Hazel takes a train to the big city, sees an address for a whore on the bathroom wall and hops in a cab; he's immediately mistaken for a preacher by the driver, the second time this has happened to him. He's very concerned that people know he is NOT a preacher...
Later, he meets a "real" blind preacher, played by the legend Harry Dean Stanton, and the preacher's daughter Sabbath, played by the actress Amy Wright who beckons "I seen you..." A haunting plea that echoes the truth: all religion is founded on myth and the impossible. Hazel rips up the pamphlet she hands him.
A big theme of this film is loneliness, and how it can fully warp the brain if left unchecked. And there perhaps is no lonelier character than the dullard Enoch Emory who gets to deliver the titular line of the movie. He says he "knows things he ain't never learned... can feel his blood beating... Wise blood." Everyone wants to feel the power of god. Believing in nothing is still believing.
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ Sidebar: Enoch Emory, of course, played by the great character Dan Shor, he of Billy the Kid from Bill & Ted, and Tron fame...
In the haunts of these religious quests, we find most of the characters are racist as the day is long. To them it is an undeniable truth. Wayward souls whose own self-hatred has turned outward, uncontrollably searching for some place to put it. And it's always been this way. "I don't have to run away from anything, because I don't believe in anything," Hazel says. His entire existence is a study in cognitive dissonance. He goes on to found the "Holy Church of Christ Without Christ" and begins to preach his nihilistic message to anyone who'll listen. In a 2001 New Yorker piece, Hilton Als wrote "Motes has a grudge against Jesus: he equates Him with sin, or more specifically with the sins that he himself has committed and cannot escape–not in the eyes of his relatives, rotten with fake piety, who believe that only the Lord can wash him clean and are no better that [n-word's] who think that the Lord will make them white."
Meanwhile, Enoch, a lowly worker at the local zoo who likes to yell at the apes, is equally consumed with finding meaning, albeit in his own infantile way...
Disguised in a comically bad wig, he steals a "new" Jesus at the local museum in the form of the tiny corpse of a shrunken South American Indian, and then becomes obsessed with a King Kong knock-off called Gonga, cutting a line of children to shake his hand (a man in a gorilla suit) and ultimately jacking the costume to use for his own immature pranks. The powerless will look for power in any outlet they can grasp...
Sabbath courts Hazel in one of the film's strongest scenes. They talk over one another as they drive to a secluded woods...
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ Sidebar: Sabbath is played by Amy Wright, who you might recall from her role as "Burning House Realtor" in Synecdoche, New York...
Sabbath reveals to Hazel that her dad is a fraud, that her father is not in fact blind, and then they make love on the grass. They could find redemption in one another, they could be one another's salvation, but Hazel can't see the forest for the trees. He continues preaching his anti-gospel and is spotted by a grifter (played by Ned Beatty) who thinks he's found a like-minded crook. But Hazel is the REAL thing...
When Beatty's character shows up with a hired hand (the great William Hickey) to interrupt one of his roof-of-his-car preaching sessions, Hazel loses it. He tracks down Uncle Lewis and runs him over with his car. That car, a symbol if there ever was one, is then rolled into a lake by a cop. It's rock bottom for our pal Mr. Hazel Motes.
Hazel blinds himself FOR REAL with lye and starts to practice increasingly more bizarre forms of self-harm, including walking with rocks in his shoes, which we learned earlier via flashback he was forced to do in childhood. It's all connected. Eventually, he's wrapping himself in barbed wire. His landlady, a character who I'm sure is more flushed out in the book, becomes his caretaker and is the last human to fail saving him. He says he needs to pay; she says that people have quit doing that kind of stuff. Not Hazel...
Wise Blood isn't a perfect film but it has some great performances and strikes a chord in the way that American cinema of the 70s often can. I highly recommend.
CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 242 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 244 ⫸
⫷ EPISODE 242 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 244 ⫸
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