FILM BLACK MAGIC
Aufderheide, Pat
fILM BLACK MAGIC BY PAT AUFDERHEIDE The pricking satire of Hollywood Shuffle, Robert Townsend's riffs on the stereotyping of blacks in the media, and Spike Lee's comedy She's Gotta Have It were...
...The sound track descends from upbeat pop to driving Afro-accented rock to ominous ostinato, surfacing into the carnal daylight of Sister Carol's full-bodied rendition of the theme song "Wild Thing...
...Black music becomes a related transcendental practice, incarnated in the mysterious Johnny Favorite—who is, we learn, both white and black...
...Questions of fundamental morality—the soul is at issue here—are grist for an orgasmic sensory revel...
...Black culture has long functioned as America's bank of the spiritual...
...It was important to me to clear up the confusion surrounding my faith," she explained in press materials...
...Rooted in relations of dominance and oppression, it is expressed in jokes about whites who have no rhythm and myths about black sexual energy...
...Carla Pinza, who plays the Hispanic housekeeper trying to protect Chris, is herself a santera...
...The unfailingly polite observer does not hold the locals up to ridicule, but he can't help asking: Is a mass-folk culture a genuine popular expression...
...The attraction that makes you sell your soul here is addiction: sex, opium, magic—the drugs that are the crutches of the powerless...
...She needs them, too...
...But right behind them, you can hear jungle tom-toms: the sound of the black experience as filtered through recent mainstream films...
...It has colored the history of American music, from spirituals to jazz to rock to rap...
...He uses the rituals of the Other to make his point...
...It's not a very good secret, but it's the only one she's got...
...He gets caught in a web of intrigue among black and Hispanic practitioners of santeria and corrupt whites who draw their power from them...
...The religious practices of the black diaspora have many expressions, but they all share at least one thing: They are not focused, as is Christianity, on salvation...
...Whether hopeful or fearful, they register a deep unease with mainstream popular culture...
...Black culture is an enduring pool, in a racist society, harboring exoticism and romance for pop artists...
...The plot features decayed, corrupt, rich whites who seize on the forbidden power of the Other and use it to build real-estate empires, political clout, and fortunes...
...The danger and promise of black magic—as voodoo, santeria, or other variants of the religions of the black diaspora—are alive in recent films...
...Think of Ingmar Bergman's reverence for Woman as Mystery, or the function of berobed sheiks in spy dramas...
...What Angel ultimately finds is a cut-rate version of the Faust story...
...The Believers, a far less effective thriller, depends on the same gambits as Angel Heart...
...The world of the Other is always a magical one, whether its mystery is celebrated or abhorred...
...Directed by quality-hack John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy, Marathon Man), it's an incoherent, murky mess of a movie...
...Audrey's at sea in an overheated consumer society...
...They also reveal that fear's flip side: the felt fragility of rational approaches to an increasingly crazy world...
...It takes place in our very own Sin City, New York, which appears to have been taken over by an occult underworld powered by the magic of black and brown people...
...And the movie-makers love it...
...Pat Aufderheide, a senior editor of In These Times, writes frequently on cultural affairs for The Progressive...
...In Angel Heart, a meld of the detective and horror genres by Alan Parker {Midnight Express, Fame, Shoot the Moon), Mickey Rourke plays a 1950s detective...
...True Stories is a far more explicit and personal film, about the puzzle of postmodernism for the artist...
...The isolated black man's magical practices turn Louis's luck around...
...He has had help from two friends from less integrated subcultures...
...And more: that it's a dangerous game to get down with the underclass, where primal rhythms and primitive practices shatter cool rationality...
...For Christians, instrumental access to the world of the spirit is categorically witchcraft, and it is evil...
...That fascination with addiction is reflected in Parker's trademark style, honed by years of commercial-making...
...The black singer is our last image in the movie, a sly suggestion of the endurance of subcultural vitality—wild, primitive—under the shifting surface of postmodern life...
...Alan Parker boasts in press materials about historical research he did on "the various extreme and bizarre religious movements of the '30s and '40s, mostly born out of economic isolation, and perhaps spiritual desperation," especially in Harlem...
...Effectively or clumsily, reverentially or horrifically, these films play on white fears both of the Other and the underclass...
...Then, above a black prayer hall, he meets Louis Cyphre (Robert DeNiro), whose overlong fingernails curl ominously around his elegant cane...
...Distinctions between folk or regional culture and mass culture disintegrate in the self-styled normalcy of Virgil...
...But black America holds no franchise on extremism...
...As in Angel Heart, what's so diabolical is not the Other's religious practice in itself...
...There a young black woman named Epiphany (Lisa Bo-net) introduces him to the world of voodoo...
...In this time of economic crisis and fundamentalism, the theme of extremist belief is appropriate...
...The film, full of high-impact shock scenes, evokes an impending sense of horror with ripe colors, shadows, noises, religious artifacts, and flash-cut editing between states of consciousness...
...Black culture, in Angel Heart, taints Christianity—in the black prayer hall—with the witchery of the Other...
...Martin Sheen plays, with his typical suffering-Christ act, a newly widowed psychotherapist who comes with his son from a white-bread Minneapolis to an ethnic New York...
...Both films are self-conscious explorations of post-modernism, both in the art world and among the taxpaying public...
...Consider a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, right-wing populism feeding on rural anger, Shirley MacLaine's pop mysticism, the continuing donations to the empire Jim and Tammy Bakker once ruled...
...The prime beneficiaries of evil are white, as is the potential victim, the little boy Chris (Harley Cross...
...The ordinary secular world, white and urban, contrasts with mystery in the supernatural rituals of a black and rural underclass...
...His ripely sentimental country tune reaches out to a lonely lady who lives in bed, but finally gets out of it to respond to him...
...The dichotomy between white (the rational, the secular, the conscious) and black (body-and-soul, the supernatural, the repressed) is an ancient one...
...she travels with voodoo dolls and lives among icons of mystic power...
...a positive force, a practical force, for helping people—physically and spiritually—through the gods...
...When he is in despair, his Hispanic friend Ramon (Tito Larriva) takes time out from playing a riproaring set of Tex-Mex barroom music to give him the name of a black practitioner of santeria (Pop Staples...
...True Stories' only engaging tale is that of Louis (John Goodman), a lonelyheart who applies the tools of electronic culture to his search for a wife...
...That's not what audiences are getting out of The Believers, though...
...The agents of evil are black and African...
...Fetish-istic ritual, for her, is the secret to living in a world where minimal family and workplace expectations are absent but people act as if they exist...
...Santeria is...
...There you see the horror of the Other in romantic forays into the forbidden...
...It pits the sunny, white, suburban world of rationality and order against the passionate, thumping, tribal rhythms of black spirituality, evoked through san-teria...
...fILM BLACK MAGIC BY PAT AUFDERHEIDE The pricking satire of Hollywood Shuffle, Robert Townsend's riffs on the stereotyping of blacks in the media, and Spike Lee's comedy She's Gotta Have It were surprise successes at the box office this year and seemed to reach a new level in movie polyculture...
...His name is Harry Angel, but he's no saint...
...The practitioners of santeria who want, haplessly, to channel those forces for good are Hispanic...
...But far more disturbing is its pervasive sensationalizing of evil...
...He lip-synchs, bar-hops, and puts commercials on TV...
...Angel Heart reaches deep into the social subconscious to make evil a thrill...
...Unlike his popcultural reference, the Raymond Chandler detective who investigates the corruption at the heart of society, Angel does take divorce cases...
...In fact, that's about all he does, and poorly at that...
...Angel Heart's lush diabolism resonates with all-too-timely anxieties, reframing them in terms of ancient fear and attraction...
...But that exoticism resurfaces periodically when it resonates with some kind of social unease...
...In Something Wild, yuppie Manhattan-ite Charlie (Jeff Daniels) encounters the riotous disorder below the neat surface of his life in the person of Audrey (Melanie Griffith...
...Byrne sets himself down in the imaginary town of Virgil, Texas, to study the habits of hicks plugged into a national commercial culture—the artist-anthropologist in the field...
...the Other is always irrational and mysterious and gets dangerous only when in contact with Ourselves...
...An obsessive dresser, Audrey individualizes borrowed "looks...
...For Byrne and Demme, both pop artists confronting a Brave New World in which they're trying to find their roles, subcultural magic is a poignant counterpoint to the quiet or noisy desperation of their subjects...
...The film's version tells them that santeria is primitive and dangerous, rooted in human sacrifice...
...And possibly even more: that the problems of corrupt power can ultimately be laid at the altars of the santeros...
...Two recent thrillers, Angel Heart and The Believers, indulge in the dark side of black magic...
...Parker's use of voodoo is based on a deep working misunderstanding between religious traditions...
...He writes a song and performs it at the talent show...
...The incantatory power of Audrey's idiosyncratic ritual universe has black music at its base...
...First, the hope: In Jonathan Demme's Something Wild and David Byrne's True Stories, black mystery is a positive contrast to the centerless, commercialized, and even desperate world of white popular culture...
...The racial hierarchy is explicit...
...Her fair skin and magical blue eyes are a physical mark of the sinister element in black-white crossover...
...They instead invoke a connection with ever-present spiritual forces...
...Cyphre wants Angel to find a missing person: Johnny Favorite, a jazz musician...
...Angel Heart's disturbing power provoked controversy over its rating, mostly because of the sex...
...Louis's success is not grounded in mainstream culture, though...
...Each offers, in a different voice, a comment not only on ancient cultural divisions but also on current anxieties...
...It is the crossing over between races, classes, and cultures that creates the potential for horror...
...Horror enters in when decadent whites cross over the color and culture line to cut themselves in on some supernatural clout...
...Faust was attracted to worldly power...
...Its slovenliness makes its racism boldly apparent...
...In a world of image and artifice— the film's production design is a testimonial to the syncretic energy of New York artists—Audrey is the fetish-master...
...Voodoo is the vehicle by which the characters cross over into the forbidden...
...Since last year's Crossroads, about a white boy who returns with a black bluesman to a crossroads where the musician once met the devil, we have seen True Stories, Something Wild, Angel Heart, and The Believers...
...Angel's search sends him to New Orleans...
Vol. 51 • September 1987 • No. 9
