The Devil All the Time and the Pathology of Religious Faith
“The Devil All the Time” is a tragic and intricate movie set in the heartland of post-World War II America that critically examines the nature of faith and religious devotion. Adapted from the novel of the same name written by Donald Ray Pollock (who also acts as narrator in the movie), this work in the genre termed “hillbilly gothic”, is a gut-wrenching tale of human suffering, tragedy, and death. The film opens on the devastated Pacific Islands of World War II, and then quickly transports the viewer to the heart of America, where the rest of the movie is set. The storyline, which unfolds over the course of a decade, traverses between the Ohio towns of Knockemstiff and Meade, and Coal Creek WV, weaving a complex web of plotlines that dovetail neatly together as the story progresses. It is a gritty and uncompromising saga that forcefully conveys its message through the use of intense and often grotesque imagery and outrage-inspiring injustice as diabolical forces run amok, unchecked, and unabated. The sardonic and forlorn quality of the story soundly establishes its pitch-black tone. For some, the film goes too far; many critics reflect a distaste for what they consider its gratuitously dark character at the expense of its messages. But laying in the shadows are astute takes on faith, duty, love, and vengeance that await anyone capable of seeing past the blood, gore, and despair to perceive them.
Perhaps the most impactful aspect of the film, from my own point of view, is that it reveals religious faith as a destructive force among individuals. Throughout the movie, it leads its most devoted adherents to their doom. It both inspires and enables suffering, violence, and death. In “The Devil All the Time”, there is no shortage of that. We bear witness to unheeded prayers and unrequited devotion. Rather than finding a path to salvation through faith, characters are woefully beguiled and led to calamity by it. Indeed, the worst tragedies in the movie befall those who cleave to it most desperately. Ultimately, we find that the various reigns of terror, from the war-torn Pacific to the American heartland, are only halted when individuals take the initiative to put an end to it themselves. The perniciousness of religious faith is best exemplified by the characters who either hold it closely or manipulate it for sinister ends.
Willard Russell
The destructive potential of faith is first demonstrated by Willard Russell, the father of the film’s protagonist, Arvin Russell. Willard is a former U.S. Marine and World War II veteran, who during his service on the war-torn Pacific, must euthanize the flayed and crucified Sgt. Miller, whom he and fellow marines discover on patrol. This difficult intervention is an early demonstration of Willard’s resolve to do the right thing, even if it means shedding blood. Over the course of the film, Willard finds difficulty communicating with God. He goes through lapses in prayer, and when he resumes later on, he fears that God cannot hear him anymore. His post-war PTSD, violent inclinations, and turbulent relationship with God all lead to disastrous consequences later in the film.
En route from the war to his hometown of Coal Creek, West Virginia, he meets his future wife, Charlotte, in Meade, Ohio. After the two marry, they settle down in Knockemstiff, Ohio, where Arvin, the main protagonist of the film, is born. Willard raises Arvin to stand up for himself, specifically through violence. This is exemplified by Arvin’s childhood memory of his father’s brutal beating of two hunters who had harassed Arvin in the woods in the preceding scene.
As the first act continues to unfold, the flaws in Willard’s faith start to materialize when Charlotte is diagnosed with cancer. Having no faith in the doctors, he desperately pleads with God for help. He erects a rustic cross in the woods. There, he prays fervently for Charlotte’s recovery. As Charlotte’s condition deteriorates, Willard’s panic intensifies and his efforts to secure divine intervention become increasingly desperate and extreme. He eventually sacrifices the family dog, tying him to the cross as a gruesome plea for God’s help.[1]
Despite Willard’s anguished cries for help, Charlotte dies. Willard responds by slitting his own throat before his grisly altar that night, orphaning Arvin. Neither the film nor the novel fully explains Willard’s decision to kill himself. However, there are a few explanations. It is possible that disillusioned by Charlotte’s death, he decided to make a final gesture in defiant anger by slitting his own throat at his makeshift altar. Perhaps, by destroying himself in the sight of God, he hoped to commit a final, irrevocable act of rebellion against the deity who had remained passive and indifferent as his wife slowly withered away. The second possibility is that, since all other sacrifices had failed, the desperate and now deranged Willard attempts to convince God to bring Charlotte back to life by offering his own in her stead. Perhaps, he may have thought, those other sacrifices were not enough. I must go further! If this was the genuine level of his resolve, it surely is a miracle he never considered Arvin as a suitable offering.
Willard, though psychologically damaged, was a man who was willing to make hard choices to do the right thing. Throughout most of his life, he did not beseech God to solve his problems; he handled them himself. He put his faith in God without expecting favors in return, a subtle sign of true devotion. It is not until Charlotte is diagnosed with cancer that he turns to God for help. The silence of God in the face of Charlotte’s slow demise drives Willard insane, leading him to slaughter animals, a human being, and eventually himself, leaving Arvin without a mother or a father. Here, the viewer sees that faith in the prolific illusion of God the in the minds of the violent or psychologically unbalanced create optimal conditions for savage and unhinged transgressions against the innocent.
Roy Laferty
A second scenario is represented by Roy Laferty. Laferty is a charismatic preacher in Coal Creek, West Virginia, who is introduced in the movie when he testifies to the members of his Church that God cured his arachnophobia. To demonstrate his newly bestowed freedom from fear, he dumps jars of venomous spiders over his head before the congregation. This radical expression of faith becomes a routine component in his following sermons and wins the attention of Helen, whom he eventually marries. However, his luck runs out, and he is eventually bitten by one of these spiders. This leads to an allergy-induced delirium where he eventually falls under the delusion that he can resurrect the dead through the power of God.
Roy attempts to demonstrate this insane hypothesis in the most insane way possible; he takes his wife to the woods, where he unexpectedly stabs her in the throat with a screwdriver. As Helen is taking her last breaths, her deranged husband consoles her in his arms, assuring her that she will soon be resurrected by his hand. Needless to say, however, things don’t go according to plan, and Laferty is left with grief in his heart and blood on his hands.
Thanks to the hapless preacher’s unshakeable faith, Helen is dead and gone. But does he change his mind about God? Of course not. Distraught, he decides to hitchhike, finally falling into the hands of the prolific serial killer couple Carl and Sandy Henderson, whom I will discuss in greater depth later. Masquerading as a couple on vacation, the pair take him to a picturesque river, where they unsuccessfully try to convince him to have sex with Sandy while Carl snaps pictures. Frustrated by the intractable pastor, Carl decides to expedite the final phase of their twisted ritual. He abandons the attempts at the lewd photography and shoots the Laferty, but not before their victim makes a final declaration of faith. Perhaps it is commendable that Roy clung to his virtues even at the moment of death. We must remember though, that it was faith itself that drove him to kill his wife and ultimately led him to his death at the hands of murderers. It is ironic that, in his final moments, Roy Laferty, reaffirmed his devotion to the very thing that delivered he and his wife to ruin.
Preston Teagardin
Next, we come to Reverend Teagardin, a monstrous wolf in sheep’s clothing flawlessly embodied in the film by Robert Pattinson. Teagardin’s relationship with faith is much different from that of Willard Russell and Roy Laferty. He is a holier-than-thou narcissist and rapist who believes that his status not only makes him better than others, but also permits him to commit acts that would, for others, be considered outright sinful. In Willard and Russell’s case, it was exclusively their commitment to faith that inspired their evil and their eventual downfall. As for Teagardin, his manipulation of the faith of others is the key component by which evil manifests through him. The people – or flock I should say – that Teagardin was assigned to serve, was a faith-saturated and credulous lot, who looked upon their religious leaders in high regard and were all too willing to defer to his ministerial authority. Ironically, viewers can swiftly deduce that Teagardin is a plague upon the rustic township. This supposed shepherd, draped in the cloth of divine authority, procedes to seduce and rape the teenage girls of the town, under the very noses of its residents. This inveterate reptile eventually targets Lenora, Arvin’s adoptive step-sister (who is also Roy Laferty’s daughter), seduces her through her faith and impregnates her. When Lenora tells Teagardin of the pregnancy, he rebuffs and abandons her. In despair, Lenora comes within inches of hanging herself, before changing her mind. Sadly, she loses balance on her support while undoing the noose, and is strangled anyway, leading the community to believe that she had, in fact committed suicide. Teagardin’s malicious spree continues unabated until Arvin finally kills him in revenge.
Carl and Sandy Henderson
The serial killers, Carl and Sandy Henderson, like Teagardin, use faith as a way to lull their victims into a false sense of security as they escort them to their doom. Throughout the movie, Carl and Sandy express their faith in God with nearly every victim in the movie, maybe even a tactic inspired by one of their first victims, Roy Laferty. Like the reprobate minister Teagardin, the murderous couple view faith as a weakness. They exploit the faith of their victims to disarm, seduce, and finally murder them.
A more interesting component of Carl and Sandy’s relationship with faith is Carl’s love of gospel music along with his statement that torture and murder bring him closer to God. This is a twisted manifestation of faith that adds an unhinged spiritual component to Carl’s appetite for inflicting suffering and death upon the unwitting hitchhikers caught in his orbit. This patently evil view is brought into starker light in Sandy’s distaste for Carl’s spiritual interpretation of their vile hobby. Despite being both Carl’s accomplice and a prostitute, Sandy eventually expresses remorse and a sincere desire to stop hunting humans. Carl, however, has no desire to hang up his camera and pistol. After all, unlike the implicitly non-spiritual Sandy, Carl gets what he considers, “divine reward” through his actions. In this case, faith does not deter evil. In fact, it promotes it. Ultimately, like Teagardin, their rampage doesn’t stop until they cross paths with Arvin, who is now on the run after gunning down Teagardin. The couple pick up the hitchhiking fugitive, intending to make him the latest victim in their killing spree. However, the vigilant Arvin picks up on the deception, and when the two turn on him, Arvin fatally shoots them, saving himself and ending the couple’s quiet reign of terror.
In “The Devil all the Time”, faith is no virtue. Rather, it is the loyal servant of evil. Throughout the God-fearing American heartland of the 1950s and ‘60s, faith inspires madness in even the most well-intentioned people, tearing away their reason and exploiting their psychological flaws to horrific consequences. Various predators cloak themselves in it, using the beneficent veneer it provides to seize upon their prey with ease and impunity. The film proves that certain interpretations can even serve to justify wickedness, exemplified by Carl Henderson and Reverend Teagardin.
Conclusion
Fortunately for the people of West Virginia and Southern Ohio, both Teagardin and the Hendersons are eventually stopped. As mentioned before, Arvin kills all three, the former in revenge, the latter in self-defense. Importantly, it is not through faith that Arvin finds the strength to kill Teagardin, nor the vigilance required to notice the Henderson’s true motives and take action before it was too late. Had he been another sheep, he may have beseeched God to stop Teagardin or prayed for his soul. Perhaps he would have fallen for the Henderson’s rouse and remained oblivious to Carl’s handgun, Sandy’s betraying eyes, and other red flags that were flying out in front of him. Arvin took responsibility. This is what it takes to be a positive agent of change.
While there are other interpretations of the film that point to an underlying pro-faith message beneath the film’s blood-soaked surface, viewing the work as an argument against faith is perhaps the best reflection of reality. After all, if we look at the history of faith, what do we see? Thousands of years of holy wars, religious persecution, and terrorism. Conquest, slavery, and despotism have all been justified by religion, and this is not even an exhaustive list. “The Devil All the Time” contributes to our understanding of the danger of faith by shifting our focus from large-scale historical events to realistic allegories of how it corrodes people on an individual level.
[1] As bad as this sounds, in the novel, it is much worse. In Pollock’s original rendition, Willard not only kills the dog, but also sacrifices a series of small animals, and even a human being.
Strong film. Great review.