“The Conjuring”: Right-wing, woman-hating and really scary (spoilers)

[muriel_volestrangler]

From its historical lies to its family-values messaging, the sneakiest Christian movie of the year is a real horror

“The Conjuring” is an old-fashioned horror movie, almost old-fashioned to the point of meta-ness. I don’t just mean the 1970s setting, the haunted house in New England, the family under siege, the demonic possession, the pair of celebrity ghost-hunters and the Roman Catholic exorcism. I also mean the film’s deeply reactionary cultural politics, and the profound misogyny that lurks just beneath its surface. I don’t know how intentional this was on the part of the filmmakers – possibly not much – but “The Conjuring” is one of the cleverest and most effective right-wing Christian films of recent years. It’s a movie about America’s obsession with evil, and how easily that gets pointed in the wrong directions. It’s a movie based on the reassuring premise that when something is wrong in your family, your community or your country, you don’t have to worry about the priests, the cops, the dads or the other male authority figures. They’re the good guys. Blame the women.
...
It’s fair to say that the driving force behind the New England Society for Psychic Research, the Warrens’ nutbar organization, was their sense that Catholics in particular and Americans in general were losing faith – not faith in God, who remains pretty popular, but faith in Satan. If you can work your way through the stream-of consciousness prose on the Warrens’ hallucinogenic website, which appears to have been designed by demons, that comes through loud and clear. “A skeptical public is the best protection that evil has,” Ed Warren writes, “and I’m going to make sure that I expose that evil any way I can.” Catholic priests who deny the existence of the devil or refuse to perform exorcisms are betraying their own faith. “The devil exists. God exists. And for us as people, our very destiny hinges upon which one we elect to follow.”

Here’s the real “true story” behind “The Conjuring”: Any time people get worked up about a menace they believe in but can’t actually see – demons, Commies, jihadis, hordes of hoodie-wearing thugs — they’re likely to take it out on the weakest and most vulnerable people in society. 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. Farmiga’s portrayal of Lorraine Warren as a tightly wound but oddly sexy psychic moonbat, with her Scottish-noblewoman wardrobe torn from the covers of romance novels, is very much worth the price of admission. Furthermore, I assume that James Wan, who was born in Malaysia, has no investment in America’s culture wars, and likely sees this movie’s retrograde politics as questions of style or genre. But 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.

Without getting too deep into spoiler-hood, the Perrons’ house turns out to be inhabited by a demonic female spirit. She preys on the living, yearns to possess a delicious and vulnerable young female body, etc. Nothing new here in terms of horror movies, or borderline Judeo-Christian theology, or generalized male panic. 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. As a ninth-generation descendant of Abigail Faulkner, a convicted Salem witch who only escaped execution because she was pregnant at the time, I call down a terrible malediction upon the people who made this entertaining but indefensible movie.

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/18/the_conjuring_right_wing_woman_hating_and_really_scary/

Their website really does fit the DU Skeptics nutty website template: http://www.warrens.net/ (silly music autostarts, by the way).

Religion News Service and the film makers ask Can a horror film lead people to God?

Though

“We’ve seen things,” Chad chimed in, “that I wish we never saw.”

may not be the best quote to end an article on a film with...

[cbayer]

1. I had previously read the RNS article on this.

I'm not a fan of horror and probably wouldn't see this anyway.

Didn't Rosemary's Baby do essentially the same thing?

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Rosemary's Baby didn't claim to be based on reality

as far as I remember, anyway. Nor did it try to claim there really were demons involved in the infamous Salem witch trials, thus trying to excuse a literal witch-hunt - consider the misogynist implications of that.

[cbayer]

3. I read a couple of articles around the anniversary of it's release, but

I can't quote them with certainty.

At any rate, Polanski has identified himself as an atheist, so either the articles I read or my recollection of them is faulty.

[Bluenorthwest]

4. Rosemary was the victim in that film and her husband the villain so pretty hard to claim that

Rosemary's Baby was 'blaming' Rosemary.

[okasha]

6. A few of the Salem victims were men.

While granting that Puritan society, including the Massachussetts colonies, was about as misogynist as you can get, it appears that the whole witch-hunt was driven by the accusations of one family and their adherents who hoped to profit materially by getting rid of certain of their neighbors.

[cbayer]

7. I saw a great documentary on that and how the whole thing was driven

by some who would financially profit.

[okasha]

8. It was all about property,

though the community used it to get rid of a few marginalized folk while they were at it.

[cprise]

5. The white male hero is Hollywood dogma

You would almost have to expect them to cross over into old school religion and revisionism from time to time. And its no longer any secret that horror films have a history of pushing conservative themes.

I am glad there are publications like Salon that are willing to call them out on it (though the coverage is really spotty, IMHO).

[Glorfindel]

9. Thank you! Now I'll be sure not to see it.

[rug]

10. I brought my kids to see it.

Afterwards, for the first time ever, they asked "What time is Mass?'

[cprise]

11. Seriously?

What did you say?

[rug]

12. Seriously. I told them 11 a.m.

I found it interesting because Mass bores the crap out of them.

I'm always on them to understand why they do things. I told them worrying about demons and scarey movies is not a good reason.

Then we got ice cream.

It was a pretty mashed up movie. If I want to scare them about devils I'll rent The Exorcist.

[cprise]

13. Never underestimate the power of the subconscious

...to extract gobs of inferences from 'mash' and piece them together in a mutually reinforcing system.

Have you ever seen the TV series 'Dexter'? If so, what do you think of it?

[rug]

14. No, I haven't although I've heard a lot of buzz about it.

If I did use Netflix I'd probably run through the series. As it is, I just flip the channels and sometimes read a book.

[cprise]

15. Its compelling to watch, but IMO

...the subtext is also from RW nutbag land. There is little doubt in my mind the main character--a serial killer--is intended to be viewed by conservatives as a vigilante antihero. After about 20 episodes last year I couldn't stand anymore.

[cbayer]

16. I watched a couple of episodes and couldn't watch anymore either.

It was too much for me.

[Dorian Gray]

17. I saw it last week

and it scared the crap out of me. But I didn't really think about it.