The Prince of Dimness
What an apocalypse we're
having! First a young hairdresser in Stigmata collapses on a crowded
dance floor as an invisible crown of thorns is pounded into her head. Then a
lurching demon made of excrement materializes out of an overflowing toilet bowl
in Dogma . And now, just in time to prove that the end of the millennium
will indeed bring about the destruction of all movie logic, we have End of
Days , in which Satan pauses by a stoop, unzips his pants, and lets flow a
meandering stream of flammable urine. As Casper Van Dien puts it rather
succinctly in The Omega Code , "Religion would have us believe there are
demons fighting and battling over our souls. But who needs that?"
And anyway, these
millennial demons are a particularly clumsy lot, far less canny and elegant
than, say, Rosemary's Baby 's John Cassavetes, whose earthly weapon of
choice was spiked chocolate mousse. In The Omega Code , for instance,
Michael York's Antichrist has seeming command of all the law enforcement
personnel in the world, but none of them can locate Casper Van Dien--playing a
New Age guru who has run off with a CD that will unlock "the genetic code of
the universe"--as he flees conspicuously on foot through the empty Los Angeles
streets in the dead of night. The Forces of Darkness are so powerless that
they're reduced to hanging around their headquarters in Rome, listening to the
befuddled Los Angeles cops on a police scanner.
In keeping with our apostate times, all these movies
feature as their protagonist a faith-challenged Chosen One. In The Omega
Code , Van Dien's character, "the world-famous globe-trotting Dr. Gillen
Lane," cringes when somebody sings "Jesus Loves Me." "My mother used to sing me
that song," he explains, "but you know what? She died in a tragic car accident
when I was 10 years old." In Stigmata, Patricia Arquette plays a
frenetic party girl, who, of all the people in the world, is judged to be the
best candidate for mouthing lost Aramaic scriptures as unseen nails are
hammered into her appendages. ("You don't get it, do you?" she yells at a
priest during a lull in these proceedings, "I have fucking holes through my
wrists!") Linda Fiorentino, in Dogma , has lost her faith over her
inability to conceive, while Arnold Schwarzenegger, in End of Days , is
so distressed over the murders of his wife and daughter that he is reduced to
making smoothies out of Pepto-Bismol and leftover pizza.
OK, God works in
mysterious ways, but it is the opinion of this column that screenwriters should
not. There is a big difference between divine obfuscation and sloppy thinking.
In Stigmata , for instance, an unquiet dead priest is desperate to notify
the world of a suppressed "fifth gospel," which, when revealed, will expose the
greed and false pretenses of the Roman Catholic church. This restless spirit
has the power to cause steam vents to erupt and windows to explode in showers
of glass. He can give Patricia Arquette the stigmata and make her eyes turn red
and have her speak in a man's voice in ancient languages and send her spiraling
aloft in her apartment until she ends up crucified in midair. What he can't do,
though, is just come out and say what's on his mind.
His poor communication skills are mirrored by the
geographically impaired Satan of End of Days . It is the murky premise of
this movie that evil is not quite as renewable a resource as is commonly
believed. In order for the Dark Angel to continue his important work in human
affairs, he must appear on Earth every thousand years to impregnate a young
woman. In End of Days the devil is first seen as a transparent watery
wrinkle that rises out of a manhole and sashays into the men's room of a
restaurant, whereupon it makes a forcible entry into the body of a prominent
investment banker played by Gabriel Byrne.
Wearing his new body, Satan sets forth in search of
the young woman with whom he must "breed" by the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31,
1999. The woman's name is Christine York, and she was chosen for this gruesome
task on the day of her birth 20 years earlier, when she was seized from her
mother's arms in the hospital by a satanic nurse and given a quickie baptism
with rattlesnake blood. Christine is also being hunted by an ecclesiastical hit
squad named the Vatican Knights, which wants to drive a stake through her heart
before she can mate with Satan, and by Schwarzenegger's Jericho Cane, who just
wants to save her. In search of his beloved, Satan takes time to visit a priest
in his hospital room. The priest is named Thomas Aquinas--not, disappointingly,
the reincarnated author of Summa Theologica but some old geezer who has
cut out his own tongue and put it in a mayonnaise jar for reasons that it would
take a second viewing of End of Days for me to figure out. (Not in this
millennium!)
Working nimbly, Satan
carves up this guy's torso with arcane writing and, using scalpels and scissors
and other handy hospital accessories, crucifies him on the ceiling. (How strong
is that acoustic tile, anyway?) One of the phrases on poor Aquinas' body is
"Christ in New York," which Jericho, coming upon the corpse shortly thereafter,
quickly deciphers to mean "Christine York," the name of the mother-to-be. Two
problems: 1) nobody 's that good at hermeneutics; and 2) why would the
archfiend, who's in a big hurry to consummate his relationship with Christine
before the ball drops in Times Square, interrupt his mission to leave clues for
his enemies?
Satan is good at many things in this movie. He can pee
gasoline, walk through fire, induce visions, and even resurrect the dead, but
when it comes to the simple task of locating Christine--which everyone else
seems to be able to do with relative ease--he's so helpless he has to break
into Jericho's apartment and badger him for her whereabouts.
It's no wonder that Good triumphs over Evil, because
Satan makes a lot of bad choices in this movie. Dogma at least has some
fun with the idea that God is really Alanis Morissette, and Michael York in
The Omega Code is as cheerful an antichrist as one could wish for, but
in End of Days when Satan is finally revealed in his true form, erupting
out of the floor of a cathedral to confront Schwarzenegger, guess what he is. A
giant frustrated-looking bat that roars and slobbers and flails its wings
around like a baby bird that's not ready to leave the nest. With a hopeless bod
like that, it's no surprise that the devil would rather look like Gabriel
Byrne. And if movies get any stupider the next millennium, the End of Days
can't come soon enough for me.
