s eyes, and now, it’s Klein’s turn as the dam finally bursts. It seems he held back his emotions even when Mary died. When she was ill, he somehow convinced himself that he could ‘stop this’, and after she died, a part of him went into deep freeze to preserve her memory. The thaw that bursts into catharsis is finally brought about by Connie. It’s as fine as any moment in cinema, as well as the crowning achievement for Gere as an actor.
Given what has become of Hollywood increasingly fixated on sequels and franchises pandering to teen audiences, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, which might have appeared a bit over-the-top upon release, may now look downright sober and restrained. Whether it qualifies as great or not, it’s surely one of the richer offerings as food for thought and fodder for emotions since the start of the new century.
Finally, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES is relevant in our time as a metaphor for people’s grasping for alternative perspectives and explanations as to what’s really going on. One doesn’t have to believe in the paranormal to appreciate John Klein’s quest in the movie. In some ways, we are living in the Age of Alex Jones, for better or worse, especially with the credibility of the so-called ‘mainstream media’ in free fall. Klein, a mainstream media figure who mainly focuses on national-global issues, comes to fixate on the strange phenomena in a small town.
At the allegorical level, it suggests that, in order to understand the macro, we need to acknowledge the micro. The health of the Big is the end-product of the overall health of the little or littles. In the US, the current malaise is the product of pushing the grand narrative while ignoring all the ‘minor’ realities across America of social and cultural problems plaguing communities big and small, north and south, east and west.
Worse, the favored grand narratives aren’t about anything real or crucial as the main emphasis usually falls on nonsense or fantasies like Globo-Homo and Negrolatry. John Klein ends up in a small town and comes face-to-face with its local problems. In the movie, they revolve around the supernatural and a looming disaster, but in allegorical terms, they could be read as issues that deserve attention but nevertheless go ignored because most people who matter dare not address them. Take the crisis of opioid addiction and deaths among working class whites that consumed 100,000s of lives. For the longest time, it hardly appeared on the radar of national news, and it took the academic work of some obscure scholars to finally bring the problem to light.
Also, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES shows how the political and social are often entangled with the personal. In Klein’s case, it’s the clinically undigested trauma regarding his late wife that triggered certain responses that led him to Point Pleasant and keeps him there to solve a riddle.
Surely, most people in the media aren’t afflicted with comparable traumas, but one could argue that all of the educated class are instilled with a kind of collective trauma’ or ‘tragic sense’ regarding certain groups, mainly Jews-blacks-homos, that may explain their irrational obsessions that end up biasing their reports and skewing their interpretations of events. A kind of ‘intellectually’-manufactured shared-‘trauma’ that nudges the educated(or the initiated) to favor the Narrative over the truth. But then, this is nothing new as Christianity long ago perfected the art of ‘traumatizing’ each new generation with the story of the Son of God being crucified for the sins of mankind, instilling a deep guilt-complex in every new generation. Wokery merely secularized this psychology of mass-trauma.
Bridge Collapse
The Why of Y
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