Satan Made Me Do It! (...Or Did He?) "The Devil's Advocate"
There is a thing out there called neoliberalism.
Immediately, language balks. Yes, it's a thing, but what kind of thing? Is it an idea? A way of thinking? A system of organizing the world, a set of economic beliefs, a period of recent history? Yes, to all this, and to a lot more.
Like so much of our contemporary language, maybe the best way to understand this word is as a tool. Yes, it holds a cluster of associations involving kind of economic thinking that has become prevalent in the last forty years, but it also simultaneously points in a complex set of directions, many of which exist outside the realm of its denotative meaning; because of this, it both conveys meaning and serves a broader set of functions.
So, for some people, invoking neoliberalism is a way of trying to convince other people that they have serious thoughts about the modern world because they’re able to use a piece of jargon, regardless (or irregardless, as the case may be) of whether they actually do have those thoughts. For others, it's a shorthand that can be used to indicate that one is on the left side of contemporary political debate, regardless of whether this is a real political stance or just something trumpeted on social media for the purpose of generating clicks. For still others, it's a way of gesturing vaguely at the ills of "capitalism," whether seriously or performatively, or both. And so on.
There are, of course, many well-educated folks out there who have definitions and understandings of the word neoliberalism that are indeed well thought-out; my point here is that in the absence of that kind of careful explication (and perhaps even in the presence of it) we should always be thinking in terms of use in addition to meaning. Neoliberalism, like "communism" and "capitalism" and "woke" and "justice" and "equity" and "rights" and all the rest of our contemporary nomenclature does not occupy a stable position; it is not a word one can simply use to communicate, assuming that someone else sees it in the same way or that it sits in the same relation to another person's galaxy of ideas as it does to one's own.
But neoliberalism is a word, let me call it a concept, that I find useful, and it's one that I'd like to invoke here. The way I'm going to try to use it for the next few moments, as closely as I can put into language, is as follows.
It encompasses a set of economic beliefs, closely tied to the policies and ideologies popularized by people like Thatcher and Reagan, that puts its faith in the logic of the free market to such an extent that this faith becomes a kind mysticism that borders (as many mysticisms do) on iron certainty; it's also a way of describing how in the last forty or fifty years this faith has seeped down from large-scale political programs and platforms and woven itself into the very fabric of our personal lives and interpersonal relationships. What started as a political movement espousing principles laid out by economists has metastasized to become a constituent element of our day-to-day lived experience.
This is still all very large and abstract, so let me give a couple of examples. The first is from an advice column. In it, a person carrying the burden of student loans wonders whether or not they have to pay them off. They grew up in America, they explain, and their family's financial circumstances made it so that to get through undergrad they had to take on $80,000 in debt. They have since moved to another country, where they earned a PhD that was mostly publicly financed.
"Since moving here," they write, "I have realized that the trauma I went through of having a very sick mom should never have been compounded by many years of debt-ridden poverty. That simply doesn’t happen here...I’m also feeling quite bitter toward my student loans…It’s money that I could use to grow some actual wealth with (or, at minimum have the potential to actually retire with)." At the close of the letter, they pose their ultimate question: "Other than fear [of consequences if they move back to the U.S.] and personal honor, is there a good reason for me to even attempt paying them off?"
Of note here are two elements of what I'll call the neoliberal mindset. The first is the notion that life consists of a smooth, deserved ascension into the ranks of the well-off, happy achievers of their dreams. Things like poverty, bad luck, and unfairness of circumstance are, for this writer, obviously wrong. The writer "should never have" had to go through both personal difficulty and debt. Why? Because these impeded their path towards "wealth" and the ability to retire. Which is to say that their frame of reference is one of a kind of fury at the fact of their own lack of prosperity, a feeling of "But everyone else is getting it – I deserve it too!" We are all, in the neoliberal vision, encouraged to believe that we are on a one-way journey into prosperity, and that anything impeding that journey is simply not acceptable.
The second element is the lack of an ethical foundation. One of the blunt facts of economic thinking is that there is, by definition, no ethical side to it. The free market has no morality: it makes decisions, or allots resources, based on appraisals of data like supply and demand, past and future economic events, and monetary value. Any ethical set of brakes to this system must necessarily be external, and in practice usually comes in the form of governmental regulation or personal morals. This is the reason (or one of the reasons) that there has long been such an alliance in America between the free market right and the religious right: without a strong, external ethical system such as the one offered by Christianity, there would be no reason for any real capitalist not to screw the other guy as profoundly as possible in order to make a buck; this, in fact, is the purest and most efficient way someone who believes in the free market can think. There is no logic in the free market that argues against child labor, or environmental degradation, or radically unsafe working conditions; it is, actually, the reverse. For the pure economic thinker, these are all ways of increasing profit.
We can see both of these factors – the belief in the ultimate rightness of personal prosperity, and the groundlessness of the neoliberal ethical system – at work in the letter writer's odd and wonderful statement of what might prevent them from simply not paying their student loans: "fear and personal honor."
The fear here is obvious: the writer might not get everything they deserve if they decide to move back to the U.S., because the government might take a dim view of their defaulting on their debt. Personal honor is more interesting. Note that it is, of course, "personal" honor, indicating that this is a purely individual thing. There is no consideration of living in a community, no consideration of the fact that other Americans, such as you and I, dear reader, financed this person's education with our tax dollars. Nor is there any sense of larger ethical considerations, such as the formulation most famously laid down by Kant that we should act in a way that everyone in the world could act without society collapsing entirely. It is, instead, only the writer’s honor at stake. And one gets the sense that just as this pesky debt is standing in the way of the promise of a life ending inevitably in wealth and retirement, the need to pay it off is standing in the way of this person's personal honor.
Two questions occur to me. If the writer of this letter really has "honor," then why is fear a factor? Actual honor, it would seem, would pertain whether or not they were afraid. The second is related: Who was it who took out those $80,000 in loans in the first place?
The second example that floated across my transom this week comes from that category of missives about how damned we all are because tech companies are mining our data to make us buy things. This piece is about the way AI is using algorithms to change the very way our minds work, through what it chooses to show us on our electronic devices. Regardless of its rather turgid notion of style, it seems to me worth reading in part because of the strange omission at its center.
"Our affinities are increasingly no longer our own," cries the writer in the opening paragraph, "but rather are selected for us for the purpose of automated economic gain. The automation of our cognition and the predictive power of technology to monetize our behavior, indeed our very thinking, is transforming not only our societies and discourse with one another, but also our very neurochemistry. It is a late chapter of a larger story, about the deepening incursion of mercantile thinking into the groundwater of our philosophical ideals. This technology is no longer just shaping the world around us, but actively remaking us from within."
Yes! We are tempted to cry with him. All of us are being turned into commodities, our preferences and predilections, our habits and histories all being stripped down and sold off to companies who are doing things like showing us ads on the internet and curating the content of our feeds, solely for the purpose of making money. This is, of course, a critique of neoliberalism, an attempt to strike a blow against the way the free market has infiltrated our minds, a jeremiad against the "deepening incursion of mercantile thinking into the groundwater of our philosophical ideals."
And yet, at the same time, it shares with the student debt missive one of the strangest and most defining elements of neoliberal thought: a kind of raging and infantile helplessness. This is captured by a rather simple question: Why don't you put down your fucking phone?
Is it really the case that AI is poisoning our thought and destroying our lives? Or is it actually the case that, like the student loan writer, you simply believe that life is meant to be lived without consequence, that you yourself are not responsible for what you do? Is it really the case that you called some conservative an asshole on Facebook because the AI made you do it? Is it really the case that you bought that fast food because the AI made you do it? Is it really the case that you went to that protest and beat up some liberals because the AI made you do it?
Or is it actually the case that you believe that life is about getting everything you want, turning yourself into a personal brand, getting wealthy and retiring happily, and that what you deserve is for all these things to happen to you regardless of the choices you make? Is it actually the case that you buy things (like phones) and use things (like social media apps) and wish so desperately for them to be inherently good and empowering and to come with no possible moral cost, that when that cost inevitably rears its head you recoil in petulant, unaccepting, fury?
Here lies one of the many secrets of neoliberal thinking: it elevates above all else the individual pursuit of the material (money, status, empowerment) and builds into that elevation a kind of childish anger at anything that has the temerity to get in the way of that pursuit. Buying is good, using is good, because it all leads to more, to abundance, to prosperity, to self-actualization. And if anything goes wrong it must be the fault of the system, because my own heart has promised me that I'm special and deserve to be the greatest.
The Devil's Advocate, directed by Taylor Hackford and released in 1997, tells the story of Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves), a morally compromised but preternaturally talented small-time trial lawyer in Florida who has never lost a case. After a particularly odious victory – he gets a clearly-guilty child molester off the hook – he finds himself being recruited by a big law firm in New York City run by one John Milton (Al Pacino) that wants to start a criminal division.
Lomax takes the job and moves his wife Mary Ann (Charlize Theron) into the swanky apartment the firm provides for them, against the wishes of his religious mother (Judith Ivey). Prosperity founded on long hours of hard work at the office immediately follows, and for about ten minutes of screen time it seems as though the Lomaxes have achieved the American Dream.
Unfortunately, it soon becomes clear – if it wasn't already, from the character's name and Al Pacino's gloriously bombastic performance – that John Milton is not just a lawyer of international renown but Satan himself. And, as old Beelzebub is wont to do, he has been offering Lomax a series of choices, each one promising things like money and power, and each one involving a moral breach. Lomax says yes to them all.
He gets the child molester off, and when this leads to the offer from the New York firm, he accepts; he tells Mary Ann that he will take care of her in this new big city, but then sacrifices their relationship for his work, sending her into so much agony that she eventually commits suicide; he wins an acquittal for a real estate developer (Craig T. Nelson) he realizes is guilty of murder; he stumbles across the firm's managing partner Eddie Barzoon (Jeffrey Jones) shredding papers to hide evidence from a federal investigation and does nothing.
At the end of the film, the Prince of Darkness reveals his long game. Lomax is actually his son (Lomax's mother visited New York one time, many years ago, and was seduced; she has never told him who his father was) and if he can be convinced to have sex with his half-sister, Satan's daughter, the resulting child will overthrow God. Lomax chooses not to comply, and kills himself instead.
The film's closing sequence creates a kind of coda to all of this: it takes us back to a moment from the opening when Lomax is deciding whether or not to defend the child molester he knows is guilty. This time he decides not to defend the man, presumably sending himself along a different path than the one shown to us by the movie. But in the final scene Satan appears again, this time in the guise of a journalist, to offer Lomax an interview that will make him famous by showing the world how noble he is for the choice he's just made, once again opening the path of temptation. Lomax accepts.
In working through the relationship between art and culture, just as in working through the meaning of the word "neoliberalism," one should take care. It would be inane to argue that the storyline of The Devil's Advocate is somehow a result of the neoliberal mindset that has osmosed into the American consciousness in the last forty years. Tales about misbegotten pacts with the devil have a long history; more specifically, cautionary tales about the pursuit of excess in the capitalist system are almost as old as that system itself.
And yet – as with the strikingly similar Oliver Stone film Wall Street from 1987 – it's clear that there’s something in the movie that responds to its cultural moment, or emerges from that moment, something that reveals the way art works to interpret its society, serving if not as a cultural conscience then at least as the person in the back seat throwing popcorn and jeering at whoever is driving the car.
But the question is how. And not just in general, but specifically. The devil, as it were, is always in the details. It's not the broad outlines of the film's narrative but the particular way that narrative is enacted that allows us to investigate how it embodies (or doesn’t embody) the desires and anxieties of the culture that produces it.
So, for example, Kevin Lomax's tale is one that has resonated in many stretches of American history. He’s the small-town boy who, through ceaseless hard work, makes it to the big city and then makes it big in the big city. Importantly, he does this because of his own individual talent: he's a great courtroom lawyer, in particular because he knows how to read people and thus pick a favorable jury.
But here, when he ascends to this new plane of success, what he finds is not what he expects. The Devil's Advocate presents Kevin and Mary Ann's introduction into the world of the high and mighty in New York as a slow indoctrination into a something like a cult (the movie bears numerous similarities to films from the Satanic cult genre, like Rosemary's Baby or The Believers). What begins as a glamorous milieu – the money, the classic eight apartment, the swanky parties – is slowly revealed, step by step, to be the result of evil at work. It’s the very notion of prosperity itself, that life to which we all "ought" to aspire, in other words, that is corrupt; put differently, there is no upper-class New York world in the film that isn't debased, no heroic millionaires, no rich, powerful good-guys out there fighting the devil. Rather, wealth itself is entirely Satan's province.
And what does Lomax realize about his talent? That it's not his at all, but a result of his supernatural lineage. He has not achieved what he has because he's a hard-working and talented individual, but because he’s a pawn in a long-running war waged by Lucifer against God. In this way, the film throws open to question the two main assurances that have run through American culture for the last forty years: that hard work unfettered by moral regulation will get us where we want to go, and that the promised land we should, or even must, all be trying to find our way into is comprised of virtuous affluence.
What the film presents us with instead is a kind of metaphor for the corrosive effects of this kind of pursuit. Consider, for example, the way it uses the character of Lomax's wife Mary Ann.
Almost immediately on arriving in New York, the horrors of life there become clear to her. She's responsible for the interior decoration of their massive new apartment, a task which she realizes is not so much an opportunity as it is a series of tests of whether she can keep up with their more experienced, more sophisticated, high-society neighbors. As Kevin spends more and more time away from her, her mental health and their marriage deteriorates; the more time she spends with her new "friends" (the wives of the other lawyers in the firm) the more their true nature is revealed to her, until in one scene she sees demons crawling beneath their skin. Finally, she's assaulted by Satan himself, which is the event that sends her to the psychiatric hospital where she kills herself.
So it's not just that the film presents the prosperity the Lomaxes find as being based on immorality, and not just that it twists the dream of personal accomplishment into a nightmare of finding that success is a result of evil powers one didn't even know one possessed; it's also that this pursuit of prosperity demolishes the only authentic, intimate human relationship at the heart of the film, leaving both Kevin and Mary Ann in an isolated, deadly spiritual destitution.
All of this is, of course, the result of a series of choices unmoored from ethical consideration. Like the letter writer who doesn't want to repay their student debt, Kevin and Mary Ann have their gaze fixed firmly on the brass ring. And like both the letter writer and the author of the piece about how AI is "remaking us from within," Lomax is faced with an old-fashioned and perhaps even quaint predicament: whether he likes it or not, his life will be determined by the choices he makes. He is indeed at the mercy of a greater system, to such an extent that he hasn't even really known who he is, why he is where he is, or what he's capable of, until his parentage is revealed; and yet, the film insists, his decision of whether or not to go along with evil is his alone.
And even when he makes the choice not to go along with the devil's plan, the final scene shows us that he has not escaped for good. He agrees to do the interview, and it's revealed that the reporter is actually Satan in disguise; the film then ends with Satan telling us that vanity is definitely his favorite sin. In other words, it's Kevin's desire (and perhaps our corresponding desire) to achieve the kind of fantastic personal success (call it empowerment, call it building wealth, call it a personal brand) to which he believes life has entitled him that leads to his ruination.
As a final addendum, it should be noted that what's revealed by even as cursory a reading of the movie as this is not that it somehow offers either a perfect diagnosis or a perfect cure for the modern condition. That is not how cinema works.
Instead, what's revealed is the uneasy way that human beings ride along in their culture, or perhaps the way that culture rides along on the uneasy backs of the human beings beneath it. We sense – even if we cannot quite articulate it – what's being done to us, what's being offered us, how the world is different for us than it was for previous generations, and how it will be different for future generations; sometimes we like these realizations and sometimes we hate them. And there is often that in us which protests, which cries out against the inhumanity of the world, which wants our strange predicaments to be recognized.
It's out of these often unstated, often inchoate feelings that we shape our stories.
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