From the moment Alex Gibney announced he was working on “Musk” in 2023, it became one of the most anticipated documentaries around – and a source of trepidation for its titular subject, tech mogul Elon Musk. But we may have underestimated how far the world’s wealthiest man and his ilk would go to prevent audiences from seeing it.

Weeks before “Musk” hit theaters, its distributor, Bleecker Street, couldn’t buy ads on TikTok, YouTube, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram or, here’s a shocker, Musk’s own X. A Hollywood Reporter story published on Sept. 25 made YouTube and Meta reverse course – a rare case of two media giants shamed into living up to their free-speech claims.

But this attempted media suppression shows “Musk” has struck a nerve, despite its namesake dismissing it as a “hit piece that misses.”

It was not lost on Gibney that at the same time that was happening, Zuckerberg, Musk and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos were dining with Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping at the White House. He’s confronted gravely perilous corruption and dangerous figures in previous, fearless documentaries such as  2019’s “Citizen K,” about a Russian oligarch who was crushed by Vladimir Putin, and 2015’s “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.”

What happened to Bleecker Street, then, is both familiar to Gibney and extraordinarily alarming. “You can see how a few platforms coalescing around the endorsement of what these tech viziers are doing decide that a criticism of tech power is somehow political and can’t be allowed in terms of open discourse on their platforms,” Gibney told Salon. “So that was really disconcerting.”

It’s shaping up to be a dark autumn for Silicon Valley’s villains. In early December, Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial” turns our attention to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, played by Andrew Garfield.  

Meanwhile, “Musk” was recently joined in theaters by Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning,” in which Jeremy Strong portrays Zuckerberg as a soulless ghoul prioritizing clicks over user safety. In “You Can See Everything,” notorious prankster Nathan Fielder shadows notorious (for different reasons) Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in the days before she went to prison. 

Gibney also profiled Holmes in his 2019 work “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” which adds another layer of coincidental symmetry: Fielder’s film hits theaters on Oct. 16, the same day “Musk” opens nationwide.

But “Musk” is unquestionably a tougher watch, and given its subject’s extensive integration into the second Trump administration, it can’t help but be political.

Of course, “Musk” isn’t campaigning for anything except our need to confront the existential threat posed by one man exercising significant control over our media and our military.

A chorus of testimony from people who were once closest to Musk builds a profile of a megalomaniacal con artist. Two of Musk’s most incisive critics, his ex-wife Justine Musk and former right-wing influencer Ashley St. Clair, describe him as a gaslighter and a nuke, respectively. 

But perhaps the most damning testimonial comes from Musk himself – or rather, existing audio recordings of Musk delivered by a CGI version of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, since he refused to participate.

All of it boils down to simple questions Gibney poses at the film’s outset: How could Musk assume so much power, and why have we given it to him? I discussed those questions with Gibney, and what they taught him about Musk and our penchant for enabling men like him, in a wide-ranging conversation transcribed below.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Salon: You’ve done a documentary on Putin. You did one on Scientology, a famously litigious organization. You have a vast filmography featuring subjects who might have taken issue, or have taken issue, with what was said in your documentaries. Where does this rank in terms of threat level, legal or otherwise?

Gibney: Well, high. I mean, when just before “Going Clear” was released, the Church of Scientology took out full-page ads in the New York Times and the L.A. Times with a big picture of me, sort of denouncing me. And there were people, you know, who would pop up in dark parking lots, you know, sort of accosting me, trying to kind of destabilize me psychologically. But I think in this case, he’s the richest man in the world. He has a lot of resources… And he has this platform, Twitter, which has become a kind of Thunderdome of hate and vitriol, and that activates, you know, unpredictable characters who sometimes act on their own…

That said, I don’t want to exaggerate what’s happened to me so far. Other people put themselves at greater risk than I, in the sense that they came forward and appeared on camera.

One of the things that you said in other interviews, and I think you actually said this in the documentary as well, is that you used to be a fan of Elon Musk’s products.

I mean, I looked at him from afar. I have some history on this whole electric car thing because I was brought in long ago to help with the editing of a doc called “Who Killed the Electric Car,” which is about GM’s first foray into the world of electric cars. A woman I met on that film, Jessie Deeter, later produced a film called “Revenge of the Electric Car,” and Elon Musk is in that.  And Jessie, when she worked with him on that, was a big fan. [Deeter is also a producer on “Musk.”]

(Courtesy Bleecker Street Film / Gregg Segal)

So, you know, I had a certain connection to him. And I’m a big electric car guy. I own one — not a Tesla— but I own one, and I had a Tesla Powerwall in my house. I also sort of liked the kind of mumbling charisma that he had for a while, because he seemed like very much a regular guy. He was joking with people around on Twitter and stuff like that.

That said, he could also do unpredictable, chaotic and sometimes offensive things. But largely speaking, my view of him was positive. But I was interested in the fact that he accumulated so much power, and so that was the basis on which I dug in back in 2022.

Do you think that his ability to amass this much power is related to the fact that he is doing it in the American capitalist system, or do you think he could have done it in any other place in the world?

Well, I mean, there are a lot of intersections of opportunities for Elon Musk, and I also think he discovered, to use a phrase of his, the anomaly in the matrix for the American system. And that is money. He discovered that not only can you get a lot of money from the federal government, but if you have a lot of money, you can use it to influence sometimes how much money you get from the federal government or state governments. So I think there was that.

The other big thing is that in America we also have a kind of grudging admiration for the P.T. Barnum-like qualities of certain larger-than-life entrepreneurs, you know, and you see that a lot in Silicon Valley . . . That is a kind of cultural trope in this society for which I think we have a weakness. We sort of like to see them trick us all, though we also do like to see them go down after they’ve tricked us. So I think for all those reasons that maybe Elon was able to succeed here in a way that really exploited some of the flaws in our system and our psyche.

There’s also a propensity in our culture to believe in some superhuman aspect of genius, which I think your documentary gets at very well.

Yeah, it’s also that our weakness for money, or the power of money, in this culture also causes us somehow to think that if you’re wealthy, you’re also wise rather than just ruthless, right?

I often think of that famous line from “Citizen Kane,” where Orson Welles is joking with somebody, you know, having been very successful playing this William Randolph Hearst character, who said, “It’s no trick making a lot of money if all you want to do is make a lot of money.” Meaning,  if you’re ruthless and determined, you can make a lot of money. Doesn’t mean you’re a genius, and it doesn’t mean that you’re a tech genius either. 

I also think Elon Musk, having seen the ascent of Steve Jobs, was sort of defining himself in that way too – or going back to Thomas Edison, who had his own P.T. Barnum-like qualities in terms of inventing a character for himself to play. It’s not just the investor; it’s the inventor.

“Musk” runs for almost four hours. Did you always know it would be that long?

No. In fact, I had a cut of the film in the spring of 2024 that was under two hours. We were moving to release that and put it into the fall festivals. Then, in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump is nearly assassinated, and Musk hitches his wagon to the Trump train. And my friends at HBO said, “You’re not done. You have to follow this story because it could go to places that you don’t expect, and having spent as much time as you have, you have to follow it to at least a moment of greater conclusion.”

So I did, and that ended up being the reason that it’s at such a length. You see patterns from the first film that then repeat themselves, but on a much larger scale, in the second film. Suddenly economic power meets political power, economic and technological power meets political power, and that is the making of an epic story.

In addition, it just so happened that as he embarked on his political project, a lot of people that I was talking to in the background, trying to persuade them to come forward, did come forward because they saw some of the more problematic aspects of Musk wielding power as part of MAGA world. That gave the story a kind of human dimension as well.

Weirdly, you know, I was having trouble kind of putting it all together, and I didn’t really get a sense of how to shape it until I watched Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” which in itself was a kind of take on the tech bros. That helped me kind of find a way forward in terms of what became a kind of epic narrative.

How so?

Well, you know, you start with a scientist who wants to do something big and important. And there’s even a sense of idealism about his ambition. But then he literally creates a monster, and the whole enterprise becomes utterly reckless and irresponsible and all about his own sort of grandiosity. Rather than a mission that might help people, it becomes about him.

What are you hoping this documentary will do in terms of making people a little bit more aware of who Elon Musk is and getting at the man behind the curtain, so to speak?

Well, I mean, it is an agent provocateur. I don’t provide a solution, but I do provide, I think, a pretty compelling story, which asks the kind of fundamental question I posed at the beginning, which is, how did this guy get so much power, and why did we give it to him? Because it’s both about him and it’s about us, and it asks some discomforting questions about how literally existential power rests in the hands of one man who is increasingly chaotic, unhinged, and seemingly pursuing power without reason. There’s a chilling moment at the end of the film where somebody asks him, “Why have you accreted so much power?” And he literally can’t answer the question…

He’s a very peculiar character who’s a chaos agent. But we’ve allowed him to become normalized in a way.

I remember writing about him being on “Saturday Night Live” and people shrugging it off, like, “Oh, it’s not that big of a deal.” But it was a very big deal. Those kinds of things make him into a character when the reality is he has massive access to power.

And he’s saying things, even on “Saturday Night Live,” that were patently untrue… Even when he says, “Did you think I was going to be a chill, normal dude?” Well, there’s a funny hidden message there, which is kind of discomforting if you really think about it. Like, if you want to drive a Tesla, be prepared to endure a lot of performative cruelty from me, including cruelty that may end up killing people. . .  That’s a pretty brutal message, honestly, for “Saturday Night Live.” But it was a joke, right? And that’s the genius, in a way, of Elon Musk: he’s constantly saying stuff that is deadly serious and a joke at the same time.

Speaking of that, the images and the joke, let’s talk about using the [CGI] avatar. I remember when the news first broke about that, someone said, “Well, I wonder if that’s Alex kind of trolling Musk back.”

I mean, it’s kind of a troll-back, yeah. In a way, it’s kind of investing in him, playing in his sandbox, because he didn’t agree to appear.

And I should make it clear, as I tried to do in the film, that what we hear from him are actual audio recordings of him. In other words, they’re not AI-confected answers. We didn’t ask AI what Elon would say. We’re taking real audio recordings, but how to couch that visually? And we took our cue, having done all this research into stuff that Elon said, from something he kept going over again: This idea that we’re likely living in a simulation. So I thought, OK, how about a simulated interview?

And yes, he’s famous for trolling people. He’s famous for creating memes. What was it he said in 2020 on Twitter? He said, you know, parodying “Dune,” he said, “He who controls the memes, controls the universe,” right? OK, well, here’s a meme for you, Elon, of you.

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What, if anything, about this documentary may help illuminate a few things for people, regardless of their political leanings, as we approach the midterms?

I mean, this should be our concern, whether you’re from the left or the right, is giving people unaccountable power. Also, this whole idea that our politics and, indeed, our Department of Justice and our Department of Defense can be utterly transactional.

We’re not getting the best that money can buy. We’re getting what money can buy. Period. In other words, the military stuff that you’re seeing is a third-rate frontier AI technology being fully integrated into our Department of Defense. And why is the worst technology being integrated? Because Elon Musk is literally paying for political advantage. So it’s a payback system, and we should all be outraged about that, left, right, or otherwise.

And now you’re seeing him trying to buy the midterms. He’s spending way more now than he did for the presidential campaign in 2024, and in part that’s to get more money for himself in the form of military contracts. But also, he knows that a reckoning is coming for him if the Democrats take over the House and the Senate, and there’s going to be a lot of investigations into him for corruption and abuse of power, taking our information, particularly possibly relating to DOGE, and doing God knows what with it.

Our whole system is built on a system of checks and balances, and the idea that the government is our instrument for making a better world, rather than, you know, making a few people rich…

But I think that what’s changed now with Trump is that the Department of Justice has become a protection racket for those who flatter and ally themselves with the president, and an instrument of revenge for those who oppose the president. You can’t depend on it as a kind of law-enforcing mechanism, and that may be the scariest thing of all. . . What we’re talking about is Putin’s Russia here, right? And if people want to avoid that, then I would strongly urge them to go out to the polls. Because this is a rogue administration that goes beyond any kind of sense of party affiliation. It’s a rogue administration that’s literally destroying our democracy.

“Musk” is playing in theaters nationwide.

 

The post Alex Gibney’s “Musk” asks why we gave Elon Musk so much power appeared first on Salon.com.

Though movies about disruptive tech founders are nothing new, 2026 has been unusually stacked with features that take a much more critical look at how Silicon Valley is reshaping our reality. Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning frames Mark Zuckerberg as a robotic villain whose ambitions are destabilizing society. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's You Can See Everything paints a damning picture of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes as she prepares for her ongoing stint in prison. After years of being widely celebrated as a visionary, you can see how the larger narrative around Elon Musk has shifted in projects like Alex Gibney's Musk docume …

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This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on how pervasive horror has become, follow Andrew Webster. The Stepback, arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

How it started

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The post Cyberpunk 2077 to get a live-action adaptation appeared first on Boing Boing.

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[Editor’s note: While preparing for my frequent course “Deals With the Devil,” which centers on the Faust theme, I discovered that one of my favorite filmmakers, Éric Rohmer, wrote a doctoral dissertation on F.W. Murnau’s silent film Faust. To force myself to read it, I put it on my syllabus, hoping that it would set up an exercise where my students could build connections between the Faust theme and a major work not obviously based upon it, in this case, My Night at Maud’s. As you will see, it turned out that much of the material in the book was not directly relevant to the course, but Rohmer does have some good stray observations about Murnau’s reworking of the Faust theme and his relationship to Goethe in particular. I share the text of the handout I will be distributing to my class in case anyone might find it interesting or useful. My translated excerpts below are drawn from Éric Rohmer, L’organisation de l’espace dans le Faust de Murnau (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1977). Page numbers refer to this edition.]

Éric Rohmer (1920-2010) was a French filmmaker associated with the New Wave movement pioneered by directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Like Godard and Truffaut, Rohmer actually started out as a film critic and scholar, and he did his doctoral dissertation on Murnau’s silent film adaptation of Faust (1926). As a film critic and aspiring filmmaker himself, Rohmer is much less interested in the plot of the film than in Murnau’s cinematic technique. In fact, he believes that the familiarity of the plot was what allowed Murnau to be so innovative in the way he presented it—all his attention was focused on technique rather than narrative. Nevertheless, Rohmer does make some very insightful remarks about how the film functions as an adaptation of Goethe’s Faust. Here I will provide an overview of Rohmer’s work and a translation of those passages. My hope is that this will help us to make connections between the Faust theme and Rohmer’s film My Night at Maud’s (1969).

Rohmer opens the book with the claim that “Of all filmmakers, F.W. Murnau is perhaps the one who knew how to organize the space of his films in the most rigorous and inventive way” (9). He defines three different kinds of space that a film can create. The first is the pictorial space, which talks about the way that individual shots or frames are composed. The second is architectural space, which refers to the way a film creates the illusion of a “real world” that the characters are moving through. The third is filmic space, which refers to the way that the film creates a sensation of movement.

The main chapters of the book go through these versions of space one by one. In the first chapter, on pictorial space, Rohmer claims that most filmmakers of Murnau’s time were inspired by photography, but Murnau preferred to use painting as a model. Rohmer goes through many individual painters he believes inspired Murnau’s broad style, including Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Vermeer. He also mentions several specific paintings that he sees as models for particular scenes and refers, in broader terms, to the way that illustrations of Goethe’s Faust may have influenced him as well. This chapter basically does not discuss the plot at all and hence does not include any substantial passages relevant to our class discussion.

In the second chapter, on architectural space, Rohmer does a detailed study of the layout and décor of the various spaces that appear in the film. This chapter includes some analysis that is so detailed that it may border on the insane—for instance, at one point he provides a chart listing and categorizing every single object that appears on screen (80-82). He also includes sketches where he tries to reconstruct the layout of Faust’s study (67), Gretchen’s house (71), and Martha’s house (72). More relevant to our discussion is his inventory of the scenes from Goethe that Murnau excluded or modified, which leads to an analysis of Mephistopheles as a character:

Now let us precisely determine, while examining each scene in detail, the places that are in Goethe and those that have been modified. Auerbach’s tavern disappears, but it is in a tavern that we see Mephistopheles provoke Valentine and engage in a feat of sorcery, here more terrifying than burlesque: the flame shooting out of the wine. If the character of Mephistopheles retains all the comic force of his literary model (without going beyond it, except perhaps in Martha’s house), Murnau wanted, however, to preserve the seriousness of the wonders he shows us, whereas Goethe tinged the legacy of the Volksbuch [a term for the original Faust legend] with derision. The demon is not presented to us, as in the play, in the form of a poodle; it is Faust himself who evokes him, just as in the legend; and the sinister monk who emerges, though sarcastic, cannot provoke in us the slightest chuckle. Murnau will equally avoid showing us the gallery of animals that is the witch’s kitchen (Hexenküche); it is in his study that Faust’s rejuvination is carried out. Walpurgis Night, which inspired painters and musicians, has also disappeared, but I do not see how a cinematographic translation of that satiric-philosophical interlude could be given, except in a spirit of Goya-esque masquerade, which is quite far from Murnau. (60-61)

Rohmer then takes a step back to think about Murnau’s relationship to Goethe more broadly:

If Murnau and Kyser [the writer of the screenplay] ultimately remain so faithful to Goethe, despite their apparent desire to distance themselves from him and return to the sources of the myth (“an old German legend,” as the credits say), it is perhaps also the case that the play carried the seed of its cinematographic transcription. It is true that the settings of the scenes, in this philosophical drama that was made above all to be read, even if they do not play a truly active role, assert their presence more forcefully than in many works better conceived for staging: that of Shakespeare, for example, or the Greek tragedies. The “tragedy” of Faust is indeed more cinematographic than theatrical, in its first and second parts. We never find in it a banal waiting room, an anonymous place, but always a well-defined place, which makes up an integral part of the old myth and of what Goethe himself forged, in the same way as the names of characters or the epoch when the story unfolds—which no one would dare change. (61)

Later in the chapter, after his reconstruction of the various sets and his listing of all the objects, Rohmer reflects further on the idea that everything in the film has a very defined purpose:

In Murnau, the same thing holds for clothing as for objects: it is never a means, a tool, a weapon for getting what one wants or seducing someone. We are in a world made of relationships of force, not of persuasion. Not of a lover’s courtship: the woman does not play the flirt, the man does not play the rake. In this universe of pure desire, there is room only for predator and prey: whether he uses the fascination of his looks or pure violence, it is all the same. Each being is for the other a vampire or a victim. Each knows what he is after from his counterpart, or what he fears. Deception is impossible. There is no need to strut about: one passes immediately to action, which is to say to assault or its simulation. The love scenes are conceived as battles where now the man, now the woman is attacking or attacked, pursuing or pursued. Thus, for example, the scene in Martha’s garden… (86).

This concreteness holds especially for costumes:

To a change in clothing there almost always corresponds a profound transformation of one’s being, and Faust, with its theme of rejuvenation, puts out in the open a theme that is elsewhere latent [in Murnau’s other films]. Moreover, the transition is not forcefully abrupt. It would be more fair to speak sometimes of blossoming or blooming. In the famous scene with the jewelry, reduced by the filmmaker to a simple necklace, or in the one where Valentin offers a shawl to his sister, the two faces of Gretchen are revealed, today a reserved young girl, tomorrow a woman and a lover. The fact of wearing such and such clothes is not for Murnau a social act, but a natural phenomenon of evolution, of growth or decline. (87-88)

In the third and final chapter, Murnau analyzes the idea of filmic space or the creation of motion. Here he emphasizes Murnau’s use of sudden appearances, which leads to another massive table listing and categorizing every example (96ff.). This chapter also includes a long section where he provides multiple abstract sketches of different scenes to trace the direction of the main movements (125ff.). He discusses the overall pattern of motion in the film as a kind of strategy, which is sometimes apparently violated by the actors. In this context, he talks about individual performances, particularly those of Emil Jannings (Mephistopheles), Yvette Guilbert (Martha), and Camilla Horn (Gretchen):

Certainly one can say that Emil Jannings and Yvette Guilbert “go too far.” It is certain that the gestures of these two actors, especially in the scene where they meet, appear indifferent to the general dynamic of the film’s strategy. They are gestures that bear a significance without reference to the global conception of the mise en scène. Their direction owes nothing to their inscription in the space of the film… But one must not confuse the direction of the film and what is proper to each filmed element…. This mode of expression is the responsibility of the characters…. It is not Yvette Guilbert, nor Jannings who “goes too far,” but Martha and Mephistopheles…. This comic verve, though due in part to the personal rapport of the actors and though apparently foreign to the general spirit of the mise en scène, is ultimately integrated successfully into the film’s modelling and its motor scheme….

By opposite means, Murnau obtains with an unknown, Camilla Horn, in the role of Gretchen, the same result…. Did he lead his actress to find some of these poses and gestures herself, or did he suggest them right from the start? It is of little importance whether he uses one or the other method. The fact is that he succeeded there as well in perfectly marrying what came from him and what he owed to the actress, giving us the impression of cutting her to the quick, of forging a new being who would be, from birth, “Murnauian”… This second nature which she is granted renders her always absolutely “natural.” (108-110)

In the footnotes to this chapter, Rohmer also returns to the notion that the Faust legend is more intrinsically cinematic than theatrical. Here he quotes Goethe’s version of the wager, where Faust defies Mephistopheles to give him happiness so great that he will declare, “Beautiful moment, please do not pass away”:

It is an idea more cinematographic than theatrical, because tragic theater, whether Greek or Shakespearean, puts the accent on the impossibility of innocence, not of happiness, having in view action rather than contemplation. The feeling of the incompleteness of the moment, associated with that of is fullness, we find in a vague way in almost all films, in the guise, most often, of a “sentimental” optimism, in search of one of those “suspensions”… that the screen is well suited to achieve by its magic and that of the soundtrack. In this sense, the “happy ending” of Murnau’s Faust appears to be more in line with the typical mythology of the cinema than with the ambiguous conclusions of the first and second parts of Goethe’s Faust. (123)

 

[spoilers ahead]

The protagonist of Kevin Smith’s Dogma, the last living descendant of Mary, mother of Jesus, is named Bethany. It’s standard practice in this kind of apocalyptic film for names to mean something, and Dogma seems in general to bear this out. Chris Rock’s character, the black thirteenth apostle, is called Rufus, after the biblical son of Simon the Cyrene, mentioned in Mark’s account of the crucifixion and by Paul in Romans 13. Alan Rickman plays the voice of God, Metatron, and takes his name from an angel who appears as a divine figure standing beside God in various apocryphal texts. So why is the last living descendant of God called Bethany?

The name Bethany comes from the biblical town of Bethany, where Lazarus lived with his sisters, Mary and Martha. Like Lazarus, Bethany dies and is resurrected by God – here Alanis Morissette rather than Jesus. I’d like to suggest that we can infer from this that Jay and Silent Bob occupy, in Smith’s film, the roles of Mary and Martha.

Like Mary and Martha with Lazarus Jay and Silent Bob have – despite their best efforts – a non-sexual relationship with Bethany. Like Mary, who washed Jesus’ feet in an erotic act of service and is traditionally associated with sex workers, Jay is constantly making sexual advances to the people around him. Like Mary, who angrily remonstrates with Jesus when Lazarus dies (‘Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”), Jay shouts at God who has appeared apparently too late to prevent catastrophe: “What the fuck is this shit?! Who the fuck are you lady?!” Like Martha, who approaches Jesus with faith (“But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask”) and opens up the tomb where Lazarus’ body has been laid to rest, it is Silent Bob who carries Bethany’s lifeless body to God to be raised. Like Martha, it is Silent Bob who quietly gets on with the necessary work, and Jay who insists on conversation.

Let us say then, with Jesus: “Jay has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from him.” Great is the mystery of Dogma. Blessed be the name of Alanis Morissette.

The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) is one of the classics of the ‘Golden Age’ of porn films. It was written, directed and produced by Gerard Damiano one year after the success of Deep Throat. The film takes inspiration both from Sartre’s No Exit – a play length exposition of the existentialist’s famous claim that ‘hell is other people’ – and from the Marquis de Sade’s Justine – whose titular character embodies the ideal feminine virtues of the 18th century, and is repeatedly punished for it; her innocence, piety, and honesty rewarded by a series of violations, as well as the torture, death, or betrayal of everyone she trusts (its sequel, Juliette, tells the story of Justine’s sister, who rejects both God and virtue, embraces corruption, and thrives).

The Devil in Miss Parton was released towards the end of a quiet period for angel film. After a glut of releases over the 1930s, 40s and 50s, barely anything was released between 1956 and 1968, when the genre gets going again with a series of films which deliberately play with its well-established cliches. If you’re familiar with angel films as a genre, it’s clear that The Devil in Miss Jones is written as a knowing parody of the standard tropes. The film’s protagonist Justine – having lived a perfectly virtuous life – dies by suicide, only to awaken into an afterlife where heaven is forbidden to her, yet she has not sinned enough to truly merit hell. The only solution, she is told by the angel Abaca assigned to judge her, is to go back to earth and earn her eternal damnation. She doesn’t seem enthused about the opportunity for theft, robbery or murder. What about lust, she asks?

Most of the rest of the film plays out as a series of explicit sex scenes, beginning with Justine’s encounter with ‘the teacher’ whose role is to cure her of her inhibitions, so as (he says) to make his work easier and hers more pleasurable. In each of the scenes – involving various other people, animals, and objects – the focus is on Justine. Both her pleasure and her voice are centred. At the end, she returns to Abaca, asks to be allowed to stay, only to be told that no such thing is possible, and to find herself, in the end, trapped in a small white room with a man (played by Damiano) raving about flies as she begs him to touch her.

Many of these narrative moves are easily recognisable from earlier angel films: a person awaking after death to find themselves with a lowly functionary responsible for overseeing their time in the space in between death and final judgement (Outward Bound (1930), Heaven Can Wait (1943), Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941); wishing to make up for the opportunities they had missed in life and hoping to do enough to be granted passage through judgment into everlasting life (Liliom (1934), remade as Carousel (1956), Angel on my Shoulder (1946); being tempted by the charms of the world they have temporarily been sent back to (The Bishop’s Wife (1947), The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945)). What’s striking about The Devil in Miss Jones is that it brings together these familiar tropes into a new format which seems, in turn, to become the template for two later angel films: 1990’s Almost an Angel, starring Paul Hogan/Crocodile Dundee and 1996’s Unlikely Angel, starring Dolly Parton. Both films share with The Devil in Miss Jones a very precise formula, here inverted: a protagonist whose entire life except for the manner of their death would seem to destine them for one of heaven and hell, and an opportunity to return to earth so as to make good on the promise of that very final moment, a moment of realisation about the kind of life they missed out on whilst alive, and then a final glimpse of their passage into their eternal destiny.

In Almost an Angel, Paul Hogan’s Terry Dean is a career criminal whose first move on getting out of prison is to try to rob another bank. As he does so, however, he spots a small girl about to be hit by a car and dies whilst saving her, only to find himself in a meeting with God (Charlton Heston), who describes himself as Dean’s probation officer, and tells him that while his entire life he never did anything but take, his final act of selflessness means that he’s earned a chance at heaven by dedicating his life to others; by giving instead of taking. While it takes him some time to unlearn his bad old habits, he manages to perform a series of selfless acts: befriending a terminally ill man named Steve and helping out the youth centre he runs with his sister Rose by clearing out some local drug dealers, convincing a tight-fisted evangelical that God is calling him to greater acts of charity, and comforting Steve as he dies. Whilst his attraction to Rose makes him regret the fact he cannot stay on earth, the film ends with a cross miraculously lighting up, Terry discovering that he cannot die, and a voiceover assuring Rose that Steve is with God now.

The sins of Dolly Parton’s Ruby Diamond are never quite as clear, but seem to be related to singing in bars, flirting with men, dating men who cheat on her, and never settling down to get married or have children. Driving home from a gig one night, she swerves to avoid hitting a death, and dies, only to find herself in a meeting with a man in a white suit who introduces himself as Peter and tells her that she’s lived an entirely selfish life, and that it’s only because at the very end she sacrificed herself for another living then that she will get a chance to make up for it. She’s then sent back to earth where she has to reconcile a family in the wake of their mother’s death by helping the father to recognise that his children need him and need a proper Christmas, helping the children to forgive their father, and pushing the father to marry his secretary, all while resisting her own desire to stay and take her place in the family home. As the film ends we see Dolly walking through the pearly gates, receiving her wings, and joining in the angelic chorus singing praise to God.

It’s interesting how precisely Almost an Angel and Unlikely Angel invert the plot of of The Devil in Miss Jones, itself a much looser parody of the angel film genre. While I can’t find any existing scholarship which connects the three the parallels are so precise – and The Devil in Miss Jones such a classic – that I’m convinced it must be a relatively direct influence on the two later films. The Devil in Miss Jones relates to Almost an Angel and Unlikely Angel like Justine to its sequel Juliette, mirrored narratives of virtue and vice, reward and punishment whose precise inversions reflect, however, a much more conventional moral universe than that of de Sade. It’s Unlikely Angel which more perfectly parallels The Devil in Miss Jones. Whereas Terry Dean ends by walking off out into the world, the promise of both further earthly adventures and of possible romantic consummation hanging in the air, both Justine and Ruby return in the end to their previous condition, albeit transformed by the lessons they have learned during their brief return to earth. Justine is only now able to fully appreciate the horror of the lonely, untouched life she already hated enough to want to kill herself; Ruby only now unable to sing in praise of God and in service of the middle class nuclear family rather than the dive bar circuit which she came from. Both films ultimately offer us a vision of the pleasures of sexual liberation once more safely enfolded into a narrative which sets desire against the care and self-sacrifice by which the white family is made and remade, in which sex can be recuperated as long as we do not acknowledge, as de Sade did, the pleasures of power, pain, and violence.