The Mothman Prophecies
With Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Will Patton, Debra Messing, Lucinda Jenney, and Alan Bates.
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The film is based on John A. Keel’s 1975 book of the same title, about nocturnal sightings of a winged, red-eyed, humanoid being in the vicinity of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, that began November 15, 1966, and ended after the town’s Silver Bridge collapsed into the Ohio River, killing 46 people, on December 15, 1967. Sightings of the “Mothman” coincided with UFO reports and electrical anomalies, one of them on a Mason County sheriff’s radio. Occult theories abound: One Web page insists that the being was the ghost of Cornstalk, chief of the Shawnee Indians, who died in 1777. The Omega Group, a team of devout Christians who conduct parateleological research on the caves of Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia, blame a multigenerational witch coven (their Web page plays the eerie theme music from Fox TV’s Millennium). But apparently the townspeople have overcome their dread: on the day the film opened, West Virginia’s secretary of state announced that Point Pleasant’s old KFC will be converted into a Mothman-themed visitors’ center, and the local paper reported progress on a 20-foot Mothman sculpture being constructed by students at a local career center.
But Pellington’s masterstroke is locating the Mothman in the electromagnetic environment of telephones, televisions, tape recorders, power lines, and brain scans. Pellington started out in music video, devising on-air promotions for MTV; after directing the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy’s 1991 video for “Television, the Drug of the Nation,” he collaborated with Bono and Brian Eno to design the wall of video screens in U2’s “Zoo TV” stage show, which bombarded the audience with conflicting orders like BELIEVE EVERYTHING, WATCH MORE TV, and EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG. Though both projects were aimed at demystifying media, The Mothman Prophecies exploits our free-floating anxiety over the tidal wave of messages rushing at us through TV, radio, cell phones, fax machines, and the Internet. Many of us have no idea how these things even work, let alone how to gauge their impact on our psyches.
