father in FRAILITY

(G.van der Leeuw, quoted in The Prophets, A. Herschel)

(Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence)

To have a vision is a vexing thing, regardless of the head in which it resides. No matter how loosely or metaphorically we wish to make it, to be invaded by another way of thinking, whether artistically, religiously or whatever, can be a dangerous proposition both for the one having the vision and a hardship on those around that person. In some ways one must be weak and/or receptive enough for the ‘message’ to get through. (Leaving aside issues of complete causality, even if one is a cynical modern psychologist, it could probably be agreed that formative pressures mount from outside the individual having the visions; it is the nature and placement of that ‘outside’ and where various thresholds take place that is at question; does everyone have a theshold or only certain individuals, like we say of the ‘gifted’? apparently not everyone can have the ‘gift’ which is really a form of ‘visitation’ in the terms we are developing here...).

In other ways, one must be strong enough to carry out the vision regardless of the societal impediments and the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune that attend such positions as the ‘visionary’ now. (This has no doubt always been the case but many now are keenly aware of the death toll that visionaries often leave behind them and this adds to the consternation when these ‘events’ -- let’s include the ‘revolutionary’ here also -- pop up, apparently unbidden, in human society...easier to relegate it to the pathological than to come to terms with the immanent impulse that seems transhistorical and perhaps even necessary in some way that we can barely fathom now.) Our inability to discern ‘truths’ in this regard have much to do with both the violent wake of the visionary and the truth claims of an outside to human history which is necessary for the visionary. And these two events are necessitously connected. There can be no knowledge of an outside (much less passage) without the threshold of violence. One immediately thinks fo the ancient passover rituals here of smearing blood on the thresholds of households which will exempt from that violence.

The plot of FRAILITY is simple enough. Bill Paxton plays a divorced father of two sons; he’s a mechanic and lives in a small town. One night he comes into his sons’ room and informs them that he has had a visit from an angel. He has been given a mission and the mission is a simple one. Humans are being invaded by demons (or perhaps more properly, by the daemonic) and some who appear to be human are in fact not human. His mission is to search out the names he is given and to destroy the demons, all he has to do is to wait for another vision which will give him the proper tools to do the job. The first tool is given him as his is riding to work one day. A shaft of light pierces the clouds and hits an old barn, inside which is a two-headed ax and a pair of gloves. In short order are found a couple of short steel pipes for bopping the demons.

Well, the older son can’t believe his father and thinks he’s gone off his rocker, while the younger son seems excited by the prospect of a superhero force. The next night the father appears with one of his ‘demons’, trussed up, bloodied but still alive. As he is taking her to the barn, the older son comes out then the younger. The father touches the woman and apparently is viscerally shocked by what he seems to see as her demonic deeds. He encourages his oldest to ‘destroy the demon.’ When he refuses , he does the job himself, cutting her into pieces and burying her outside int he nearby town Rose Garden.

Ok, then, a number of demons are killed, the audience gets to see what we think the father is experiencing when he confirms his victims demonality. The oldest son becomes completely unhinged, brings the sheriff out (who is apparently not a demon) and who is killed by the father, who grieves that the sheriff is the first human he has killed and that it is the son’s fault. He has his son dig a large cellar and after another refusal on his son’s part to participate, locks him in the cellar for an extended period of time. The father apparently hopes that his son will be similarly Visited. The son is indeed reformed when he emerges, having seen the error of his ways. (Earlier he had declared that he had no faith and in fact didn’t believe in god at all.) At what was to be the time of his first killing after his ‘conversation ‘ however, he puts the ax into his father’s chest.

Now I forgot to tell you this part: The story is told mostly as a flashback by one of the sons. We are led to believe it was the oldest son, Fenton, the unbeliever who was forced to his Visitation. (The youngest son always claimed to believe his father At the beginning of the movie he has contacted the local FBI agent and has told him that he knows who has been doing all the serial killing recently, those that have been designated the ‘Hand of God’ killings.

oldest son to youngest

Here is where the fun starts. There is a sort of a switcheroo during the last quarter of the film, when the agent is taking Fenton to the site where all the bodies are buried. And this is actually the point at which it starts to become a horror film. The story is really being told by the youngest son, the believer. Apparently Fenton, the oldest, just went beserk, killing people at random, but under the impression that he is doing his Father’s work. The true inheiritance of Demon Destroyer went to the youngest. And in fact he has come to the FBI agent because --- he is on his list as a demon. It turns out that the father truly was having visions concerning evil deeds done by those he killed, and that they were child molesters and homocidal maniacs, including the FBI agent (played by Powers Boothe who has always struck me as looking sinister anyway) who killed his mother with a large knife. And in a nice twist it turns out the youngest is now the town sheriff himself! Natural Law and man made law have coincided in the figure of the sheriff, the visionary, the juridical, and the executionary collapsing into each other in a sort of mystical theopolitical state. (I’m reminded of the upcoming MINORITY REPORT wherein technology has given us the ability to go back in time and catch crimes before they happen, I guess you could say a mystical TECHNOpolitical state.)

So why am i so fascinated by this movie? We often wish we had a scrying function built-in (from the old english word ‘descry’, to reveal by gazing into a shiny surface, a crystal ball), some way to connect the conscious and the unconscious, a bit of witchery that would give certitude to our pronouncements of violence.

Everything centers on the quest for recognition and legitimacy and we will no longer accept that this can be conferred from outside the human community. We (who are scientifically enlightened) might in fact say that nowadays such conferrals or Visitations are a sure sign that the judgement is NOT to be trusted, that inevitably in the supernatural (or religious) quest for those thesholds the horror that is unleashed is a horror of a primal dividing of the human race into opposing quadrants where there is no binding, where the sutures of law dissolve in Radical Difference: "Destroying demons is a good thing, killing humans is bad." (How many times have you heard recently that "these terrorists are barely, if at all, human or they wouldn’t be able to do these things.")

The entire apparatus of twentieth century ‘sciences’ such as psychoanalysis is devoted to melding together the human community INTO the human community such that any difference is contained within an essential sameness and that traumas of recognition and legitimation be fought within this (global) community.

But even enlightenment seems powerless before the sheer fact of human violence and is hard pressed to find sources of legitimacy for it. And. problematically, when sources of legitimacy ARE found, they are found to be MOST legitimate when that source is invisible (whether state or god it apparently doesn’t matter):

"The acute question to pose is upon whom will fall the frightening power implied in a world-embracing economic and technical organization. This question can by no means be dismissed in the belief that everything would then function automatically, that things would administer themselves, and that a government by people over people would be superfluous because human beings would then be absolutely free. For what would they be free? This can be answered by optimistic or pessimistic conjectures, all of which finally lead to an anthropological profession of faith."

"One could test all theories of state and political ideas according to their anthropology and thereby classify these as to whether they consciously or unconsciously presuppose man to be by nature evil or by nature good."

(Carl Schmitt, the Concept of the Political)

But what if we come to the decision that some members of the human race are demons and that others are humans, what then? (Schmitt, let’s keep in mind, was a brilliant jurist in Germany during the Third Reich. One of his main contributions was the concept that politics requires the concept of enemy/friend. Answering the What Then? question in a chilling footnote, Schmitt quotes another author who "quotes approvingly Bacon’s comment that specific peoples are ‘proscribed by nature itself,’ e.g., the indians, because they eat human flesh. And in fact the Indians of North America were then exterminated. As civilization progresses and morality rises, even less harmless things than devouring human flesh could perhaps qualify as deserving to be outlawed in such a manner. Maybe one day it will be enough if a people were unable to pay its debts.").

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At one point in the movie the boys are watching the old clay animation series DAVID AND GOLIATH about a boy and his dog and the above comment is made by the clay father. No, there are no strings attached--and yet the inanimate moves and by a human hand, though invisibly since the characters exist in another time space, where the hand is elided. Likewise the demon-hunter Bill Paxton, his psychopath son Fenton, and the older son Adam. (someone might complain ‘But they’re ALL psychopaths!!’ Well, that is an answer to the question I’m trying to ask but it may not be the only one and it doesn’t seem to be the answer that the movie is giving, nor Carl Schmitt, nor Water Benjamin, each in their opposite but strangely similar ways. Nor for that matter the Israelis right now [or the Palestinians in their own more individualized way]. This lengthy quote from Benjamin raises the disturbing question of another kind of violence, eerily similar to the divine natural justice practiced in FRAILTY and raising just as many questions:

"If the rule of myth is broken occasionally in the present age, the coming age is not so unimaginably remote that an attack on law is altogether futile. But if the existence of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence is assured, this furnishes the proof that revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man, is possible, and by what means. Less possible and also less urgent for humankind, however, is to decide when unalloyed violence has been realized in particular cases. For only mythical violence, not divine, will be recognizable as such with certainty, unless it be in incomparable effects, because the expiatory power of violence is not visible to men. Once again the eternal forms are open to pure divine violence, which myth bastardized with law. It may manifest itself in a true war exactly as in the divine judgement of the multitude on a criminal. But all mythical, lawmaking violence, which we may call executive, is pernicious. Pernicious, too, is the law-preserving, administrative violence that serves it. Divine violence, which is the sign and seal but never the means of sacred execution, may be called sovereign violence." (Critique of Violence)

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FRAILITY is frightening in many ways. Like a finger pushed into a puddle of mercury all of those ways, no matter how opposed, verge round into each other: enlightened views become overcast and medieval; supernatural knowledge becomes an oasis of uneasy knowledge; humans split into demonic Others and those with Knowledge are given sanction to destroy them. One thinks uncomfortably of Le Pen and the French elections. One thinks of the increasing flows of the displaced and the nomadic around the world, who, in their out-of-placedness, must often be thought of as demons. And then one years for an ax to cut the impossible Gordian knot, and the horrific realization dawns that we are at the end of the movie. And the beginning.

Robert Cheatham

atlanta

april 2002