Review
Culture
Film & TV
Monsters
4 min read

How to do the Devil’s work in modern America

The Bondsman ‘literal evil’ fits so easily into today.

Giles Gough is a writer and creative who host's the 'God in Film’ podcast.

A bondsman looks to a colleague.
Kevin Bacon and Jolene Purdy star.
Amazon Studios.

The Bondsman looks like the kind of story we’ve seen many times before, but look closer and you’ll see some fascinating insights.  

The show dropped on Amazon Prime last Thursday, starring Kevin Bacon as murdered bounty hunter Hub Halloran, who is resurrected by the Devil to hunt demons that have escaped from the prison of Hell. Hub learns how his own sins got his soul condemned, which pushes him to seek a second chance at life, love, and bizarrely enough, country music. 

After being murdered in an all-too visual pre-credits sequence, Hub is resurrected, and after seeing some supernatural horrors he can’t explain, Hub is quickly sent chasing down those demons with the help (and often hinderance) of his mother played by Beth Grant. They receive instructions on which demons to capture via fax. The demons are suitably unsettling, with their red pinprick-of-light eyes and gravity defying leaps. As scary as they are, they are also helpful enough to get themselves killed with conventional weapons and burst into flames as soon as they die, saving Hub the inconvenience of having to dispose of the bodies.  

In the first few episodes, it would be easy to dismiss The Bondsman as schlocky genre fiction. Kevin Bacon easily leans into the laconic, foul-mouthed cynic, more comfortable with ultra-violence than discussing his emotions. The Southern Gothic is an aesthetic we’ve seen in more Amazon Prime shows than we care to remember at this point, and the gore is at the level you would expect from horror experts; Blumhouse, and the setting of rural Georgia, is reminiscent of The Walking Dead. You could be forgiven for leaving this show at the pilot and not returning to it. But if you can make it through the formulaic first few episodes (which are mercifully short, 35 minutes at the longest) your patience is likely to be rewarded.  

For any viewers familiar with Angel or Constantine, the idea of a hero who fights evil but is still damned to hell for their past actions, is well worn territory. But if we look at Hub’s ‘co-ordinator’ Midge (Jolene Purdy) we get a small insight into the banality of evil. Midge is coerced into selling her soul to the devil in order to save her dying infant son. This highlights how often people are drawn into corruption because they were forced to pick the lesser of two impossible evils. As Midge’s own ‘co-ordinator’ tells her: “The fastest path to hell: selling your soul to help someone you love”. Midge’s son is ‘miraculously’ healed, so long as she continues to meet her quota of convincing people to sell their souls. It seems the devil has a better health plan than corporate America. 

Those subtle jabs at corporate America make the show quietly subversive. The devil’s minions here appear as the ‘Pot O’ Gold’ company, a slimy operation that preys on the weak and perpetuates misery in order to benefit a faceless boss. What’s interesting is how ‘literal evil’ fits so easily into the model of a capitalist corporation. Whilst many US politicians may decry the evils of socialism, it seems that as far as evil in America in The Bondsman is concerned, the call is coming from inside the house.  

It's true that God is largely absent from this story. In the same way that competent, protective parents are absent from children’s novels. If he was present, that would undercut a lot of the narrative tension. Despite this, it’s interesting how even in a world where characters reference and believe in the existence of God, virtually none of the characters think to pray or ask for his help. It brings to mind the C.S. Lewis quote about how “the doors of hell are locked on the inside". 

This might possibly be the show’s greatest contribution. What we can see from The Bondsman is God in the inverse, a negative image. Instead of the hope of an eternal life, they’re faced with the numbing despair of lasting torment. Hub and Midge are sent out on missions by a faceless, uncaring ‘boss’ rather than a loving intimate father, forced into being corporate co-workers rather than found family. Once it moves past the adolescent gore-for-gore’s sake of the first few episodes, it seems The Bondsman might have a fantasy world worth exploring. 

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Review
Art
Awe and wonder
Culture
5 min read

Stanley Spencer’s seen and unseen world

The artist’s child-like sense of wonder saw heaven everywhere.

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A woman dressed in dark Victorian clothes sits on a street among angels.
Detail: Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors.
Stanley Spencer Gallery

The seen and the unseen are keys to the work of Stanley Spencer but, while imagination is required to bring them together, they are not real and imaginary, rather they are real and real. 

The catalogue for Seeing the Unseen: Reality and Imagination in the Art of Stanley Spencer begins with a quote from Spencer’s writings:

“Everything has a sort of double meaning for me, there’s the ordinary, everyday meaning of things, and the imaginary meaning about it all, and I wanted to bring these things together.” 

Writing as he does, Spencer draws on the thinking of William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge who, as Malcolm Guite has shown, viewed the imagination as not only shaping and putting things together, as Spencer describes, but also removing the dull film of familiarity that we put over everything, to see it with freshness once again. That freshness being primarily, the innocent view of a child.  

This exhibition brings together stunning examples of Spencer’s realistic works – his portraits and landscapes – which he often viewed as “potboilers” that merely paid the rent, and his biblical or symbolic works which had his heart and which, in his mind, formed a vast exhibition in a “church-house”. The curators, through their apt juxtapositions, compellingly demonstrate how Spencer brought together the seen and unseen in his work.  

View from Cookham Bridge (1936) is a realistic work that shows us beautifully a summer’s day in an area of great meaning to Spencer. He set his magnificent but unfinished Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta, which is permanently on show at the Gallery and towers above everything else in the exhibition, just downstream of Cookham Bridge. Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta teems with people and incident while, in View from Cookham Bridge, there are no people to be seen. Yet, in this painting, Spencer enables us to feel their presence – hearing the ducks and splash of oars, the chatter of people – thereby leading us to visualise the unseen. 

Spencer’s biblical and symbolic images are primarily set within Cookham, as the village itself suggested settings for specific scenes to him. The Betrayal is set at the end of Spencer’s own garden where the distinctive buildings of the maltings can be seen in the background. The Last Supper is then set in those same maltings, while Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors is set in the garden of Sarah Tubb’s home on Cookham High Street. Through this means Spencer emphasises both the universality and particularity of the Bible’s stories, in that they can be reimagined or reenacted anywhere and in the humblest of settings.  

Heaven in ordinary is a particular response to the incarnation – God moving into our neighbourhood – and is one that Spencer pushed to particular lengths, as is shown here through images from his Beatitudes of Love series. The Beatitudes are where Jesus turns our expectations of worldly success and achievement upside down by teaching that it is the meek and humble, the persecuted and those grieving who are blessed in God’s eyes and kingdom. In his Beatitudes of Love, Spencer demonstrates God’s acceptance of all by turning our expectations of beauty upside down and deliberately giving us characters who seem grotesque as those we are asked to admire and love. 

In doing so, he is also showing his retention of a child-like vision of the world as, from the perspective of a child, all adults are large, lumpy and disproportioned. Unlike a later great religious artist, Albert Herbert, who escaped from the limitations of adult vision by deliberately painting in a child-like manner, Spencer painted with a child-like vision. This can be seen in Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta where his child-like Christ is both rotund but wonderfully energetic as he leans forcefully forwards from his wicker chair to engage with a group of children who are responding in the range of ways that children do, from attention and captivation to distraction and disinterest.  

His child-like vision and understanding are perhaps most clearly seen here in one of a series of pen and ink drawings undertaken for an almanack published by Chatto and Windus. These were domestic scenes illustrating the months of the year. The image for July is of his first wife Hilda smelling a flower. This is not an image of refined woman delicately savouring a pleasant odour, instead Hilda’s face is buried in the daisy, nose against pistil, as a child gaining the fullest experience possible.    

Blake was eight years old when he first saw angels in trees on Peckham Rye. Similarly, Spencer developed his sense of Cookham as a village in heaven in childhood. He never lost that child-like vision, although at times he questioned whether it had been successfully retained. Despite many poor choices and challenging life experiences, the works shown here reveal that Spencer carried a child-like sense of wonder through his life and work and, as a result, left as his legacy the deepest and broadest vision of heaven in ordinary that any artist has been able to gift to us.  

While his dream of a literal church-house in which to house his complete oeuvre was never a realisable aim, his works, taken as a whole, provide a key with which open a door allowing us to see what church and home, heaven and village, are together. Although small in size and therefore able to only show a minimal percentage of Spencer’s work at any one time, the Stanley Spencer Gallery, housed as it is in a former Wesleyan Chapel, creatively operates as a diminutive church-house for Stanley’s works, taking us deeper into his unique achievement one exhibition at a time. 

 

SEEING THE UNSEEN: Reality and Imagination in the Art of Stanley Spencer, Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham, 7 November 2024 – 30 March 2025 

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