The movies have had it with bad men.
Six years ago, almost to the day, I sat in a Toronto movie theater and watched Louis C.K.’s directorial debut, a winking Woody Allen tribute entitled I Love You, Daddy. The black-and-white film (an homage presumably to Allen’s Manhattan) starred John Malkovich as Leslie Goodwin, who starts wooing the barely legal teen daughter of Glen (played by C.K.). (Manhattan features a 40-something writer, played by Allen, dating a 17-year-old.)
This movie had it all, from impassioned speeches about who gets to decide if teens having sex with adults is consensual to men miming masturbation at their female colleagues. It was funny sometimes. It was uncomfortable. In my writeup, I wondered what exactly I Love You, Daddy was supposed to be doing, because it obviously was trying to do something.
If you didn’t see it, it’s probably because I Love You, Daddy’s buzzy release was summarily canceled mere weeks later when the long-rumored worst-kept secret on the comedy circuit — that C.K. had, for decades, been indeed masturbating in front of shell-shocked female colleagues — became public knowledge via a New York Times investigation. A day later, C.K. confirmed that the allegations were true. The rest is history.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24915564/megankoester.jpg)
Greenwich Entertainment
I’m not sure I ever could have predicted that six years after squirming through I Love You, Daddy, I’d be back in that Toronto theater, watching a documentary about C.K.’s rise, demise, and comeback. Sorry/Not Sorry, directed by Caroline Suh and Cara Mones, was produced by the New York Times; it had been set to premiere on Showtime, but the network dropped the project this June. Its great strength is its many interviews — with several of C.K.’s accusers (including comedians Jen Kirkman, Megan Koester, and Abby Schachner), with a number of New York Times journalists who worked on the story, and with Michael Ian Black (who expresses regret about defending C.K.’s recent comeback on Twitter) and Michael Schur (who hired C.K. on Parks and Recreation). That last set of interviewees raises the most pertinent question the documentary asks, which is why nobody did anything when everyone knew about C.K.’s behavior, and whether it’s that very inaction — “I thought, it’s not my problem,” says Schur — that is the problem.
The I Love You, Daddy premiere comes up in the film, of course, which implicitly raises a related question. If, as several in the film insist, everyone must have known about C.K.’s behavior — looking back at my writeup, I see that I mention it, which suggests it was mainstream knowledge — then what does it mean that this very festival showed the film and celebrated its filmmaker?
What it means, I suppose, is that the world changes slowly, if at all, and people who gatekeep culture make some very sticky decisions when it comes to art. (Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, after all, just premiered new films at the Venice Film Festival.) Sorry/Not Sorry doesn’t even try to answer the question of whether the movie should have been shown — or, perhaps to its detriment, whether all of the people excusing C.K.’s behavior are guilty not just of enabling his behavior but actively encouraging what seems like some mental health issues.
What it does do, though, is remind us that bad men get away with bad things in part because we’re conditioned, over and over, to see them as normal and funny, permutations of “locker room talk” and “just making a joke.” Several women in Sorry/Not Sorry talk about how they were discouraged from calling C.K.’s behavior out because people said, in essence, that that’s just what Louis does, and it’s weird and funny and come on, stop being so uptight, this is comedy after all.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24915565/womanofthehour.jpg)
Netflix
It was an eerie echo to hear a day after I saw Woman of the Hour, Anna Kendrick’s capable and engrossing directorial debut. The film tells the true tale of Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto), who was in the middle of a lengthy murder spree when he appeared on the game show The Dating Game in 1978. Kendrick plays Cheryl Bradshaw, the female contestant on that episode, who grows increasingly frustrated with the show’s real reason for existing: an excuse for the audience to howl at leering comments the male contestants would level at the women.
It’s startling to hear; there are obvious ways in which the TV of 1978 is not the TV of 2023. But what Kendrick’s film smartly weaves into the narrative is the many ways in which women are conditioned to put up with men because, as the saying goes, they’re afraid of being killed. (One of C.K.’s more famous bits has to do with his surprise that women keep dating men, since statistically and historically, men are the biggest danger women face.) The women who are attacked by Alcala are shown, with a queasy believability, trying to placate him, stroke his ego, smile to please him, and laugh off discomfort — all learned survival tactics.
A lot of us, though, are simply imitating what we’ve seen on a screen, whether it’s the plethora of movies in which women are chiefly the mollifying or pliant presence, or tales in which exploitative male behavior is chalked up to bravery, swagger, or genius. It’s still a little jarring to see films in which female protagonists simply refuse to play along, and refuse to be “likable,” either.
It’s not shocking that The Royal Hotel, which also played at TIFF, is one such film — no surprise coming from Kitty Green, whose previous film The Assistant was a devastating masterpiece about a new assistant to a Harvey Weinstein-like boss. Green re-teams with Julia Garner for this film, in which Hanna (Garner) and her best friend Liv (Jessica Henwick) are traveling through Australia and run out of money. They take temporary jobs at a pub in a remote mining town, laughing off the suggestion that they’ll have to be okay with some “male attention,” only to find themselves hemmed in at every turn by every variety of male attention.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24915568/royalhotel.jpg)
Neon
What makes The Royal Hotel brilliant, besides its heart-pounding performances, is how it illuminates the many ways in which men acting in socially acceptable, ordinary ways — playful catcalling, persistent passes, flexing power to be impressive — forms its own kind of horror house of mirrors in which it’s impossible to tell what’s truly sinister and what’s just someone acting like a guy they saw once in a Western. Hanna, far less amused by all the antics than Liv, is still sucked in by them. (“Men can be babies,” Cheryl is told in Women of the Hour, a refrain that fits here too.)
Can any of this be fixed? Could anything have been done about Louis C.K., a man who’d built an empire on the perception that he was trying to be a good guy? Can a culture willing to let men pretend machismo and a lack of empathy makes them men — an obvious falsehood, but one that people prefer — ever really fix itself? When we put these stories on screen, what are we even doing?
These are big questions that seem to be alive in this year’s movies, dealing with the ways that even “good” men are taught to be entitled and then allowed to be violently angry when they don’t get what they want. Yet that’s a hard story to tell, and an even harder one to live. Perhaps the only answer is to keep loudly insisting that these questions matter and that they deserve their own space on screen, too.
The only real alternative is to burn it all down.
The Royal Hotel opens in theaters on October 6. Greenwich Entertainment acquired Sorry/Not Sorry after its TIFF premiere. Netflix acquired Woman of the Hour for distribution after its TIFF premiere.
The Exorcist: Believer shows how American religion and Hollywood movies have shifted.
The identity of the titular, singular “exorcist” of The Exorcist has always been a little murky. In the 1973 original — which overcame studio skepticism to become one of the most successful and significant horror films of all time — there are a few exorcists, all priests trying to cast a demon out of a 12-year-old girl named Regan (Linda Blair). The movie’s true protagonist is Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), a priest experiencing a serious crisis of faith, but there’s also a more seasoned exorcist in the mix, Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow). So there are at least two exorcists (plus a third priest, a friend of Karras’s), and thus the movie’s tension and allure come from its plot ambiguity. You don’t really know what’s going to happen, or who’s going to survive this encounter with the pits of hell. It all ends pretty horribly.
There have been a bunch of Exorcist installments in the intervening 50 years, some more successful than others. The Exorcist: Believer, the newest film in the franchise, is meant to operate as a loose sequel to the 1973 original. Director David Gordon Green claims the rest of the films “fall into the acceptable mythology” of his new film (though their events aren’t mentioned in the movie). Should it be successful, Believer is planned as the start of a trilogy sequel-reboot of the series, much like the Halloween films that were released between 2018 and 2022. (Green helmed those too, along with writers Danny McBride and Scott Teems, who return for this film.)
As a film, it’s at best serviceable, stronger in its world-building than in its climactic exorcism and nowhere near as unnerving as the original. Yet Believer is a fascinating artifact of 2023. It highlights in myriad ways how much the world has changed since the original’s release. Hollywood isn’t the same, and neither is American religious culture.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24977441/exorcist1.jpg)
Universal Pictures
That The Exorcist: Believer’s title still employs the singular case furnishes even more of a misnomer than it did in the original; these days there seem to be an awful lot of exorcists trotting around. Set (and released) 50 years after the events of The Exorcist, Believer centers on single dad Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.) and his young teen daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) living in Georgia. (The names are more than lightly allegorical.) Angela’s mother died in an earthquake in Haiti, just after Angela was blessed, in utero, by a Haitian woman.
Angela disappears into the woods with her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum) and the pair turn up three days later, 30 miles away, shoeless and seemingly disturbed. As their behavior grows more erratic, neighbors like Ann, a nurse who lives next door (Ann Dowd), Victor’s sparring partner from the boxing gym (Danny McCarthy), and Katherine’s parents (Jennifer Nettles and Norbert Leo Butz) get drawn into desperately finding a solution. Ann leads Victor — who lost whatever faith he’d had after his wife died — toward someone who might know something about erratic behavior among young teen girls: Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn, who starred in the 1973 film), mother of Regan.
Out here in the world you and I inhabit, The Exorcist’s original release sparked immense controversy among clergy and critics, with Catholics divided on whether the movie was vile, blasphemous, or a great recruiting tool for the church. Billy Graham — emphatically not Catholic, and extremely influential at the time — decried the film as having the devil in every frame. Requests for exorcisms (from Catholics and otherwise) rose sharply, a trend that’s ebbed and flowed in the years since. Beyond its religious implications, the film furnished a cultural touchpoint, especially since its sold-out showings and reports of fainting and possession-like behavior from inside the theater helped bolster it at the box office. You may never have seen The Exorcist, but you probably know the gist of it.
The Exorcist — in contrast to Believer, unfortunately — is indeed genuinely shocking, even if the scene in which Regan’s head literally spins is a little less viscerally terrifying to audiences brought up on slicker effects. (The special effects throughout the original movie are still extraordinary and would have seemed far more so in 1973.) Perhaps the most reflexively terrifying moment is when Regan (who is, we are meant to understand, in the early clutches of puberty) sticks a crucifix into her vulva repeatedly, an image that’s so distressing and painful and sacrilegious — it is the hell demon possessing the girl that’s violating her — that it is hard to speak of, even now.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24977428/exorcistog1.jpg)
Warner Bros.
At one point in Believer I thought we might be witnessing a repeat of that moment: a demon howls and a metal crucifix falls off the wall, and I thought, Oh no, I can’t handle watching this again. But it’s used for quite a different disgusting purpose, and while that’s plenty disturbing on its own, it pales in comparison to the vulva-stabbing. That was the most telling moment in the film, though: In the instant after the thought occurred, it vanished, because if there’s one thing I know about mainstream Hollywood productions, it’s that they’d never do that today. (For that kind of shock, you need to dive deep into independent productions unbothered by studio executive notes, or reach outside of American borders.)
This isn’t the only way in which Believer shows how seismic the cultural shift has been from 1973 to 2023. The themes of the original Exorcist film are threefold: faith tested and renewed in the face of supernatural evil; anxieties about parenting, particularly for single parents; and the threat, particularly to patriarchy, that surfaces when girls reach puberty. All three are illustrated vibrantly throughout that film, and all mapped strongly onto what was going on in the broader culture. A decade of sexual liberation and feminist activism had given women new freedoms, but also stirred new anxieties in a culture that demonized single, working mothers and sexually liberated women. These specific anxieties would be tied into fears of the demonic and the occult well into the 1990s via the Satanic panic.
More broadly, though, the mid-20th century into the 1970s was a time of tumult for belief, particularly in America, where a combination of postwar trauma, 1960s rebellions, new spiritual voices, and apocalyptic dread combined to send traditional religious hierarchy into a tailspin. Even Vatican II, which concluded in 1965, radically changed how the Catholic Church conducted its business and upended its long-defined order. In the ensuing upheaval, some Catholics found their faith strengthened, while others were threatened, leaving the church for other traditions, or none at all. Even beyond Catholicism, 1970s Christian America was gripped by a kind of apocalypticism that translated into phenomena like the rise of cults and the wild success of Hal Lindsey’s biblical-prophecy-as-conspiracy-theory book The Late Great Planet Earth. The Exorcist tapped into that specifically Catholic doubt and uncertainty, but was applicable far beyond the Pope’s reach, and it did not leave viewers with any firm answers to their searching questions.
In a similar way to the original, Believer (as perhaps befits the name) reflects the religious tenor of our times. To its credit, the film actually understands, with a literacy far beyond typical Hollywood fare, the kinds of practices that separate, say, Pentecostals from mainline Baptists from Catholics. Yet this is not a film that assumes Catholics have a handle on how to cast out demons; over and over, the characters state that religions all over the world have rites for exorcism, and ultimately opt for a (not very effective) nondenominational exorcism. (It’s still mostly Christian, though there’s some rootwork mixed in.)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24977444/exorcist3.jpg)
Universal Pictures
That patchwork approach to religion, though — in which it’s assumed that no one tradition is the right one, and that we can draw from all kinds of traditions in creating whatever works best for us to connect with the divine — is a marker of 21st-century America. As sociological studies have noted, the fastest-growing religious group in America are the “nones,” who don’t identify with any particular religion, though they may take part in spiritual practice. In this way, Believer is an Exorcist for 2023, constructed around a world where God and evil are real, but the ways we reach the supernatural aren’t predominately guided by organized religion. It’s a thoroughly modern approach to the same themes.
Ultimately, Believer opts for a more optimistic ending than The Exorcist, which might be the most revealing choice of them all. Believer comes off almost like a Christian movie, if you toned down some of the horror and gore. It hews to a Christian movie dictum as well: The end of a movie has to be inspirational and uplifting. This film ends with a statement that feels designed to comfort the audience: that the only tool we truly have to ward off evil is one another. Our comfort doesn’t really come from faith in God, but faith in the people around us. They help us sustain our dreams in the face of grief and loss and the unknowable. Love is all you need, and so on.
In truth, it’s not just Christian films that require a happy ending; virtually every mainstream Hollywood production concludes with some kind of meditation on love, community, family, or friendship, and how even when the world is ending we can find our comfort in one another. So Believer is a product of today’s movie market as well as the religious marketplace.
None of this makes Believer good — but it does make it interesting, and its likely box office success is a reminder that exorcism stories remain fascinating to us. Even the most modern and secular among us are a little afraid of losing our children to a force beyond our control. We worry, somewhere deep down in our most ancient psyches, whether we actually have sovereignty over our own selves, or if we can be swept up by malign spirits we can’t even see. The world around us has shifted a great deal in the last 50 years. But some things, it seems, never change.
The Exorcist: Believer opens in theaters on October 6.
As tourism returns to Maui, those displaced by this year’s deadly fires face losing their homes again.
Like many other families this August, Krizhna Bayudan, 23, a Lāhainā resident, recalls her family of six sleeping in their cars wondering whether their house, where she has lived her entire life, burned down in the fires that decimated West Maui. They would later learn that it was completely destroyed, along with every other house in their neighborhood. Her family relocated at least five times within the first few weeks before being placed at a hotel-condominium in Kāʻanapali. “It’s so nice to just see people we used to see … and knowing that they’re okay,” Bayudan said, describing walking the hotel’s hall, which has become a collective space for many other displaced families.
Just one month after the deadliest wildfires in US history ravaged West Maui — killing at least 97 people, displacing thousands, and incinerating the historic town of Lāhainā — Hawaii’s governor announced that the island would fully reopen to tourism. Beginning October 8, travel restrictions will be lifted and visitors will be welcome to resume their vacations.
The reopening means that families like Bayudan’s face yet another displacement from hotels as they prepare to make room for tourists who will soon lodge in the same rooms that have been used as emergency housing. This moment underscores historic tensions between tourism and local residents and Hawaiians: Maui’s economy depends on tourism, yet the visitor industry is making it increasingly unlivable for those who call it home. Now, with a reopening for tourists being framed by their governor as a welcome return to normalcy, many locals feel the opposite as they navigate what they see as a housing crisis within the climate crisis.
Bayudan and her family have been told by the American Red Cross, which operates the hotel for fire survivors, that they would have lodging there until October 31, which was later confirmed via email by the resort’s management company. But she joins many other displaced residents in their fear of the unknown. She’s heard that the date could be extended, but if not, she has no idea where her family will move next. While living in the hotel has given her and her family some much-needed relief, the uncertainty around when they would need to relocate has made it impossible for them to feel settled and safe. Bayudan told Vox that her family is still in danger of being relocated well before that date if the rental owners decide that they want to come back to Maui.
“I just want a final answer already,” she said. Until then, she will continue living out of her suitcase.
Hawaii Gov. Josh Green’s administration, along with the Hawaii Tourism Authority, is imploring visitors to return to spend money at the island’s hotels, restaurants, retail shops, and visitor experiences in order to support its economic recovery. “We have to just begin to heal,” Green said during a recent news conference at the state capitol in Honolulu, on Oahu.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24977846/GettyImages_1668665655.jpg)
Tamir Kalifa/Washington Post via Getty Images
After survivors spent weeks sleeping in gymnasiums, church halls, in their cars, and on the beach, nearly 8,000 people are currently sheltering across 40 Maui hotels. Many of them are employed in the visitor industry, some at the very hotels where they’re staying. A majority of them are in impacted West Maui, which hosts over 50 percent of the entire island’s lodging capacity.
“As we continue care of those displaced, we may look to consolidate or shrink our footprint across hotels,” said the American Red Cross in a statement to Vox. “During this process, some people may need to be relocated to different hotel properties. However, we will communicate all changes with our residents and do our best to ensure the least amount of disruption as possible.”
Veronica Mendoza Jachowski, co-founder of Roots Reborn Lāhainā, a group of Maui-based immigration lawyers and community organizers, is currently providing direct emergency needs assessment to Latino immigrants, including undocumented survivors. She said the uncertainty is already doing the work of forcing some community members out. “They’re leaving the hotels and now paying rent,” she said. “They’re not even two months out, and they’re already hustling to make ends meet so that they can pay rent.”
For some, the October 8 reopening signifies a rushed return
Gov. Green and the American Red Cross have assured that those who qualify for housing assistance will not be kicked out of the hotels without alternative accommodation. The reopening has nonetheless stoked fears of further displacement and reignited outrage from state residents over whom their home ultimately caters to, and how much longer it can sustain that servitude. Some survivors have already reported receiving notices from their hotels asking them to vacate. Others remain on edge, fearing that it’s only a matter of time before they receive their own notices.
At the end of September, the state’s Safe Harbor program ended, threatening more than 600 disaster survivors with displacement if they did not register to remain in temporary housing by that date or could not show proof of residence, Hawaii News Now reported. Some survivors, including those who were unsheltered before the fires, will now be transferred back into a temporary shelter setting.
Those who don’t face relocation still fear that it’s too soon to return to normal. “There is this forced attempt to make the October 8 reopening feel happy and cheery and inevitable,” said Khara Jabola-Carolus, a former state official now volunteering primarily for Tagnawa, an immigrant group organized in the wake of the fire. Tagnawa provides a working-class Filipino response for the Filipino immigrants who make up roughly 40 percent of Lāhainā’s community.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24968197/AP23250724398762.jpg)
Jennifer Sinco Kelleher/AP Photo
Interacting directly with those impacted, she has heard “the spectrum” of responses to the reopening, but none of them have been eager. “It’s this looming date that everyone is dreading,” she said.
“Some people [say], ‘Well, we know that it’s good for the rest of the island, so we’re willing to take it for the rest of Maui because we don’t want to hurt our friends,’” Jabola-Carolus added. “What I saw more of, personally, were people erupting into tears and talking about how sad it was making them.”
Healing, many survivors believe, is the last thing the reopening will bring.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24977861/GettyImages_1664598721.jpg)
Tamir Kalifa/Washington Post via Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24977862/GettyImages_1664596456.jpg)
Tamir Kalifa/Washington Post via Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24968179/1668665477.jpg)
Tamir Kalifa/Washington Post via Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24977868/GettyImages_1668665514.jpg)
Tamir Kalifa/Washington Post via Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24977869/GettyImages_1668665629.jpg)
Tamir Kalifa/Washington Post via Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24977872/GettyImages_1664607364.jpg)
Tamir Kalifa/Washington Post via Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24977871/GettyImages_1664597865.jpg)
Tamir Kalifa/Washington Post via Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24977877/GettyImages_1644509539.jpg)
Tamir Kalifa/Washington Post via Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24977876/GettyImages_1636810855.jpg)
Tamir Kalifa/Washington Post via Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24968182/1668665597.jpg)
Tamir Kalifa/Washington Post via Getty Images