I’ve never been religious. I don’t go to church, I don’t pray and I don’t believe in heaven and hell. But I do think that I have a keen sense of religion, probably best described as a morbid curiosity towards it, and a personal relationship with it which is half visceral, half cerebral – it’s the feeling you get walking into a dimly lit cathedral and suddenly having the fear of God in you, before the intellectual side kicks in again and you remark on the use of light and space in Gothic architecture.
It’s this religious side to me, I think, that makes me totally love The Ninth Gate, Roman Polanski’s bizarre 1999 fi lm about book collecting and summoning the devil. The film has the strange appeal of the occult, and gives me the same buzz I get reading about weird Satanic cults and wild biblical interpretations when I stray too far into the demonology pages of Wikipedia (more common than you might think).
The plot concerns one Dean Corso, Johnny Depp in one of his more endearing performances, who is hired by rare book collector Boris Balkan to recover the two other copies of a book called The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, a seventeenth-century book written by the imagined author Aristide Torchia, supposedly adapted from an older book written by the devil himself, and which is said to hold the key to summoning Satan and achieving immortality. Balkan, who owns one copy of the book, believes the other two to be forgeries, and employs Corso to verify the authenticity of his copy. Corso, in his hunt for the manuscripts, follows a trail of mystery and death, in which many of the people he encounters in the world of antique books are brutally murdered, their bodies hauntingly arranged afterwards in manners that exactly reflect the engravings which illustrate the book. His search leads him around Europe, where he encounters misguided Satanic, orgiastic cults, is hunted by hitmen, and is aided throughout by a mysterious woman with paranormal powers, played by Emmanuelle Seigner, who turns out to be not quite the guardian angel we thought she was.
Undoubtedly the film is hammy and the ending, which I shan’t spoil, is pretty dubious. But the film is interesting in ways beyond simply a strange fascination with the occult. There’s an undercurrent throughout of sexual deviance, the kind we might associate with a debauched, orgiastic and hedonistic kind of anti-religion, and an exploration of similar issues of sexuality that Polanski began to delve into with the 1968 classic Rosemary’s Baby. Indeed, in the film’s last sex scene, we can’t help but recall the climactic moment in his earlier film and Rosemary’s haunting pleas of, “What have you done to its eyes?”, as Emmanuelle Seigner’s flash a devilish green. Looking at the genealogy between the two films, we might say that the latter “has his father’s eyes”, as this final moment, by recalling Rosemary’s Baby, reminds us of the sexual significations of much of what we have seen before in The Ninth Gate.
The film has a focus on vision, as the book’s engravings become the central concern of Corso, who gradually comes to realise that, across the three copies, diff erent illustrations are signed by LCF – Lucifer. When Polanski ends the film with a sex scene that is defined by this demonic gaze, he both sexualises and perverts in hindsight the reading processes in which Corso is involved throughout. He insinuates that there is some inherent eroticism in the penetrative gaze we aim at texts in looking for meaning and authenticity, notions that are inseparably intertwined in the idea that to access the book’s potential – summoning the devil – its reader must verify its authorship, as only the engravings by Lucifer himself will work for the ritual.
The film’s interest in authorship and the relationship between sight, image and text becomes interesting when we remember that it is itself based on an original book, the novel El Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. The translation of text into image, represented by the engravings in the book, is taken a step further to the translation into the moving image, a film. Polanski’s film might be read as a search for authenticity in a medium, cinema, which comes late to the game of narrative representation, and plays with what it means for a director to adapt a book into film. The occult itself becomes symbolic of the obfuscating and mystifying tendencies of interpretation, and echoes somehow the strange fetishisation of the piercing gaze of the search for meaning or allegory. When looking for significations in what we’re watching, we see the devil staring back at us, and for a moment it seems like we’ve delved into something dangerous – we’re dancing with the devil. But maybe I’m just being superstitious.
