In an infamous blood pact with the Devil, Faustus exchanges his soul for 24 years on earth full of luxury, women, gold, and success. Written by Christopher Marlowe the story is a literary epic that many suspect exists at the heart of Hollywood. The multibillion-dollar tinsel town is the home of stardom, notoriety, riches, and vanity, but is it also home to a soul selling Mephistophelean pact?
Is there an unspoken Faustian pact that drives Hollywood?
A self-professed Catholic and outsider, Mel Gibson gave a compelling interview in the late 1990s in which he spoke in mysterious, albeit revealing, metaphors about the soul of Hollywood.
“I had a whole bunch of weird paranoid suspicions about what the hell was going on, and I formed a bunch of opinions about the town. And I thought surely that couldn’t be, because a whole place cannot be like a weird town. Then you go away and say, That’s insane thinking. Then you realise you were on track. Some of your worst nightmares were on track.”
The nightmarish realities of ‘tinsel town’ are often masked by illusory mirages of fulfilment, success, and the spotlight. Young people admire and worship actors and actresses, but little is spoken about in terms of what they have to do at times, to attain the heights of success, stardom and admiration.
Stardom comes at a price. Most recently, Matthew Lawrence has spoken publicly about his ghastly experience on the Hollywood casting couch. He lamented, “I’ve lost my agency because I’ve gone to the hotel room of a very prominent Oscar-winning director and asked him to take his clothes off to take polaroid’s of him, and if I did x, y, and z , I would be the next Marvel character, I didn’t do that.”
The casting couch is a Mephistophelian proposal
It’s not a new phenomenon, either. In an interview with Larry King in 1988, the world-renowned former child actress Shirley Temple spoke of her experience at a Hollywood studio in which both she and her mother were sexually assaulted by Hollywood executives, and shortly after left in utter dismay and confusion.
Hollywood’s most scandalous ‘casting couch’ controversy of recent memory saw film producer and founder of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, publicly crucified.
“Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.” –Marylin Monroe
As one of the most successful Hollywood producers ever, Weinstein engineered films like Scary Movie, Good Will Hunting, and Spy Kids. Emerging allegations of Weinstein’s predatory behaviour towards young actresses came to light in 2017. Soon after, just under 100 women came forward and accused Weinstein of assault, rape, and battery. Weinstein, who is now serving jail time, denied all charges and was eventually convicted on multiple counts of rape, sexual harassment, and sexual assault.
But how much of the backlash against Weinstein was motivated by soul-selling regret?
There’s no doubt that Weinstein targeted many innocent victims. There’s no doubt that many were unwittingly placed in compromising and potentially unsafe positions, and there’s no doubt that some were unwitting to the ‘casting couch’ reality .
But we cannot pretend that there weren’t actresses who participated in a sexual exchange for fame, notoriety, and success.
Weinstein’s sexual predations were after all, Hollywood’s ‘open secret’. At the 2013 Oscar nominations, host and creator of Family Guy, Seth McFarlane, while announcing the winners of the best female actor category, jokingly remarked on stage, “Congratulations,you no longer have to pretend you are sexually attracted to Harvey Weinstein.” One of the characters, Jenna, in a 2012 episode of the TV series 30 Rock, remarked, “I’m not afraid of anyone in show business. I turned down intercourse with Harvey Weinstein on no less than three occasions, out of five.”
Weinstein’s Lawyer, Benjamin Braffman, who many would describe as the devil’s advocate, made the potentially uncomfortable point no one in the media would dare to make, he told the Times. “The casting couch in Hollywood was not invented by Harvey Weinstein. If a woman decides that she needs to have sex with a Hollywood producer to advance her career and actually does it and then finds the whole thing offensive, that’s not rape.”
How many actresses accepted Weinstein’s sexual advances in order to further their own careers?
While Hollywood selectively demonises sexual predators towards women, it feels comfortable allowing convicted pedophiles to operate within its ranks and file.
The director of the Jeepers Creepers franchise, Victor Salva, is a convicted paedophile, yet he still continues to make Hollywood films. Salva, who was convicted of sexually abusing a minor, videotaped the crime and then was found to be in possession of child pornography. The studios, actors, actresses, and film production companies that work with Salva are not late to the party; they just have no moral problem with Salva’s pedophilic past.
It would be unconscionable to think that those who work with, associate with, and produce Salva’s film are not aware of his past criminal history. But Salva’s survival in the swamp-like ecosystem of Hollywood is nothing new. Decades ago, Hollywood decided that its agenda was pure and simple: profit over principle. The infamous Roman Polanski, a prominent Hollywood director, continued to make movies in Hollywood despite being charged in 1977 with unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. Despite this, Polanski continues to make films.
Now, we could argue that the town’s lack of moral sensibility is a pure reflection of the economic interests that seek to maximize profit. In the vacuum of this pursuit, characters of questionable moral and criminal standing may also have free reign over many in vulnerable positions. But in the principality of ‘stardom’ beneath the lewdly licentious culture of tinsel town, Hollywood reserves a heathen-like obsession with the occult.
Is the occult in Hollywood a dominant subculture, or is it the norm within the industry?
Like many things in Hollywood, it’s shrouded in mystery, but there’s no denying that it has a longstanding fascination with the occult. From the occult-obsessed works of film director Kenneth Anger to actress Vanessa Hudgens self-professed witch status to Lana Del Ray and Paris Jackson’s history with occult witchcraft, little has changed with Hollywood’s obsession with black magic, Alistair Crowley, and occultic interests.
Why do award shows and concerts depict satanic and occultic rituals?
It’s hard to say whether such acts reflect a desire to partake in shock value theatrics that seek to make a mockery of Judeo-Christian values or whether they reflect something more nefarious.
It sounds like a baseless conspiracy cooked up by the ever-fetishistic participants of Qanon, right? But the artist’s ‘Sammy Smiths’ 2023 performance at the Grammys was one of the most bizarrely maligned spectacles in recent memory. His performance exhibited a woman in a cage, and behind her, a fire was shot out from the stage while Sammy Smith, who was wearing a devil suit, was performing to the delight of the audience. The performance received widespread condemnation.
Then there was Shakira’s 2023 MTV Music Awards performance, where she performed centre stage while holding two knives and symbolically taking them to her chest while a ring of fire burned around her on stage.
Creative Commons Marina Abramović (with the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art she received in 2008) at the screening of Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present ” by Manfred Werner/Tsui
The love affair with the occult doesn’t end there, either. Strange and mysterious figures like Marina Abramovic continue to feature alongside prominent Hollywood actors and actresses. Her claim to fame? A self-professed ‘performance artist’ whose public demonstrations of self-harm and occult-like public rituals continue to baffle audiences. At the 2023 Moca Gala in Los Angeles, cakes in human form were cut open by Abramovic and fed to participants in an occult-like cannibalistic kind of ritual. The contents of the cakes resembled blood and internal organs, and when extracted from the life-like cake, participants were then fed it. It is disturbing to view the images themselves, yet none of the guests appear to be moved at all.
Angelina Jolie claims she was involved in what?
Perhaps we could dismiss this kind of new-age fascination with the occult as just another fad, but the rubber meets the road somewhere. In a video released some years ago, what appears to be Angelina Jolie is seen describing her participation in sexual and animalistic ritual torture. During the video, she stated:
“It’s like, I would film it , I would encourage, everybody, all different types of sexual. But there’s that in order to encourage everybody, all different types of celebrities. But there is that thing it’s like… A lot of people misunderstand maybe with S&M. And they think… It’s superficial. And I have to explain to people how… Like, where it’s more like… You’re tied down because you need to… be able to, like, have something hold you down to keep you still. Or, like, you’ll fight or go absolutely mad… you’ll be able to heal once your beaten ,so it comes to that real, real place. You know, as opposed to being accessories or something. It’s like tattoos with me, there was that time where I was like, ‘Oh, I have tattoos’ and after a while, you’re like, you can explain them. It comes from that real place. People who are kind of like darker, but its a great thing to be able to see everybody’s sexuality, but its so weird when yo just, I have the most amazing compromising photos of people… My snake, I had to kill him”
Statements like this beg the question: What the hell is she talking about? Angelina Jolie claims she would film people engaged all kinds of sexual activity. She also claimed there were benefits of sadomasochism and that you feel ‘healed’ once your beaten, that it was a great ‘thing’ to be able to see ‘everybody’s sexuality’ and that she has documented photographs of people in ‘compromising situations’ and that she had to ‘kill her snake’.
I should note that at no point does Jolie mention the word ‘ritual’. However, everything she’s describing certainly sounds like an occultic ritual. Critics dismiss that Stanley Kubrick’s Eye Wide Shut was an insight into the elite’s secret Satanic and occult sex rituals, but when figures like Jolie are openly exclaiming their participation in activities that sound like it was taken from the script of Kubrick’s final film, what else are we to conclude? Reality is stranger than fiction, after all.
Ultimately, you could make the cynical argument that it doesn’t matter whether there is a soul-selling pact within Hollywood. Some would contest that it doesn’t affect their lives in any way. The problem is, though, that millions of children around the world sadly idolise actors, actresses, and singers. Hollywood pits itself as the moral beacon of light in the world, and almost all of the film content we consume is produced by Hollywood. The public should rightly be alarmed if the production of content is somehow the result of a soul-selling exchange. If we object to clothes being produced by third-world labour, then why don’t we object to the occult-obsessed, soul-selling apparatus in Hollywood? After all, as consumers, we are somehow involved in the process itself.
