Hello In There: Simon of the Desert and The Ninth Configuration
By Zayne Reeves

Let me just cover my ass by stating emphatically that I am not a theologian nor do I play one on TV or even off-broadway summerstock.  What I am is someone who, for better and for worse, lost it at the movies. I came of age during the 80s, where the classrooms I received my education in were beginning to discover how they could supplement their lesson plans by playing a movie in class that illustrated the points they had just discussed.  Of course, I was often subjected to classes and teachers that abused this tool, and I was asked too many times to substitute Patrick Swayze in a rebel soldier uniform for a real discussion with an adult interested in making sure that I wouldn't have this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when I discovered a little book called Lies My Teacher Told Me a few years down the line. I was asked to learn my lessons through these films so I naturally gravitated towards the ones that were entertaining such as Glory and Michael Mann's The Last of The Mohicans, and did better in classes that showed these movies such as my creative arts electives and social studies classes.  I had greater difficulty maintaining interest in classes where there either were no films or no entertaining ones. To this day, I blame my lack of mathematical ability on the fact that A Beautiful Mind didn't come out until I was already an adult.

When I took classes in religious heritage, I was saddled with Charlton Heston superdogs like The Awakening or those skin peelingly dull TNT religious epics that always seemed to feature Ben Kingsley, Martin Landau and/or F. Murray Abraham.  Consequently, and I am exaggerating to prove a point here, I lost touch with whatever it is that constitutes my faith and beliefs in a higher power. Again, that ain't the whole story, but it's the script I have for my purposes here and I'm sticking to it. To be honest, it wasn't something I missed. I was happy to not think about it although I live in a region of the United States where that is a tricky road to navigate. Still, I managed it fine until two things happened.  One is that my country's sitting president has quite effectively managed to make his faith a major part of his appeal to his voter base. The other involves a certain former Mad Max and a little movie he made last year that you might have heard some people talk about.

Suddenly, I couldn't take an afternoon walk without seeing three or four billboard ads put up by churches inviting me to "See The Passion, Then Join Us For The Rest of The Story." I couldn't seem to extricate myself from situations where I would meet people who would ask me if I had seen The Passion of The Christ. It got to the point where I was almost sheepish in admitting that I hadn't because I could see the look of confusion and disappointment in their eyes. The point is that the whole thing forced my hand to reevaluate my long dormant beliefs. What those are and where I'm at with them now isn't something I'm going to discuss but, throughout the process of rediscovery, I sought out films that discussed faith and religion in a way that I was comfortable with and, most of all, that discussed them in ways that were entertaining and light years removed from the stiff, pedantic likes of The Ten Commandments or The Greatest Story Ever Told. Here are
the two that mean the most to me.

 

SIMON OF THE DESERT

We could use Luis Bunuel right now although Simon of The Desert, made in 1965, is so startlingly contemporary in its critique of a culture more interested in Christ's crucifixion than his teachings that it feels like the great director is alive and well and would like a word with Judge Roy Moore. The film opens with Simon (Claudio Brook) coming down from his pillar where he has fasted and prayed for six years, six months and six days (Bunuel's satire of St. Simeon Stylites is not above the occasional knock knock joke) to scale an even higher perch built for him by a rich local family. Atop his new pillar, far above the rest of humanity, Simon leads the priests and the rest of the small desert community in prayer when a thief, whose hands were severed for his crimes, repents and asks Simon to restore his hands. Simon prays to God and the crowd witnesses a miracle as the thief's hands suddenly reappear. After thanking God, the very first thing that the thief does with his hands is smack his son upside the head for asking if they are the very same hands that were chopped off in the first place. Funny bit of business but it also works to illustrate Bunuel's frustration with "kiss up, kick down" followers who mistake lip service for actual faith.

Simon and the priests are deep in prayer one day when a woman walks past them. Simon sees an ugly, cross-eyed hag where one of the priests sees instead a beautiful young woman. Simon admonishes the priest for his weakness and asks him not to pray with him again until he can control his impulses. After the priests leave, the woman (Silvia Pinal) reappears in full impish schoolgirl regalia and Simon instantly recognizes her as Satan.  What follows is a series of attempts by the devil to seduce Simon from his pillar, the most famous of which is the scene where Satan rides inside a self-propelled coffin through the desert.  Satan even attempts to discredit Simon among the priests by possessing the body of one priest (who bears an uncanny resemblance to alt country icon Blaze Foley) and then planting wine and gourmet cheese in Simon's food bag which never contains more than lettuce and a skin of water. The possessed priest is revealed to be the devil and what follows is an honest-to-goodness Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd routine between Satan and the priests:

SATAN: Down with the Anastasis!

PRIESTS: Viva!

SATAN: Viva the Apocatastasis!

PRIESTS: Down! (One priest mumbles to another, "What's the Apocatastasis?" to which his fellow priest shrugs)

SATAN: Down with Jesus Christ!

PRIESTS: Down! I mean, Viva!

Afterwards, Satan comes to Simon again, dressed as a bearded Greek man holding a tiny lamb. For a moment, Simon believes it is God who has appeared before him until he realizes it's the devil (punting the lamb was probably a giveaway) and he berates himself for almost falling for the deception. As penance, Simon vows to stand on one leg until he has proven his worth to God. Frustrated by Simon's unshakeable asceticism, Satan whisks them both away to a 60s night club (the film itself is never clear as to when it's taking place although it appears to be the middle ages) where they sit, dressed as bored hipsters while teenagers dance to a rock and roll band. Before getting up to dance, the devil informs Simon that someone has taken his place on the pillar and the film ends as Satan gets her groove on. This ending should be taken with the proverbial truckload o' salt because Bunuel ran out of funding and probably found himself in a situation where he had to cobble something together very quickly before the production was shut down.

Bunuel packs a lot into this 45 minute film but never once does Simon of The Desert feel overly dense or busy. And for an incendiary filmmaker so legendary in his contempt of organized religion, you would expect Simon to be portrayed in a harsh, condescending light. What's surprising is that he gets a break from Bunuel, probably because the director saw a lot of himself in this iron-willed man who is neither a fool nor a hypocrite. Simon might be a humorless scold but he is a true believer and remains sympathetic even as he chides young, unbearded priests for their exuberance and dresses down a dwarf who carries on an extremely inappropriate relationship with his prized goat.

What Bunuel didn't have respect for was the extravagances of the clergy, the fickle nature of so many followers of the church or the way that the Catholic Church both demonized and marginalized women.  Simon's mother is allowed to live in a tiny shack next to her son's pillar so that she can be near him every day although Simon has sacrificed all human relationships stating "Earthly love cannot come between the Lord and His servant." For Bunuel, this is the root of the church's disconnect from humanity although it is ironic that, even as an adult, Simon receives his sustenance from an umbilical cord of sorts when he lowers his food bag from a rope so that it can be filled and brought up again. That rope is his only tangible lifeline to the world below him. Casting the beautiful Silvia Pinal as Satan was no mere casting stunt either. Pinal's Satan repeatedly uses her naked body as a weapon against Simon and her intent is not so much to appeal to his prurient interests (the man truly has none) but simply to offend him with her sex.  Tellingly, it is when Pinal wears a beard and disguises herself as a Greek man that Simon immediately assumes it must be God. Bunuel is hardest on Simon in these scenes as he is clearly using the martyr as a stand-in for the Catholic Church.

Luis Bunuel was born and raised in Calanda, Spain at the dawn of the 20th century.  Bunuel described the small village of Calanda as medieval and he was the recipient of a strict Jesuit education whose program had gone unchanged for nearly two hundred years.  The experience marked him for life and he returned to it often in his film career (Nazarin, Virdiana, The Milky Way) when he wasn't otherwise preoccupied ripping bourgeois culture a spankin' new asshole. The other defining experience of Bunuel's formative years was seeing Fritz Lang's Destiny, which inspired him to realize his calling as a film director. Bunuel claimed to have never directed a single scene that compromised his convictions or morality and it is that adherence to his own vision of aesthetic purity that informs his treatment of Simon in this film.  While completely unsparing in his criticism of a church that has lost its way and its followers who have lost sight of Christ's message of love and kindness, Bunuel softens up ever so slightly with Simon and it allows for both the filmmaker and his surrogate's humanity to shine in a ways that a brilliant, if cold, latter day masterpiece like The Discreet Charm of The Bourgeoisie had no time for.

THE NINTH CONFIGURATION

Humanity, if I may be allowed to bastardize Patrick Marber's best line from Closer, is a fist wrapped in blood according to William Peter Blatty's The Ninth Configuration.  Adapted from his own novel, Twinkle, Twinkle Killer Kane, it must be said that Blatty the filmmaker leaves Blatty the novelist in the dust here. Where Twinkle, Twinkle Killer Kane often felt like a flat, declamatory first sketch containing the promise of greatness, The Ninth Configuration is the full blown portrait of that greatness. A nearly impossible film to categorize, Configuration is one of the few truly great American movies that tackles Big Issues successfully and yet is not a genre film per se.  Invasion of The Body Snatchers (both the Siegel original and the Kaufman remake), Duck Soup, Singin' In The Rain, The Wild Bunch and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (do I even need to clarify which version?) are films that hold that hoary old mirror up to society far more effectively than, say, Gentleman's Agreement or Driving Miss Daisy ever could. The Ninth Configuration has elements of a thriller, a comedy, a postwar drama and just about every other genre you could think of and yet it belongs to none of those. The closest comparison I can come up with is Tom Stoppard's great play, Jumpers. With Jumpers, as with many other Stoppard plays, you have a story that is operating on several different levels, in this case involving philosophers who speak of the existence of morality and goodness and yet are oblivious to the corpse in the other room. It's your basic middle America crowd pleaser about logical positivism, bacon sandwiches and trampolines.  Except with Blatty's film, we get Catholicism, Vietnam, spooky castles and lines like "I'm a Buddhist. In case of an emergency, call a Lama."

Opening with a shot of a secluded castle, we are informed by Ed Flanders' voiceover narration that a number of Vietnam soldiers, suspected of faking mental illness, are being kept in a castle in the pacific northwest (the film was actually shot in Hungary) for observation and testing. Colonel Hudson Kane (Stacy Keach), the most respected psychiatrist in uniform, has just been appointed head of this experimental asylum and his arrival at the castle is greeted with a hearty "Hail Caesar!" by the inmates. Possessing an infinite capacity for understanding and kindness, Kane genuinely cares for his patients and strives to connect with them and never, even for an instant, does he display anything resembling impatience or condescension. In particular, Kane takes an interest in Captain Cutshaw (Scott Wilson), an astronaut who aborted a launch during final countdown by saying, among many other things, that he couldn't go to the moon because it was bad for his skin. Cutshaw is an avowed atheist who nonetheless jokes that he still believes in the devil "because the prick keeps doing commercials." The relationship between Kane and Cutshaw is the heart and soul of the film. Cutshaw attacks Kane's faith at every point to which Kane counterargues on behalf of faith and humanity.

“Who are you really? You're too human to be human," Cutshaw tells Kane. And it is tricky for me writing this to discuss much of what happens in this film for fear of spoiling the experience of anyone who has yet to see The Ninth Configuration. Let's just say that Kane is a man who is as deeply wounded and in need of salvation as Cutshaw.   Kane sees Cutshaw's atheism as a challenge that can reaffirm his own faith and conquer the terrible demons that torment him in his sleep. Cutshaw's inability to believe is eating him alive and he is a man so full of rage that he can't help but spite his own need for redemption by calling God a foot (Blatty's least favorite body part) and railing against "Foot" for allowing children and animals to suffer. At one point, after Kane tells him that the good in the world proves that there is a God; Cutshaw calls Kane "so dumb you're adorable."

Blatty, a Catholic, loads the film with more symbolism than an Italian film festival and while he isn't quite on par with Bunuel (who is?), he hits more than he misses in an astonishingly assured directorial debut. Role playing with the inmates in order to indulge and possibly cure them, Keach and the other caretakers (all military men) dress as Nazis while the inmates play The Great Escape. Cutshaw starts another argument with Kane who, while wearing a Nazi uniform the entire time, makes his most lucid and compelling argument for man's inherent goodness by listing example after example of how a person can selflessly give his life to save those around them. Cutshaw refuses to believe it and asks Kane to give him one personal example of this happening, which leaves Kane momentarily silenced. In a bravado dream sequence, an astronaut (Kane) plants a flag on the moon and turns with outstretched hands to greet Christ on the cross.......on the moon!  Throughout the dream sequence, we hear Kane's voice as he once again makes his case for Christ. Here's the speech in its entirety:
 
KANE: In order for life to have appeared spontaneously on earth, there first had to be hundreds of millions of protein molecules of the ninth configuration. But given the size of the planet Earth, do you know how long it would have taken for just one of these protein molecules to appear entirely by chance? Roughly ten to the two hundred and forty-third power billions of years. And I find that far, far more fantastic than simply believing in God.

Blatty was also a former gag writer before he gained his greatest fame as the author of The Exorcist and you can hear in the lively DVD commentary track how elated the man was to have an opportunity to show off his one-liner skills again after being shackled a horror writer for nearly a decade. The Ninth Configuration practically hemorrhages memorable lines and insanely entertaining monologues. And none are more entertaining than the one delivered by Jason Miller's theatre director (who adapts Shakespeare's plays for dogs) whose speech on how Hamlet wasn't quite crazy, wasn't quite sane, but in dire need of indulgence or else he would go insane, should be taught in every acting class in America. At times, Configuration almost resembles a Marx Bros. movie but there is always something disturbing lurking around the corner that shades the hilarity with a touch of dread. There is a heaviness to the film that might seem ponderous at first but, if you stick with it, you will see why it had to be that way. 

The film's climax is a bar fight sequence that is positively squirm inducing for both its hyper realism and its Grand Guignol-esque qualities. A rock bottom Cutshaw escapes the institution, steals a car and drives down to a local watering hole to get soused. Spotted by the most demented David Lynch bar thug that David Lynch never thought of, Cutshaw is quizzed, bullied and, finally, tormented by a thug named Stanley (an unforgettable Steve Sandor) and his gang of biker friends.  Kane comes to rescue Cutshaw but is taken hostage and tortured by Stanley as well. It is in the violence that ensues where Kane finds his redemption and it is Kane's death (from a knife wound) that gives Cutshaw his one example of humanity's goodness. The film ends with Cutshaw revisiting the castle after a number of years and, after returning to his car, he finds his St. Christopher medal (which he gave to Kane) sitting in his seat, which is the sign that Cutshaw asked of Kane to give him if there is a Heaven.

At times the exchanges between Kane and Cutshaw feel like Blatty engaging in his own form of self-therapy and it might not have worked so well as a piece of cinema had it not been for Stacy Keach and Scott Wilson so perfectly inhabiting their parts. Also helping to anchor the more fantastic elements of the script is Ed Flanders who plays Colonel Fell, the castle's medic and a man with some secrets of his own. Flanders was perhaps the most naturalistic actor to ever come down the pike and he gives even the most absurd situations a reality and a gravitas even when his character is unnaturally obsessed with having his pants wrinkled by an inmate or cracking corny jokes at the skull that sits on his desk.

My carp with The Ninth Configuration when I watch it now is that it seems to stack the deck in favor of Kane and his pro-faith arguments. Cutshaw gets the one-liners but even when he jokes that "Infinited goodness is creating a being whom you know in advance
is going to complain," you can feel that his character is yearning to be convinced.  Cutshaw's final speech talks about how he couldn't go to the moon because if he died there, and there was no God after all, then that would be really and truly alone. Kane's ninth configuration argument is powerful (and the Christ/moon imagery unsettling in its beauty) but certainly Cutshaw could have come back with a monologue that beat Bill Hicks to the punch on dinosaurs and creationism. I also have a problem with Kane finding redemption, and getting his pride back, by killing about a dozen people in a bar fight. Granted, it was a stunning scene, the violence was responsibly portrayed as horrifying and both Kane and Cutshaw had been brutally mistreated but it still gives the audience this cathartic, "kill the bastards" jolt that is far removed from the film's deep spirituality. Still, so few American films are willing to pull the trigger and truly talk about faith in a way that doesn't read like a Hallmark card or a cynical bit of red state pandering and here you have one that isn't afraid to go to bathroom, pull the gun from behind the flushbox, return to the table and shoot the Turk.

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