A RECENT POLL ASKED HOW MANY AMERICANS BELIEVED in God and everyone seemed surprised that a majority said they did. Whether or not these believers practice their belief is another question. But, bypassing that, what about the Prince of Darkness? How many people believe in Satan? If Hollywood is any indicator—Gurdjieff once said it was a home of Hasnamusses—it would appear the devil is clearly big box office, for movieland is inundated with flicks and movies (we reserve the word film for serious efforts) directly or indirectly involved with Sammael.(1) The resulting societal thought-sewage is as amazing in its concentration in time as it is in its pervasiveness in geographical space. That within the same time frame millions upon millions of brains are being fed celluloid Satanic suggestions—and without any real opposition(2)—is a spectacle of psyche pollution that has no parallel in recorded human history.

In all this drivel The Devil's Advocate has appeared. It's a film worthy of comment. According to Taylor Hackford, its director, "The people in this story who get into trouble are people who have made certain choices. I don't believe in blaming the Devil for these terrible events; when people have the opportunity to exercise their free will, they choose to damn themselves nine times out of ten. I wanted to show that you make your own choices in life—the Devil is merely the impulse inside of us to choose what we know is ethically wrong. It's not some guy with a forked tail—we ourselves are responsible."

What Hackford takes as a given—that people are conscious of a choice that is to be made and that they have the clarity and will to make that choice—is of course, from a Gurdjieffian point of view, the great illusion. A will that is strong and purified enough to be free of the grip of organic animality and contemporary psychologisms is indeed free to act. Otherwise, one's will, as every other aspect of the person, is simply in the service of the chief feature of one's psychology. So the question of free will, like the question of the soul—whether or not people have one—is specific to the level of consciousness.

Now for The Devil's Advocate itself. From the driven and indulgent quality of their behavior, it seems unlikely that Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves), the young hotshot Florida defense attorney, and Mary Ann (Charlize Theron), his rowdy but adoring country trophy wife, know of will as anything more than, as Gurdjieff says, the resultant of all their desires. But suspending that disbelief allows us to get into the meat of the story. Lomax, having successfully defended 64 clients—the last obviously guilty of child sex molestation—is summoned to New York City, the Big Apple, by John Milton(3) (Al Pacino), head of a powerful international law firm and the contemporary manifestation of the Devil, this time a cool, urbane CEO who never sleeps.(4) The scene in which Milton offers Lomax a job while strolling around the firm's rooftop water garden that looks down (sans railings) on the Lower Manhattan street scene fifty floors below is truly as breathtaking as it is symbolic. Lomax bites the apple, so to speak, takes the job, and he and Mary Ann are moved into Milton's own luxury building where everyone lives the lifestyle of the rich and famous. Milton hands Lomax his 65th case, a city sanitation charge against a black voodoo witch doctor who sacrifices goats in the practice of his craft. After Lomax gets him off, Milton throws him the big one, number 66,(5) the defense of Alexander Cullen (Craig T. Nelson), a wealthy real estate developer accused of three brutal murders and, again, obviously guilty.

Tempted by the high voltage glitz and glamour of modern Babylon's power-possessing beings, edged as it is with super-sensational beauty, desire and rivalry, what little identity Mary Ann has is soon swallowed up and she falls prey to her subconscious.(6) Lomax, meanwhile, spends long nights at the office preparing to defend Cullen. Throughout, Milton counsels his protégé, pointing out, for example, the "loudness" of the expensive hand-tooled cowboy boots Lomax has continued wearing. Says Milton of himself, "They never see me coming."

Just as Lomax is about to try his big case, Milton tells Lomax he is taking him off it. His wife is unraveling, Milton says, and Kevin needs to help nurse her back to health. So here it is: Kevin's big and defining choice after all the little choices he has made and Milton is making the decision for him—taking away his freedom of choice! And it's the right choice, the humanitarian choice! Kevin, go comfort your wife. Who would expect the Devil to be on the side of Good? It's an arch cunning move on the chessboard of life, a move of deep deception worthy of one known as the Prince of Lies.

Totally asleep in his desire, Kevin—there being no question of his having consciousness or free will—shows the lawyerly magic that has enabled him to stand the courtroom truth on its head. He argues that if he agrees to give up the case and his wife gets better, he will hate her. To avoid that—for the good of their marriage—Milton should keep him on the case and Kevin promises afterward to give Mary Ann all his attention. So Kevin argues with the Devil and apparently 'wins.' "All right, Kevin," Milton slyly intones, seemingly capitulating to Kevin's plea. Kevin thinks he has won but what he has done is to provide clear evidence that he loves win number 66 more than his failing wife.

At the film's end Kevin, faced with the results of his actions, finally wakes up enough to confront Milton in his palatial apartment overlooking Gotham. Having witnessed Mary Ann's suicide, Kevin cries out that he loved his wife. "Yes, Kevin," Milton agrees in a deep rasping baritone, "but not enough." His desire stripped bare, Kevin is filled with shame and guilt. It is here that Milton shows his 'compassion' for his protégée. In a magnificent scene whose depth and pacing shows Pacino at full strength, his John Milton blames not Kevin but God. For it is God, he says, who gives us instincts and then confuses us with a field of opposites. As we shuffle from one foot to the other, from yes to no, damned if we do and damned if we don't, God sits back and laughs. It's a conundrum whose only solution, Milton argues, is to side with him. In so doing, Milton can take "the bricks," the guilt, out of Kevin's stomach. Follow him and Kevin needn't feel guilty for any of his actions. He can do whatever he likes, as long as he likes, to whomever he likes, and not feel a thing.(7)

Milton's interpretation of mankind's predicament—instincts in a field of opposites—is good as far as it goes. And that is what makes it dangerous. His understanding is partial and biased but not obviously so. The trouble with Taylor Hackford's film is that it neither points this out nor explores the question (in Hackford's earlier words) of why "when people have the opportunity to exercise their free will, they choose to damn themselves nine times out of ten." Hackford shows Milton's opposition to God, but he offers no worthy opposition to Milton. That's what makes films and flicks which treat serious subjects so polluting. The limitation of their viewpoint leads to the very thing they oppose: nihilism, anarchy, hubris.

Hackford, committed to the idea of free will as a biological entitlement for everyone, sees no out for Kevin other than the obvious. He has Kevin believing that his brain—that part of himself that he most identifies with—has made the wrong choice. So Kevin does what a lot of people do. He gets rid of his brain. He shoots himself in the head. The implicit message is that if you choose wrong, commit suicide.(8) But it isn't the choice between yes or no that is the problem—it's that Kevin isn't aware of his awareness. He doesn't see that the yes or no appear within his awareness. By always identifying with the contents (the thoughts, feelings, images, impulses) of his awareness, saying "me," "mine," or "I" to them, he reduces and circumscribes his awareness to that content. Faced with a choice, he goes back and forth between a yes and a no, identifying with one, then the other, wearing himself out, until he does whatever is easiest. Ignorant of this fundamental discrimination, Kevin can provide no opposition to the report of his senses and his subsequent interpretations, all of which are based on subjective memory associations, personal predilections, and identifications.

The Devil's Advocate puts forth the accepted secular idea that life is about making the right choices and that we learn from our choices. Were this true, the history of mankind being one of war and crime, we certainly would have learned by now and our present world would be Eden before the Fall. To learn from our choices, we must be present to them, not as an "I," but as awareness. For a choice to be freely made it must occur within a knowing awareness—otherwise all is determined.

The film ends with a 'reincarnated' Kevin Lomax who, thinking he made the wrong choice last time, now makes what he believes is the right choice this time.(9) And so the never-ending story of "I" revs up for still another replay, the only difference being location and script. As a devilishly smiling, sparkle-eyed John Milton declares—Vanity is my favorite sin.

(1) Satan goes by various names and titles in Jewish and Christian literature, among them: Semihazah, Azazel, Belial, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Apolyon, "god of this world," "father of lies." Says Neil Forsyth in his book The Old Enemy: Satan & The Combat Myth (Princeton University Press, 1987), 5-6, "His character, indeed his very existence, is a function of his opposition to God, or to man, or to God's son, the god-man. But he may appear as tempter, tyrant, liar, or rebel, each time taking on the characteristics appropriate to his role. If he appears as the opponent of God, he is (eventually) the rebel, and if God is good, as is often but not invariably the case, then he is evil; if he appears as the opponent of man, then he is the tempter, or the tyrant."

(2) That in the end the good guy wins or the bad guy gets his is not opposition. It's simply the "cover" under which the movie can be defended on educational or ethical grounds while pouring a lot of filth into people's minds. That a movie like The Silence of the Lambs is well written and directed and has a strong cast doesn't make it any more "clean." Rather, it only strengthens the movie's perversity.

(3) No doubt referring to the English poet, author of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.

(4) There is no rest for the wicked because if the Devil falls asleep in any sense he exposes himself to his subconscious, his conscience. Therefore, he stays awake from fear, hatred. Not love of consciousness but fear and hatred of God keeps him awake. So he is awake only in the negative.

(5) The numerology is based on Revelations' number of the beast, 666.

(6) Actually, she begins to see how people and things are, but having no self-awareness in the real sense she cannot rightly absorb and understand what she is seeing.

(7) Aleister Crowley, the black magician known as "The Beast," once painted in large white letters on the Palisades of the Hudson River leading into New York: Do what thou wilt.

(8) The idea of Christian penance, redemption, and salvation is curiously not mentioned, even though Kevin Lomax is a baptized Christian with a devout mother. Given Dolly Parton's and Marlon Brando's complaints several years ago about the ethnicity of Hollywood's power structure this is understandable.

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