"I don't know how I ended up here last night. I didn't even know I was in West Virginia. Somehow, between 1:00 and 2:30, I traveled 400 miles and ended up on that road by your house... and I've got no memory of it."
--John Klein, The Mothman Prophecies
"Oh, they exist. All kinds of things exist around us that we never see, right? Electricity, microwaves, infrared waves. You know, these things have been around forever. They show up in cave paintings. They're a normal condition of the planet. They're just not part of our consensus of what constitutes physical reality."
--Alexander Leek, The Mothman Prophecies
The Mothman Prophecies tries to tell a dramatized, loose version of what author John Keel claims to be historical and metaphysical fact in his book of the same name. As Mothman is one of the more culturally visible cryptids (unverifiable/exotic creatures that appear in folklore or other legends) after the most prominent ones like Bigfoot, a film about the entity could have been a great one. Unfortunately, it takes until around the halfway point for the flow of the scenes and the weight of the philosophical subject matter to actually become competent. Beyond this point it is a much better movie than what precedes it. However, Richard Gere carries a movie that does not lean quite as much into its mystery, legitimate epistemological inquiry, or personal drama as it could have, at least failing to do so throughout its whole runtime, but The Mothman Prophecies remains a film that explores a renowned cryptozoological figure that has been given little attention in cinema.
Production Values
For a movie about the supposedly real Mothman of Point Pleasant (as with so many things, no one can philosophically prove or disprove its existence), The Mothman Prophecies does very little with its aesthetics to really capitalize on the iconic imagery associated with its cryptid. In a car crash scene, for instance, Mothman's appearance is so quick and the effects so lacking in effort that the distinct presence of the creature is not established well. The camera in that same part cuts from one angle and shot to another so rapidly that the scene is visually disjointed even after Mothman's few frames. In flashbacks to accounts of reported sightings of what turns out to be Mothman, the effects are weak. Cinematography and a consistent but skillful aesthetic style are not the stronger aspects of The Mothman Prophecies. What, if anything, is successful? Richard Gere's performance is persistent in its quality from start to finish. Both his subtle and more overt moments give him the chance to showcase genuine talent. For some scenes, he shows restraint, and for others, he conveys genuine curiosity or fear. His scene where he talks to Indrid Cold on the phone is great in part because it focuses on him and the metaphysical/epistemological and personal drama that the story needs. Alan Bates has an excellently realized role as author Alexander Leek later in the film as well. Unfortunately for the premise of this movie, though almost everything else is mediocre except the premise itself, which is not given artistic justice here at all despite its potential. Even the supporting cast of Laura Linney, Debra Messing, and Will Patton do not make the movie worse, but their development and dialogue is still secondary at best to Gere's.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
John and Mary Klein are at last enjoying the payoff of being in a position to buy a new house they both think is perfect for them, enjoying each other as much as they enjoy the new house. While driving that very night, Mary sees an apparition, a brief glimpse of an entity with red eyes, that leads her to crash the vehicle. A trip to the hospital reveals that she has had a rare form of cancer for years, and it quickly takes her life once she is admitted. Two years after her death, John still has not emotionally moved on, and he takes a drive one night, almost aimlessly, only to end up having his car stop working next to a house in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. He asks if he can use the phone, only to find that the property belongs to a man who claims to have seen him for the past two nights at 2:30 AM, knocking on the door. A police officer who saves John from getting killed by the man tells him that she has heard of many bizarre events as of late. John attempts to find a link to the vision his wife insists she had before the car crash years before.
Intellectual Content
Hallucinations, alternate dimensions, spiritual or advanced physical creatures--no one with human limitations could possibly know which of these possibilities a sighting of a strange being actually is. What one can know with absolute certainty is that one sees something without knowing if there is any stimuli there or what that stimuli is if it is indeed externally present. The Mothman Prophecies tackles this surprisingly well by the time the second hour comes around even if it never brings up some of these particular epistemological details. It includes a fictional version of the allegedly real Indrid Cold who, according to the stories on which the film is loosely based, provided information to real author John Keel before the Silver Bridge collapsed in 1967. The movie portrays Indrid Cold by using his voice far more than his appearance, but a character describes Cold as one being among many who can take whatever form it prefers and that has some sort of unclear motive in communicating with humans prior to disasters.
"It depends on who's looking," Indrid Cold says when asked about his identity. The nature of perception as is relevant to Cold and beyond is explored somewhat well once the character Alexander Leek is brought in. A cryptid and precognition author John Klein seeks out, he points out that even according to contemporary scientific paradigms, things like electricity and infrared waves are supposed to exist even though it is objectively true that one cannot just see them. He also notes that the Mothman's kind of being does not have to be God or even any more intelligent than humans to just naturally perceive more than them--not to discover more purely logical truths, but just to perceive more, as all beings that grasp reason at all could discover all of them if they tried hard enough (as opposed to finding truths that logic governs but that one cannot know, such as whether a recalled event really happened. Leek does not clarify all of this and says something that gives away that he is not a rationalist which I will address below, but he does use the very relevant example of how a window washer could see from a point of high elevation a car crash happened far away from people on the ground. Still, Leek does talk as if he has assumed that the reports of Mothman are accurate on the basis of testimony even though believing any event happens or that any outside being, even other people, exists because of testimony is irrational. It is the embrace of that which words cannot prove and one cannot know from looking to reason alone, as knowing something like the Mothman's existence is logically possible does not mean it actually exists whether or not one perceives sensory evidence for it.
Since hearsay, most sensory perceptions, and even memories prove only that the direct experience of sensory perceptions and memories within the mind, not having any logically necessary connection to an outside world or even outside immaterial phenomena, this would at most be evidence that could be illusion, like all scientific experiences could be. Up to this point, besides the implied belief that he can know from this evidence that the Mothman's race exists, Leek has been perfectly rational in his response to the in-universe evidence and even recognized its relationship to popular scientific ideas of the day, but he then says that these moth-like beings are not "rational," totally failing to realize that the laws of logic are universal and the only things that are inherently true by self-verifying necessity. This, of course, makes everything that is true at least logically possible and thus consistent with the only self-evident logical truths (facts like that if something logically follows from an idea or truth, it cannot not be the case that the conclusion follows from the given concept and that the conclusion is intrinsically true if the concept that it flows from is true). Whether or not such cryptids truly exist, which is absolutely unknowable while trapped within human limitations although every truth about even the concept of the cryptids is governed by the laws of logic, nothing that contradicts logical axioms is true, and yet the idea of a Mothman does not contradict them. Leek predictably grasps the sensory evidence for Mothman, by happenstance since he is not a rationalist, of course, better than he grasps the laws of logic that dictate all truths, divide possibility from impossibility, and epistemologically reveal themselves and every other thing!
Conclusion
Better editing and a much stronger first half would have elevated The Mothman Prophecies to a much higher category of quality. In its second half, it becomes a far superior film in many regards, which only highlights what could have been a superb introduction to the eventual payoff. Richard Gere is at least far from being a weak link in the chain from the start, and Alan Bates joins him in having this characteristic when he eventually shows up. Additionally, the way the film arrives at the 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant makes great use of the most famous event of the Mothman legend while giving it new cinematic context. Just avoiding the rapid camera cuts of some scenes, making the first half more focused, and improving the dialogue of the first hour could have made this masterful instead of a mixture of mediocrity and quality.
Content:
1. Profanity: "Damn" is used every now and then, and "shit" perhaps even fewer times.
2. Sexuality: A couple engages in very amorous behavior before they are interrupted by someone else.
No comments:
Post a Comment