American Satan (2017)
Dir. Ash Avildsen
Written by Ash Avildsen and Matty Beckerman
Starring Andy Biersack, John Bradley, Jesse Sullivan, Booboo Stewart,
Malcolm McDowell, with Bill Goldberg, Bill Duke, Mark Boone Junior and Denise
Richards whaaaaaaat?
AMERICAN SATAN is a fucking mystery. I never heard anyone, in real
life or online, talk about it. Never saw an ad. Never saw a review. I stumbled
across it only because I noticed it was listed in Malcolm McDowell’s
filmography and so I looked up the trailer. But it’s not just some scruffy
indie film funded on kickstarter; there’s more than a dozen listed producers
and executive producers (including ROCKY director John G. Avildsen and Rob
Zombie producer Andy Gould), and somebody obviously spent some money on
this thing, providing it with a crisply professional crew, a gallery of recognizable
actors in medium-sized roles, dozens of locations, and even a handful of huge
crowd scenes. And a score co-written by Ko“Я”n’s Jonathan Davis! Holy moly!
Spare no expense! They even claim there’s going to be a spin-off series? So
obviously someone must have seen this, or at least someone must have had
reason to believe someone would see it. But, ah. Why?
Having now seen it myself… it’s
still a fucking mystery. I can tell you a little about what happens in it, but
I still can’t claim to understand it, or explain who it was made for. What I
can say for sure is that I think teenagers are involved somehow, either on the
supply or demand end. Because one thing that’s beyond dispute is that AMERICAN
SATAN is an adorably earnest, mixed-up muddle of angst and anger and horniness
and anxiety and teenage stoner philosophy, like it poured straight from the notebook
doodlings of some earnest high school senior with dyed black hair and T-shirt
that says “Fuck the world.” All of it is deeply and spectacularly terrible, but
it’s also so adorably sincere and emo that I have no choice but to kind of love
it. Can’t help myself. Oh jeez, I just realized – is the American Satan me?
The plot is less simple and clearly articulable than I’m about to
make it sound, but in essence AMERICAN SATAN depicts the sad tale of youthful
rocker Johnny Faust, lead singer of a band called The Relentless. Faust (yes,
that seems to be his real last name – his mom is called “Mrs. Faust!”) is
played by Andy Biersack, real-life singer of the band Black Veil Brides, a
casting decision that makes sense --the role requires quite a number of musical
performances-- until I tell you there’s a credit for “Johnny’s singing voice”
and it’s another guy, vocalist Remington Leith of a band called Palaye Royale.*
Which raises the question, what kind of crazy movie hires a non-actor professional
singer to play the lead role of a singer, but then dubs his voice with some
other singer? The mysteries of AMERICAN SATAN go deep.
Anyway, we first encounter Johnny
“The Doctor” Faust as a gloomy high school senior who lives in Columbus, Ohio with
his mom (Dr. Christmas Jones herself, Denise Richards!?) and assures his
mewling virginial Christian sweetheart Gretchen (beauty pageant winner Oliva
Culpo) that although he has to move to LA to start a band, he’ll be back just as
soon as he becomes a huge mega-star by playing unlistenable Hot Topic rock
music and can afford to do what he really wants, which is to return to
Ohio and marry her and settle down and live a life of quiet suburban
domesticity. The first part of the plan goes amazingly well: he quickly meets a
trio of bandmates (BooBoo Stewart, HE NEVER DIED, Ben Bruce of the band Asking Alexandria, Sebastian
Gregory, Australian musician and actor), and the four of them recruit bassist
Lily (Jesse Sullivan “Creature XXX” in the short film FUCKKKYOUUU) after a
brief and unfortunate debate about whether they should let women in the band. But
the second part of his plan encounters some turbulence due to the apparently
unexpected perils of being a huge megastar, most of those perils instigated by
the openly sinister Lily, who insists on maintaining an air of suspicious
mystery when she is not manipulatively provoking trouble for everyone. Can’t a
guy just become a huge superstar in a sensible, responsible manner and make
enough money to buy a house in the Ohio suburbs for his sexless, blank-eyed
high school prom date? Oh, the cruel caprice of fate!
The movie does not treat any of this
as a joke, by the way. It is, if nothing else, incorrigibly earnest and
committed to making sure we understand the tragic gravity of this tale. And that’s
part of what makes the movie so alluringly befuddling, because frankly put, the
inherent wrenching tragedy of becoming a huge rock star and being deluged by
money, drugs, and gorgeous naked groupies might be a little hard to relate to. But
AMERICAN SATAN seems only barely aware that any of those things might conceivably
sound appealing. This guy Johnny Faust is the most reluctant rock-and-roller it
would be possible to invent; despite all the tattoos and the persistent gothy
attitude, the movie insists on treating him as a naïve but obstinately fuddy-duddy
wet blanket, who wants no part of the rock n’ roll lifestyle and would rather
drink responsibly, get to bed early, file his taxes, and exchange promise rings
with his abstinent, blankly wholesome high school sweetheart. He’s the most innocent cinematic rock star since everybody else in Queen except Freddy
Mercury as portrayed in the movie BOHEMIAN RAPSODY. He seems apologetic and a
little chagrinned even at going to a nice, quiet, oak-paneled restaurant bar booth
for a few pints with his bandmate.
And well he should be, as it turns
out, for it is here that they encounter one Mr. Capricon, (Malcolm McDowell,
TANK GIRL) who addresses the band (minus bass player Lily, who is always
mysteriously and suspiciously absent when he shows up) with a sinister proposition:
if they commit one murder, he will make them huge superstars. He seems, --well—a
little devilish, but due to his British accent is demonstrably not the title
character.
Obviously this is a moral turning
point. On one hand, instant mega-stardom would certainly expediate Johnny’s lifelong
dream of investing in midwestern real estate. But on the other hand, is it
worth a human life? They mull this over for an appropriate 30 or 40 seconds
before deciding to kidnap some kid who they heard was a rapist and is
definitely an asshole who calls them a homophobic slur, and lock him in their
beat-up band van and set it on fire, symbolically burning the honest, humble
home they had built together and becoming corrupted. Standard
deal-with-the-devil stuff… except that Johnny immediately has second thoughts
and sets the kid free. But then the dumbass would-be sacrificial victim, now completely
safe, tries to run away and five seconds later manages to die accidentally entirely
through his own stupidity. So I guess the band is off the hook, morally
speaking.
But it still counts with British Satan, apparently, because they do
become famous, and even their van appears again! Man, lucky break! But as they
tour the country spreading their message of whatever it is that they’re shouting
about in their songs, things start to turn rotten as they succumb to the lures
of easy sex and omnipresent drugs, find themselves constantly under attack by angry
protesters, and also, --oh yeah!-- discover that their music is inspiring a
nation-wide wave of vengeful murderers. Which makes one recall that some guy
who is probably the Devil seemed really invested in making them famous and may
possibly have had sinister motives for doing that, especially since he continued
to be real helpful even after they kind of bungled the whole “murder a guy”
thing and are probably at most guilty of kidnapping and reckless endangerment,
not actually murder.
This little incident with the original deal, in fact, is emblematic
of the film’s spectacularly confused message. I mean, in theory, this is a
pretty easy little parable about selling out your morals for fame and material
excess. That’s, like, the only possible point of structuring your movie around
a “deal with the devil.” But then it never quite sets this up correctly. Johnny
–the only character the movie is even a little interested in—keeps getting
unwillingly pushed into things, and the movie keeps refusing to make him
responsible for his choices. There’s no hubris here to support a cathartic
fall; he never seems like an ambitious libertine who lets his insatiable
desires corrupt his soul. He seems like a humble small-town kid who doesn’t
quite have the confidence to say no to peer pressure. Even when things start to
get out of control and everyone is banging groupies and doing heroin and
causing murders, he just keeps sort of mumbling that this isn’t a good idea and
he doesn’t really want to do it. Does “He that loves pleasure must for pleasure
fall” apply if he’s sort of ambivalent about pleasures and just doesn’t know
how to politely decline? It’s enough to make you wonder whether his last name
is actually a weird coincidence and not a literary reference. Which, uh, --well--
let’s just say the screenplay doesn’t make one confident its authors had read a
lot of Marlowe.
The pussy-footing refusal to allow the central character
to actually enjoy --or even aspire to-- the copious debauchery depicted here is
so pervasive as to feel out-and-out destabilizing, like there’s some crucial context
that I’m missing. In fact, for long stretches, I kept wondering, is this
some sort of weird Christian-propaganda cautionary tale? That would
certainly explain its overwhelmingly and persistently sordid portrayal of what
should be, by any reasonable entertainment standard, a wish-fulfillment fantasy.
And it would explain why it’s so poisonously afraid of the spiritual debasement
of the rock-and-roll lifestyle and so bizarrely uncritical of the implication
that what Johnny should do is keep himself pure for marriage to his vacant-eyed
young-Republican teetotaler hometown girlfriend. Ultimately I don’t think that’s
what the movie intends (nothing I could find about any of the filmmakers backs
up that hypothesis, anyway), but it’s hard to miss how blithely reactionary the
movie feels.
This vague sense of judgmental hectoring is augmented by the fact
that the movie is openly suspicious of bassist Lily, who is always agitating
for trouble and mysteriously vague about her origins and never around when the
Devil shows up. She’s proudly bisexual and liberated and confrontational, which
one would assume a rock-n-roll themed horror movie would be enthusiastically in
favor of. But we have a weird feeling she’s probably the Devil and she keeps
goading them into situations where they get in trouble and is also revealed to
work at a Baphomet-themed bordello which is just a few cenobites short of a
HELLRAISER set, where she gets everyone hooked on drugs and debased sex with
Satanic hookers and one of them dies. So… is the movie anti-sexual liberation,
or… what? What are we supposed to make of that? It, ah, doesn't seem to have the most positive view of women, anyway.
 |
| Nevertheless, She Persisted. |
On the other hand, maybe not, because
the movie can’t seem to make up it’s mind about whether the band is making the
world better or worse, and it seems to be on-board with them in some occasionally
eyebrow-raising ways. We learn that their music has been inspiring waves of
violence as young people murder their bullies. Uh oh, sounds like they’re
basically facilitating a wave of school shootings! No wonder the Devil wanted
to make them America’s most beloved musical institution! Except that the movie
seems weirdly ambivalent about whether or not that’s a bad thing. In fact, it
offers several apparently earnest speeches suggesting that while it is, on the
whole, probably a bad thing to murder people, well, maybe it’s time for society
to change, and maybe murdering a few assholes will inspire a kinder, gentler
society in the long run. Maybe this is what the revolution looks like, you
know? Which is pretty, um, wow.
Similarly, it often seems like the Devil is making good points
(McDowell gets some charmingly plummy speeches), and maybe even working with
fellow supernatural being Gabriel (Bill Duke! What the?!), who is probably a
good guy inasmuch as he speaks entirely in aphorisms. But come on, this guy’s
literally the Devil and he’s played by Malcolm McDowell. There’s no way we’re
supposed to think he’s right. Right? But then, if the Devil is trying to push
their dangerous rock and roll excess, should we reject rock and roll and turn
to Jesus? The movie sure doesn’t seem to think so; the Christian protesters and
the angry rednecks they fight with are definitely not portrayed positively even
though we know they’re right, this band literally is working for the dark one.
At the end, after murders and arrests and random meaningless sex with dozens of
teenage groupies and also possibly having sex with the Devil and getting hooked
on heroin and overdosing and then coming back to life, when Jonny wants to get
his head straight he goes to a Hindu guru. So, I guess the correct answer is
Hinduism? But, like, the Devil and Angels are also real? And as long as you
stay off the drugs, a few mass shootings are probably not such a bad thing after
all? Like, what in the fresh fuck are we supposed to do with all this madness?
A lot of people offer a lot of philosophy, and I have no idea who the movie
thinks is right.
 |
| Like, this is definitely a sign things have taken a bad turn, correct? Can we agree on that? |
“The only people on
Earth who would conceivably enjoy this dumb movie are metalheads, so why would
you write a plot where it turns out the parents are right, metal is
dangerous and should be censored and condemned? My only guess is that [the
filmmakers] … were banking on something I’ve long suspected: every true
metalhead secretly wishes metal really was evil.”
With AMERICAN SATAN, we see something similar: although we have a
movie whose whole hook is about rock music, which stars several professional
musicians, and was directed by the CEO of a record label (more on that later), the
life of a professional musician is almost without exception portrayed as miserable
and corrupting, and the effect of their music is depicted as potentially destructive
for the listener. But unlike with heavy metal, where you can see the appeal of the
fantasy that listening to Dokken would summon slimy demonic puppets or whatever,
I can’t see a similar tongue-in-cheek joy at playing into the stereotype here;
watching someone despairingly bottom out just isn’t as much fun. That’s not the
appealing part of the fantasy, right? That’s the boring second half of the VH1
Where Are They Now. And I can’t imagine even the most cynical rock n’ roll
fan finds much appeal in the fantasy that listening to rock music would inspire
you to become a school shooter, right?
This is further complicated by the weird and inescapable parallels
to real life: Beirsack really was a bullied teen from Ohio with some
regrettable Batman-themed tattoos who dropped out of high school to move to LA
and form a crappy rock act. This is basically his 8 MILE! So maybe this is a
story shaped by the perspective of a young kid who indulged too much in his
initial burst of fame and now looks back with disgust and regret at those
years, and that colors the way the film portrays them? In a Huffington
Post interview about the movie, Director Ash Avildsen
(2015’s WHAT NOW) stresses this point: “With the exception of the physical
manifestation of Satan, everything in the film is based on real events. Either
myself, or these guys, or the producers have had these experiences in the rock
music scene. It didn’t take that much crazy imagination, even though when
people see it they’ll say ‘how did they think of that?”’ (Note: No human being has
ever or will ever watch this movie and say “how did they think of that?”). Fair
enough, so I guess this is all about gritty reality, then? But wait, in that
same interview, Beirsack draws a clear distinction between himself and the
character. While noting that their origins are identical, he says, “The
difference is I didn’t make a deal with a deity… [T]here’s so many divergences
in paths that you can take to success… You can sometimes forget where you came
from initially… I don’t know what I would have done if I had the chance to
become very successful out of nowhere. When you’re hungry and you want nothing
more than to have that success, who knows what you would do if someone
presented you with the keys to the kingdom?” So it sounds like he took a very
different path than the one we see here.
In fact, while Avildsen is the founder and CEO of
Sumerian Records (who, predictably, rep Black Veil Brides, Asking Alexandria, Palaye
Royale, and Jonathan Davis, along with Between the Buried and Me (!) and
briefly the Dillinger Escape Plan (!!)) and is obviously in a good position to
have heard the tales of some of those “real events” the movie depicts, the
whole approach has a weirdly dated feel. The legendary drug-fueled
groupie-banging excess AMERICAN SATAN wallows in was a feature of 70’s and 80’s
metal bands, and sure enough, those are the bands that get name-checked as a
reference point. But the movie is aggressively set, like, RIGHT NOW. Avildsen
is explicit on this topic: “…I wanted to have the music sound like what a big
band might sound like today… I wanted to be like “Okay, what if Tool was a more
mainstream heavy metal band with more raspy punk vocals?”. So I strayed away
from having the band sound classic rock, I wanted it to sound modern and
relevant. We weren’t ambiguous with the time frame… We wanted to make it clear
that this was present day.” But do the kids today do this shit? I feel like
Biersack’s actual bandmates are probably teetotalers who took their rock and
roll money and prudently invested in it.
In fact, I’d go
out on a limb and hypothesize that the “real events” Avildsen is recalling were
likely related to him by members of an older generation (he was born in 1981).**
And that’s part of the movie’s weird vibe; it’s the story of a bunch of
distinctly modern millennial kids who are for some reason living out a
particularly 1980’s experience that doesn’t really exist anymore. The result of
this generational mismatch is that the film curiously smothers a tale of
unmistakably bygone 1980’s debauchery with a thick layer of fretful millennial
anxiety. But those two mindsets sit very strangely together. In the
cocaine-dusted innocence of the 80’s, a hedonistic focus on the pleasure of the
moment made sense; placing a bunch of painfully self-aware burnt-out
twentysomethings –who, remember, have on average way
less sex than their 80’s counterparts did and
with a
great deal more stress-- into that same scenario feels
bizarre and unnatural. In order to get the characters to work themselves into a
respectable heedless decadence, they require some direct pressure from the
Devil himself – and even then they still feel anxious and guilty and conflicted
and certain that they’re ruining everything.
Speaking of modern anxiety, there’s also a truly wonderful amount
of time spent discussing stoner occult conspiracy theories. I think someone
even gets a dollar bill and does the thing where you fold it up and reveal a
secret message. There’s definitely a lengthy discussion of the famous Apple
666/original sin conspiracy. Why? No idea. Maybe
just generalized awesomeness? But probably for the same reason, whatever it is,
that the movie includes about 60,000 words of intertitles during the credits quoting
various musicians talking vaguely about dark magic. Like all movies with
“American” in the title, it obviously feels certain that it’s really getting at
something universal and potent about the cultural moment (or at least that it’s
close enough to hide behind that claim as an excuse to trot out a bunch of tits
and a promotional CD for the director’s label, which is, if anything, probably
a more venerable tradition). But unlike AMERICAN GANGSTER, AMERICAN PSYCHO, and
AMERICAN HUSTLE (“it’s about Capitalism, man”) or AMERICAN PIE and AMERICAN
BEAUTY (it’s about sex, man”) or AMERICAN SNIPER (“it’s about brittle authoritarian
masculinity… or maybe we’re just awesome?”), I genuinely emerged from the
entire none-too-brief, densely-packed-yet-oddly-uneventful 112 minutes without a single solid guess as to what the point here is supposed to be. Is it about
the dark side of ambition? About the corrosive effect of fame? About a sinister
satanic conspiracy to corrupt the youth? A sinister satanic conspiracy to liberate
the youth? About being careful what you wish for? About just, like, not doing
heroin and maybe not fucking so many groupies?
There’s something like 25 minutes devoted to a weird tangent where
a nice suburban mom talks her way into bringing her virginal teenage daughter
onto the tour bus to be deflowered by Johnny (!), and then while they’re at it she
ends up fucking someone else, maybe even Bill Goldberg (HALF PAST DEAD 2, who,
unless I dreamed this, shows up as their tour manager or something?) and it’s
this nutty thing, but despite the somewhat disturbing implications it seems
like both mother and daughter are into it and maybe even having a kind of weird
bonding experience. Again, this sounds like something that Poison had to deal
with more than anything that’s happened to any band that became famous in the
past 30 years or so, but I’ll take it: it seems to be a rare lighthearted
moment of debauchery where everyone had a good time. But then a few scenes
later, we cut to mom and daughter at home, when their husband/father finds out
what happened, grabs a handgun, and blows his brains out! What the fuck, dude! Nothing
narratively substantive comes of it but it’s such a weirdly specific little
vignette that you gotta figure it means something—but what?
 |
| Oh yeah I forgot to mention, that Game Of Thrones guy is in there. Not Hodor, the other one. Hurley. No wait, that was Lost. You know the one I mean. That guy. |
The movie’s most baffling turn comes
at the finale, which has already started to get a little narratively abstract (long
story short, Booboo Stewart, who plays a guitarist apparently named “Vic
Lakota,” does a CNN interview on acid where Larry King appears as himself, and
may genuinely not have known he was interviewing a fictional band). ---PLEASE NOTE:
I’m going to spoil the ending, I guess, although I’m not really sure
what I’m even describing here.-- “Mr. Capricorn,” alarmed that Johnny
seems to be increasingly ambivalent about the whole experience, starts dating his
mom (?) and meanwhile Johnny has been fucking Lily, who of course we suspect is
probably the Devil in disguise (man, what is it about this movie and weird
parallel incest tropes?). In the big finale, Lily vanishes and Mr, Capricorn
appears and tells Johnny that he wants him to commit a murder on stage to,
like, ignite the revolution or whatnot. And to further provoke him, he reveals
what we’ve suspected all along, that haha, it was he, Malcolm McDowell,
who has hiding inside the nubile body of the Relentless’s bisexual liberated
female bassist all along, spurring them forward to this climactic point (and although he doesn’t specifically mention it, that means our boy was banging beloved
character actor Malcolm McDowell in disguise!). Oh shit!
…Except not, because after this huge
reveal there’s a little coda with one line of dubbed dialogue at the end which tells
us that none of that was true. I guess the Devil was just lying and all that
suspicious stuff Lily did was just a coincidence and she’s just a normal human,
except sort of a bitch I guess (we’re told she’s a heroin addict who is now in
recovery, and she never appears or gets mentioned again and nobody seems to
think her behavior requires any further explanation).*** A baffling turn for an
inexplicable character in a indecipherable riddle of a movie. Or, alternately, a
desperate last minute re-write so they could spin off a series (and, less charitably, possibly also to safely assure us that don’t worry bro, no homo
shit here). Either way, it kind of raises the question of, what did the
Devil actually do here, anyway? I’m not sure how he helped them, and Johnny
doesn’t even seem to think it would be altogether a thing bad if he did – the
movie seems to ultimately adopt the stance that maybe God and the Devil are
both a little right, and maybe the thing to do is to kind of let them balance
each other out. Which, in practice, means that a few school shootings are
probably a necessary evil, but we don’t want to start a whole revolution here,
that would be going too far.
Actually, I feel the movie would
probably have benefited from going too far; as it is, it feels tentative and
vaguely formed, with plenty of provocation but not a lot of real substance, or,
hell, even any real narrative arc. For a movie with some real crazy turns, it’s
an oddly passive, languid thing. Still, I kind of admire its goofy, earnest,
mixed-up spirit. Almost certainly without meaning to, it captures something
that feels kind of real about the teenage experience, when the world feels overwhelming and oppressive and everything –God, the Devil, Good, Evil, Sex, Partying,
Sick Riffs, Identity, The Man, Society, The Future, Texting, Responsibility, Stoner
Conspiracies, Porn, Bitchin’ Tats, and everything else in a young person's****
life just sort of spills over without any real structure or logic. It’s all
very dumb, but that doesn’t mean it’s not deeply felt. That doesn’t exactly
make for a good movie, but it does make for one which is probably more charming and unusual than a more traditionally good version would be. It stinks, but at least it
smells like teen spirit.
*I know this, of course, from my usual
high level of background research; you can rest assured that I had no prior
knowledge whatsoever of what a “Palaye Royale” or whatever might be.
** It occurred to me that
this tracks with the fact that he might well have grown up around hard-partying
celebrities, because his dad was John G. Avildsen (ROCKY, NEIGHBORS, the KARATE
KID). But then I read this rather
heartbreaking interview which makes it painfully
clear that he never met his father and probably didn’t even benefit from
his financial success (the one time he saw him as a child was at a family court
hearing over child support, where John refused to acknowledge he was present.
Jesus!). Although since the elder Alvidsen is a producer on this movie, one
assumes they must have met at least once since that 2015 interview. But unless
they made up for lost father-son time by exclusively discussing John’s partying
with Stallone in the 70’s, I doubt he was the source for these anecdotes. So I
dunno. Maybe he heard these stories from grizzled old roadies? He did work with
Steve Adler from Guns N’ Roses in his 2015 movie WHAT NOW, so maybe this is all
stuff that specifically happened to Steve Adler.
*** I notice actress Jesse
Sullivan is the only person to be recast for the spin-off show; I’m not sure
exactly what happened here, but that’s obviously a clue of some sort. It’s a
shame, though, because she’s giving far and away the most interesting performance
in the movie, although the fact that she’s the only character who isn’t utterly
passive about everything probably helps.
**** I say young person,
but the movie is utterly oblivious to the idea that there might be a
perspective other than a young man’s; the only female character who isn’t
a completely passive object for male characters to act upon is Lily, who is a destabilizing
bitch, and also a sex object. I don’t think the movie is aware of this
at all, but its complete disinterest in the inner lives of its female
characters is another way in which it feels startlingly dated.
