THY SOUL SHALL BEAR WITNESS!

At its controversial best the cinema has always been about breaking taboos, and perhaps the biggest taboo of all is death. Victor Sjöström's 1921 touchstone film The Phantom Carriage combines both transgressive subjects into a single narrative that flips the binary opposites of the physical and the spiritual upside down. In Western civilization, explorations of metaphysical quandaries have always been somewhat frowned upon unless they are conducted in a socially acceptable context, that is, within the constraints of academia or a mainstream religion such as Christianity. As early as 1921, when cinema was just leaving its infancy stage, Sjöström dared to explore the nature of the spiritual and the physical in a context that appears, on the surface, to be socially acceptable, but in fact draws upon the esoteric philosophies of occult organizations that have never existed anywhere except on the fringe. The Phantom Carriage is an early example of filmmaking that cleverly camouflages its true intent, a tradition of the occulted taboo that continues to this day.

The main purpose of fiction, particularly the popular brand of fiction so prevalent in cinema, has always been about discussing the taboos of the day in a safe context—safe, that is, for both the audience and the author. The fictional veneer allows the audience to take in vital information without being offended while also allowing the author to hide his true purpose behind the excuse that the proceedings are all in jest. “We're just entertainers, Grand Inquisitor, that's all. Nothing to be too concerned about.” A capital jest, indeed.

In the early 1600s a playwright named William Shakespeare knew this very well, and employed the technique to masterful effect in one crowd-pleasing production after another. Shakespeare's plays, of course, were never intended to be worshipped from afar by literary scholars as rarified pieces of High Art preserved under glass, but rather to be enjoyed as intense melodramas filled with blood and guts and bawdy humor.