The Devils & the Offensive Truth

December 8, 2021 Eric Botts

BEWARE SPOILERS

We go into every post assuming you’ve already watched the films being discussed. In other words, we’re about to spoil the hell out of The Devils (1971).

The Devils has, for decades, been notoriously difficult to watch by legitimate means, and if you could watch it, what you saw was likely to have been chopped to bits and divorced of all the core scenes that made sense of the story. These days, though, you can find it on eBay—and by other means I shouldn’t really endorse here.

(A quick heads-up: This essay’s a doozy. There’s a lot to say about The Devils, and it’s hard to gloss over any of it. I mean, I’m trying, but as you’ll see, even the glossing over takes a while.)

Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) has been called the most controversial film in Hollywood history. Not just controversial for its time, Russell’s masterpiece remains shocking to this day in its depictions of cruelty, orgiastic sexuality, the evils of the 17th-century Catholic Church, and blasphemous imagery.

The film offers a social critique of the Church and human history, exploring themes of power, faith, charisma, mass delusion, and mob mentality through psychosexual religious imagery and some serious body horror. It reflects the realities of a historical episode that, after nearly three-hundred years, feels no less outrageous and bizarre.

The result has been clouded by censorship for decades, but if you manage to watch the (mostly) uncut version, you’ll find that the film, even for the non-religious, is deeply uncomfortable viewing. Much of that discomfort, though, comes from the understanding that it’s based on real events. And even though Russell takes many, many liberties with his source material, it’s still surprisingly close to the horrific history it portrays.

In fact, the parts of The Devils that inspire the most inflamed responses from critics are not those invented by Russell for dramatic effect—with the possible exception of the film’s most controversial scene, but I’ll get to that later. Critics, for the most part, have responded most aggressively to the scenes rooted in the actual events on which the film is based. Those depictions have inspired accusations that the film is anti-religious, anti-Catholic, and downright blasphemous.

We’ve explored some of these ideas earlier in this series with our Dissection of We Summon the Darkness, in which we talked about audiences’ rejection of the film for portraying a Christian organization that stages fake Satanic ritual sacrifices and suicides to scare people into the arms of the church. And waaaaay back in our post on Häxan, we talked about the historical reality of Medieval Europe, in which the Church repeated accusations of witchcraft over and over until the people believed them. Leveraging this power, the Church murdered countless innocents, mostly women, in the name of God. Their so-called “witchfinders,” as we wrote then, “manifested the devil wherever they went and in so doing, became him.”

The Devils and its source material, which I’ll get to in a moment, tell of one particularly horrific event, in which the Church carried out the torture and execution of an innocent man in the name of God. In the process, they drove an entire convent of nuns to commit shocking levels of sacrilege and forced them to undergo misogynistic tortures disguised as exorcisms, all for the sake of petty vengeance and the consolidation of political power.

A Brief Historical Summary

The film is an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s 1952 nonfiction book, The Devils of Loudun, which tells the story of Sister Jeanne, the mother superior of a convent in the village of Loudun in 17th-century France. Jeanne accuses a philandering and arrogant Jesuit priest, Urban Grandier, of having summoned devils to ravish and possess her and the entire convent.

The Church brings in several exorcists. One of them, Father Surin, is a charismatic zealot who whips the nuns and the entire town into a frenzy of outrage and heretical hearsay—that is, heresy that was also hearsay. These political, religious, and social forces culminate in the horrific torture and execution of Grandier by burning at the stake.

That’s roughly where Russell’s film ends. But it’s only about two-thirds of the way through Huxley’s treatment, which goes on to detail what happens to the exorcists and the nuns. He focuses specifically on long, sympathetic, and nuanced character studies of Father Surin and Sister Jeanne, far from the melodramatic figures that Russell’s film offers.

According to Huxley, the exorcists went on trying to dispel numerous, named devils who were thought to have possessed specific parts of the bodies of these nuns. Huxley summarizes the exorcists’ mapping of Sister Jeanne’s devils:

Leviathan … occupied the center of the Prioress’s forehead; Beherit was lodged in her stomach; Balaam under the second rib on the right side; Iscaaron under the last rib on the left.

Father Surin, in particular, worked with Sister Jeanne for years. These two people at the heart of the crimes against Grandier, in Huxley’s telling, fed each other’s delusions through earnestly held faith in the teachings of the Church and faith that they themselves were special. Each believed themselves to be either a blessed saint or a damned demoniac, depending on when, over the course of their strange and tortured lives, you asked.

Sister Jeanne was a poor soul whose body was positively bursting at the seams with devils, but she overcame them to become touched by the divine, leaving her prone to religious ecstasies and holy possessions by an angel of God. Father Surin was the exorcist who helped her defeat the devils but became himself possessed, crippled, and tormented by visions of his own damnation. Surin, though, would eventually find his own religious ecstasy and salvation, followed by a miraculous recovery.

The Nonfiction Novelist & the Filmmaker

Huxley writes of these people and events as an essayist, a historian, and a novelist. He offers long discussions of the philosophical and religious beliefs that would have made possessions, miracles, sorcery, and witchcraft all seem downright plausible. He pours over diaries, Church doctrine, government documents, and other sources to unpack the sociological and psychological forces influencing the people of Loudun. And he uses these sources to do the work of a novelist, telling stories with characters and scenes and metaphors and irony and foreshadowing, but working with real people and events.

Funnily enough, the New York Times, who, in 1966, published the above interview in which Capote claims the term as his own, had published, twenty years earlier, an advertisement for a book titled, The Glass Crutch, “one of the most unusual best-sellers ever published—a non-fiction novel.”

The term used at the time to describe this kind of writing was “nonfiction novel,” a genre Truman Capote claimed to have invented with his true-crime thriller In Cold Blood, in 1966. Of course, lots of nonfiction books did novelistic things, including The Devils of Loudun, published in 1952, well before In Cold Blood. And the term itself goes back at least to the 1940s. But Capote was a charismatic egotist, and people like to believe what charismatic egotists say, so he usually gets the credit.

The turn toward the devices of fiction would eventually lead nonfiction writing to be taken seriously, as more than an accounting of events and information, as a vehicle for art.

But there’s an interesting thing that happens when nonfiction gets treated as art. All this tension gets created between art and fact. They push and pull at each other. For some writers, the facts seem so important that the art takes a backseat, and others become so enamored with the art that they start manipulating facts to fill some structural or metaphorical need.

The way I see it, the art of nonfiction is in how you arrange and portray the facts. The real people and events, the unaltered details, are like bits of film that you edit into a cohesive story.

Of course, that’s not always how it works. Capote, for instance, completely fabricated the final scene of In Cold Blood, in which a detective has a conversation with the best friend of a murder victim.

In the case of The Devils of Loudun, Huxley was working with an incredible number of primary sources—stuff written by the very people who participated in or witnessed the events in question. These included Grandier’s, Surin’s, and Sister Jeanne’s diaries and letters. So, it’s very possible that the book is utterly faithful to those sources. But without getting really researchy and academic, I can’t speak much to Huxley’s historical accuracy, except to say that his meticulous discussions of theology, philosophy, and politics in 17th-century France suggest a dedication to honest representation. If he is embellishing or filling in some details, I’m inclined to take these as minor infractions. That is to say, Huxley’s book, though artful, ultimately favors fact over art.

Not so for Russell, who’s treatment is grandiose, frenzied, almost cartoonish. The Devils doesn’t pretend to be nonfiction. It’s filled with imagery from the ecstasies and possessions (or if you prefer, the delusions and mob insanities), as well as the political and moral grotesqueness associated with the events at Loudun. A whole slew of exorcists collapses down to a single character, Surin. The film’s sets are spectacular and beautiful (in a horrific sort of way), but they’re not in the least bit historically “accurate.” The scenes involving King Louis XIII are downright absurd, and Russell shows no qualms with going into the heads of his characters to depict nightmares and fantasies that their real-life counterparts are unlikely to have written down with the level of detail that he portrays.

In short, the question of accuracy is beside the point in Russell’s film. His is a historical melodrama far less concerned with factual purity than with an artful rendering of the horrors portrayed in Huxley’s book. As a result, The Devils, though based on historical events, favors art over fact.

Censorship & Critical Disdain

I won’t get into the whole production history of The Devils. (If you want more on that, Adam Scovell recently wrote an excellent article for the BBC: “Why X-rated masterpiece The Devils is still being censored.”) But it’s important to understand the levels of censorship that the film has faced and continues to face. Censors in the UK, where it was produced and first released, cut it to an extent that Russell found mostly palatable, but several other European countries butchered or outright banned the movie, and it was so utterly chopped up for American audiences that many critics at the time of its release couldn’t even make sense of the story.

As a result, there are many, many different versions of the film floating around, and Warner Bros., who produced it, to this date refuses to put out the full director’s cut. So, if you want to find the “most complete” version, you’ll have to resort to non-officially sanctioned means and hunt down the one with the infamous “rape of Christ” scene.

I know that sounds like the sort of scene you could probably do without, and the story does still make sense without it, but the removal hurts one of the film’s key sequences, in which the nuns are going insane and committing terrible blasphemies throughout the convent. Without the offending scene, all the madness seems to build and build toward a climax that never actually occurs.

Other cuts are much more damaging though. If you’ve seen The Devils, and it made absolutely no sense, then you probably saw one of the butchered versions and should consider looking for something more complete.

As for the rest of the movie, I haven’t seen any of the chopped up versions, and I don’t have a list of every shot and scene cut out of each, but I’ve seen the most complete version available. It’s not hard to figure out what would’ve been cut and how those cuts would make the film appear silly, unwatchable, and offensive for the sake of being offensive.

No wonder critics at the time were so incredibly ungenerous toward the film. Roger Ebert, for instance, wrote a brutally sarcastic review, mocking Russell for making what Ebert regarded as a pretentious, vulgar, and irrelevant shock flick. Writing for the New York Times, Vincent Canby described it as “a see-through movie composed of a lot of clanking, silly, melodramatic effects … of so little substance, obscene or otherwise, that” anyone involved with the film’s production, financing, or release “must be in league with Beelzebub.”

But really, the problem these critics had with The Devils, their true outrage underneath all the smarmy posturing, was laid bare by Ann Guarino in the New York Daily News:

… though said to be based on historical fact [The Devils] could not be more anti-Catholic in tone or more sensationalized in treatment. … One sequence is in particular bad taste. [Vanessa] Redgrave imagines [Oliver] Reed as Christ coming off his cross, kissing her and rolling around the ground with her as the multitudes watch.

(Oh, if only she’d seen the version with the censored “rape of Christ” sequence. Imagine her response then!)

In the end, the aggressive rejection came down to religion. They saw The Devils as “anti-Catholic” and “anti-religious,” a film in bad taste, not because of pornographic nudity, but because the naked women are nuns; not because of extreme violence, but because that violence is committed by the Church against an innocent man; not because of perverse fantasy sequences, but because those scenes are blasphemous in nature.

The hypocrisy is fascinating in a way because what’s being censored isn’t content fabricated for shock value. Rather, the most historically accurate parts of the film are what get attacked. The sisters of the Loudun convent, according to Huxley’s sources, performed nearly all of the acts portrayed in Russell’s films, with the apparent exception of the “rape of Christ” scene—and even that scene is plausible, given the other occurrences. Grandier’s horrific torture at the hands of the Church is, if anything, downplayed in Russell’s film. And Sister Jeanne’s psychosexual fantasies of Grandier as Christ, while there’s no way to know their precise content, adhere very closely to what Huxley describes from her diaries. In other words, the most offensive parts of the film depict realities that censors, critics, and audiences refused, and in many cases still refuse, to face.

One of the most shocking images in Russell’s film is his representation of the papacy in Grandier’s trial, in which the judges are costumed to look very unsubtly like the Ku Klux Klan.

Offensive Historical Truths

In spite of sustained censorship efforts over the past forty years, The Devils has had ardent defenders. Writing for the LA Times, Bridget Byrne praised the film:

[T]he very real substance of the ideas [The Devils] delineates have been shot into thousands of brilliant fragments by a wild imagination.

You have to grasp the philosophy, work out the undercurrent of seriousness, close the structural gaps for yourself, even as you are transported by a literal orgy of visual splendor.

This view has slowly grown over the decades, leading to The Devils’ well-earned reputation, not merely for being controversial, but for being a masterpiece of artful melodrama. The film has an impressive 7.8/10 among IMDB users. Rotten Tomatoes, where it currently holds a 67% positive rating among critics and an 88% audience score, sums up the current critical consensus this way:

Grimly stylish, Ken Russell’s baroque opus is both provocative and persuasive in its contention that the greatest blasphemy is the leveraging of faith for power.

From this angle, faith-based objections to the film are ironic. Although The Devils takes oodles of historical liberties—revising and removing characters, intentionally “inaccurate” set designs, the invention of inner fantasies experienced by very real people—it’s still faithful to the core truths of the historical episode. And those core truths add up to a critique of power and human self-interest based on religious faith. When they’re censored out, not only does the film become artistically jumbled and silly, it loses much of its historical context. It becomes less accurate, less poignant, more gratuitous, and somehow more sensationalized.

The unsensational truth is that Grandier was tortured and burned at the stake, in part, because he made powerful people angry, impregnated and abandoned one of their daughters, and refused to admit to being a witch (or sorcerer or incubus). The ungratuitous truth is that he was also tortured and burned, in part, because the mentally ill Sister Jeanne struggled to distinguish reality and fantasy, fell in love without ever having met him, felt spurned when he married someone else, and accused him of witchcraft. The blasphemous truth is that he was tortured and burned, in part, because Father Surin was a powerful and charismatic figure capable of stirring frenzy while believing he was doing the work of God. And finally, the offensive truth is that he was tortured and burned, in part, because he was inconvenient to the French Crown and the papacy.

This last truth is made all the more offensive (to some, anyway) because Russell draws parallels between Grandier’s trials and those of Jesus of Nazareth, substituting the people of Loudun for the people of Rome; the French Crown and Catholic Church for the Roman Empire; and Jean de Martin, Baron de Laubardemont for Pontius Pilate.

But by pushing to discredit the film and censor its most politically and religiously charged material, critics, censors, and Warner Bros. also suppress the film’s historical truths: That church and state have committed horrific crimes in the name of God and that charisma is a dangerous weapon in faith and politics, capable of spurring people toward grotesque and barbaric acts.

In The Devils of Loudun, Huxley writes, “The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”

If the comparison of Grandier and Jesus is offensive, it is only so because the comparison is apt, if not perfect. A person is condemned to horrific torture and execution, martyred for political gain. It’s an offensive historical truth that we are doomed to repeat again and again—from Jesus Christ to Joan of Arc to Urban Grandier to Fred Hampton (shout out to Judas and the Black Messiah)—because we refuse to accept and confront the sins of the past, to make ourselves better than Pontius Pilate, better than Pierre Cachon, better than the Baron de Laubardemont, better than J. Edgar Hoover.

The Other Folk