Sympathy for the Devil: Walking a Mile with MurderLust
Art & Trash, episode 31
Sympathy for the Devil: Walking a Mile with MurderLust
Stephen Broomer, April 19, 2024
Appearances can be deceitful, and beneath such a deception there may be no depth at all, no substantive or satisfying explanation. Steve Belmont, a security guard and Sunday school teacher, moonlights as the 'Mojave Murderer', killing sex workers and dumping their bodies in the desert. Belmont is a comical grotesque, interesting only for the lack of explanation for his crimes. He is unfixed, chameleonic, charming to some, to others, a surly misanthrope, a predator. He is a man who idolizes nothing and nobody, but who pursues authority with calculating desire.
This video essay situates Belmont in the public perception of violence and authority, while also addressing the film itself as the blackest of black comedies, a gruesome satire of the hypocrisy and naivety of Christian America.
You can buy MurderLust on DVD from InterVision/Severin here.
SCRIPT:
In the rogues gallery of 1980s American cinema, the Mojave Murderer is painfully ordinary. He torments and taunts women out of sheer misogynistic malice, kills them and drops their bodies in the desert. How he is perceived by others seems to change from one scene to the next, but he is essentially unmysterious. He is the antihero of Murderlust: Steve Belmont, a comical grotesque, interesting only for the lack of explanation for his crimes. He is unfixed, chameleonic, charming to some, to others, a surly misanthrope, a predator. He is a man who idolizes nothing and nobody, but who pursues authority with calculating desire.
Belmont is a security guard who has slithered into affable respectability in a voluntary position of authority, as a Sunday school teacher at his local church. Such authority is easily, and for Belmont, eagerly abused as he trades off a mask of charm and cheer with petty venom. The film’s title suggests something simmering and uncontrollable: but Belmont isn’t driven by lust, on the contrary, he’s in control, until he isn’t, compromised and exposed by his own sense of entitlement. His need for control is comprehensive, from his manipulation of fellow parishioners, to his willful provocations and dismissive attitude towards customers and coworkers at his security job. He’s the kind of asshole who meets assholes everywhere he goes. The title Murderlust is merely sensational: what Belmont sets in motion, and what will be his undoing, is not guided by lust, but by the arrogance of a well-fed ego, matured in smug silence.
Character studies of murderers tend toward social explanations. This is how mass culture copes with those crossed lines, taboos of murder, rape, pedophilia: to humanize, to empathize, to understand the ways that underlying traumas shape the worst traits of humanity. Filmmaker Donald M. Jones moves out of step with such storytelling, for even though the sole perspective of Murderlust is that of Steve Belmont, moonlighting strangler, the film affords Belmont no psychological explanation because it so much as admits that he is incapable of introspection. He never reveals underlying wounds, even through ironic admissions: he makes no admissions at all. The closest he comes to this is when he tells a prostitute that her child couldn’t help being born, implying that the concept of original sin plays a role in his hatred of women. This statement is made in the opening scene of the film, but is never again mentioned.
What is the social explanation for the Mojave Murderer? He is an exemplar of self-absorption and loathing. He kills women because he hates women. He hates men too, but his hatred for men manifests only through sneering superiority. Belmont is a Teflon Superman with a God complex whose front masks not some craven, shameful need, some uncontrollable impulse, but the predatory mirror of his respectability, that is, an aspiration to total mastery. His character is not that of a man, but of the worst kind of god. This is not a subtext: when Belmont talks to church administrators about trying to “live his faith,” he sees himself at the centre of a faith, the mad prophet of the desert heat, piling bodies up under the sun. This is the comic heart of Murderlust: that a man so plainly uncharismatic, grouchy and vicious is perceived by others as their own pious ideal. In the presence of the churchgoers, he meets an expectation, a quiet, thoughtful man who performs charity for strangers.
The film is also a tour of commonplace, clichéd ironies: the security guard who is predatory and untrustworthy; Christian charity as a veneer for self-possessed greed; the photographer without a public whose boasts about fame and celebrity are just a lure to cover seedier intentions. All of this coheres around Eli Rich’s deadpan performance as Belmont, a performance that anticipates the obtuse, inflexible countenance of Henry in John McNaughton’s film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and the mannered absurdity of Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho. Unlike Henry (which was inspired by the outlandish confessions of Henry Lee Lucas), Steve Belmont is not rooted in reality, and unlike Patrick Bateman, he is not a symbol of generational excess: but he does meet both characters partway, for another aspect of his character, the anonymity, charm, and violent potential of the man next door. McNaughton’s film and Ellis’s book emerged from an America still reeling from the trial of serial killer Ted Bundy. Donald M. Jones made Murderlust while Bundy was on death row, and the killer had become a spectre lurking under the front of every suitor in America. Ted Bundy was not the drooling, disfigured monster that America had been taught to fear: he was considered handsome, a picture of normalcy. This grants two themes: that appearances can be deceitful, and that beneath such a deception there may be no depth at all, no substantive or satisfying explanation, no why. Belmont is a picture of normalcy for the churchgoers he encounters. They don’t regard him as suspicious, because to be suspicious in their world, one would have to be abnormal on the surface. This could be the fault of their naivety; or it could be that they are conditioned to submit to authority. In either event, this marks Murderlust as a satire of the piousness, propriety and insularity of such communities.
The only character who raises suspicions about Belmont is Sunday school pupil Debbie Schultz, whose natural teenage cynicism recognizes him for the monster that he is. Even this is grimly farcical: it’s all just an ironic coincidence. She despises him as she does any authority figure. By chance he is even more corrupt and sadistic than she presumes him to be. When she accuses him of abuse, which is only later suggested to be untrue, he patronizes and shames her embarrassed father into apologizing to him. Steve Belmont’s absence of a conscience becomes a source of mordant comedy. When he confronts these charges, other members of the community congratulate and elevate him and promise him a promotion, in a hideous irony, to be head of the church’s adolescent crisis centre. The promise of such authority stands in stark contrast to other aspects of Belmont’s life, whether he’s haplessly concealing a corpse from his nosy cousin, in a strange and jarring bout of slapstick; or taunting his boss at his security job, a show of his own contempt for authority. As a black comedy, Murderlust operates entirely in relation to the concept of authority: here, domination is never just. Authority can only be a magnet for sheep or a monster’s truncheon.
Belmont’s evil wit rests uncomfortably against the film’s sadistic murder sequences. Is it a matter of intention or coincidence that actor Eli Rich’s gruff delivery has a mordant humour of its own, drifting between a flat affect and whispered confidences? Eli Rich would go on to play a similar role in Jag Mundhra’s The Jigsaw Murders, as a photographer who preys on pin-up models; but in that film, which is primarily a police procedural, Rich’s performance of sneering duplicity is just a trope of the genre. In Murderlust, that same duplicity is the film’s central, and largely unchallenged, perspective. The comedy of Murderlust is above all situational and farcical: this mixing of genres amplifies the film’s unpredictability, and gives Belmont’s fate a tinge of irony, stabbed, shot and baking to death in the desert sun, paying for the gaffes of his hubris, less than a God and less than human.
