As a parade of presidential candidates attempt to come up with uniquely anodyne messages of hope and unity, Penny Lane’s Hail Satan? provides an interesting counterpoint, proving that a grassroots movement founded with an oppositional mindset can be both optimistic and politically productive. It helps, of course, to have an image as provocative as the devil on your side, and Lane’s documentary shrewdly illustrates how media savvy can turn a fledgling protest into an international cause célèbre. Like Our Nixon and Nuts! before it, Hail Satan? is an effectively jolly takedown of the powerful and foolhardy.
A fleet blend of original, borrowed, and archival news footage, the film takes a wry and generous approach to the Satanic Temple, the interrogative in its title scanning as a good-natured “Why not?” Lane begins Hail Satan? in a richly comedic vein, as Lucien Greaves, co-founder of the Satanic Temple, orchestrates a protest outside the Florida state capitol in 2013. As one member calls the media to promote the event (“The Satanic Temple. S, as in Sam.”), someone in a grim reaper outfit passes by and walks up a staircase. This strain of irony continues at the scantly attended rally, where a hired actor representing the group repeatedly yells “Hail Satan! Hail Rick Scott,” referring to the Florida governor who was then supporting a bill allowing schoolchildren to share messages promoting their faith during assemblies.
This meager public display yields an outsized impact in the media and in local politics, a theme that Lane hits repeatedly, and with impressive restraint. After the rally, Greaves fires his fake spokesman and reluctantly becomes the face of the Satanic Temple; though he claims that he didn’t want to be the face of the group (he may have suspected that his goth aesthetic and one clouded-over eye belied the appeal of his message), Greaves needed to be its voice. In “supporting” a bill intended to bolster the place of Christianity in public life, Greaves asserts his freedom of religion to support the devil in kind.
In some cases, this terrifies the religious right enough to force them to backtrack legislation that would serve to blur the separation between church and state. This is, for Greaves and his flock, a remarkable feat of activism and rhetoric, and Greaves’s calm, clearly argued statements rile up the media and attract tens of thousands of followers. Some are disillusioned Jews and Christians, others are merry trolls, and still more are drawn to the Satanic Temple’s broader efforts to promote religious pluralism and combat other strains of extremism (protests at women’s health clinics, various local efforts to install images of the Ten Commandments in public buildings). As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes says in one of the film’s many cable news clips: “You open the door to God, you open the door to Satan.”
Lane documents the temple’s growth in a string of talking-head interviews (a few, amusingly, feature horn-wearing members blacked out in silhouette to preserve their anonymity) and visits to burgeoning local chapters around the country. Most provocative is the Detroit church, led by Jex Blackmore, who takes the group’s adversarial nature to feminist extremes. Greaves isn’t above bold antics, gaining attention by setting up a protest of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps wherein same-sex couples make out over the grave of Phelps’s dead mother, but as the group’s membership grows his instincts become more cautious.
The innerworkings of the Satanic Temple are unfortunately left a bit oblique, and the film too often feels like an advertorial for the group. Late in the film, Blackmore is excommunicated from the temple after calling for the assassination of Donald Trump. Lane uses this rupture to reveal how many large movements must moderate to preserve their popularity, but Hail Satan? avoids depicting any of the Satanic Temple’s internecine debates, just as it neglects to discuss how the group is financed. (Lane does contextualize the Satanic Temple within the history of Satanism, using public-domain cartoon, film, and news clips to chart the rise of Billy Graham, God’s creep onto our currency and pledge of allegiance, and the “Satanic Panic” of the 1990s.)
After a merry and lively first half, Lane’s film effectively resets itself to organize around a single, factory-issued right-wing public representative, Arkansas state senator Jason Rapert. While Rapert attempts to install a monument of the Ten Commandments on capitol grounds, Greaves and his flock propose an accompanying statue of their patron saint Baphomet, a winged goat sitting on a throne while two children gaze at him admiringly. Like her ideological brethren the Yes Men and Nathan Fielder, Lane slyly reveals how both provocateurs play to the media’s appetite for extreme imagery and diametrical debates, but her film drags as it rehashes the ideas and themes it covers which such efficiency in its early stages.
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