The Devil's Diagnosis of Disenchanted Modernity

Cinematic reflections on our modern malaise

Jul 22, 2024

Dear Living Dark reader,

There was a time in my twenties and thirties when grim visions of the human prospect like those found in dystopian novels were prominent in my thinking and feeling about life. I found them kind of exhilarating, even though there were also depressing. The paradoxical pleasure of prophetic doomsaying, I suppose.

But that was in the 1990s and early 2000s. As we all know, doomerism and dystopian dreaming went mainstream beginning in the late aughts, and with that having occurred, today I find that my affections have flipped a bit, so that I rather groove with the brilliant conceit put forth by Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof in their screenplay for 2015’s Tomorrowland—a flawed movie that nonetheless deserved a better box office and critical fate than it received—that our collective obsession with narratives of doom has become a self-fulfilling prophecy that will destroy us if we don’t come to terms with it.

But even so, lucid and cathartic articulations and identifications of the dystopian potentials before us and among us retain their charm and remain as necessary orienting points. Or at least that’s how it is in my own life, where significant moments of deep responsiveness to cinema, literature, and music have formed a kind of inner mountain range of enduring, prominent peaks that serve to orient me in my journey through this experience of seeming to be a separate individual inhabiting a spontaneously unfolding world.

Today I found my thoughts turning to three of these peaks. Then I found myself writing about them. What follows is the result, which I offer for your edification, enjoyment, or whatever else you might derive from them.

Mr. Frost (1990)

Thirty-four years after Jeff Goldblum played the eponymous serial killer who just may be the devil in Mr. Frost, his character still has some of the best dialogue ever written/spoken in an English-language movie—and a horror movie, to boot—about the spiritual malaise of modern scientific-technocratic culture.

As Mr. Frost speaks to the psychiatrist assigned to him (Kathy Baker in a strong performance) in the institution where he’s incarcerated, she decides to humor him to see what she can find out. “Let’s say you are who you say you are,” she says. “Now, what would the devil be doing here?” Frost/Goldblum’s reply offers a mini-diagnosis of what has gone wrong in history as science and technocracy have converged on the cultural center and produced a disenchanted world in which the societal guardians and figureheads of reality and sanity and mental health are cut off from all sense of the spiritual or numinous:

I wanted to set some things right. You took a few years and undid centuries of effort. It used to be simple: God on one hand, evil on the other. There was a struggle. We had a game. And yes, we made it up. But then you came along—the scientists, the geniuses. You know, you couldn’t care less about the human spirit. You’re in your heads. You’re half-hearted. You believe in nothing. There was a time when people sold their souls to me for youth or wealth. Well, these days I know you think you don’t need Mr. Frost. But where’s your enthusiasm? There’s no passion. There’s no life.

Dr. Day—note the symbolism of the name—asks him, “So what do you want from us? What do you want from me?” And Mr. Frost, after making an intentionally jarring joke about hoping she can cure his bed-wetting, states his purpose for being in the world as follows:

I want, I must, reveal to the world your impotence in the presence of the age-old power of the wild side.

He then goes to explain that to accomplish this considerable feat, he is going persuade her to do the absolute worst thing that a modern-day, rationally-scientifically trained psychiatrist could do to a patient: He is going to convince her of the truth of what she regards as his delusion—that he is the devil—so that she will feel compelled to murder him. “The very negation,” he observes with quiet menace and satisfaction, “of an entire era of progress.”

If you haven’t seen this movie, I strongly urge that you track it down. You can also watch the excerpts above. The scene I have been describing starts at 2:40. The scene immediately prior to it shows Dr. Day’s and Mr. Frost’s first meeting. As you’ll see, the good writing is elevated by Goldblum’s performance. He positively radiates his signature charisma, though in a darker form than usual.

I suppose you might also say that Goldblum as Frost acted as a kind of devilish muse to me, for when I was working at a piano and digital keyboard shop in 2004 and 2005, and when daily proximity to those instruments began to draw a torrent of new musical compositions out of me, I ended up composing and recording one song, which I titled “Daimonica,” that used a combination of original music and audio clips from multiple movies to express what I then thought and felt about the experience of being internally driven by a seemingly independent and autonomous creative force. At one point, I inserted Frost’s “I want, I must” to express that sense of absolute compulsion. Here’s the song:

“Daimonica”

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-4:23

Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

Perhaps not tangentially, back when I first watched Mr. Frost with avid fascination in college, I also happened to be obsessed with Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and its flawed but wonderful 1966 film adaptation by director François Truffaut. Every time I heard or thought of Mr. Frost’s impassioned diagnosis of the soul deadness of modernity, I flashed on a line from Truffaut’s movie.

It’s spoken by Montag in the scene where his wife holds a dinner party for some of her friends. Montag, who has been reading forbidden books and finding his intellectual and emotional life consequently inflamed by strange, unfamiliar, and fascinating new thoughts and feelings, recognizes the insipid and galling shallowness of these people who don’t even feel moved or engaged with reality when something like the death of a husband occurs. They all live in the superficial hyperworld and headspace of emptiness, distraction, chemical sedation, and endless entertainment that their dystopian society has taught them to regard as the real world. And Montag, his frustration erupting, utters a charge at them that might have come from the mouth of Mr. Frost:

You’re nothing but zombies, all of you....You’re not living, you’re just killing time!

I couldn’t find an embeddable video, but you can watch the scene here.

My Dinner with Andre (1981)

Equally impactful is Andre’s grim vision in My Dinner with Andre of where humanity may be headed, which is all the more striking because it just kind of comes out of nowhere, with none of the previous dialogue having forecast that a vivid dystopian vision is about to be voiced:

See, I keep meeting these people, I mean, just a few days ago I met this man whom I greatly admire. He’s a Swedish physicist, Gustav Björnstrand. And he told me that he no longer watches television, he doesn’t read newspapers, and he doesn’t read magazines. He’s completely cut them out of his life, because he really does feel that we’re living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now, and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot.
And when I was at Findhorn, I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted his life to saving trees. He just got back from Washington, lobbying to save the redwoods. He’s eighty-four years old and he always travels with a backpack because he never knows where he’s going to be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn he said to me, “Where are you from?” And I said, “New York.” He said, “Ah, New York! Yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave but never do?” And I said, “Oh, yes!” And he said, “Why do you think they don’t leave?” I gave him different banal theories, and he said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all. I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built. They’ve built their own prison. And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia, where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result, having been lobotomized, they no longer have the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made, or to even see it as a prison.” And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, “This is a pine tree.” He put it in my hand and said, “Escape, before it’s too late.”
You see, actually, for two or three years now [my wife] Chiquita and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out, that we really should feel like Jews in Germany in the late thirties. Get out of here! Of course, the problem is where to go, because it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction.
You see, I think it’s quite possible that the nineteen-sixties represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished. And that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now, and that from now on there will simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there will be almost nobody left to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts. And that history and memory are right now being erased, and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet.

As with Goldblum’s dialogue in Mr. Frost, Andre’s words lodged in my creative mind and ended up working their way into a song that I composed: