One of the most common ways that horror comments on the human condition is by locating real tragedies and concerns in the language and imagery of horror. Literal monsters stand in for metaphorical ones. This is not an especially earth-shattering observation, I know. Mostly I bring it up because every now and then I’ll run into a film that borrows a lot of the language and imagery of horror to tell a story about the human condition. Which sounds like I’m just saying the same thing, but it’s sort of taking the trappings and conventions of horror films, gestures universally associated with horror, and locating something that isn’t horror at all within them. The film Monsters comes to mind, basically the story of two people getting to know each other as they journey across a stretch of Mexico made hazardous by the intrusion of extraterrestrial life. The monsters from outer space are just part of the environment, not at all the point. It’s sort of an eversion of the horror film.
All of that, because I think that best describes The Ninth Configuration. It’s a film with a horror setting, a premise ripe with horror potential, written and directed by the author who brought us The Exorcist, an absolute classic of the genre. But for all of that, it’s less horror and more drama about what it takes to cope with horrors.
It’s another gray, overcast day in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. A guard stands a lonely watch in a poncho, manning a checkpoint at the entrance to a large, foreboding, gothic-looking castle up the road. He admits an official vehicle, and goes back to standing there. The car winds up the road and into the courtyard of the castle, where a number of men run around in a mixture of costumes and pajamas. It’s a lot of hectic activity and one or two officers fruitlessly attempting to contain it. It looks like a madhouse, because…well, it is. One of a series of hidden, secret installations set up by the military to study soldiers who’ve come back from Vietnam suffering psychotic breaks. So far, every therapeutic approach they’ve tried hasn’t really worked, and so the Army has sent one of their top psychiatrists, Col. Hudson Kane, to take over supervising treatment.
Kane has some…unconventional…ideas about treatment.
For most of its running time, this film feels like an example of postwar absurdism in the vein of
Catch-22 and
Gravity’s Rainbow, operating from the idea that war and the institutions that wage war are themselves absurd, themselves insane, and so are in no position to judge those driven insane by waging war. As a matter of fact, madness seems to be the only sane response. It’s an idea that’s probably at its most mainstream in the television series adapted from the novel and film
M.A.S.H., a long-running institution on television from the early 1970s to early 1980s. And the patients here are very much in the antic, borderline-comic vein of that show. Nammack thinks he’s a superhero, Fromme thinks he’s a doctor (and not actually a doctor, as Kane discovers to his dismay), Reno is working on adaptations of Shakespeare performed by dogs, Fairbanks has multiple personalities, Bennish thinks he’s from Venus, and Cutshaw - an astronaut who decompensated as he was preparing to go to the moon - doesn’t seem to be delusional, just very angry and reluctant to be serious about anything or engage anyone honestly.
They are depicted as clearly delusional and/or unstable. But at the same time, the purportedly sane ones don’t fare much better. Fell, the acting psychiatrist, seems to be treating the whole situation as absurdly as the patients do, though it seems clear in his case that it’s out of a resignation to the insanity of the entire war, and Kane’s intense calm and unflappability, as the film goes on, seems to be hiding even deeper cracks. Perhaps the only thing worse that someone who’s lost it is someone who’s lost it and desperately trying to hide it. And it’s definitely laid out like a horror movie. It’s a gothic-looking castle in the foggy mountains of the Pacific Northwest, housing a bunch of deranged veterans, playing out their delusions to the bemusement of the regular military staff and the weary patience of the doctors. There’s very much this idea that the inmates are running the asylum, and so when Kane proposes to try something different, to indulge them, to let them act out their fantasies without the staff intervening, this is where the film takes a turn, as you’d expect. But it’s not the turn you think.
There’s an obvious way for this film to go, what it seems like it’s leading up to, and a lot of that is in the horror-movie trappings, the repeated shots of the castle in the nighttime, rain pounding down on gargoyles and hooded statuary, as if a mad scientist is about to create horrid, unnatural life, ironically juxtaposed with jaunty music. Conversations are as often as not conducted in voiceover, accompanied by shots of empty rooms, statues and wall decorations. A picture of Bela Lugosi as Dracula serves as a silent comment on the accommodations, and scenes inside Kane’s office look out on the rest of the castle, the space outside his doorway a hive of chaos. There’s a mixture of sinister and frenetic that seems to promise something bloody and awful, but in the third act there’s a revelation, one that reframes the film as one about whether or not salvation is possible. Honestly, it works. The tensest scene in the whole film is an extended (painful, hard-to-watch) moment outside of the hospital where you’re waiting for violence to break out, at this point it’s almost inevitable, but hoping it won’t, because in some way there are souls in the balance here. Not in any supernatural sense, just in the sense of someone desperately needing to be shown that people can act selflessly and what it’s going to cost to do just that.
The film is quite literally like a long, dark night of the soul, and when the sun finally comes out and the curtain is raised on what we’ve just seen, it feels like something has lifted, like sins have been forgiven, as they have historically been forgiven. It’s comic, it’s tragic, it’s uncomfortable, it’s like very, very few other films I’ve ever seen.
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