The Ninth Gate and Seduction

Something else about a damn movie:

(WARNING: THEMATIC SPOILERS)
Recently I had the good fortune to come across and purchase a bargain basement priced copy of one of my all time favorites; Roman Polanski’s widely-ignored Satan-noir The Ninth Gate. Ham-fistedly marketed to overemphasize the movie’s understated (even businesslike) sexual elements and transform its quiet menace into popcorn fodder, trailers and spots produced for the 1999 film tend to not reflect their source material in the slightest, and are far more interesting to observe as the final dinosaurs of the now-dead “nineties-style” blockbuster era. Perhaps this is the reason why the film failed with audiences in such a major way; people came in expecting to see Satan blow up or something and instead got ninety minutes of guys in glasses drinking scotch and talking about gilding. The Ninth Gate is a thriller for characters too out of shape to jump out of windows, and too bookish to woo the femme fatale (in fact, she pretty much does all the work). It’s a movie about collecting and about books, and when characters aren’t name-dropping fancy-sounding Italian and Latin words, they’re in the library doing research, which is apparently what this movie counts as an action sequence. It may sound intolerable to the average moviegoer, but I was hooked from the very beginning.

With all of its leather-bound, academic smoothness, The Ninth Gate stands to be quite a unique entry into the ranks of the modern thriller. The plot in short: a sleazy but cunning rare book dealer (Johnny Depp) is hired to authenticate an infamous satanic manuscript for his rich collector patron (an awesome Frank Langella), a task that, needless to say, draws him progressively deeper into a web of international intrigue and Lucifer-oriented ne’er-do-wells. But while The Ninth Gate might just seem to be the Eurotrash Da Vinci Code, It remains far more interesting in my eyes because of what it hides, what it tempts us with, but refuses to say.

The Ninth Gate hinges crucially on the titular book; The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows. A beautiful piece of Oscar-deserving art department design, the prop is centered around a set of odd woodcuts, each one supposedly depicting a satanic allegory. However, the message is riddled away behind mountains of obscure pseudo-medieval symbolism. Somehow, correctly deciphering these woodcuts will allow the lucky devotee to rouse up the Devil himself. Without getting too much into the fineries of the plot, and how each of the three surviving copies of the manuscript play into the mystery, I want to talk about the woodcuts themselves.

As previously gushed, this book and these illustrations deserved awards. Beautifully illustrated, perfectly capturing the “gothic noir” vibe, I have rarely seen such deeply considered material objects used in films, especially when something far less time-consuming could have been substituted. The artists who designed these pieces were truly master seducers. A mounted knight approaching a walled city, his index finger held to his lips. The caption? “Silence is golden.” A man hanging from a parapet by one leg (his other cocked behind him, Hanged-Man-style), while above him an armored fist grasps a flaming sword. “I enrich myself with death.” And so it goes. They are so beautiful, so rich with detail, that their authenticity seems plain; the gross image emits a strong impression of meaning. Nine deliciously ambiguous works of art, each one desperate to communicate, evoking an armada of signs, but ones that we are woefully unable to parse.

And yet, as space devoid of meaning, a blank enticement, we are seduced, drawn to them against our will, just as a well-crafted movie trailer lures us with the emptiness of its signs.

The characters too are seduced by the woodcuts, in exactly the manner that we are, however for them the consequences are far graver. Reading over reviews of the film, I’ve seen at least one critic (who it was, I’ll never remember) frame the central theme as the deadly conclusions of obsession. Many of the characters are scholars with a special draw towards Satan (“it was love at first sight,” declares Barbara Jefford as ‘the Baroness’) who have spent lifetimes assembling information dedicated to their interest. Regardless, they are otherwise logical beings live in a modern, mundane universe, surrounded by their fantastical books of witches and warlocks, the perfect stance of the collector standing among his objects. However, when the Nine Gates appears, when the possibility of Satan is made manifest by the seduction of the book’s signs (given weight by the biographical and historical facts about the book), they cannot help but make way for their death. Meaning is hidden behind these images, and its absence is like a riptide. The obsessives spend the film’s duration attempting to fill the space, fill the images, with projected meaning.

Of course, the truth is that there is no meaning, that Satan does not exist, and through the hubris of attempting to challenge Satan to exist (by summoning him, but also by deciphering and giving meaning to the empty signs) the false meaning that they bestow upon the images destroys them.

The fact that The Ninth Gate does not hinge on the overtly supernatural – as does Rosemary’s Baby – is significant. The universe that we are exploring is one that contains a “supernatural” in the fullest sense of the word; that is, there is no overt, obvious bleeding of the fantastical into the realm of the everyday. The world of magic is clearly marked off, located deep between the covers of the books that house the movie’s soul. There is no God (or Devil), sacred and profane are immutable categories, and the supernatural, no matter how enticing its signs, is still the supernatural, the not-natural; in modern secular language, the false. As the collectors rush to the ambiguous like lemmings to a cliff, they are thrown off of it as those same signs “fatally” seduce them, and appearance regresses back into appearance and the void is revealed. I think we can clearly see Langella’s character experiencing this very sentiment as he immolates himself, first willingly, and then writing in horror.

This is the metaphysical stance of the film. However, The Ninth Gate also stands for the “witchcraft” of seduction, because it is seduction that drives the plot. The “gates” of the woodcuts are literal gates in The Ninth Gate, passageways through which lack/of/meaning hopes to wring the necks of the characters.
This whole thing, of course, owes much to Jean Baudrillard’s amazing book Seduction.