c. 1996 Religion News Service
(Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Winston-Salem, N.C, an author and a former Wall Street Journal reporter. E-mail him at journey(at)interpath.com.)
UNDATED _ In the bargain box at Blockbuster Video, my 16-year-old son recently found”Rosemary’s Baby,”the 1968 thriller about the birth of Satan’s heir in a witches’ coven on the 7th floor of New York’s fabled Dakota apartments.
Watching it again after 28 years, I was struck by how chaste the movie was in its treatment of evil. The witches next door were a nosy but charming elderly pair. Their witch-friends resembled a genial bridge club. Mia Farrow’s rape by Satan barely rippled the surface. Satan was a green, scaly figure who inspired quaint rituals among his followers. When Mia Farrow agreed to raise the scion of evil, the moviegoer was led to smile at her maternal instinct.
At the time, Roman Polanski’s film was horrifying. Now its portrayal of evil seems subdued, almost likable _ like a Norman Rockwell painting of a typical American family.
Now I understand the danger of nostalgia.”Rosemary’s Baby”seems to have been filmed at the precise moment when our national innocence about true evil came to a crashing end. After a childhood diet of Lash LaRue whipping hapless bad guys, suddenly King and Kennedy were assassinated. Riots in cities and on college campuses pitted citizens against each other. A tragic war seared a generation. Drugs swooped in. We could no longer avoid seeing the systemic poverty that was crippling black communities. We finally grappled with images of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
Even the film was overtaken by events. The Dakota apartment building in Manhattan, made famous by this movie, gained new notoriety as the scene of John Lennon’s murder. The film’s director seduced a young teen-age girl and fled to France to avoid prosecution. The star became tabloid fodder for her bitter custody battle with an aging director who was romancing a teen.
In fact, these latter years have unmasked evil itself. We know about drug dealers who prey on the young, parents who commit incest with children, leaders who lie and cheat, companies that treat people as commodities, and a system in which a few grow extraordinarily rich at the expense of a growing underclass. It’s hard to be moved by a scaly figure with claw-like fingers.
The nostalgia craze of these end-of-millennium days looks back to an idealized era when life was seemingly better. Boys and girls shared”young love,”not babies; ball players didn’t care what they were paid; jobs were for life; marriages were for life; downtowns had stores;”drug store”meant pharmacy; Ike played golf in safety; and evil meant witches and midnight rituals, rather than a frightening presence touching our very lives.
We are tired of seeing how much all this has changed _ if indeed it ever was true, for hindsight isn’t always 20-20. So we fantasize about a golden era, and treat the present as an unpleasant aberration.
Nowhere is nostalgia more pursued than in Christmas festivities. The cry goes up,”Put Christ back into Christmas!”_ as if the downtown shopping frenzy of the 1950s were somehow more Christ-centered than the suburban mall frenzy of today. We yearn for old-time images, beloved traditions. Woe to the pastor who dares alter the Christmas pageant. Woe to the family that can’t measure up to old-time images. We have come to see Christmas as perhaps the last Maginot Line against change.
The cloak of nostalgia isn’t our friend. Instead of yearning for simpler times, we should be steeling ourselves for the challenge of complexity. Instead of treating cultural ugliness as an aberration, we should see that it comes from within us. Instead of thinking that family walks on tree-shaded streets in long-ago villages would make life work again, we should recognize the assault of evil.
By evil I don’t mean the green, scaly, once-in-a-millennium fornicator that 1968 sensibilities dictated, but a frightening dissembler and destroyer of lives whose relentless handiwork we can barely stand to see.
It was this relentless foe, after all, whom God sent his Son to combat.
MJP END EHRICH
