Hallelujah

MARJOE IS AN UNDENIABLY slick and engrossing film unfortunately, it is a movie that focuses on the wrong subject. An expose of the "big time" evangelical preaching racket, this documentary has been conceived as a public act of repentance for former revivalist Marjoe Gortner. It serves almost entirely as a showcase for its egotistical protagonist and never confronts a more important topic--the lives and motivations of the people caught up in his religious revivals. As a result the audience is subjected to a frustratingly inarticulate exercise which is nevertheless provocative and revealing in spite of itself.

Marjoe this name is derived from "Mary" and "Joseph" I was brought into has parents' preaching "act" at the age of four Billed as the world's youngest ordained minister., he created a considerable star in California by performing his first Marriage only a year later. The documentary includes home movies of his early years plus coverage of his final year on the circuit. He first quit the business at 14, returning two years later when he went broke. The split between unbearable, so he perservered through a final year of fire and brimstone during which he supervised the making of this film.

From its inception Marjoe was tainted by ethical ambiguity. The project is somehow reminiscent, on a less drastic scale, of the government's venereal disease experiments in which poor black Southerners were not told the nature of their infection. Similarly, for the purposes of his documentary. Marjoe continued to victimize unsuspecting people for a year. While the element of good in his work must be considered, there is no doubt that the revivals brought in many thousands of dollars unjustly. Even if Gortner didn't share in the cash (he does not tell us), a number of his unwitting con men colleagues did. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the profits from this movie are going, in any way to undo the exploitation Marjoe purports to expose.

Toward the movie's end. Marjoe explains that he looks at his actions as "bad, not evil." There may be more than a semantic nicety to that. But it is unsubstantiated by Marjoe's attitude. He is using this film as a springboard toward an acting and singing career, and his regard for the people he preached to as foolish and blind bespeaks lack of compassion that, in his case, is particularly unbecoming.

To make things more uncomfortable, there is a strange absence of shock value in the episodes of trickery recorded by this film. While the success of such blatant exploitation is dismaying, and the number of tricks employed prodigious, the real picture of a corrupt evangelist that Marjoeprojects almost duplicates the stereotype made popular by the fictional Elmer Gantry. It is a sad but true comment that the dishonesty illumined already seems logical in the context of evangelical religion.

Two redeeming factors give the film its special value--the inadvertant study it offers on the character of Marjoe, and the movie's implications for the lives of people victimized by "the religion business."

As a boy, Marjoe maintains, he could not have been held accountable for his acts, although he admists never to have believed at any time in the truthfulness of what he was doing. The movement attracted him with its glitter and the limelight t assured him. What Marjoe does not acknowledge is the relation between his craving for attention and the cruelty of his mother, who dunked his head underwater or smothered him with a pillow to insure that her young "gimmick" memorized his allegedly God inspired sermons contentiously Rather, he insists that he resented his lather more although he actually hates neither patent because he suggests unconvincingly, he's doing his thing and they were doing theirs.

MARJOE'S unreflective arrogance shows in other moments as well a warning in the him crew not to make it with Pentecostalist groupers. I've made it a rule not to take out girls from the church I stick to airline stewardesses and a final scene in which he performs the having of the hands upon his puppy the message is clear the people were as stupid as dogs.

Thus hardly demes that Marjoe did good or asserts that he is beyond at understanding of his past Indeed he explains evangelism as group therapy under the guise of holiness Preachers "help congregants enjoy an overwhelming release of physical tension, after which the disappearance of various sympions is no doubts genume On the other hand, this is something less than a sufficient intellectual basis for a film protending both to originality and to unsightfulness throughout the study, Marjoe's observations are if anything agonizingly superficial

The film's other asset has in its indirect revelations concerning the congregants and them relationship with the preacher Marjoe's charisma is beyond question. The intense emotional and physical reactions of his audiences bear witness to the hole he has cracked through their fortified walls of intense self-repression. He is an unquestionably good actor and a competent singer and organist. His comparing himself to Mick Jagger is not at all baseless. Amidst an aura of religious righteousness rather than an atmosphere of Satanic evil, Marjoe, like Jagger, conducts an exercise in group masturbation legitimized by the central figure of authority, or in Jagger's case, of anti-authority.

In a real sense, if we accept the models of recent European historians, Marjoe illustrates the genuine danger of persistent fascist strains currently evident in America. Essentially left behind by the urban industrial age, the rural Pentecostalists, usually very young or very old and poor in either case, see no hope for self-advancement in the reality of changing American life. They are struggling to adhere to the values by which they have been raised amidst an era of upheaval in which those values have been betrayed, Theirs is a last ditch effort to fend off the Powers of the unknown ("Can Jesus deliver a drug addict? Can Jesus deliver a homosexual?") and to realize symbolic economic success in traditional ways ("I resolved to use that Cadillac for God.") These survivors of the rural lower middle class put their faith in an authoritarian figure who facilitates an escape from their repression while promising the persistence of a social order in which they believe. Theirs is a war against both the rich and the urban poor, the activist workers and students, and the wealthy urban and suburban capitalists. The willingness of the paranoid elderly to entrust themselves to Marjoe recalls that scene in Cabaret in which a member of Hitler's Youth teaches the old men in a German beer garden the words to "Tommorrow Belongs to Me."

It is this phenomenon and not Marjoe that most deserves study, the more so if it could be filmed the way Robert Coles writes and the filmmaker could immerse himself in the lives of the congregants in order to project the coherence of their lives from within. Marjoe's inability to do this is a major disappointment, but a film this suggestive--though its suggestiveness seems accidental--clearly deserves to be seen and pondered.