DEVIL

It’s really the last bastion of the creep. So we can’t help but be suspicious when people act like they’re here having wholesome fun. Behind strangers in the dark, and strangers behind us, all fixated on the fantasy that the merciless flux could be framed, which is to admit to being hopelessly covetous and afraid. But it can’t work if the lights aren’t down, which seems to be a problem in theater five lately. It’s like that nightmare scenario: you’re in an elevator and suddenly it stops and you have to look up and see your fellow passengers, and speak. “There’s a reason we’re the audience,” says the security guard to the police detective, as they peer into the video monitor at the stuck elevator onto which, the guard insists, the devil himself has come to harvest souls. So is it the smarmy salesman, the cranky middle-aged lady, the priss, the angry black man, or the guy in the hoodie who turns out to be an Afghanistan vet? It’s super-awkward. Then the lights go off—not in here, though—and one turns up dead, then another. I’ve been on subway cars like that. Having to deal with each other is literally the worst thing we can imagine.

Hard to believe no one’s ever had this idea for an opening before, it’s so simple but brilliant: a vivid helicopter shot of the Philadelphia skyline, projected upside-down. As we pan across the buildings their weight is palpable, they hang—as they truly do—off the belly of the earth. That vertiginous moment when Virgil and the Pilgrim clamber up Satan’s hairy legs and find themselves right-side up. The movies are Cartesian—they think they think, and therefore exist. But like him they reject the better hypothesis: it’s all a clever demon’s trick. We feel a presentiment of damnation whenever an ending is a twist.