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Globe, March 10, 2000; available from http:/ /www.bostonglobe.com (accessed October 23, 2001). 10. Nick Carter, “Convoluted Story Slams Shut Polanski’s ‘Ninth Gate,’” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, March 9, 2000; available from http:/ /www. jsonline.com/enter/movies/reviews/mar00 (accessed October 23, 2001). 11. Bob Graham, “Summoning Silliness: Roman Polanski Salutes and Spoofs Satanic Thrillers,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 10, 2000; available from http:/ /www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?¤le=/chronicle/archive/ 2000/03/10/DD108488.DTL (accessed October 23, 2001). 12. See Mitchell, The Devil on Screen, 208–13. 13. Oppositional readings are designed to escape and resist the gravity of the text, which I have discussed as the appeal of perfection and unity characteristic of all texts. An oppositional reading does not mean one can read a text as one pleases, however. In the reading below, the argument is that one can contend with the text, not on its own terms, but within the context of the demise of occultism as a social form. In other words, I am reading the ¤lm as an object of popular culture. 14. Pérez-Reverte, The Club Dumas. Pérez-Reverte’s novel is a complex meditation in the practice of reading which weds a narrative about The Three Musketeers with Corso’s quest for The Nine Doors (variously, The Nine Lies). In his screen adaptation, Polanski and his coauthors, John Brownjohn and Enrique Urbizu, strip the narrative of its many Eco-esque subplots and focus exclusively on the occult threads. Signi¤cantly, the ¤lm adds an ending that does not appear in the book and ampli¤es the supernatural elements. In the novel, the reader is encouraged to discount the role of supernatural forces (the evil goings-on being simply the evil of humans). Perhaps to appease the expectations of audiences, a number of scenes in Polanski’s ¤lm are suggestive of the supernatural. Part of the ¤lm’s commercial failure, I think, has to do with Polanski’s ampli¤cation of the supernatural elements which resulted in a kind of supernatural ambivalence. 15. K. Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 441–42. 16. See ibid., 323–444. 17. For exemplary examples see Brummett, “Burke’s Representative Anecdote as a Method in Media Criticism”; and Tonn, Endress, and Diamond, “Hunting and Heritage on Trial in Maine.” 18. K. Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 442. 19. In my reading of Burke, social order and hierarchy are merely the surrogates for Marx’s conception of class, with which Burke was very familiar . A one-time communist, Burke gradually moved away from political socialism, especially during and after the Red Scare in the United States. In reprints and new editions of his books, it was not uncommon for him to replace socialist concepts with less socially and politically dangerous con298 / notes to pages 207–209 cepts. See Schiappa and Keehner, “The ‘Lost’ Passages of Permanence and Change.” 20. Yet perhaps not as well as Burke’s conception of “logology,” which he de¤ned as “words about words” and used to make sense of “words about God.” See K. Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion, esp. 1–7. My reasons for persisting with the analogy to dramatism will become clearer momentarily. 21. LaVey, “The Church of Satan,” 31. For a variation of this theme see Fritscher, “The Selling of the Age of Aquarius.” 22. Stephanie Zacharek, “‘The Ninth Gate’ [DVD review],” August 4, 2000; available from http:/ /www.salon.com (accessed October 23, 2001). 23. In Polanski’s running commentary on The Ninth Gate DVD, he suggests that this conundrum was precisely his intent with this scene. He notes that an important part of the ¤lm, as with the novel, is a nagging uncertainly about whether the events depicted have to do with the supernatural. As the movie moves closer to an ending, however, it is clear that Polanski wanted to emphasize the supernatural elements to appease audience expectation. 24. Elvis Mitchell, “‘The Ninth Gate’: Off to Hell in a Handbasket, Trusty Book in Hand,” New York Times on the Web, March 10, 2000; available from http:/ /www.nytimes.com/library/¤lm/03100gate-¤lm-review-html (accessed October 23, 2001). 25. Ibid. 26. Crowley, Equinox of the Gods, 127. 27. I should also mention that Polanski intended the ¤lm as a celebration of “old horror ¤lms,” as he notes in the DVD commentary. This intentional nostalgia permeated every aspect of the ¤lm, Polanski notes. For example, instead of rendering the ¤lm’s...

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