Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
Hail Satan?
★★★★
Now playing
The past few years have taught us not to doubt the political power of a good troll. Modern Satanism’s recent revival tends to be treated as an amusing curiosity. Director Penny Lane zeroes in on the political project behind the media-baiting antics, making Hail Satan? a funny, compelling portrait of a group that’s pushing the limits on just how far a prank can go before it turns into something else.
If there’s one thing twenty-first-century Satanism is good at, it’s looking the part. Satanic Temple co-founder and primary spokesperson Lucien Greaves, with his scarred right eye and permanently smug expression, is basically a real-life Bond villain. Lane lets him do most of the explaining, and he characterizes the enterprise in the language of Enlightenment liberalism.
According to Greaves, ever since Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan in the 1960s, modern Satanism has been distinguished by its self-aware, atheistic understanding of Satan as a metaphor for freedom, not a supernatural deity.
“Blasphemy isn’t just directed at other people to offend them,” Greaves says. “Blasphemy is very much a declaration of personal independence.” The Satanic Temple was instituted in 2013 to advocate for religious freedom, countering what its members see as the U.S. evangelical movement’s efforts to undermine the Constitutional separation of church and state. The film’s main subject is the Temple’s nationwide campaign to block or remove statues of the Ten Commandments from state property.
They’ve successfully accomplished this by counter-proposing their own monument: a statue of the demon Baphomet on the same grounds. In some of the funniest scenes, Greaves and other Satanists stand before GOP state legislatures, forcing them to recognize that if one religion is permitted to build a religious monument, any federally recognized religion can—and, in the U.S., there is no single official determination of a religion’s status. As Greaves says of the most famous episode, “We were giving the Oklahoma government a civics lesson.”
A more radical push from within the movement comes from Jex Blackmore, head of the Detroit chapter, for whom “activism is a Satanic practice.” On the film’s evidence, she is the most skilled at choreographing theatrical spectacles, but as the organization grows and becomes more institutionalized, her preference for direct action over gaming the legal system is increasingly sidelined. That she’s also dropped from the film when she’s dropped from the organization feels like a missed opportunity.
Hail Satan? is more effective at highlighting the contradiction between the Satanic Temple’s stated intentions, which at their stuffiest feel a bit like Dawkins-style atheism meets hashtag resistance, and the evident appeal of the group’s use of ritual. Satanism is not just an elaborate troll; it also satisfies a genuine spiritual need that modern liberal society can’t.
arts@indyweek.com
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