Horny Abbess, Empty Relic, Open Fortress, Public Toilet: Reconnecting with Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971)

Russell’s principal avatar in this film is Louis XIII, the Carnival King and Lord of Misrule. Devoted to ersatz relics and to his “tacky stage farce,” he quietly uncovers not only that the nuns’ Satanic devotions (and perhaps all devotions) are ersatz, tacky stage farces but that they are for this very reason sacred.

* * *

1.

Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) is hell-bent on extending the Church’s authority to encompass the entire of France and to this end strikes an alliance with King Louis XIII (Graham Armitage). But his plan is complicated by Loudun in the southwest – a fortified enclave within whose walls Catholic and Protestant coexist in peace and to whose late governor the king has promised not to intervene. And why would he want to anyway? To Richelieu’s chagrin, the king is far less interested in politics than in what Ken Hanke rightly describes as his “tacky stage farce” – an ultra-campy dramatisation of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus starring himself as the titular goddess.1 Plus, he can shoot all the Protestants he likes on his own estate.

Until a new election is held, control of Loudun rests in the hands of Father Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed). Despite his vocation, he is hotly desirous. “Every Tuesday afternoon,” remarks an onlooker at the governor’s funeral procession, “an hour in bed with the vintner’s widow, then off to take Confession – the hypocrisy of it!” But he is also hotly desired. The same onlooker continues, “Well, there’s one man worth going to Hell for.” And none desires him quite as hotly as the abbess of the local Ursuline convent, Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave). Her lust seems to manifest in a pair of visions in which Grandier appears to her as Christ. In the first, he walks on water, then she, as Mary Magdalene, cleans his feet with her hair. In the second, he hangs on the cross while she caresses his wounds, eventually tongue-punching the hole cut in his side by Longius’s spear.

Perhaps this is to make Sister Jeanne sound delirious. She has certainly been called so. Thomas R. Atkins describes her visions as “the eroticism of a deranged consciousness . . . projected by a very sick lady in heat.”2 Gordon Thomas calls her “sexually crazed” and “supercharged with repression.”3 And Adam Scovell claims that “Sister Jeanne’s lust deranges her.”4 On the contrary, what makes Sister Jeanne’s visions so disquieting is the fact that they appear to a stone-cold realist, jaded and cynical – one reduced to uttering her prayers, as Russell’s screenplay puts it, “automatically.”5 In a blog post for Wonders in the Dark, Troy Olson credits Madeleine de Brou (Gemma Jones) with being the only character who “keeps things grounded in some sense of reality.”6 But when de Brou approaches the convent with the intention of becoming a nun, she seems so naive, so fundamentally out of touch with the economic and political contingencies of monastic life, that the world-weary Sister Jeanne can hardly refrain from mocking the would-be novice:

You look pious enough. A face like a Virgin Martyr in a picture book. And what is that in your hand – ah, yes, a pretty pocket edition of The Imitation of Christ in red morocco. Respectful black weeds, very becoming – and downcast eyes.

Before explaining:

Most of the nuns here are noblewomen who have embraced monastic life because there was not enough money at home to provide them with dowries. Or they were unmarriageable because ugly, and a burden to the family. Communities which ought to be furnaces where souls are forever on fire with the love of God are merely dead with the grey ashes of convenience.

While the historical Sister Jeanne was daughter to the fantastically wealthy Baron of Cozes, The Devils gives zero indication of whether or not its own Sister Jeanne has “money at home.” Nor does it seem to pass any final judgement on whether or not she is properly “ugly”: with her long, red hair, and Redgrave’s soft, angular features, Sister Jeanne is beautiful in a Pre-Raphaelite (or, perhaps – and this amounts to the same thing – a Botticellian) way, but she also has a hunchback; physically, she is, at once, Elizabeth Sidal/Simonetta Vespucci and Quasimodo.7 In the intensity of her visions, however, there is, I think, a clear suggestion that she has “embraced monastic life” precisely because hers is a soul “forever on fire with the love of God” – a love that, as in the Song of Songs, or the poetry of Hildegard of Bingen, or the writings of Angela of Foligno, or the Visions of Hadewijch of Antwerp, or the Showings of Julian of Norwich, or the Life of the Holy Mother Teresa of Jesus, or the letters of Marie of the Incarnation, articulates itself via imagery that is patently sensual. She is not simply sex-starved and/or sex-mad. Instead, her experience is defined by a seemingly contradictory idea: a “passionate celibacy,” as John/Ernest Worthing phrases it in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest;8 an eroticism of the chaste.

Little wonder, perhaps, that, as Russell would recall in his autobiography,

One of the greatest champions of The Devils is the Reverend Gene Phillips of the Society of Jesus. He teaches film at Loyola University and was so impressed that he immediately included it on the curriculum.9

Famously, not everyone would agree with the Reverend Phillips. Ann Guarino wrote in the New York Daily News that The Devils “could not be more anti-Catholic in tone.”10 Likewise, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore called it “an insult to cinema.”11 It was banned in Finland (and remained so until 2001) and was cut to ribbons by censors in Britain and America. In Italy, it acquired the unique distinction of being winner of Best Foreign Film in the 1971 Venice Film Festival, winner of a silver ribbon for Best Foreign Film from the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists in 1972, and banned throughout the country. Whose view can we trust here?

2.

Two things happen – suddenly, and in immediate succession. First, Grandier falls in love – true love, apparently – with de Brou. As a Jesuit priest, he is forbidden to take a wife, but after careful (and, indeed, Protestant-like) deliberation on the fact that “There isn’t one law in the New Testament which forbids one to marry,” he weds himself to de Brou in secret. Second, an army – led by Richelieu’s agent Baron de Laubardemont (Dudley Sutton) – arrives at Loudun to raze its walls and Grandier seizes his authority to halt the demolition. On the face of it, both occurrences would seem uncharacteristic of Grandier, a pleasure-obsessed egoist. But on closer inspection a consistency emerges. Earlier in the film, the following dialogue unfolds between him and Father Mignon (Murray Melvin):

MIGNON: My cousin [Louis Trincant, Loudun’s public prosecutor and the father of Grandier’s latest concubine] tells me his daughter is pregnant. You have your whores. Why did you have to meddle with her?

GRANDIER: It seemed a way.

MIGNON: A way to what?

GRANDIER: I begin to understand at last that all worldly things have a single purpose for a man of my kind. Politics, power, women, riches, pride and authority – I choose them with the same care that your cousin, Monsieur Trincant, might select a weapon. But my intention is different. I need to turn them against myself.

MIGNON: To bring about your end?

GRANDIER: I have a great need to be united with God.

Mignon concludes that Grandier is “sick,” but the latter is actually situating himself within – or, at least, alongside – an esteemed and established tradition. The Christian practice of “turn[ing] . . . against [one]self” as a “way” of becoming “united with God” is at least as old as Pseudo-Dionysius, whose Mystical Theology says of Moses,

Here, renouncing all that the mind may conceive . . . he belongs completely to Him who is beyond everything. Here, being neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united to the completely unknown by an inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing.12

Similarly, in his ninety-first Laud, Jacopone da Todi writes:

Self-annihilation, you transform every loss into gain;
Your light destroys all
That would keep us from God.13

Likewise, in The Mirror of Simple Souls, Marguerite Porete describes the following process:

And if she is thus unencumbered in all aspects, she loses her name, for she rises in sovereignty. And therefore she loses her name in the One in whom she is melted and dissolved through Himself and in Himself. Thus she would be like a body of water which flows from the sea, which has some name, as one would be able to say Aisne or Seine or another river. And when this water or river returns to the sea, it loses its course and its name with which it flowed in many countries in accomplishing its task.14

And in his fifty-third Sermon, Meister Eckhart summarises his teachings, explaining, “When I preach I am accustomed to speak about detachment, and that a man should be free of himself and of all things.”15 What is radical about Grandier, then, is not that he has been “turn[ing] . . . against” – or, as the mystical tradition would put it, “annihilating” – his own self in order to be “united with God.” It is that he has been deploying “politics, power, women, riches, pride and authority” as his means of doing so. The Devils, then, is no straightforward conversion story. It is not just, as Russell himself would put it in an interview for The Guardian, “about a sinner who becomes a saint.”16 Specifically, it is about a sinner who, rather than simply turning away from sin, moves through it, toward salvation. Of course, this sinner’s tragedy is that “politics, power, [and] women” eventually conspire against him to bring about his downfall. Or perhaps this is his triumph – perhaps his victory consists in his having successfully enlisted these things as the instruments of his own martyrdom, the tools of his own self-immolation.

Either way, in Grandier’s sudden and absolute devotion to de Brou, there is, I think, an attempt to undertake this same self-annihilation in order to get closer to the divine. Grandier himself indicates as much during his show trial, describing his marriage as “a real ceremony, a simple act of committal done with my heart, in the hope of coming to God through the love of a woman.” And his sudden, suicidal devotion to Loudun is scarcely any different.

3.

When Sister Jeanne discovers that Grandier has married another, she is consumed with jealousy and undertakes to avenge herself by telling Mignon that Grandier has possessed her in the form of a devil. Sensing an opportunity to avenge his cousin, Mignon gives word of Jeanne’s accusation to Laubardemont, who sends for the “professional witch-hunter,” Father Barré (Michael Gothard). And Barré subjects Jeanne to a horrifically violent and grossly invasive “exorcism” while Laubardemont extracts her official “confession”: Grandier is “responsible for this evil possession.”

In The Devils of Loudun – one of the important sources for The Devils – Aldous Huxley describes the exorcism of the historical Sister Jeanne as “the equivalent, more or less, of a rape in a public lavatory.”17 The comparison seems to have provided the cue for Peter Maxwell Davies, who described his intention in scoring The Devils: “This has got to sound as if it’s taking place in a public toilet . . . a resonance which you want to get out of.”18 Likewise, it seems to have informed what Scovell rightly (and paradoxically) describes as the “horrifyingly white-clean aesthetic” of the porcelain tiles in which Derek Jarman covered not just the exorcism chamber but the entire of his Loudun – including, crucially, the defensive walls.19 But why is “a rape in a public lavatory” any more shocking than a rape elsewhere? What feels particularly repulsive or horrifying about Huxley’s phrase (and, by extension, about Maxwell Davies’s music and Jarman’s sets) is the terrible sense of correspondence between the terms “rape” and “public lavatory”: insofar as rape (especially, the rape of a celibate nun) is a profaning of the sacred, a violent opening up of what has been carefully sealed off, a forced and total exteriorising of some closely guarded interior, it prefigures something of the communal bathroom – a site of public privacy, shared seclusion, and open secrecy. It would be absurd to say that rape and the public lavatory are fundamentally indistinct (perhaps by insisting, say, that both phenomena are simply different flavours of what Jacques Lacan called “extimacy” (“extimité”) – that is, the inherent exteriority of the interior, the eventual objectivity of subjectivity itself).20 What is clear, however, is that the absolute exteriority of the first maintains an echo in the paradoxical exterior-interiority of the second. What is awful about the “opening up” of Sister Jeanne is that it brutally reduces a complex state of open enclosure – namely, the paradoxical eroticism of the chaste – to one of straightforward openness. That, and the fact that that initial open closure seems to have found its objective correlative – its incarnation, as it were – in the public-privacy of the communal toilet décor.

4.

Next, Barré threatens to execute the other sisters unless they too pretend to be possessed. From the outset, it is strongly implied that the entire thing is a charade – or, in Russell’s word, a “cabaret.”21 No one has really been possessed by anything, and Laubardemont, Mignon, Sister Jeanne, and the other Ursulines are simply playing along out of belligerence, hatred, envy, and fear, respectively. Ron Capshaw argues as much, claiming,

Unlike The Exorcist, they are no actual possessions in [The Devils]; all of the naked, cavorting, contorting nuns are pantomiming what they think the authorities and swelling crowds want them to do.22

Confirmation that it is only a pantomime appears to arrive in the form of the king, who disguises himself as the Duke de Condé and visits the cathedral in Loudun whilst the nuns are putting on a particularly zealous performance. He produces a gilded box, and the following exchange unfolds:

DE CONDE: Father, may I try this?

BARRÉ: What is in the casket, sire?

DE CONDE: A holy relic from the King’s own chapel. A phial of the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Tell me, Father, what effect would the close proximity of this relic have on devils such as these?

BARRÉ: It would put them to flight.

Sister Jeanne responds accordingly – abandoning her histrionics, resuming her usual demeanour, and announcing, “I am free! I am free!” Then, raising the box for all to see, the king opens it up and inverts it. Nothing falls out. The casket – like the nuns’ demonstration – was hollow all along. It is they who are defined by “hypocrisy” (literally, “acting”). “Have fun!” instructs the king.

At odds with these false theatrics is the development of what appears to be true faith in Grandier. As the nuns’ behaviour becomes more depraved, so does his appear to become more graceful, more saintly. This trajectory reaches its climax when, having refused to validate Barré’s lies with a “confession,” Grandier is burned, martyr-like, at the stake. Smiling, he utters, in imitation of Christ’s words in Luke 23:34, “Forgive them – forgive my enemies.” On the one hand, this fate seems to grant a degree of validity to Sister Jean’s earlier visions: it becomes difficult to dismiss those visions as nothing more than Biblically inflected wet dreams when they prophesy Grandier’s eventual Christlikeness with such accuracy. On the other hand, the film refuses to confer absolute legitimacy on Grandier’s faith.23 As John Baxter puts it, “raddled corpses and naked hairless nuns mock Grandier’s lofty ideas of spiritual transcendence.”24 God does not swoop down to deliver Grandier from the stake. Nor does he arise three days later. There is not even a thunderclap. On the contrary, he is mocked by the people of Loudun who stage in front of his blazing pyre a bawdy, mummers’ play retelling of his life and lusts.

5.

In Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian, having decided not to break the heart of his latest romantic interest, turns to wondering, “Had it been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed?”25 After some deliberation, he concludes:

In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity’s sake he had tried the denial of self.26

How do we know that Grandier has not done the same? That he has not thrown himself into marital bliss and civic responsibility simply because they are the only sources of pleasure and pride that he has not yet exhausted? What makes The Devils so unnerving is that we do not.

In fact, in a now-lost scene, Grandier actually appears to have lost his faith in God altogether. In spite and yet because of that loss, he addresses his doubts to Him, explaining:

I thought I had found you and now you have forsaken me. To make a man see in the morning what the glory might be, and by night to snatch it from him.27

It could be argued that this prayer of unbelief, with its deliberate echoes of Matthew 24:46 (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) and Mark 15:34 (“My God, my God, for what have you forsaken me?”), only makes Grandier more Christlike. But this would be to oversimplify things. The point here is less about Grandier per se than it is about Matthew 24:46 and Mark 15:34. It is precisely these passages that prompted G. K. Chesterton to write:

Let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.28

Which, in turn, prompted Slavoj Žižek to extrapolate:

The only way, really, to be an atheist is to go through Christianity. Christianity is much more atheist than the usual atheism, which can claim there is no God, but [which] retains a certain trust in the Big Other. This Big Other can be called natural necessity, evolution or whatever. . . . The difficult thing to accept is . . . that there is no Big Other – no point of reference which guarantees meaning.29

But even this is to oversimplify things. Žižek appears to have missed the crucial phrase in Chesterton: “in an instant.” And the idea of a fully atheist Christianity in fact owes more to Wilde’s description in De Profundis of “an order for those who cannot believe”:

the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Everything to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith.30

And “at the core of Wilde’s remark,” writes Simon Critchley, “is the seemingly contradictory idea of the faith of the faithless and the belief of unbelievers, a faith which does not give up on the idea of truth, but transfigures its meaning” (i.e., from “veracity” to “adherence”).31 The important thing about Grandier’s doubtful prayer, his faithless faith or his unbelieving belief, is not whether it confirms or denies that he has become “united with God.” Nor is it simply, as Žižek might put it, that this very ambiguity – this very absence of “a point of reference which guarantees meaning” – is itself the defining feature of the Christian divine (though this is certainly some of what is important here). On the contrary, it is that, as Critchley writes,

the faith of the faithless reveals the true nature of faith: the rigorous activity of the subject that proclaims itself into being at each instant without guarantees or security, and which seeks to abide with the infinite demand of love. Faith is the enactment of the self in relation to an infinite demand of love.32

Because love – true love – entails a degree of self-annihilation, it made sense for Grandier to “hope of coming to God,” both “through the love of a woman” (“I want to serve you,” he tells de Brou) and through his topophilia or civic devotion (“and I want to serve Loudun,” he adds). But his subsequent experience of love’s insatiability – of the unfillable lack inherent within desire, the unending wanting that underpins wanting – appears to have brought both his personal nullification and his conviction in the Christian divine to their logical end: namely, self-assertion in the face of cosmic uncertainty, “the rigorous activity of the subject that proclaims itself into being without guarantees or security.”33 Grandier’s doubtful prayer, like Christ’s on the cross, exposes prayer’s true nature.

It is here that Atkins’s misreading of The Devils is most apparent. For Atkins,

the priest Grandier is quite normal and, considering his calling, embarrassingly heterosexual. This single fact lends a balance to The Devils that was missing in [The Music Lovers]. We have some norm by which to judge the abnormalities.34

How can this be the case? How can someone be simultaneously “normal” and “embarrassingly heterosexual”? Both the mean and the outlier? It is not enough to quip that excess has become the standard, for if such were the case, then there could be no standard and therefore no excess. Instead, the contradiction appears to be the result of a need to invest The Devils with some sort of stable benchmark or control by which to assess the chaos (a need that also seems to underlie Olson’s claim that de Brou “keeps things grounded in some sense of reality”). What makes The Devils so unnerving, however, is precisely its lack of any such benchmark, any such grounding. From beginning to end, the film is terrifyingly, thrillingly void, in Critchley’s words, of “guarantees or security.” The final suggestion that Grandier’s belief might contain some “truth” consists not in any deus ex machina revelation but in his maintaining until death the un/believing attitude of his doubtful prayer – a self-assertion before cosmic uncertainty that was born, via love, from self-annihilation and religious conviction (an attitude that is far, I think, from any norm, and that is by no means exclusive to heterosexuals). Crucial, then, about this “priest,” in Wilde’s words, “in whose heart peace had no dwelling,” is that he is the very model of a priest.

Might the same be said of the king’s empty reliquary? Does its hollow solemnity, its vacant mystery, like those of Wilde’s “unblessed bread” and “empty chalice,” prefigure a paradox that would have been present in the actual “blood of our Lord Jesus Christ”? For Carolyn Bynum, the power of devotional objects,

lies . . . not so much in indexicality as in the paradox of what we might call “dissimilar similitude” – that is, both the dissimilarity of tooth, body, hardened gem, and unfolding vine to each other and in the wholeness of heaven they, taken together, present and re-present.35

As Critchley explains:

Things are not mere signs and symbols pointing to something transcendent but are rather the Incarnation of the transcendent: objects have an agency, they have super-powers. Objects . . . are the paradoxical incarnation of transcendence. The Eucharist both is and is not God.36

If any reliquary is full, it is still, for the faithful, hollow; something in it always fails to materialise, precisely because what does materialise in the relic (or, at least, what it is believed to materialise) is ultimately immaterial, a (holy) ghost. But the paradox is particularly apparent when the reliquary contains, or purports to contain, “the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Like the Eucharist – nay, for Catholicism, being ontologically identical with the Eucharist – that blood “both is and is not God.” It is, at once, a perfect incarnation of God and one that necessarily fails to incarnate Him, and is thus just ordinary blood (or, in the Eucharist, just ordinary wine), precisely because He is ultimately unincarnatable. The King’s ersatz relic prefigures a falsity that lingers in the true one.

6.

Russell himself would eventually arrive at a similar conclusion (or perhaps its mirror image). In Altered States, he describes The Devils as “the last nail in the coffin of my Catholic faith, a faith that had sustained me for more than ten years and given my life purpose and direction,” explaining:

My picture of God was hazing over: too much incense, too much stained glass, too much sci-fi in the sky. It was time to come down to earth. My Catholic missal was falling apart.37

But rather than simply giving up on religion, rather than permanently committing to the idea that, in Žižek’s phrase, “there is no Big Other,” Russell claims, “I needed a new prayer book,” explaining:

I found it in Wordsworth’s The Prelude, and started devotions anew in his church, where the nave was Borrowdale, the transept was Catbells and Grange Fell, the altar . . . was Castle Crag, and the Roof was Clouds of Glory.38

It is a wonderful example of the fact that, as Critchley puts it, “Those who cannot believe still require religious truth and a framework of ritual in which they can believe.”39 But what is strange here is the fact that the articles in Wordsworth’s “church” are more persistent, that their mysteries exceed and outlive those of “incense” and “stained glass,” precisely because they are patent fabrications, belonging not to any actual but only to an imaginary “church.” Here, the falsity of the Catholic missal, the very fictionality of its “science-fiction in the sky,” seems to have been the blueprint for the endurance of Wordsworth’s “prayer book.” For Russell (as for Grandier), the failure of theism – the “Death of God,” as it were – lives on in the triumph of topophilia.

7.

Eckhart raises a similar point in his nineteenth Sermon. Expounding on Acts 9:8 (“Paul rose from the ground and with open eyes saw nothing”), he argues:

I cannot see what is One. He [Paul] saw nothing, that is: God. God is a nothing and God is a something.40

Perhaps the important word here is “and.” Eckhart does not simply say that “God is a nothing,” and we cannot claim the passage as evidence for the idea that “Christianity is more atheist than atheism.” The crucial lesson here is that the coexistence of doubt (“God is a nothing”) and faith (“God is a something”) is itself the vital ingredient of the “true” faith – that is, the unwavering or persistent faith that, for Eckhart, has “God” as its object. The incredulous credo is the authentic credo. But how to enact both doubt and faith simultaneously? How to pay credence to the outright incredible? And thereby glimpse what “I cannot see”? By “annihilating” the “I.” By reducing the self to “a nothing” (in grammatical terms: to form the infinit(iv)e, subtract the first person). As Eckhart puts it:

What God is, that he is entirely. . . . When the soul is unified and there enters into total self-abnegation, then she finds God as in nothing.41

In his moment of doubt, Father Grandier becomes one such abnegant, a hollow shell – divested both of himself and of any real belief in God’s actual existence. Critchley describes the process in Mysticism, explaining “the process of the undoing of the substantial self might also entail the undoing or annihilation of God as substance.”42 It is to the same process that Eckhart appears to be referring when he writes, in his fifty-second or Poverty Sermon, “let us pray to God that we may be free of ‘God.’”43 And it is also to this process that both Hadewijch of Antwerp and Mechthild of Magdeburg appear to be referring when they describe God and the soul as mutual abysses or absences.44 What is crucial in all of these instances, however, what distinguishes mystic self-annihilation from ordinary nihilism, is the persistence of “religious truth” (in these cases, unwavering fidelity to “God”) and a “framework of ritual” (“let us pray”). The paradox, here, is that those same distinctions are also available to the atheist – that, in order to transcend nihilism, one only needs to be true or faithful to something and to be able to stage a halfway decent ceremony.45 Belief is by the by. As Gwendolen puts it in The Importance of Being Earnest,46 “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.” The crucial feature of the king’s box is not the contents but the gilding.

8.

When the King, as de Condé, reveals that the gilded box is hollow, the nuns – including Sister Jeanne – only drop their histrionics temporarily. Hardly a minute passes before they renew them – only, this time, with added fervour: burning Bibles, swinging from the Sanctuary ceiling, and rapturously fucking themselves and each other and the curling toes of a larger-than-life-size sculpture of the crucified Jesus (this is the notorious “Rape of Christ” scene that was excised from virtually every cut, and that was only unearthed in the Warner Bros. vaults by Mark Kermode in 2002). Mignon climbs to the loft in order to watch the chaos from a distance, but there he only becomes enthralled by the spectacle and begins to wank along. Thomas records that “even shortly before his death, Russell maintained that the sequence was integral to the meaning of the film” (though Thomas also concedes, “I am not sure I can agree with him”).47 What, then, if anything, might be this sequence’s “meaning”?

The immediate suggestion appears to be that Sister Jeanne, the nuns, and Mignon, having been exposed as mere “hypocrites,” are finally able to participate in something akin to the “Confraternity of the Faithless” from De Profundis, or to undertake what Fernando Pessoa (largely paraphrasing Wilde) describes in The Book of Disquiet:

To attain the satisfactions of the mystic state without having to endure its rigours; to be the ecstatic follower of no god, the mystic or epopt with no initiation: to pass the days meditating on a paradise you don’t believe in – all of this tastes good to the soul.48

Only, the “Rape of Christ” is a sort of blasphemous or Satanic parody of what is imagined in Wilde and Pessoa: a taper burns, but it is between a nun’s thighs; she and her sisters become the “ecstatic followers” of no demons, enacting a pandemonium they do not believe in. This reading, however, is complicated by the faint suggestion that, somewhere along the way, Mignon and the nuns have actually become genuinely possessed. Russell’s screenplay includes lines spoken by “DEVILS (speaking through the Nuns),” for “LEVIATHAN (speaking through Jeanne),” for the same “LEVIATHAN (speaking through Mignon),” and for “BEHERIT (speaking through Agnes).”49 These lines, moreover, do not appear to be voiced by the regular actors on set but to have been dubbed in during post-production. Should we conclude, then, that they are properly inhabited by real devils? Once again, the film offers no final confirmation, no “guarantees or security.” And this, I think, is just as well, for what is important here is not whether or not the nuns (and Mignon) are genuinely possessed – that is, whether their fidelity is to Satan himself or simply to Barré. It is simply that the presence of fidelity (“religious truth”) at all, when coupled with their orgiastic rites (“a framework of ritual”), “tastes good to the soul.”

Reed was often cast – as Russell’s wife, Lisi Tribble, would put it – as the director’s “alter-ego.”50 And while this is at least partly the case in The Devils – that Grandier’s complicated relationship with Catholicism is, to some extent, an analogue of Russell’s own – it is also (and, I think, more clearly) the case that Russell’s principal avatar in this film is Louis XIII, the Carnival King and Lord of Misrule. Devoted to ersatz relics and to his “tacky stage farce,” he quietly uncovers not only that the nuns’ Satanic devotions (and perhaps all devotions) are ersatz, tacky stage farces but that they are for this very reason sacred (albeit, in the nuns’ case, hellishly so). Thomas criticises Russell for the fact that he “more than once inserts a sequence of deliberate, low-down burlesque that appears to undercut the seriousness of the drama” (Thomas has in mind, I think, not only the “Rape of Christ” but also the King’s “Birth of Venus” pageant and the scene in which he shoots down Protestant “blackbirds” dressed, literally, as blackbirds). But the very point of The Devils appears to be that the latter category is presaged in the former: that every “[serious] drama” – every communion with the divine, every experience of new love, every conflict over faith – has its prototype, as Russell would put it, in “cabaret.”

9.

It is also difficult to maintain any meaningful distinction between Wilde’s faithless faith or Pessoa’s hollow mysticism or the nuns’ Satanic equivalent, on the one hand, and Sister Jeanne’s initial, prophetic visions, on the other. If Sister Jeanne’s visions are “true,” in the way that the faith expressed in Eckhart’s nineteenth Sermon is “true,” this is not just because of their prophetic accuracy but also because of the coexistence of doubt and faith that seems to manifest within them. These visions appear to testify at once that “God is a nothing” (they are just Biblically inflected wet dreams) and also that “God is a something” (they are prophetically accurate). The faithlessness that seems to characterise Sister Jeanne’s eventual “hypocrisy,” her pretending but not believing herself to be possessed, was already the authenticating factor of her initial devotions. It is for this reason that there is no contradiction between Sister Jeanne’s being, at the outset of the film, so utterly cynical and so completely “on fire with the love of God.” One is the prerequisite for the other.

The penultimate scene in The Devils is another controversial one. Sister Jeanne is engaged in ritual self-flagellation when Laubardemont presents her with what remains of Grandier – about eight inches of his charred femur. At first, Sister Jeanne adores it, as she might a holy relic. Then, moaning “Grandier! Grandier!” she begins, as Vanessa Redgrave would eloquently put it, “fucking herself with it.”51 Is she simply taking advantage of the fact that she has altogether lost her faith here? Having experienced firsthand the vile, political ends which that faith can be forced to serve? Is she revelling – or, at least, finding consolation – in the sensuality that this loss has made permissible? And simply concealing that revelry by bookending it within an established mode of penance? Or is she “fucking herself” with a more straightforwardly religious purpose? Is it an act performed, like Grandier’s marriage to de Brou, “in the hope of coming to God through . . . love” – only, love of a man (a man who, being deceased, could present no real obstacle to or distraction from God)? The central message of The Devils, I think, is that the former possibilities persist in the latter – that the nonbeliever who maintains the believer’s rituals prefigures that believer precisely because the believer must always exist in some state of disbelief; that Pessoa’s “epopt with no initiation” who spends her days “meditating on a paradise you don’t believe in” is, in a sense, the epopt par excellence precisely because she must already be a noninitiate. In the second-to-last scene of The Devils, it is clear that Sister Jeanne is experiencing that paradise firsthand. What is important, however, is not whether it is a bodily or a spiritual paradise – that is, whether her fidelity is merely to Grandier or to God via Grandier. It is that the presence of fidelity (“religious truth”) at all, when coupled with her self-flagellation (“a framework of ritual”), is enough to transport her there.

10.

The Devils might have been “the last nail in the coffin of [Russell’s] Catholic faith,” but it is not simply the last hurrah or swan song of that faith. Russell himself appeared to indicate as much, telling Carol Kramer for the Chicago Tribune, “We never set out to make a pretty Christian film. Charlton Heston made enough of those.”52 On the contrary, Russell would routinely insist that “the film, basically, is about politics.”53 His meaning here appears to be that the film is less about religion as such and more about the ways in which religious institutions are exploited to serve political ends. On the one hand, there can be no doubt that this is precisely what takes place in The Devils: Richelieu, Laubardemont, Barré, and Mignon manipulate the Ursuline convent in order to raze Loudun and to gain control of all of France. On the other hand, there seems to be a degree of obfuscation here, for The Devils – I hope it goes without saying by now – is profoundly concerned with theological matters.54 Or could it be that this very relationship is a political one? As Critchley writes,

The political question . . . is how . . . a faith of the faithless might be able to bind together a confraternity, a consorority or, to use Rousseau’s key term, an association. If political life is to arrest a slide into demotivated cynicism, then it would seem to require a motivating and authorizing faith which, while not reducible to a specific context, might be capable of forming solidarity in a locality, a site, a region –in Wilde’s case a prison cell.55

In the final shot of The Devils, Madeleine de Brou, dejected and despairing – demotivated and cynical, as it were – stumbles through the ruined walls of Loudun and out into the French countryside – where Protestants do not coexist with Catholics in peace, but where they are strapped to wheels, hoisted high into the sky, left to die of starvation and exposure, and eventually eaten by maggots. What has been lost here is not merely a brick-and-mortar structure but a Rousseauian “association” – one that had overridden the Catholic/Protestant divide but whose “authorising faith” was neither of those religions. The “political question” that remains at the end of The Devils is this: How was that faith constructed? How was the horrific schism wrought by the Religious Wars transfigured into a shared love of place, a transcendent experience of civic pride?

The answer, I think, is again in the set designs. Russell was fiercely opposed to the idea of filming The Devils among seventeenth-century buildings, telling Baxter:

I was cocking a snook at people who had preconceived ideas of what a historical film should be. Anything before the eighteenth century is automatically in crumbling ruins, all grey blocks of stone. It looks like a pageant in fancy dress. We wanted to do away with the cobwebs and the grey stone and get a contemporary feeling. The people of Loudun who were so crazy about their city and trying to save it certainly didn’t see it as an old museum relic. For them it was something new and modern. So we had to make it modern for people today.56

Crucial about Jarman’s sets, however, is that the horror of “cobwebs” persists in their “horrifyingly white-clean aesthetic.” The secrecy of the occluded, crumbling crypt lives on but is transfigured, in the open secrecy of the public lavatory. Russell describes how he and Jarman, preparing for the set designs,

looked at [Fritz Lang’s] Metropolis and took some ideas from that. There’s one scene where the workers run along an underground passage that’s a cross between the Metro and the Maginot line, and we went for these arches because they have a timeless quality about them, especially when they’re painted white.57

But what kind of “timeless” are we talking about here? The sets for Metropolis are not intended – as say, Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh was intended – to be “unfettered by the traditions of the past.”58 Rather, they are defined by what Ingeborg Hoesterey calls their “eclecticism” – their combining “functionalist modernism, art deco, the scientist’s archaic little house with its high-powered laboratory, catacombs, and the Gothic cathedral.”59 Likewise, what characterises the affect of the Metro (at least, of the London Metro) is that it too seems to unite “functionalist modernism” with “catacombs.”60 And the same could be said (indeed, has been said) of the Maginot line: even though each of its bunkers, for Paul Virilio, is an example of “modern war-making apparatus,” stepping into any one of them is akin to descending “inside a pyramid or in the depths of catacombs.”61 If the people of Loudun were “crazy about their city,” if the place itself enabled them to transcend the horrific schism wrought by the Religious Wars, that was not simply because its walls were modern, not just because they were straightforwardly “white-clean.” It was because those walls took the horrors of that schism and transfigured them into a more contradictory style: Catacomb-Modernism, Gothic-Functionalism, a paradoxical ability to be – like Metropolis, the Metro, and Maginot – “horrifyingly white-clean.”

What is also transfigured into that style is the actual schism – not simply the horrors caused by the Catholic/Protestant divide but the divide itself. Within Post-Reformation Europe, Loudun is no ordinary stronghold. It does not simply keep a Protestant people safe from a Catholic one or vice versa. Instead, it is a bastion of religious tolerance, keeping a Catholic/Protestant people away from a Catholic one. And this tolerance, of course, is paradoxical: it consists not simply in accepting the other faith but in accepting and rejecting it simultaneously – in being at once open to its existence and closed off from its practice. Loudun, then, is not simply an enclosure that gets opened up or breached; rather, it straddles a complex state of open enclosure but is assimilated into a straightforward – albeit nationwide – enclosure. It is not simply a unit that is divided; it straddles a complex state of divided unity but is brutally reduced to one of straightforward unity. For Russell and Jarman, what ultimately made the people of Loudun “crazy about their city” – what finally enabled them to subsume, in spite of all good reason, their personal enclosures and divisions, their animosity toward each other’s faiths, within a shared, ecstatic love for the place – was not some simple opening up, not just an absolute acceptance of the other’s faith, but an enclosure around that place.62 And what was vital about this enclosure was not just that it took the schism between Catholic and Protestant and placed it between Catholic-Protestant and Catholic, between open enclosure and straightforward enclosure, between divided unity and straightforward unity. It was also that the style of this enclosure was derived from the communal toilet – the very locus of that open enclosure and divided unity. The final lesson of The Devils is that the vital ingredient in forging a common, secular identity from secluded, religious sects lies in the creation of some pseudo-devotional object whose aesthetic incarnates the paradox of common seclusion. To put this slightly differently: there is no public without the public lavatory.63

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All images are screenshots from the film.