God Told Me To (Larry Cohen, 1976)

[Mr Sausage]

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[knives]

I like the movie for the most part, but I think making the source of the problems be aliens cheapens the effect some. Does anyone feel that was the right choice?

[dwk]

I don't think it would have been any different if it had be angels or demons or Jesus. I assume that the popularity of nonsense like The Chariots of the Gods played into Cohen's decision to make it aliens.

[therewillbeblus]

I can see how it’d be disappointing if the whole film was taken at face value, but the alien presence provides an illogical extreme to amplify several thematic readings. One is that, like Annihilation’s manipulation of universal compasses in time, place, person to arrhythmic rule-defying results, inciting our impotence by disorienting us from basic constructs, God Told Me So’s alien inclusion redefines our sanity as a privilege. We're so vulnerable to falling apart with the introduction of an aggressive stimulus that mimics a higher power greater than us (be it aliens, God, abnormal psychology, etc.) and that doesn’t make sense to us, the latter point destroying our concept of 'reality' by revealing it as either false or a myopic dimension of something greater we cannot mentally or spiritually access, neither of which are good options. This can even work as a more grounded allegory for a detective chasing a serial killer whose mind works differently, or contending with a lover with a different perspective on events and values- just heightened to a wild ceiling to ‘earn’ that dysregulation. As long as the intruding vehicle disrupts this atheist and narcissistic world(/psyche of the surrogate agent) to unveil the horror that our rules, law, order, morality, etc. are all social constructs, it doesn't really matter. But 'aliens' effectively succeed at doing so, especially by refurbishing the sci-fi trope of an apocalyptic invasion destroying humanity to reflect the internal psychological disintegration that comes when we are forcibly sobered from solipsistic comforts.

Anyways, I feel like I wrote about this more in-depth after my first viewing in the sci-fi project thread (which means I must've thought the aliens were key to the film's greatness right away!):

You guys got me curious about God Told Me To, and my God, what a schizophrenic gem. Here is a film that appears to be a police procedural B-movie in almost every way until its eerie premise explodes in a series of chaotic experimental action scenes that are nothing short of riveting, propelling it into an exhausting transformation that's anything but what it appeared to be. The parade attack is filmed in a manner that violently assaults the senses in sound design, blocking, and angular invasiveness, so unpredictably violating of the codes of viewer-safe cinematic language, and out of step with the methodical subdued pacing that came before, that my heart was pounding for minutes afterwards and didn't let up from there. The rest of the narrative follows an equally destabilizing rhythm, mimicking the bipolar score from Taxi Driver only in the form of a visual symphony (released around the same time, and Herrmann was originally tapped to score.. mysterious). I don’t know if this is necessarily high art, but the film provokes the existential horror of contesting with the notion of unfamiliar phenomena- alien forces synonymous with God’s power in an atheist world of skeptics and false senses of control- to a degree that reflects a trauma response from unrationalizable enigmas. This is one of those few intelligent films that demonstrates how fragile our capabilities are when presented with stimuli that challenges our complacent routines and schematic laws of existence.

And yet this film goes further into subjectively embracing the psychological defense mechanisms of narcissism, self-reflexively modeling the process of viewership as well, where Nicholas must double down on his belief of grandiosity to cope with this mysterious figure poisoning his worldview. So we too must drown in stylistic suffocation as we root for his own mental self-preservation to achieve salvation for ourselves vicariously. These jarring confrontations are strategically disguised within a deceptively mediocre sci-fi horror procedural, successfully implementing provocative offerings of macabre phantasmagoria to infect the frames at random; the arbitrary tempo signifying the psyche of our protagonist slowly rattled away from secure affirmations of reality, transparently revealing them to be privileges. Yes, in this film sanity is a privilege, and perhaps not a natural one.

As the narrative reached its final act, I found myself developing a dual reading of the film as a strong allegory for the disintegration of a detective’s psyche as he invests more and more time into relating too strongly to the killers he chases, the necessity of identifying with them consequentially eroding his own identity. There are many paralleled symptoms to this disturbance, such as victims/survivors turning to blame Nicholas as their abuser, and of course his own magnetic draw towards this alien leader. The wife/ex-wife conversation about Nicholas’ subconscious superstitious beliefs in children not being born postures at an interpretation of his blending of personalities with killers as a self-fulfilling prophecy to make sense of his perceived inability to be a father, or be vulnerable to anyone safely when he cannot trust himself. He desperately wants to differentiate himself from those he chases yet fatalistically cannot outrun his own mental decline. His late statement to his partner, “You don’t know who I am,” and the subsequent surrender of the relationship, is stated as much to himself as to her, as if looking in a mirror of fear and connecting with an image impossible to avoid any longer. This is the kind of bone-chilling self-destructiveness that dances on the jagged knife of self-delusion and acute perceptiveness, and the final showdown is as metaphorical an exhibition of Nicholas’ fight for his own soul as it is a literalized sci-fi horror climax. The theme seem to be as much about the devastating loss of 'self' as anything else.

[colinr0380]

I often wonder how much of the vérité sniper sequence of this film was done as a homage to the same kind of Candid Camera sequence in Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty, as a kind of appropriation of absurdist arthouse into the exploitation cinema mode.

Sylvia Sidney certainly had a bizarre series of late roles, from one of the most memorable victims in Damien: Omen II to the dotty grandmother who becomes key to defeating the aliens in Mars Attacks!, but her role here may just be the most eye-popping out of of all of them!