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Film Review by John Demetry
"He [Satan] does not levitate beds, or fool around with little girls: WE do." -- James Baldwin on The Exorcist in "The Devil Finds Work"
Pellington's narration requires the spectator's unconscious acceptance of the white-hetero hegemony, averting audience confrontation with the power structure. By disguising real personal and social distress, Pellington creates an unsatisfactory entertainment: one that denies genuine catharsis. Some reviewers recommend the film for its expert chills and thrills - "atmosphere," they might call it. Others dislike the film because it lacks narrative coherence - plot holes fail to allow suspension of disbelief. This actually marks a frightening critical consensus that defines entertainment as escapism. They fail to examine how the film's scares or its gaps in narrative logic invite audience projection.
"Our fears and anxieties" actually refer to hetero-white-male fears and anxieties. Pellington, falling in line with the Hollywood hegemony, presupposes the homogenous identity of the popular audience. Defining the film's temporal and spatial reality from Gere's perspective, Pellington locks the spectator into identifying with his travails. Pellington identifies those fears and anxieties: Gere loses his home, his wife, his job, his sense of masculine control - all symbols of his privilege. When the Mothman cometh, he plays on those fears. Projecting those anxieties onto gays and racial minorities through the media-political juggernaut sustains the hegemony. Pellington's diabolical filmmaking approach supports the process by deflecting political scrutiny onto a movie bogeyman. The Mothman is a supernatural force that warns humans of impending disasters - such as the 1967 collapse of the Point Pleasant bridge over the Ohio River that inspired this film. The film suggests that the Mothman fucks with humans just to laugh at man's inability to change fate. Less clear: The Mothman orchestrates that fate, intending to use the bridge collapse to take away Gere's sense of control. The final title tells us that the cause of the bridge's collapse remains unsolved - pointing blame at the Mothman. (The real reason for the collapse probably has more to do with a capitalist system that weighs cost against human life.)
That's the meaning behind the technically impressive opening sequence that establishes Gere's love for his wife, Mary, and the Mothman's warnings of her death. Pellington creates a compact montage: Gere in the office, weird currents running through the phone line, Mary taking a shower, a disturbance in the phone line that causes Gere to miss the name of a contact which he then scribbles into his notebook: M-A-R-Y. This sequence also establishes Gere's journalistic integrity when he corrects a colleague's grammatical error. It proves that Pellington understands cinematic grammar - through which he divorces responsibility and morality from integrity. The film's story develops from the sustaining of order in the "universe" by bringing Gere a new love interest (Laura Linney as a small-town police officer) and providing him the opportunity to save her life - where he failed to save Mary's. The film's opening title demands journalistic respect: "This story is based on events that happened in Point Pleasant, West Virginia." This reflects the film's valuing of both media (Gere) and police (Linney) authority: a perfect match. The film demands the diverse popular audience to project itself onto this celebration of the hegemony. To enforce audience identification with Gere and to distinguish Gere from the Mothman, Pellington uses the camera to signify the Mothman's point-of-view. One notably voyeuristic perspective: the Mothman spies on Gere and his wife in the hospital. Later in the hospital, Mary tells her husband: "I just want you to be happy." The false definitions of "happiness" that this film secures and the resulting fear of losing that "happiness" bring evil into the real - social and political - world. This privileging of Gere's point-of-view actually privileges media point-of-view. Pellington violates the disparaged visual literacy of the mass audience. A dishonest visual motif in the film: Pellington constantly turns the film image into digital-video pixels. Doing so subliminally recalls the inaccurate interpretations of the Rodney King video and enters the zeitgeist when most of the nation experienced the crumbling of the Twin Towers on television. The technique makes the audience subservient to the filmmaker's means of signification. The film taps into the power structure's real fear: losing control over meaning. Pellington's escapism turns mass death into spectacle and manipulates audience perception - his way of levitating beds and fooling around with little girls. By constructing audience point-of-view, Pellington possesses the spectator. Baldwin's moral foresight predicted it: the Devil still finds work in Hollywood. |
Richard Gere hunts the supernatural in The Mothman Prophecies 
Will Patton in The Mothman Prophecies 
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