As I joked on Twitter, I’m pretty good at reading crypto-reactionary meanings into films.
Spring Breakers is a critique of our decadent culture and a defense of faith and organized religion. The Dark Knight is an apologia for the neoconservative reaction to 9/11 and vocalizes support for harsh interrogation, extraordinary rendition, and the surveillance state while at the same time criticizing those who would cut and run in Iraq. The Dark Knight Rises is pro-responsible-business, anti-Occupy, and a devastating critique of demagogues who spout nonsense about economic inequality. Man of Steel is actually about an isolationist agrarian nation coming to grips with the fact that it is the world’s only superpower and, therefore, responsible for ensuring its safety.
Sometimes even I can’t quite tell how serious I’m being in this assignations. Is Star Trek Into Darkness an esoteric commentary deeming drone strikes moral because it shows how quibbling about the practice leads to the destruction of an entire American Federation city? Probably not: I’m guessing it was just sloppily plotted. But maybe! Who is to say?
Point is: I know of what I speak when it comes to reading secret conservative meanings into films. And even I have no idea what Andrew O’Hehir is getting at in this review of The Conjuring. (Some spoilers to follow; reading my review might be handy since I am not recapping the plot below.)
"‘The Conjuring’ is one of the cleverest and most effective right-wing Christian films of recent years," O’Hehir writes. "Just for the record, I’m fine with movies that ask us to suspend disbelief about God, the devil, alien abductions, the innate goodness of the United States of America and any other unlikely-to-impossible things you care to mention." Emphasis mine because I see what you did there! Très clever. But I still am unsure why this movie was so evilly rightwing!
"The relentless focus of ‘The Conjuring’ on married life, Christian baptism and the old-school Latinate mumbo-jumbo of the Catholic Church as essential elements in resisting evil—and on womanhood and especially motherhood as the fount or locus of evil—is just too much to overlook," he writes. Now we’re getting somewhere. But it’s a weird paragraph insofar as there is no "relentless focus" on married life other than the fact that there are two married couples in the film. And baptism is mentioned twice, but only in the context of the Roman Catholic’s Church potential hesitancy to perform an exorcism for un-baptized kids.
Is "womanhood and especially motherhood" the focus of evil in The Conjuring? I guess, insofar as the demon is the soul of a deceased witch who murdered her newborn son and has cursed the property on which the crime occurred. But motherhood is also what saves the two families at the heart of the film: the possessed mother’s love for her family and the ghost-busting mother’s love of her child are what defeat the demon ravaging the families. Are we really at a point where simply having families act like families and having people take religious obligations seriously on screen is cause for a film to be dismissed as reactionary tripe? Seems a bit much.
Here is what really set off O’Hehir:
But along with the overall tone of hard-right family-values messaging, "The Conjuring" wants to walk back one of America’s earliest historical crimes, the Salem witch trials of 1692, and make it look like there must have been something to it after all. Those terrified colonial women, brainwashed, persecuted and murdered by the religious authorities of their day – see, they actually were witches, who slaughtered children and pledged their love to Satan and everything! That’s not poetic license. It’s reprehensible and inexcusable bullshit, less egregious but somewhat akin to making a movie that claims, in passing, that slavery was OK or that the Holocaust didn’t happen.
This is an interesting thing to freak out about. I’ll be honest: I was a bit surprised myself to hear it referenced. But to act as if this is an apology for the trials or some sort of stunningly original artistic crime is silly. Was it terrible when Marge Simpson, in a Halloween episode that is a clear reference to the Salem witch trials, was made out to be an actual witch? Was Rob Zombie’s Lords of Salem "reprehensible and inexcusable bullshit"? What about "Young Goodman Brown"? Is The Conjuring’s tossed off line about the witch trials really akin to Holocaust denial or defending slavery? Or is it an artistic convention that is occasionally used in horror films and elsewhere by hack screenwriters?
I tend to like O’Hehir’s reviews because he often makes some of the same deep readings I do (though with a decidedly different spin: The headline for his Dark Knight Rises review declared it an "evil masterpiece" and he described it as "fascistic"). But I think he’s gone off the deep end this time.