THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
STORIES OF O THE SCREEN Damien in The Omen and Sondra in The Obsession come off as being pretty much the same character. Yet they ought to strike us as different in the end-the one an embodiment...
...Finally his father recognizes that there is something not quite right with the boy and accepts the necessity of doing away with him...
...But in truth, of course, none of these films has such powers...
...Since The Omen has more action sequences, I suppose it is, in a crude way, the more exciting film...
...But as he raises the ceremonial knife above the lad's heart, he has a moment's doubt, just enough to let the police burst in and shoot him...
...The mechanics of evil work well enough whenever there is a scene with any violence, but a sense of the presence of evil and the will to it are missing everywhere else...
...They are too alike in being under the guardianship of their films' real villains, the nanny in The Omen and the business partner in The Obsession-people who don't let sentiment interfere with business, the operatives of the devil...
...Pretty devious, huh...
...But in Rome when Michael pays a visit to the church where he first met his wife, he there finds Sondra (Genevieve Bujold), who is the wife's very image, a perfect reincarnation of the woman whom Michael still grieves...
...The children are always such nonentities, such ciphers...
...Different as they are ultimately supposed to be, one reason Damien and Sondra don't affect us differently is that evil has a kind of impersonality in both these films...
...The core of the plot in each of these films is an act of evil of the most personal kind-filicide in The Omen and incest in The Obsession-yet the commission of such acts doesn't really seem to matter in either film...
...Because she has been raised in secret by the partner, Sondra is so dominated by him he can make her cooperate...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...For all their aspirations to the bizarre and obsessive, neither film manages to give an impression of anything more than the sort of evil that is all too easy and familiar in movies...
...The whole scene makes such a muddle of the Abraham legend that far from having the reverse moral force from the Bible, as seems to be the intention, it has no moral force at all...
...Fifteen years after the kidnap-murder of his wife and daughter, Michael (Cliff Robertson) is lured off on a trip to Rome by his best friend, who is also his business partner...
...In making an innocent embody the evil it proposes, a movie like The Obsession or The Omen-or The Exorcist-does not seem to enhance evil so much as nullify it...
...A flagpole toppled uncertainly from a church tower begins to seem, plummeting toward the priest, as purposeful as a javelin in flight...
...The reason that we can't believe in the presence of ancient, taboo evil in these films is that we can't believe in the presence of good in them...
...Yet they ought to strike us as different in the end-the one an embodiment of evil, the other presumably innocent -and the fact that they don't is, in large measure, the reason each film fails with us...
...On the contrary, they try to succeed by preying upon fears we already have and bring into the theater with us...
...The difference between them is that Sondra is only being used for evil...
...The violence is full of kinky little turns...
...The suicidal nanny jumps from the roof eaves and, reaching the end of her rope, is jerked back through a window...
...And in The Obsession, when Michael and his daughter embrace at the end, the film seems to be sweeping aside as of no consequence the fact that they have slept together...
...A changeling whom Satan has foisted off on the rich and influential Thorn family, Damien accompanies his mother (Lee Remick) and father (Gregory Peck) on the latter's appointment as ambassador to England...
...But she does feel bad about it, as she shows by trying to commit suicide, and in the final scene she and Michael are reunited in an embrace...
...By wooing and winning Sondra, Michael now tries to rid himself of the irrational guilt he has always felt for his wife's death...
...While we don't feel disappointed when the father hesitates to kill his son, I don't think we feel particularly relieved either...
...In the end, though, Sondra turns out to be Michael's own daughter and the unwilling pawn of his partner, who was in fact behind the kidnapping years ago...
...We can have our fill of them in the newspapers everyday for just a fraction of the cost...
...The supernatural in these films is, at best, just a metaphor for the super-agencies in our own lives...
...But it is so sappy and cliche in each that the family's subsequent corruption by evil has no shock value...
...She is its victim rather than, like Damien, its source...
...It is the premise from which each film proceeds...
...Both The Omen and The Obsession begin with a portrait of family life...
...Here the film's inversion of an ancient moral legend, the Oedipus story, matters even less than in The Omen...
...We go to films like The Omen and The Obsession hoping to be shown something we have never seen before, hoping to have a bizarre and unprecedented expertence...
...This is another reason Damien and Sondra don't seem sufficiently different...
...But nothing in the straight dramatic scenes in either film is done with equal panache...
...This is a rather different closing from The Omen's, where Damien turns to give the audience a knowing smile while attending his parents' funeral...
...Except at the moment of death, characters are almost too bland and conventional to be told apart...
...The partner rescued the daughter from that aborted crime and is now trying to use her once again to get control of Michael's interest in their business...
...Though the producers of The Omen may have been nervous about showing us Gregory Peck ritually stabbing his son, and may have refrained from such an ending for that reason, I don't think the film makes us nervous about it...
...But why should we spend three or four dollars at the movies to be frightened by people like that...
...The journalist's severed head lands eerily reflected in the plate glass that severed it...
...Who cares about the loss of a happiness that we didn't believe in in the first place...
...It is the obsessive feeling we have all the time anyway that someone or something is plotting against us...
...Along the way Damien presides over the impaling of a priest, the decapitation of a journalist, the suicide of his first nanny, the aborting of his mother's second pregnancy, the murder of his mother by his second nanny and the near ravening of his father by dogs...
...It is not finally abnormal psychology or occultism that would terrify us here, but conspiracy...
...In the sort of atmosphere these films create personal evil is impossible, even though that is what gothic romances like these need to be truly horrifying...
Vol. 103 • September 1976 • No. 20
