What do you suppose are the chances that the brothers Raimi, Sam
and Ivan, who are responsible for Drag Me to Hell,
actually believe in hell? Given the probability that most
clergymen these days don’t believe in it, I’d say they were
pretty low. So what are the implications for a movie in the
climactic scene of which we watch as the ground opens up beneath
one of the characters, who is then dragged down into a fiery pit
screaming “Help me! Help me please”? When a similar thing happens
in Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni, the eponymous victim
doesn’t scream like a little girl. He is defiant to the end,
spurning all offers of help, which is what creates the moral
universe of that great opus irrespective of whether Mozart or da
Ponte, his librettist, actually believed in hell or were only
using it symbolically. In Drag Me there is no moral
universe. Hell is, like everything else, just a joke.
Or at least I assume it is. The alternative is to suppose that
the authors are getting a chuckle out of imagining someone’s
being submitted to eternal torments. That, as Dr. Johnson said of
Hamlet’s wish for Claudius, “That his soul may be as damn’d and
black/As hell, whereto it goes,” is a thing “too horrible to be
read or to be uttered.” But in a “non-judgmental” world in which
we have grown used to thinking of actions as detached from their
consequences and thus, gradually, to thinking of them as
having no consequences, the iconography of hell has
become nothing more than part of the repertory of horror-movie
effects. And, of course, for some time now horror movies have
been trending comical, since the horror-movie effects are well
recognized as such by the media-savvy teenage audiences for which
they are made and so are not taken seriously anymore.
Actually, Drag Me to Hell resembles reality TV more than
it does most horror movies. That too may represent a trend. It
also has about as much reality as reality TV too, which is to say
zero. The movie is constantly threatening to turn into the kind
of reality show in which contestants have to eat bugs and wallow
in mudpits with corpses and do other gross things in order to
prove their willingness to flatter a degenerate audience’s sense
of what “reality” is. The contestant in this case is pretty
little Christine Brown (Alison Lohman), a bank loan officer who,
angling for a promotion from a boss (David Paymer) who wants her
to show how tough she is, denies an extension on her mortgage to
an old gypsy woman (Lorna Raver), who proceeds to curse her.
That’s what leads to the bugs and whatnot. Seeing her almost
childish feminine freshness violated by various forms of
grossness and corruption seems to me to be intended to produce a
sexual frisson — and not in a good way.
Now I’m no expert on gypsy curses, but I’m pretty sure that they
expire at the grave. Gypsies may be the possessors of powerful
magic, but it would be decidedly heterodox to suppose that they
— or any other mortals, angels or spirits below the pay-grade of
the Divinity Himself — had the power to damn anyone to hell. If
hell existed, that is. And if anyone were ever sent there, which
we are now generally pretty sure no one ever is. The theological
confusion just renders the emptiness of the moral universe of the
movie and the triviality and artificiality of its gallery of
schlock horrors that much more weightless in the imagination —
as if the Raimis had said, “Whatever. We know you’re not going to
take any of this stuff seriously anyway.”
It’s too bad, since I went to their movie hoping for a touch of
satire, a point of contact with the real world which seemed to be
promised by the allusion to the current credit crisis and
foreclosure epidemic. Surely it must be possible to impose a
moral template on the behavior of borrowers or lenders or both
such that a supernatural sanction of some sort on that behavior
might fit in with a genuine, grown-up, moral understanding of the
world? But if so, the Raimi brothers have given all that a miss
for the sake of a feeble, po-mo joke. In the classic horror
films, the authors dared their audience to believe in monsters or
ghosts or zombies, as even Mr. Sam Raimi does to some extent in
his “Evil Dead” franchise. That even so little belief as this is
no longer on the agenda may also be not unconnected with the kind
of moral laxity that has led to so much economic hardship.
