Prince of Darkness (1987)

Prince of Darkness starts out as a film about ideas. In fact, there are too many ideas. Carpenter fixates upon ideas at the expense of creating characters anyone could care about or forming a truly fascinating series of scenes that to integrate the ideas into a plot.

The ideas in the film are jam-packed. The approach is an example of the post-modern technique of narrative that flaunts as much real-world information, esoteric and scientific, high-brow and low-brow, as can be legitimately squeezed into an actual plot. We're given a gnostic Manichean theory, quantum physics, Judeo-Christian mythology, Catholic conspiracy theories, psychokinesis, timetravel involving tachyons, supernovae, computing, ancient languages, manuscripts, mathematics and apocalyptic prophecies.

Yes, this film is smart. Too smart. Much like the novels of Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and their followers (from Robert Anton Wilson and David Foster Wallace to Neil Gaiman), you're oppressed by a general air of the know-it-all. The characters themselves are all academics, a classicist to analyze the Coptic manuscipt, biochemists to analyze the organic matter, applied physicists to handle the mathematics discovered in the ancient book, computer scientists, and theoretical physicists with highly philosophical inclinations to give naturalistic explanations to properly mythological events.

And there we've come to the crux (pardon the expression). This film, again like the novels of Pynchon et al. functions like an enormous conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory generally proceeds by amassing data uncritically, taking it all as connected when it ought not to be grouped, and attempting to provide a unifying theory of this data. Scientific theories are successful because scientists accept data critically and group data together in realistic ways. Not so for Victor Wong's theoretical physicist. As far as he's concerned, Judeo-Christian mythology, gnostic dualism, quantum physics and Einsteinian relativity is all legitimate data and should all be explained with a single theory. Since he's not a religious man--and apparently neither is Carpenter, who is also screenwriter--the explanation is naturalistic (i.e. with no appeal to the supernatural).

So within the first 30-40 minutes of the film, we're told that all matter in the universe has an opposite, anti-matter; that anti-force seeping into the world is the source of all evil, therefore evil is a physical thing; that both the good and evil sides have a god, which is some sort of alien being; both have a son that came to earth, the good one being Jesus and the evil one being neon green telekinetic liquid called Satan; that Jesus tried to dispose of Satan, but his Apostles decided to hide the information made up some nonsense about evil being in the heart rather than in the world just so no-one could figure out Jesus was an alien warrior come to battle the green liquid; and there's something about logic breaking down at the subatomic level and how this shows our perceptions of time and space are all wrong, all of which is intended to explain away the apparently supernatural events of the film. One oddity is that Carpenter takes the notion of matter having a mirror-opposite so literally he uses mirrors as actual gateways to the anti-world.

Then the film becomes a rather typical possession-based horror film, with a monster, some fights, and a big-bang climax, all of which is rather disappointing insofar as the characters had been largely ignored for the sake of the ideas and then suddenly the ideas are being ignored for the plight of the characters. That just doesn't work.

That's not to say it's a bad movie. Once it gets going, it is actually quite scary; the oppressive music can be thanked for the constant sense of dread. And one character, Walter, does manage to earn the audience--he should have been the main character, not The Mustache. The ideas explored are, moreover, quite fascinating, especially to someone who actually knows a bit about the ideas being played with. As a child watching the film, I had no idea what was going on; now I do, and wish Carpenter had stuck to these guns. At the very least, Carpenter can be applauded for trying to make a genuinely cosmic horror story.

With all of the ideas being thrown around, it's not entirely clear what Carpenter is trying to say. On the one hand, as I think I've already shown, he's not sympathetic to religion, not to its morality or its doctrines. One early shot shows the church and the cross through bars, implying it holds us captive. Other shots show crosses hanging above masses of electronic equipment, implying the co-existence of religious views and science. If anything, it's suggesting science really can explain everything--or at least pseudo-science.

In short, the intellectual build-up never really pays off. One wonders what Peter Weir, or even Nicolas Roeg, could have done with the same material; whatever it is, it'd probably be getting a Criterion release around now.

Moral of the story:
Join the faculty of liberal arts instead.