The Body and the Blood

“At grief so deep the tongue must wag in vain; the language of our sense and memory lacks the vocabulary of such pain.”

– Dante Alighier

Picture a church. Pretty, peaceful. There are ghosts in the pews. Picture the candles with lovely yellow flames moving with the gentle grace of practiced dancers. Each flame represents one soul prayed for. Who prays for you? 

Who prays for Alice Spages?

Alice, Sweet Alice (1976) begins with the inscrutable intonations of a child’s voice in the hushed, solemn tone of the pious. We see a little girl—is it her voice?—in her confirmation dress, the veil, virginal white, shrouding her face into impassiveness and anonymity. In white-gloved hands, she holds a handsome crucifix. She looks angelic, posed for a photograph to flaunt in a gilded frame. The credits appear in red like blood stains on the blankness of the negative space of the frame, as white as the unsullied pallor of clouds sitting in voluptuous tufts beyond which waits heaven. (Herman Melville’s audit of the color and its myriad meanings comes to mind here.) The voice whispers its prayers, and as it gets to “at the hour of our death,” the girl in white raises the crucifix to reveal that it is a knife—big, sharp, glinting like the eyes of a corrupt angel. For whom has this hour arrived? 

You imagine that, somewhere out there, the pealing of a bell heralds death.

This is Paterson, New Jersey, 1961. Crime, reactionary social ideologies; a city rife with poverty, crowded with crumbling structures and infrastructure and families struggling to make ends meet; many young people, kids even, not bad people but mired in a bad scenario, resort to crime—petty, serious—to make a buck in this vicinage of rot and hopelessness. A large, inchoate community united in suffering. Many of them Roman Catholic. Ah, Catholicism: such an exciting religion, written in the language of great literature, populated with larger-than-life characters and a grand sense of spectacle which lends itself to the visual arts. Da Vinci, Velázquez, Michelangelo, Scorsese…

Alfred Sole—who never blew up as a celebrated auteur despite his obvious talent—captures the feeling of all that romantic Catholic mythology, its epic scope and penchant for lugubriousness, a religion based on stories of Heaven and Hell, of pearly gates and eternal damnation. And always, there is promised redemption for the loyal acolytes, an everlasting paradise right beside God. Eat his flesh and drink his blood and pray that you may be one with God and his great insoluble plan for us all will be revealed.

And the lurid imagery of Catholicism is here, in Alice, Sweet Alice, aka Holy Terror, aka Communion, this small movie trembling with the ineffable secrets of a religion whose tangled tales of sin and redemption and boundless, inevitable oblivion predict genre fiction, airport novels, magical realism in Latin America, American postmodern behemoths, scary movies. In just over one minute, Sole has lyrically and economically established everything we need to know about the film. He has already warned us that anything and anyone may be dangerous, and he has shown us the violence skulking innately in not just the shadows of Catholicism, but in the lighted, pretty parts, normally reserved for God’s love, his bright warm breath trying to disperse the dark but maybe can’t quite. Suffering is vital to Catholicism; it brings us closer to Him. The air of the film is chilled, like the air in the lacuna between Fall and Winter, yet also heavy with the feverish heat inherent to the vivid storytelling of Catholicism. Sole is also provocatively fueling the paranoia of the church’s community. Alice is an image of comminatory blasphemy. 

Who can decipher the cryptic stratagem of God? It’s like trying to grab the wind with your teeth. 

And in crowds, in our solitary moments, we try. 

In Alfred Sole’s film, the Catholic community comes together to pray; they come together to condemn. To ratify their own interpretations of God’s will. To buttress their convictions. To breed in their children more acolytes. To assure themselves that they follow the will of God, adhere to his commands, commands handed down by a man who trekked up a mountain and came back down with two stone tablets. The question is: who commands Alice? She is, at 12, a troublemaker. Menacing, even. Alice (Paula Sheppard) is childish in demeanor and possesses a face passing shot to shot from the classic cherubic look of a babe to the maturing visage of a woman (Sheppard was 18 when she shot the movie), at once betraying no sin, yet somehow wise beyond her years. She looks perturbed by something she shouldn’t yet understand. And she is juvenile in temperament, prone to petty, pedantic anger and splenetic outbursts when she isn’t getting adequate attention, when something doesn’t go her way or while her younger sister Karen (Brooke Shields) is doted over. She’s a brat, but we sense a deeper darkness in her. 

We watch Alice behave oddly; watch her don a cheap dime store plastic mask looking like a sleepy and unengaged child’s unfinished crayon sketch of a face. This is the first time we meet Mrs. Tredoni (Mildred Clinton), on her knees, yellow rubber gloves scrubbing the black tile floor of a priest’s quarters as the father is giving Karen (also in yellow) a present while Alice asks permission to use the bathroom. We watch Alice fondle with gentle, provocative caress of small delicate fingers a painting of the Holy Mother revealing her eternal heart garlanded in flowers and pierced by a blade with a cruciform hilt, gazing at the image with a wonderment that, however innocuous, evinces something nefarious in a way we can not yet articulate. We see Alice in the basement, where she stands before a table rife with various knickknacks, including a mask and a box of matches and a creepy doll, resembling a wicked sorceress at her makeshift altar. The girl just seems … off. 

And we watch her run around the wayward remnants of abandoned buildings guarded by patrol dogs (the modern Cerberus), shadows and danger you can’t see but can feel as the notes on a piano ping in a tone of deceitful innocence. In these ruins, relics of the past we decided to forget and leave to decay at their own speed, we know that this ostensibly innocent girl may be a little too naughty to consider simply precocious or pesty. And, as portended by the crucifix-as-knife reveal, we know, down in the tenderness of our bones, in the peevish parts of the soul—where we banish the unthinkable and whatever shames us, induces guilt, frightens— that something bad is going to happen soon. As Dante says, “One ought to be afraid of nothing other than things possessed of power to do us harm, but things innocuous need not be feared.”

During a service for children making their first Holy Communion, an exuberant Karen among them, a woman with hair the color of hellfire sings. The pews are filled with family, with the members of the Catholic community for whom the word of Jesus—or, for some during these times of tumult in a collapsing city in the armpit of a country going through a chaotic identity crisis with the first Catholic in the White House and minorities rising up in opposition to hatred, the bastardized word of Jesus—is infallible, Karen is mercilessly strangled with a candle by someone in Alice’s mask and unsullied, bold-yellow rain slicker both sisters own. The attire’s vibrant cheeriness and childish pasquinade of a human face, the pretty color associated with sunny, blue-sky days and the Helianthus annuus, betrays the unnatural, ungodly cruelty of what is happening. 

And then you remember Cain and Abel.  

Sole intercuts shots of the younger sisters slaying in the house of God, one place where you’re supposed to feel safe, with the service for first Holy Communion, which is performed once the child has reached an age of reason and can now, if they prove themselves ready and worthy, receive the body and blood of Christ, which Catholics consider to be the actual transmutation of bread and wine to literal flesh and blood. The priest speaks Latin to the kids who don’t understand what he’s saying. They speak the scripted lines, but it means nothing to them except another required endeavor assigned by their parents. The blasphemous spilling of innocent blood…

Then comes a pall of smoke rising from a pew, sickly-gray, like the corrupted hue of the white dresses and veils. A hellish image. Blasphemous. Kind of beautiful. There is a chaotic burst of confusion among people who cannot comprehend this, who have never experienced real, genuine evil themselves in such a personal way—though the adults who lived through World War II surely saw evil unspooling like scary stories in smudgeable ink across the folded pages of newspapers—and now cannot reconcile with the real life manifestation of what they’d before only read about Hysteria, histrionics. The Devil has come to Paterson, New Jersey, on a day which promised to be nice.

And here’s Alice, with her sister’s veil. Why did Alice steal the veil? She wanted the host. She wanted to be closer to God, and closer to her community. She wants to be good. Is that because she’s bad? 

Nothing brings a community together like tragedy, except maybe tested faith, and a community loves a good subject at which they can direct their collective scorn. The town weirdo is always a good option. Or the bad seed. And here, with this unspeakable, insane evil done, they need a villain. To designate someone a villain, beyond the reach of our forgiving Lord, is to bond with your neighbors in ways which transcend mortal existence and will extend forever in heaven, where your enemies will not be joining you. Corinthians 1:10: “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.”

Sole has a singular feeling for mysterious dread, giving his film an eloquent,eerie low-budget aesthetic beauty and a pervasive notion of unease using careful compositions that, while not ostentatious, possess the same kind of weird, eccentrically striking style as the characters, eliciting from us the anticipation for evil. For nearly two hours, he suffocatingly suffuses the film with a tainted air of distinctly human menace—for humans are the ones who commit violence in the name of God, the ones who wrote the Bible, established doctrine, laid down laws, and perpetuate their own version of right and wrong in the name of their holy authority, always manipulating “His” word to fit their mouths. There are no monsters, no cosmic entities, no beasts burning with the everlasting ire of Satan: it’s a person, flesh and blood, who kills. But which person?

We may find ourselves already wondering if it’s possible that God has forsaken Alice—whose every appearance is in some way slightly unsettling, even if we can’t quite say why, an insinuation of iniquity in defiance of articulation (so unthinkable is it that a young girl would be evil)—because of the minor yet careful details with which the film is replete. The pervasive threat of Catholicism is as potent and seemingly plausible as its promise to deliver us from temptation and save us. Soon, we may even wonder if hissy fits could maybe, possibly lead—oh lord, don’t even think it—to her murdering her sister, such a sweet girl, the family’s—and community’s—favorite of the sisters. 

When the killer in the mask and yellow jacket stabs Alice’s mean, vindictive aunt, giallo-y blood of reddest red flowing in runnels into puddles and jagged holes hacked into fishbelly-pale flesh, we don’t exactly feel bad. And when the mean, vindictive aunt crawls her bedraggled self outside into a gray sad Paterson street yelping for help, rain slashing downwards (Ezra 10:13: “But there are many people here and it is the rainy season; so we cannot stand outside. Besides, this matter cannot be taken care of in a day or two, because we have sinned greatly in this thing”), we may hope that, if Alice is the killer—though that would make the community’s assumption correct, and Sole wants us to have a bit of rebel in us too—that she gets away with this one. 

But it isn’t Alice. It’s Mrs. Tredoni, a servant of the Lord, an integral member of the inner-circle of the faithful community. She is punishing the sinful—and Alice was conceived out of wedlock, a bastard little brat. The rest of the film grows bloodier and weirder, like the Bible as you approach Revelations. She defenestrates Dominick. She stabs Mr. Alphonso. She runs to the church to hide; Father Tom denies her communion. So she stabs him, too. Right in the neck. 

What does any of this mean?

Oh yes, the mysteries of life. The insoluble master orchestrating it all. The perils of free will.  

And yet, Alice, Sweet Alice isn’t a theological statement. Not solely. It doesn’t posit lazy anti-Catholic bloviations or make the faithful into fools (though there are individuals who are cruel and foolish, as in any congregation of people). It uses the imagery, the fables, the metaphors like fat ripe fruit—the violence in the collision of light and dark in the soul, and the violence spilling out into human corporeality—as inspiration for making a smartly, sickly compelling narrative of wickedness and the tragedy of tainted innocence. It conjures a moody, eerie aesthetic of suffering and confusion and a desperate search for answers to mysteries we cannot articulate, and which we may not, in the end, want solved. What community means to the film is both a way of finding strength in something greater than the sad individual and our small personal plights—and believing in and being part of this great something can mollify our sad, personal plights—as well as an excuse to voice personal anger en masse. The priest is truly, genuinely decent; his assistant is twisted, his congregation a hodgepodge of personalities unified in faith and all mixed up on ideas of how to manifest their beliefs. The film has many shots cramped with the congregation all pressed against each other, with halls narrow like stalwart belief. It is, like everything in life, pregnant with the possibility of redemptive beauty as much as it is danger. Togetherness gives strength. It is up to us how we flex. Our will is unfettered, and it is burdened by our restricted point of view, which keeps the world all interpretation. 

And in the church, the candles still sit, shrinking slowly but doggedly symbolic in ways whose profundity lasts long beyond the life of the melting wax, the little flames golden and dancing in the gentle, silent prayers eddying like hot breaths. All those candles with golden crowns alight: a collection—a community—of souls called back home. And when they burn down to nothing and the flame dies, they are replaced and relit.