Is the free speech debate dead? Plus, the devil!
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A pro-Palestinian protester uses a bullhorn during a demonstration in front of Sproul Hall on the UC Berkeley campus on April 22, 2024 in Berkeley, California
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
In anticipation of more pro-Palestinian protests, many college administrators rolled out new rules this fall that include getting pre-approval for posting flyers or hosting demonstrations. Brittany is joined by UC Irvine sociology professor David S. Meyer, who studies social movements and public policy, and Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Kate Hidalgo Bellows. They discuss the changes on campuses and how they tie into debates over free speech.
Then, Brittany kicks off a new series exploring horror tropes. It's called The Trilogy of Terror. First up: Beelzebub. Brittany invites Travis Stevens and Klaus Yoder, historians and co-hosts of the podcast Seven Heads, Ten Horns: The History of the Devil, to talk about the symbology of the devil and how representations of him in horror movies have changed over time.
Copyright 2024 NPR
In anticipation of more pro-Palestinian protests, many college administrators rolled out new rules this fall that include getting pre-approval for posting flyers or hosting demonstrations. Brittany is joined by UC Irvine sociology professor David S. Meyer, who studies social movements and public policy, and Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Kate Hidalgo Bellows. They discuss the changes on campuses and how they tie into debates over free speech.
Then, Brittany kicks off a new series exploring horror tropes. It's called The Trilogy of Terror. First up: Beelzebub. Brittany invites Travis Stevens and Klaus Yoder, historians and co-hosts of the podcast Seven Heads, Ten Horns: The History of the Devil, to talk about the symbology of the devil and how representations of him in horror movies have changed over time.
Transcript
BRITTANY LUSE, HOST:
Hello. Hello. I'm Brittany Luse and you're listening to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. A show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
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LUSE: This week, we're connecting the dots between unauthorized flyers, secret chat rooms and campus lawns? I know, I know - how are all of these things connected? Well, we're going to find out with staff reporter for the Chronicle Of Higher Education, Kate Hidalgo Bellows, and UC Irvine Professor David S. Meyer, who studies social movements and public policy. Kate, David, welcome to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE.
KATE HIDALGO BELLOWS: Thank you, Brittany.
DAVID S MEYER: Good to be with you.
LUSE: I wonder, you know, you both have looked at probably so many images and videos of campus protests. What is the most memorable protest sign you've seen - all time?
MEYER: Do we want? Time travel. When do we want it? Doesn't matter.
LUSE: (Laughter) That's a good one. That's a good one. But to shift our tone, this week marks one year since the war in Gaza started and basically one year of student anti-war protests. And this fall, things have been a little quieter on that front than they were during the spring semester. And that's for a reason. Universities have instituted new policies. At the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University and the Virginia Comonwealth University, students have to get approval for any outdoor event or demonstration. Students at Stonybrook University can't post flyers without approval. Even events such as vigils for Palestinians or lectures featuring Palestinian speakers have been canceled at the University of Maryland and Wake Forest University. Free speech has been in question at American universities for a long while, and less than a decade ago, there was a national multi-year discourse about protecting free speech on campus. And I'm not seeing that as much right now. Are the campus free speech debates dead? We will revisit that. But first, Kate, why are administrators saying that they need to implement these rules?
BELLOWS: What we are hearing from administrators is that they cannot repeat the chaos of the spring semester, that they want to make sure that campuses don't get out of control like they said they did in the spring. And they're also using the argument that creating these protest restrictions or First Amendment time, place and manner policies are intended to keep students safe and, you know, ensure that people have access to the entire campus.
LUSE: So for those who may not know, what do you mean when you say time, place and manner policy?
BELLOWS: So colleges that need to follow the First Amendment - public colleges - you are allowed to limit forms of expressive activities only to the extent that it affects the time, the manner in which they happen, so through flyers or chants and audio, stuff like that, and the place where it happens. Those are the only restrictions that you can put in place and you can't make restrictions on the basis of content, so you can't ban progressive speech.
LUSE: But this does come on the heels of some really tricky stuff. Some Jewish students have said that they feel like their campuses became hostile environments toward them. And there have been reports of both antisemitic and anti-Islamic activity on some campuses. At the same time, there were some actors who used the argument of fighting against antisemitism to try and shut down pro-Palestinian speech. So administrators were faced with a problem. Where was the line between making sure all students felt safe on campus and restricting speech? It seems like the timing of the changes they made could be seen as an effort to avoid conflict. Now, there have been a variety of responses to the student protests from different school administrations. But for the schools that implemented these new rules, what are student protesters saying about their ability to speak on campus?
BELLOWS: They see it as an example of viewpoint discrimination. The pro-Palestinian protesters see these policies as being implemented in direct reaction to the protests of the spring, which they have been very vocal about saying that they weren't violent, they were peaceful. They say, this is intended to squelch their free speech rights. They're saying that these new time, place and manner policies make free speech too burdensome. If you're going to require a reservation ahead of time to host a protest, that that really is not in the spirit of the First Amendment that public universities and colleges have to follow. So they've been very vocal against these policies.
LUSE: Well, as I said earlier, in the mid-2010s, there was a heated national debate about free speech on campus. And it was mostly about students who held progressive values, not wanting alt right or, you know, racist or sexist speakers to come to their campus. I think we can remember a lot of those op eds in major newspapers and magazines across the country during that time. I know I do. But I'm just not seeing the same type of discussion, maybe even not even as much discussion about censorship or suppression of speech in the wider media coverage right now. Are campus free speech debates dead? David?
MEYER: Campus free speech debates are not dead, but they're complicated, and there are very few people who actually care about free speech as an abstraction. I think people tend to care about speech when somebody they don't like is platformed or somebody they do like is shut down or they feel that they can't say what they want. So free speech debates always come packaged in the particular, and the particular is generally what students and observers are responding to. It used to be a reliable thing in the mid-2010s. If you wrote a book from a conservative perspective, you scheduled your first stop on your speaking tour - on your book tour for UC Berkeley because you could reliably expect students to try to shut you down and prevent use of campus facilities for you to talk about what you've done. That's what happened with Milo Yiannopoulos. And it's a great way to get a tremendous amount of attention to then take your story to Fox News. I think the free speech debates that you remember not that long, long ago were really about protecting a space for conservative speech.
The current debate about expression, I think campus administrators are going to say, of course, that they have no viewpoint discrimination in these new rules that you can't protest after 4 o'clock in the afternoon or after 3 o'clock in the afternoon, or that you have to get a permit 28 days in advance because those are content neutral. But the students who staged those protests last spring, that generated the disruption and the attention, understandably think the new restrictions were directed at them.
BELLOWS: Yeah. Like, what David said, students have been pointing to the Palestine exception to free speech, which is a theory that posits that colleges and universities want to preserve free speech and allow as many voices on campus as possible, except when that involves advocating for Palestinian rights. The critics who are pointing to this - often students and faculty members - say that's a double standard and that it does not follow the First Amendment or speech policies that many private colleges are committed to.
LUSE: You know, campuses have long been hotbeds for political movements. Like, are there antiwar movements that used similar tactics to the ones that we're seeing now? 'Cause, I mean, you know, a lot of the pushback has been based on how disruptive these students' techniques have been.
MEYER: So there's very little that's new in the protest repertoire. But people are always trying to innovate. The debates about free speech go back to something that was actually called the Free Speech Movement that started in Berkeley, California, at UC Berkeley. And it was about setting up tables to recruit people for civil rights work. That's how it started. And if you go online and type in Berkeley Free Speech Movement, you will see a graduate student named Mario Savio standing on top of a police car, giving a speech. Pretty disruptive.
Disruption is the point of a protest action. You want to disrupt the functioning of your institution as usual so people have to pay attention to your issue. And the encampment strategy, which I can trace back to the 1930s, was most famously used in the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, where students built shantytowns on college campuses and demanded that their universities divest from investment in South Africa to try to undermine the functioning of the apartheid government there. So when college administrators now say, we want free speech, but we don't want the disruption, the disruption is part of the story.
BELLOWS: I will add that social media is a new factor from the other things that David mentioned, and that's certainly transformed the spring protests in terms of the ways that students were able to mobilize their peers and create a national movement. And it's also something that is harder than the other factors, like tents and flyers and stuff like that, for administrators to control or limit.
LUSE: Oh, that's a really good point. You know, I wonder, are the colleges' responses different than they have been in the past?
MEYER: Campuses have always varied in their response to student protest. In the fall, however, I think what's a little bit different is that they seem to be marching in step. And that's new, as far as I can recall. I think preempting is a great word. I don't know if college presidents have secret chat rooms where they coordinate about this stuff. Boy, that's a room I'm not going to get invited into. But they certainly watch each other. And they're certainly cognizant that college presidents have decided to resign from their jobs because of the political fallout from these protests.
BELLOWS: Yeah. To go into more detail about what David is talking about, I think college presidents do not want to be the next person to be asked to talk to Congress. And so they're very much on watch for that possibility. They don't want to deal with it anymore.
LUSE: I mean, you know, we're talking about how some administrators feel as if they have to be content neutral in their messaging right now, but also, money is a big factor. Where do funders fit into all of this?
MEYER: I've always imagined that something that presidents get evaluated on - I've heard this my entire career - is how well they do at raising money. When people who are capable of funding a building say, I'm no longer going to contribute, well, college presidents pay attention.
BELLOWS: Yeah. We have seen a couple examples of those campuses that have lost donors, or donors have threatened to pull out from their financial relationship, or they've had less success on giving days. So this is not something that's just hypothetical.
LUSE: I'm not in college. I left a long time ago. There's lots of people in this country who've never been to college or never finished. You know, for people who aren't in college or never went, why should they care about these new rules? Why should they care about this free speech debate that is developing right now?
BELLOWS: I mean, the protests have been led by young people who are going to enter the workforce, whether that's academia or otherwise, and bring their beliefs and experiences with them. I also think it's important to know what's on the minds of young people and certainly to remember that these aren't all young people. This is just a fraction.
MEYER: On one level, the fact that lots of students across the United States have seen horrifying pictures of civilian casualties or civilians being taken prisoner, and they say, we want to do something to stop the harm - I think that's encouraging. OK. Why should we pay attention? People who are willing to protest are likely to do something else. People who are willing to protest are quite likely to vote, so what happens in the hothouse of the university campus can easily refract back and spread to the rest of the world. And that's an exciting thing, and it's certainly worth paying attention to.
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LUSE: Well, we will see what happens as this war continues and, as I imagine, students will continue to be protesting in whatever ways they can. David, Kate, I have learned so much here. Thank you both so much.
BELLOWS: Thank you, Brittany.
MEYER: Good to be with you, Brittany.
LUSE: And as a thank you, I would like to teach you something by playing a game with the two of you. Can you stick around for a tiny bit longer?
BELLOWS: Yes.
MEYER: Sure.
LUSE: We'll be right back with a little game I like to call, But Did You Know?
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LUSE: Stick around.
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LUSE: All right, all right. We're going to play a little game I like to call, But Did You Know?
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LUSE: Here's how it works. I'm going to share a story that's been making headlines this week. And as I give you some background on the story, I'll also ask you trivia related to it. But don't worry - it's all multiple choice. And the first one to blurt out the right answer gets a point. Person with the most points wins, and their prize is bragging rights. Are y'all ready?
MEYER: Sure.
BELLOWS: Great. Yes, I'm ready. I could use some bragging rights.
LUSE: There have been a few major flops as of late - from box office duds like "Megalopolis" and "Joker: Folie A Deux" to Katy Perry's ill-fated album, "143." Something I'm learning is that you're never too big to flop. And we're going to learn a little more about these panned projects. To begin, "Megalopolis" is a movie whose lead character, an architect, can stop time with his mind. Beyond that, I'm not really sure how to describe this movie, and I saw it. About how long did it take Francis Ford Coppola to make "Megalopolis" - A, 20 years; B, 30 years; or C, 40 years?
BELLOWS: B?
MEYER: I'm going to say A.
LUSE: Unfortunately for both of you, and for Francis Ford Coppola...
MEYER: (Laughter)
LUSE: ...You're both wrong.
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LUSE: The answer is C, 40 years. He first got the idea in the '70s...
BELLOWS: Wow.
LUSE: ...But started writing the script in the early '80s. He spent $120 million of his own money for it to make only $4 million its opening weekend.
BELLOWS: Yikes.
LUSE: Did either of you see the movie?
BELLOWS: No, absolutely not.
MEYER: No (laughter).
LUSE: I can't recommend it.
BELLOWS: I will make sure...
LUSE: (Laughter).
BELLOWS: ...Not to see that.
LUSE: I can't say - I can't recommend it. All right. Well, question No. 2 - turning to "Joker: Folie A Deux," this movie is about the Joker and Harley Quinn meeting in an asylum, the Arkham Asylum, and falling in love and singing songs. It is a musical, and many people were very upset by that. Which Billy Joel song features in "Joker: Folie A Deux"? Is it A, "Uptown Girl": B, "My Life": or C, "We Didn't Start The Fire"?
BELLOWS: C.
MEYER: C, "We Didn't Start The Fire."
LUSE: OK, wow. You both said C.
MEYER: And we're both wrong, right?
(LAUGHTER)
LUSE: The answer is B, "My Life."
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LUSE: The movie musical also features "Fly Me To The Moon" by Bart Howard and "When The Saints Go Marching In." But unfortunately, Miss Gaga's music stylings were not enough to get people to see this movie (laughter).
BELLOWS: Oh, no.
LUSE: What movie that maybe doesn't need music would you want to turn into a musical? I know my answer - I think the horror movie "Saw III." It's already so unserious, and a lot of it takes place in one room. So why not add a song? Boom, put it on stage. Done.
BELLOWS: I feel like it's hard to think of movies that haven't been turned into musicals.
LUSE: At this point.
MEYER: Maybe the new "Apprentice" movie about Donald Trump's early years.
BELLOWS: Oh, my God.
LUSE: That might actually be a little too good (laughter). All right. Well, to recap the score, David, you are at zero points, and Kate, you are also at zero points. So without further ado, the final, potentially tie-breaking question. No. 3 - staying on the topic of music, let's turn to Katy Perry's album, "143." Which phrase is associated with the number 143? Is it A, see you soon; B, I miss you; or C, I love you?
MEYER: I miss you.
BELLOWS: Let's go with C.
LUSE: Well, Kate, I'm glad you took that extra second to think about it 'cause you're absolutely right. The answer is C, I love you.
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LUSE: It's the number of letters in each word.
BELLOWS: Oh, wow.
LUSE: One is I, four is love and three is you. One-four-three for I love you was very big in my middle school. But unfortunately, the love did not save 143 - Katy Perry's album - from receiving pans from critics. I do have a fun fact for you, though. This code seems to have originated from a Lighthouse in Massachusetts. The Minot's Ledge Light flashed one, then four, then three, and was nicknamed the I love you light.
MEYER: Oh.
BELLOWS: That's cute.
LUSE: That is it for but did you know for this week, and congratulations to Kate on your win.
BELLOWS: Thank you. Thank you. Sorry to Katy Perry.
LUSE: And David, Kate, thank you both so much for joining me today. This was great.
BELLOWS: Thank you.
MEYER: Thank you, Brittany.
LUSE: That was staff reporter for the Chronicle Of Higher Education, Kate Hidalgo Bellows and UC Irvine Professor David S. Meyer. I'm going go take a quick break, and when I get back, we are kicking off a trilogy of terror with the devil and how he symbolizes more than just evil in horror movies.
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LUSE: Stick around.
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LUSE: Now that spooky season is in full swing, a lot of our streaming services have been sprinkled with familiar faces, like Jason Voorhees, Count Dracula and my fave - Jigsaw. But there's one guy I really cannot stop seeing on my screen. I can't say I like him, and you probably don't either, but this dude is everywhere. I'm talking about the devil.
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LUSE: Now, let's be clear. I'm not talking about the actual devil, which many people do believe in, I'm talking about depictions of him across pop culture in movies, TV and music. Back in 2021, Lil Nas X went viral for his song, "Montero," where in the music video, he seduces the devil and then becomes him.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MONTERO (CALL ME BY YOUR NAME)")
LIL NAS X: (Singing) Call me when you want, call me when you need, call me in the morning, I'll be on the way. Call me when you want, call me when you need...
LUSE: And then there was Doja Cat going demon mode.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DEMONS")
DOJA CAT: How my demons look now that my pockets full?
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LUSE: I loved both these music videos. They played with devilish imagery in a way that felt kicky, and to the point, which is perfect for what's essentially a short film. But then there's the world of cinema. And the dark lord seems to be the villain du jour. He's dominating in horror. And you can see various versions of him or his followers scheming in "Longlegs..."
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NICOLAS CAGE: (As Longlegs) My friend that lives downstairs.
LUSE: ..."Late Night With The Devil..."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL")
LAURA GORDON: (As June Ross-Mitchell) Speak.
INGRID TORELLI: (As Lilly) You know who I am, Doctor.
LUSE: ..."Evil Dead Rise," "The Exorcist" sequel and many, many more. When I first started noticing the devil trend in movies, I have to be honest - I hated it. I thought it was lazy writing. Movies like that almost always end in ritual sacrifice or in exorcism...
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LUSE: ...Which, if you can believe it, gets kind of old after a while. As a storytelling method, it reminds me of ending a mystery show with it was all a dream. There's no big resolution or satisfying surprise. But it turns out there might actually be something interesting there, because some people think the devil is evoked in pop culture at particular points in history. This is going be the first of three segments we're doing this October. I'm calling it the trilogy of terror. Once a week, every week for the rest of the month, we are going to break down different tropes in horror. So, to kick it off. I'm talking to historian of Christianity Travis Stevens and theology professor Klaus Yoder. Together, they're the cohosts of "Seven Heads, Ten Horns: The History Of The Devil." And today, the three of us will dig deep into the devil's roots from the Bible to the big screen. Klaus, Travis, welcome to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE.
KLAUS YODER: Thanks so much, Brittany. It's awesome to be here.
TRAVIS STEVENS: Yeah, we are super excited. This is such a great show.
LUSE: Oh, thank you. Well, I'm excited to have you all here joining us for our trilogy of terror series. And specifically, we are here to talk about the devil. As you know, a lot of people believe in the devil and Satan, but today, we are talking about the media and pop cultural depictions of the devil. So in that vein, what do you think is the scariest devil you've ever seen?
STEVENS: I'm going classic. It's "The Exorcist."
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ELLEN BURSTYN: (As Chris MacNeil) And how do you go about getting an exorcism?
BURSTYN: If a person is, you know, possessed by a demon or something.
STEVENS: I know we don't actually see the devil, but that's part of it for me.
LUSE: Really?
STEVENS: So my view is that if you actually represent the devil directly, it's not scary anymore. It takes something away. But if you can't even see, it's like stuff that goes bump in the night. That is way scarier to me.
LUSE: You know what they say. It's like the devil you know versus the one you don't. That's a very good point. Very good pick, Travis.
STEVENS: Thank you. Thank you.
LUSE: OK. But what about the funniest devil you've ever seen?
YODER: There is a devil in the German Reformation called the Pants Devil.
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YODER: So with the Pants Devil, you got to watch out for being too ostentatious with your styles and just standing out too much. The no-fun Lutheran reformers of the late 16th century are like, that's the devil.
LUSE: (Laughter) You know what, though? I kind of like that. I kind of like that. It's keeping you humble. It's keeping you humble. Wow. Beautiful. OK, so there are a lot of ways people have chosen to represent the devil in culture. And I'd argue that the devil is a very popular horror trope right now. What do you make of the prevalence of the devil in horror?
YODER: Yeah, I think we talk about the current moment through the 20th century as a time of secularization, as a time when people are less religious, but I really think that people are getting a lot of their religion at the movie theater or on their screens and sort of having this familiar traditional representation of evil that's accessible in a media form, that - you know, that sort of is able to be reinvented over and over again. Some of the most iconic representations that we've seen come at times of perceived powerlessness, of a loss of identity. A time of crisis is such a cliche, but we've spoken of "The Exorcist." This is a post-Watergate film when the best and the brightest in the political class have very visibly failed spectacularly.
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RONALD REAGAN: Therefore, I shall resign the presidency, effective at noon tomorrow.
YODER: This is a time when gender norms are changing. We're in the era of Roe v. Wade. We're in the era of recognizing that single motherhood, single parenthood is a major social phenomenon.
LUSE: So, for those of you who haven't seen it, "The Exorcist" is about a single mom whose kid gets possessed.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE EXORCIST")
JASON MILLER: (As Father Karras) I'm Damien Karras.
MERCEDES MCCAMBRIDGE: (As demon) And I'm the devil.
LUSE: And to bring it to today, the anxieties around single motherhood are still with us. And I don't think I'm spoiling it when I say this, but "Longlegs" also makes a strong connection between single motherhood and the devil.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LONGLEGS")
CAGE: (As Longlegs) Why don't you ask your mommy?
LUSE: And "Evil Dead Rise" also follows a single mom and her pregnant sister's battle against demons.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "EVIL DEAD RISE")
MORGAN DAVIES: (As Danny) Mom?
ALYSSA SUTHERLAND: (As Deadite Ellie) Mommy's with the maggots now.
YODER: And so I think that when we have moments of great anxiety, the devil pops up on your shoulder. And I think that that's a real big part of the equation. It's like a way of processing major social, political, cultural anxieties.
LUSE: Oh, that's such a good point how if something feels unfamiliar or new or unknowable or unexplainable, then it's very easy to explain things away as evil. And what better way to represent evil than the devil? Travis, I'd love to hear from you on this. Like, why do you think the devil is so prevalent in cinema?
STEVENS: I think right now, there are anxieties that we need to work out in our shared imaginative, creative, artistic sphere, and cinema is a great place to do that, right? When it leaks into our political sphere, that's where I think we get into real trouble because that turns into flattening and groupthink and labeling entire social groups as evil.
LUSE: Devil imagery, imagery of the devil, demonic imagery has been with us basically as long as the belief in God. But how have the patterns in how the devil physically shows up or is depicted on film reflected our anxieties about him?
YODER: The pattern I would point to is the association between the devil and these people who have too much power or are, like, sort of selfish to a satanic degree. Like, those associations with elites is something that you see a lot. And that goes all the way back to the Hebrew Bible. Elites out of control is often something you see associated with the devil.
LUSE: I mean, I could see that with the recent movie "Late Night With The Devil," which features this talk show host who rubs elbows with the world's most elite men. But the devil being aligned with the greedy elite also matches up with how devil-like figures are seen across different religions.
STEVENS: I would just add that there's also a kind of recycling of tropes that are, you know, deeply conservative or traditional. Some of those might include the goat horns. That goes a couple of different ways. One, you've got sheep and goats - right? - in Jesus' parables, where goats are evil, sheep are good. So you see those horns, and you know who you're dealing with, right? You know? So...
LUSE: Whoa. Yeah.
STEVENS: ...There's that. There's also, like, the horns that come from medieval antisemitism. So...
LUSE: Right.
STEVENS: ...There was a mistranslation of this part of the Bible where Moses is coming down from the mountain, receiving the law, and, having seen God face to face, has a shining face, is how you should translate this Hebrew. But you can also translate it...
LUSE: Right.
STEVENS: ...As horned. And so medieval Jews, including, you know, Moses archetypically, were represented as having horns in some ways.
LUSE: Oh, my gosh.
STEVENS: And because that was the social anxiety of the Christians of that era, that got taken up in representations of the devil, as well.
LUSE: Wow. What you describe is something that, you know, I've heard some of my friends growing up - like, their parents had people, you know, back in the '60s or '70s inquire as to why they didn't have horns, because they had heard that Jews had horns. It kind of bowls me over how that was something that went that far back and also had roots that were so associated with evil. It's wild how powerful these images of evil and these images of demons or the devil can be and how they can actually harm people in real life.
YODER: Totally.
LUSE: But on your podcast, you've also tied the devil to fear of the other. Can you expand on that fear of the other and how you see it reflected on screen?
YODER: One of the most chilling and, like, openly xenophobic parts of "Rosemary's Baby" is at the end when everyone's assembled around, like, the bassinet cradle thing, and it's, like, Japanese tourists. And, like, this is such a trope of, like, '70s films, the kind of awkward, like, dorky-looking Asian tourists who are just, like, crowded around things with cameras. And then you see them at the end there for the birth of the Antichrist Satan baby. And it feeds into that association with foreignness, with the diabolical. And it also feeds into the idea of, like, the diabolical as a evil conspiracy of, we might say, globalists - right? - you know, that it sort of feeds into the antisemiticness (ph) of it all, too, of - that this is something that is hostile to national boundaries, is actively trying to degrade and destroy America and Christianity and stuff like that. So, yeah, that's, like, sort of a classic one.
STEVENS: Great. I can hop in with a relatively recent movie, "Longlegs." One of the more subtle tropes is a kind of queer coding of the villainous character. And the director has gone on the record to say, oh, this is not intentional. We're here to critique the artwork - right? - not the intention of the folks who created it. And what comes out is you've got this creepy adult character who presents as someone who uses makeup, has kind of long, shaggy hair. It could be, like, a glam rock aesthetic, could be some plastic surgery gone wrong. But what comes across is definitely not someone who is strongly on one side of the gender divide.
That's part of a longer legacy of horror playing with ideas of gender. There's a clear link in the film between this genderqueer character and satanic ritual and worship. That is the disturbing connection that I think links to contemporary politics. Antitrans legislation is being pushed in conservative Christian circles for political reasons.
LUSE: You know, for most of history, I would say, I would argue being called a devil worshipper was bad, but there's been a modern-day shift where pop stars like Lil Nas X are embracing satanic imagery. Billie Eilish recalled that classic imagery of the fall of Lucifer in the video for her 2019 song "All The Good Girls Go To Hell."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ALL THE GOOD GIRLS GO TO HELL")
BILLIE EILISH: (Singing) She'll want the devil on her team.
LUSE: And when Sam Smith and Kim Petras performed their song "Unholy" at the 2023 Grammy Awards, Sam was dressed in full devil regalia, top hat to pitchfork.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SAM SMITH: (Singing) Doing something unholy.
LUSE: We're not saying that these people themselves are worshiping Satan. I'm not privy to that information. But what is powerful?
(LAUGHTER)
LUSE: What is powerful about embracing devil imagery for yourself?
STEVENS: So I think, first, the power move is the same one that queer people do when we reclaim the term queer. Do you think you have captured the essence of who we are? You think you've named who is good and who is bad? And it turns the tables on that mode. And there is something that is primally powerful about rejecting that kind of binary and saying, you can't control who I am, you can't name who I am, and you can't own who I am when I do that myself. It robs them of the power of naming us, which I think is huge. My first suspicion anytime I see someone adopting some of the imagery of the devil or Satan is that they're taking their power back.
LUSE: What about you, Klaus?
YODER: The devil is a way of processing all the horrible things humanity can do. Like, the devil is most interesting when the devil is the most human because humans do horrible things to each other. The devil's, like, a great way to think through that. And so taking it back means, like, recognizing that, like, oh, there's a story to how I got here. Whether I'm perceived as an aggressor or whether I feel like a victim, like, I have reasons for what I've done. That's really, like, sort of powerfully in the background for why people claim it. It's seen as, like, sort of the quintessential modern gesture, you know, ironically, like, owning the demonization as a way of owning your humanity. And I think that's why it's powerful.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LUSE: Well, (laughter) Klaus, Travis, thank you both so much. It was so great to talk to you today. Thank you.
YODER: So great to meet you, Brittany. Yeah - really, really love your podcast.
STEVENS: Thank you, Brittany. This was awesome - really appreciate it.
LUSE: That was Travis Stevens and Klaus Yoder, hosts of the podcast "Seven Heads, Ten Horns: The History Of The Devil."
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LUSE: This episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE was produced by...
BARTON GIRDWOOD, BYLINE: Barton Girdwood.
ALEXIS WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Alexis Williams.
LIAM MCBAIN, BYLINE: Liam McBain.
COREY ANTONIO ROSE, BYLINE: Corey Antonio Rose.
LUSE: This episode was edited by...
JESSICA PLACZEK, BYLINE: Jessica Placzek.
LUSE: Engineering support came from...
CARLEIGH STRANGE, BYLINE: Carleigh Strange.
SIMON-LASLO JANSSEN, BYLINE: Simon-Laslo Janssen.
LUSE: Our executive producer is...
JASMINE ROMERO, BYLINE: Jasmine Romero.
LUSE: Our VP of programming is...
YOLANDA SANGWENI, BYLINE: Yolanda Sangweni.
LUSE: All right. That's all for this episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I'm Brittany Luse. Talk soon.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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