Word: satanity
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...existence, singing Manson's songs, dancing, swimming in a small pool, stealing cars for cash and picking through garbage for food. Miners in the area reported being chased away by amazons wielding knives. Manson reportedly held an almost hypnotic spell over his followers, who called him "God" and "Satan." His women lolled harem-like around the commune nude or barebreasted, catering to his every whim. One chagrined ranchhand relates discussing business with Manson while one of Manson's girls performed a sex act upon the "guru." But women in the "family" saw him in a different light...
...RARELY sees completely integrated films, works whose every element contributes to a single expression. Few directors reach the maturity and control necessary to such a work. Sorrows of Satan (1927) finds Griffith once more transcending himself, leaving behind the formal means by which he ordered his earlier dramas for a simpler, more direct style. Sorrows is so unified that its mood and meaning can be assigned to no single aspect of that style...
...every turn and nuance is heightened, given immediate meaning for the character involved, as much by its understated acting as by its simple shooting style. Carol Dempster has come far from the frolics she and Lillian Gish gave Griffith's films of the earlier twenties. And Adolphe Menjou, as Satan, is the model of restraint. For him a grimace or devilish leer would be an unspeakable faux pas. But Griffith, far from leaving him a polished gentleman without depth of character, makes his slightest gestures personally significant. Menjou is eating dinner with Ricardo Cortez in the grandest of opulent restaurants...
...such terror we recognize the power of each simple detail, the seriousness of all the beautiful things happening before our eyes. Sorrows is no sweet moralistic drama. The moral unity it maintains is the most complex of artistic attitudes. Satan, for example, is no villain. Indeed, Griffith discarded villains after America (1924). The men who rob the hero and heroine of Isn't Life Wonderful are driven to their crime by hunger and, like the two leads, by marital love. They are as human, as noble, as anyone else. Satan goes through more intense emotional crises even than the deserted...
...graveyard where the four corners of America have gathered to mourn the death of the enigmatic Cock Certain. Like the impoverished Italians of Pasolini's Teorama these Americans seem to be struggling, each to possess alone the memory of Cock Certain, perhaps their Christ, perhaps their Satan, surely their source of life. Their struggle though is ultimately a dance of death, as yet another enigmatic figure, a man dressed in white pied-pipers the players away...