“The Devil All the Time”: American Gothic & Violent Faith
“It seemed to his son that his father was fighting the devil all the time.”
TRIGGER WARNING
Please note that this film contains graphic depictions of intimate partner violence, sexualized violence, and animal abuse. I don’t discuss them in this post, but be aware of this when you watch it.
The Devil All the Time (Netflix 2020) is a haunting adaptation of a novel of the same name by Donald Ray Pollock published in 2011. Set in a post-WWII southern Ohio, the film (much like the novel it draws from) is an intensely American vision of the shadow side of religious zealotry and the traumatic tanglings of rural life. Featuring an all-star cast (Tom Holland, Bill Skarsgård, Mia Wasikowska, and Robert Pattinson) and stunning cinematography, the film succeeds in creating a delightful juxtaposition of eerie and comforting in its use of warm tones and familiar settings for sites of unsettling violence.
Although there are several themes I could discuss here, I’d like to discuss Southern Baptism, religious corruption, and the role of Capitalist Christianity in The Devil All the Time. I think situating this in the rich history of American Gothic does justice to the source material (a novel of this game name by Donald Ray Pollock) and Antonio Campos’s masterful retelling alike.
To begin, let me engage in some plot summary.
This is a complex film with a lot going on, so to best contextualize religious mania in the film, I feel obligated to give some background.
Tom Holland as Arvin
American Gothic literature has provided a rich narrative tradition through which readers and authors alike explore counternarratives to the longstanding propaganda campaign that is U.S. history. Scholar Teresa A. Goddu, writing on this literary history, writes that “the United States, as many American Gothic texts argue, is built on economic exploitation and racial terror” (“American Gothic” in The Routledge Companion to the Gothic 63), rendering the Gothic a critical mirror (or perhaps portrait, in the Dorian Gray sense) through which American society can recon with the horrors of its establishment and the realities of its history. The Devil All the Time, I’d argue, is situated in this tradition, as the palpable economic turmoil exhibited by all the film’s characters is translated into a vicious criticism of the American market, its dependence on the military-industrial complex, and the exploitation of vulnerable people by the country’s religious institutions.
American Gothic literature has provided a rich narrative tradition through which readers and authors alike explore counternarratives to the longstanding propaganda campaign that is U.S. history. Scholar Teresa A. Goddu, writing on this literary history, writes that “the United States, as many American Gothic texts argue, is built on economic exploitation and racial terror” (“American Gothic” in The Routledge Companion to the Gothic 63), rendering the Gothic a critical mirror (or perhaps portrait, in the Dorian Gray sense) through which American society can reckon with the horrors of its establishment and the realities of its current history. The Devil All the Time, I’d argue, is situated in this tradition, as the palpable economic turmoil exhibited by all the film’s characters is translated into a vicious criticism of the American market, its dependence on the military-industrial complex, and the exploitation of vulnerable people by the country’s religious institutions. As the economic situation of Arvin’s rural family worsens, leading to food instability and medical neglect, his father’s religious mania reaches new heights, Arvin is subjected to the catastrophic consequences of economic deterioration and a lack of guidance. Desperate to find something to cling to when society fails him, Arvin’s father goes to extreme lengths to grasp his faith, sacrificing Arvin’s beloved dog at a makeshift altar in the woods in a bid to convince God to save his ailing wife’s life; and subsequently taking his own life when, despite being a good servant of the Lord, she passes regardless.
Robert Pattinson as the most vile preacher character I’ve encontered in film in recent years
Arvin’s faith is deeply shaken by this violent betrayal, (by God and by his father), and this develops into the tension of the rest of the film. By the time Arvin is in his teens, his disdain for religion creates a palpable counterpoint to the pious obedience of his grandparents (now official guardians) and his “step-sister” Lenora. When a new preacher, Preston Teagarden (Robert Pattinson) rolls into town and begins grooming Lenora, Arvin is one of the few removed enough from the town’s religious expectations to see him for the predator he is, and when Lenora falls pregnant, Arvin’s revenge spiral kicks off with some casual murder and a few beatings of other local ne’er do ‘ells for good measure.
All of this is punctuated with a serial killer couple who have been plaguing the area for the last few years, and the film regularly cuts to them seducing, photographing, and then killing their victims in the backwoods around the sleepy little town our main characters find them in. Additionally, Harry Melling’s Roy Laferty (Lenora’s father and another problematic preacher) experiences an intensifying religious mania throughout the film, culminating in him killing his partner to prove his devotion to God (in a discomfiting parallel to the killing of Alvin’s dog), and the subsequent mad dash to escape the law makes for a complex, fast-burning, high-stakes film finale—particularly when constructed as a backdrop to Arvin’s rage. It is worth noting that all these threads of plot intersect with each other as the movie hurtles towards its conclusions with a finesse that seems to be increasingly rare in popular film, and I applaud the hard work done by the writers, actors, directors, and editors that came together to make that happen.
Religion, Capitalism, and the American Megachurch
The underpinnings of the American Megachurch are present in almost every instance of religious observance in this film. From Willard and Alvin’s woodland altar to the church lunches and worship sessions lead by the film’s two preachers, the film skirts the line between religious fervour and religious mania expertly. The primary reason I connect this to the American market is the attention that both preachers in the film pay to signals of poverty, using them to achieve the dual purpose of providing a religious example of “Christian charity” while humiliating the members of the community who have no choice but to wear their economic hardship on their sleeve. This is exhibited about halfway through the film, where Teagarden points to a dish that Alvin’s family had painstakingly prepared to welcome him to the community and creates a 10-minute speech on “true piety” as it was “obvious the family that brought this had nothing to give but chose to give anyway” as Alvin’s grandmother fights back tears of humiliation. This, obviously, radicalizes Alvin further, but there’s an important foregrounding here of religious zealotry, exploitation, and power.
Bill Skarsgård as Alvin’s father, and a young Arvin (later played by Holland) to his right
With churches in North America having tax-free status and some of these church leaders raking in millions of dollars a year through donations and tithing systems, churches become institutions that pray on economic instability and expectations of charity. As people become experience increasingly precarious economic conditions, they turn to a higher power in the hope that this higher power will help, protect them, or otherwise intervene, and this vulnerability paves the way for narcissistic, power-hungry church leaders to prey on their congregates financially, socially, and sexually. Abuse in these evangelical churches is no secret, and although the congregations in The Devil All the Time are nowhere near megachurch classification, this same system of economic instability, religious fervour, and predatory leadership is transposed into the evangelical culture of Arvin’s town. I’d argue further that the reason the film is so unsettling is precisely because it narrows the focus down to specific instances of this abuse. It rejects the macro, the social acknowledgement of such a distressing epidemic, and foregrounds it through the Gothic by bringing it to an intimate, personal, and subsequently undeniable individual space. Foregrounding evangelical fervour and its ties to capitalism, industry, misogyny and sexual abuse, Arvin’s dubious morality is refreshingly honest in a landscape of deceit and false idols. A truly unsettling story of the dark side of the southern American Dream, The Devil All the Time is a film worth watching, more than once, to truly digest the statements it is making on the “glory days” of the evangelical, working-class American south.
Harry Melling (whom you may recognize as a former Dudley Dursely) as Roy Laferty
Staying true to American Gothic’s history of criticizing the tenets of American culture that are so often idealised in the country’s media landscape, The Devil All the Time drags, kicking and screaming, evangelical hypocrisy into the sunlight. Rather than being a Gothic of darkness, mist, and mould, this southern Gothic is one of dust and heat and horseflies—a deeply human Gothic that chooses to horrify through illumination rather than obscurity.
