That time John Carpenter found the devil in quantum physics

The surprising depth in this little-known gem by a legendary film-maker

Catholic priests and scientists aren't supposed to agree about the nature of the world.

That's key to the mythology of our modern age.

The Science shows us that the world is nothing but matter and energy out there banging around.

Christianity is a hangover from a less enlightened age when man still believed in gods and demons haunting the night.

The scientists turned a floodlight on the dark and discovered it was all an illusion. There's nothing out there but more particles banging around.

John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness takes that idea out with the trash

Today's viewer can't help but notice how Carpenter totally fails to ridicule the Christian faithful in the name of atheist materialism.

Any snark-filled sci-fi film worth its salt today couldn't wait to sink its ironic venom into the soft necks of any character stupid enough to believe in God.

Religious characters must be dull, emotionally troubled people prone to psychotic meltdowns.

While Carpenter isn't quite a friend to the Christian believer, he's not an outright opponent. That by itself makes for a more interesting sort of story than the one-sided hit piece.

The film's premise is standard horror-movie stuff

Satan's alive and well as a green goo locked in a million year old glass jar, hidden away by a secret order in the Catholic church.

Then we add a team of 80s grad students led by the sorcerer Egg Shen – no, wait,  hang on, that's long-time Carpenter collaborator Victor Wong, playing a physics professor.

The character of the priest, played by Donald Pleasance, brings these jaded academics into the fold of the church – literally, as this is where the action takes place.

But it's the metaphorical dimension where this tension between modern science and old-time religion gets interesting.

The thematic core of the movie sets it apart from a B-tier hack-n-slash

What if the weird world of quantum physics and the religious doctrines of Christianity were two ways of describing the same thing?

The professor of physics teases the viewer with hints of the weird quantum world, which challenges all of our intuitions about matter and time and causality.

The Catholic priest tells a secret tale of the Church's origins – hinted to be aliens – as a defense mechanism against the circulating green goop and the chaotic "Anti-God" it seeks to revive.

What if the creator of the universe were incompatible with our experiences of the world?

You can watch this film as a group of hapless 20-somethings stumbling blind into an ancient horror as they're picked off one by one.

That's the low-level viewing.

The dialogue between science and religion is the real meat of the story. Carpenter dramatizes this effectively, using mildly graphic action to show us the darkness waiting just outside the lights of reason.

It turns out that those illuminating spotlights didn't show the scientists as much as they thought.

Our confidence in science turns out to be a fatal arrogance.

But what if it turned out that God was not the benevolent creator of Christianity, either?

That's the truly unsettling message of the film

What if religion were all a sham? What if the force sustaining the all creation was an inverted, evil power?

If science turns out to be powerless against the chaotic forces of reality, religion is not exactly in a better position.

That's the conclusion of at least one character.

And a bleak conclusion it is. That, combined with the "explaining" of religion in materialistic terms, might seem like talking down to any religious-minded viewers.

It might seem like an entirely pessimistic conclusion.

This is compounded by the prophetic dreams which appear to be broadcast into the mind from the far-off future year of... 1999.

But it's not so simple as that

The fusion of religion and science doesn't get rid of faith in the name of all-knowing science.

That's how it would go in any of today's snark-fests.

Carpenter's bold enough to challenge that central dogma of the modern age.

Good and Evil aren't found only in the hearts and minds of human being.

Evil is more than the corruption of the human will.  

These aren't subjective projections on to a neutral reality of facts.

Good and Evil are real and objective aspects of the natural order. As real and natural as the particles studied by physicists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3252Ostw2wI

The climax of the film shows us the physical embodiment of that evil in all its glory.

What about that mysterious figure seen leaving the church in the time-warped dream from the future?

The question of freedom and fate hangs over the conclusion of the film. Carpenter's a wise enough storyteller to leave that question unanswered.

Whether that future can be prevented, or whether fate wins, would tell us a great deal about the prospects of Good in a universe of quantum evil.

We don't get those answers. Rightly so.

The unresolved tension between two potent but incomplete worldviews is much more interesting getting all the answers handed to you

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Why Blindsight isn't all that great a story

Peter Watt's grimdark nihilism mixes the best of SF speculation with unlikeable people and a depressing message

You wake up one day to discover that your family lives in a computer and a race of hyper-intelligent vampires hunts the survivors

I'm talking about Peter Watts' much-remarked book Blindsight.

There's a lot for the sci-fi geek to like here.

Mind uploads into a shared VR reality which is more fun than living out in the real world.

Biologically realistic vampires revived from extinction by genetic cloning tech.

The selling point of the story is the wildest aliens like you'll never see on Star Trek. They don't even have mushy foreheads.

Even the human crew of the starship Theseus (a prophetic name if there ever was one) isn't quite normal.

Not surprising. The central conceit of Watts' existential SF horror story is that normal ain't what it used to be.

The headline of this post might give the impression that I don't like the book.

Not true.

There are things I like about it. There's things I don't like about it.

The discussions of consciousness and evolution are some of the most interesting parts of the book.

What I don't like is how one-sided it all is. The deep thinking is put out there in the service of an agenda.

And that agenda? Nihilistic grimdark fatalism.

Nothing matters woe-is-me I forgot my Zanax today.

C'mon.

If nothing matters then why'd you wake up and create this beautiful piece of art for the readers to enjoy?

Existential nihilism is so boring because it's so clearly the author's own psychological hang-ups intruding into the writing.

If the author coughed up a wad of black phlegm all over the page it would be less of a heavy-handed intrusion into the story.

The philosophical story about consciousness as an evolutionary dead-end sounds plausible enough. As a story premise, it's fantastic. What we have here is a tantalizing tale that wraps up reflections about mind, life in a purposeless world, Fermi's paradox, the hard problems of space travel, and more themes I'm certainly forgetting.

I don't agree with any of Watts's conclusions, by the by, but my philosophical disagreement is less important than the broaching of the subject, or its use as a dramatic core.

In story terms, what the crew of doomed Theseus discovers at that rogue planet beyond the edge of the solar system explains a whole lot about the haunting silence of the stars.

The difficulties of space travel for warm, wet Earth-adapted beings like ourselves hit home hard.

That stuff is the best part of the book. The problem's different.

The story itself is ultimately unsatisfying, like all nihilistic stories. Who cares what happens to any of these people if nothing, nothing done by any human ever, matters?

Horrific dread and terror have a place in all kinds of fantastic fiction. The depressive nihilism of the story runs well past that. We cross the line beyond unsettling to the point where you have to wnder what's the point of reading stories.

We get it, the world sucks and everything sucks and nothing matters and I forgot to take my SSRIs today.

Here's a dirty secret about philosophy. Very few abstract ideas are motivated by rigorous argument and supporting reasons alone. Many of the deepest problems about knowledge, ethics, and What Exists could be better explained as psychological scruples.

Worried about free will? Think ethics are just somebody's opinions? Believe that nobody can know anything?

It won't surprise you to learn that the people who believe these things almost always fall into a certain psychological profile.

You'll know it when you meet them because they are by temperament jaded, cynical, pessimistic people.

Around here at RP we love to dabble in the bleak side of things. The empty black void of space. The inevitable impact of technology on the human condition. Synthesizer music. Cultural wastelands. Existential terror. All that and more.

But Your Host also recognizes the other side. Bleak for bleak's sake isn't satisfying.

If you want to look at the ugly, you have to contrast it with beauty.

Ditto for the contrast of good and evil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA9GhsYt2O0

It's the contrast that makes the meaning. Get rid of that and all you've got is a boring wasteland of grey-scale junk.

PS – If you enjoy these posts, why not subscribe? That way you can receive them directly in your inbox... and you'll get the members-only posts.

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