Father Frank's Rants - The Mist

FATHER FRANK’S RANTS

Rant Number 312 22 July 2008

The Mist

‘A mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground’ Genesis 2:6

In the days that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, the Bible narrates, a vapour arose from the earth. It brought a refreshing rain, just before the creation of Adam and Eve. Truly, that health-giving biblical mist couldn’t be more unlike The Mist. One that brings a deluge of evils. In the film based on the Stephen King’s novella. Not stuff from the fainthearted, mind you. Heard a few gasps in the audience – one or two my own. Can’t resist the cliché’- nearly jumped out of my seat. But The Mist is more than a run-of-the-mill, flesh-creeping horror movie. It’s got ideas in it. Flawed, yes, but fascinating. With a fantastically negative ending – something pretty courageous for a director to do, these brainless, juvenile and arch-consumerist days.

Meteorology must be one of King’s interests. His plots often hinge on rough weather. In this case, a thick fog follows a storm. A father and his blond little boy go to the small town’s supermarket to buy provisions. A chatty, friendly atmosphere. But the mist soon blankets the crowded shop. Funny, loud noises at the back. The hero and others go to investigate. A long, spiky, writhing tentacle whips out of the mist and drags out a screaming youth…the action’s on.

The monsters of the mist aren’t just plug-ugly. They are unpleasantly noisy. Roars, bellows, whirrs, flaps, screeches, hisses…you name it. Bat-like fiends, winged bugs, colossal spiders…not much originality there. Only the skyscraper-like, ungainly legs of an unseen, lumbering incubus struck me as genuinely frightening. As often, the truly horrible is the half-glimpsed.

The freaks outside are matched by one mental freak inside. Mrs Carmody. A Bible-thumper. That is, a religious nutter. A nasty, crude, hysterical Christian fundamentalist. Overflowing with hatred, she rants on and on about the end of the world, punishment, all that gaff. Gathers fanatical followers. Calls for a scapegoat. (What’s new?) First a soldier is knifed and thrown out to the creepy-crawlies to feast on, then the hero’s cute little lad is demanded in sacrifice. Until a sane guy blows her brains out. Some spectators cheered.

All right, Mrs Carmody is a caricature. And a very crude one at that. Even the British Secularist Society – the official UK atheist body – might admit that. She is so intolerably stupid, it is impossible to feel a glimmer of sympathy for her views. Curiously, though, her character also plays the role of a cinematic scapegoat. The fall guy. I mean, she is portrayed so bad and mad, I conceive her as a kind of sacrifice to the majority prejudices of the audience. People who lazily like to imagine any person with strongly-held religious beliefs is either a crank or a terrorist. How peculiar. After all, post-Reformation Anglo-Saxon culture was synonymous with Protestantism. (‘Scratch an Englishman and find a Protestant’ wrote G.B. Shaw) And Protestantism = the Bible. But today’s residual Anglo-Saxons have largely forgotten the Good Book. Thus the media insinuate that the only individuals who care about Scripture are the loonies. A sign of the times, I suppose…

King is a king amongst storytellers. Pity he is no Dostoevsky. Too middle-brow. The dialogue shows it. It drops occasional hints of man’s deep-seated disposition to evil, prone to emerge in times of crisis, but that is not followed up. It may allude to the Christian doctrine of Original Sin and that’s Mrs Carmody’s province, liberal minds would assume. (Note how even the Church of England keeps studiously mum about Adam’s fall.) Similarly, a character mentions the fatal human tendency to fall into the arms of a Fuhrer. Frankly, that’s dated and misleading, in political terms, at least. The age of the old, overly aggressive, conquering imperialisms is over. Globalisation posits an entirely different concept of political sovereignty. Today’s global empire professes and celebrates democracy, human rights, free institutions and NGOs. Its ideological and cultural tentacles are infinitely more sophisticated and overreaching than those of the old dictators. And the masses seek salvation through digital network wizards like Bill Gates, ‘open society’ philosophers-speculators like George Soros and progressive interracial messiahs like Barak Obama. Old style fuhrerprinzip is as defunct and as anachronistic as the Holy Roman Empire. (Hardt and Negri’s opus, Empire, is the text, folks!) Come to think of it, the post-modern Empire is a bit like The Mist. Deceptive, all- pervasive and lethal. Only, people are suckers for it.

What has actually set off the fog and its avalanche of horrors? A certain project arrowhead. A military experiment gone disastrously wrong. The Army, you see, has messed about with ‘other dimensions’. Old sci-fi hat. Don’t accuse me of cheap psychoanalysing but…alternative worlds are often useful receptacles for our own unconscious fears, desires and hang-ups. But who/what do the reptiles of the mist stand for? Hmmm…only a resurrected Dr Freud could delve into that one.

Director Frank Darabont’s master stroke is in the ending. Superb! My mind runs back to films as different as Quai des Brumes and Planet of the Apes for anything so bitter and tragic. It must have taken real guts to go for it. The pop-corn munching brigade that frequents cinemas today doesn’t like unhappy endings. It upsets their New Labour-nurtured tiny, optimistic minds. More or less consciously, they probably believe themselves to be living in the best of all possible worlds. Irrationality, guilt, sin and evil are categories they barely comprehend. They will marvel at fleeing hero David Drayton, stuck out in the mist and encircled by the outlandish grunts of an invisible, infernal menagerie. To spare his surviving companions from the monsters' claws he puts one bullet into the heads of each. Including that of his pleading, innocent little Billy. Then, mad with grief, he sticks the muzzle of the gun into his own mouth. Pulls the trigger. But the chamber is empty. After that…won’t tell.

‘There was no hope’, commented my friend Helen. No. Not in The Mist. And, sometimes, not in real life, either. History is indeed brimful with hopelessness. The hijacked passengers of 9/11 had no hope. And, purely biologically speaking, we are all hopeless in the end.

Don’t give up, however. Simply turn to the Good Book. In there you will find the supreme hope, the most wonderful and joyful of all happy endings.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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