Werner Herzog’s 1981 portrait of tele-evangelist Gene Scott,
God’s Angry Man, is ultimately perhaps too brief to do subject to its
bizarre subject, rendering it too easy to caricature him as a straightforwardly
hypocritical materialist. Not that Scott, who we’re told is dealing with as
many as seventy lawsuits at any given time, doesn’t apparently spend a large
portion of his broadcasts asking for money, but based on what we’re shown he
does so with a self-entitled, hectoring rage that seems distinct from the
smarmy latter-day “prosperity gospel.” Herzog doesn’t probe the details of
Scott’s doctrinal positioning, and it’s unclear what the experience of watching
his show, which seems unstructured and rambling at best, actually amounts to (at
times, in fact, as in his creation of an “FCC Monkey Band”, a collection of
wind-up animals intended to embody his view of a adversarial Federal
Communications Commission, it might be consumed as unhinged performance art). On
that issue of materialism, Scott claims he doesn’t own anything directly except
a black bag he carries around with him, the contents of which are revealed to
no one (he somewhat puckishly allows it might just be his dirty socks); his
expenses are entirely borne by the church, implicitly allowing him a defense
against being the rich man who can no more enter heaven than a camel can go
through the eye of a needle. Even so, the film’s (almost) last words are a song
about a propserous man who, if he can scrape into heaven at all, will only be
granted a rusty halo and second hand wings, and one wonders if that’s partly an
expression of Grant’s own insecurity (he does allow earlier that he sometimes
wrestles with his faith), of whether his ranting reflects fear of an afterlife
which will fail to justify the choices he made in this one.
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