VILLAGE VOICE, 7/6/83, p. 51, J. Hoberman
W. Eugene Scott, the white-maned, pinched-faced television preacher who's the subject of Werner Herzog's 46-minute documentary, God's Angry Man, calls himself "the most honest guy on TV." In a sense, he's right. Using a Glendale, California, UHF station as his pulpit, Scott hosts an apparently endless telethon cum psychodrama in which he bullies his audience into sending him money. ''This is not a show," the cowboy-talkin' Scott likes to say. ''God's honor is at stake!"
God's honor - I guess there's nothing heavier than that. At least that's how the not unsympathetic Herzog seems to see it. Scott appears here as a ridiculous visionary loner - first cousin to Aguirre, the Herzog character who called himself "The Wrath of God." Of course, Scott must have a line even if it's the standard reactionary litany against communists, homosexuals, women's rights, and big government to go along with his shtick but Herzog characteristically gives the preacher's politics short shrift. Scott believes that "either people are for me or against me" because, it would seem, "there are some people who, if God's for it, they're against it." Aside from an obscure reference to a tax bust in Connecticut and an Ernie Kovacs-like burlesque of FCC bureaucrats, it's unclear what God wants except more money for Dr. Scott.
Scott has no illusions about his political appeal--"I get my votes in checks," he brags - but Herzog concentrates mainly on Scott's pitching. His creativity may even impress long-term listeners to WBAI. In fact, I'm told, for the last few years Scott's eternal telethon has served dissolute California youth as a kind of video party record. "I will not be defeated tonight," Scott warns menacingly and, after a long pause, "Not one more word until that thousand comes in." Folding his arms, he glares at the camera in squint-eyed close-up for a slow burn more lugubrious than Jackie Gleason's. The tension builds and suddenly Scott is raging like a stuck varmint: ''DO you understand it's God's WORK?! What IS Christianity? Is it games, gimmicks, words, MASSAGE or is it . . . LIFE AND DEATH !? ! Six hundred miserable dollars and STILL you sit GLUED TO YOUR Chair!" The diatribe bears fruit but Scott refuses to be mollified.
''Why didn't you do it because you loved God, he snarls and begins counting up his bread in paranoid ingratitude.
God's Angry Man was shot in 1980, the FCC didn't pull the
plug on Scott until last May. According to an article in the San
Jose Mercury. the preacher concluded his last, desperate telethon
by exhorting the video faithful to send him long-term pledges
payable in monthly instalments over a l0 year period. The contributions
were for no single project at one point in Herzog's film, Scott
boasts of supporting three orphanages, a publishing house, and
a travel agency - but rather to reimburse him for past teachings.
"I don't give out little bottles of water from the river
Jordan." the Mercury quotes him as saying, ''My snot's
worth more than that!"
Herzog, who strikes me as a documentary filmmaker nearly as radical as early Andy Warhol, has a tourist's appreciation for fantastic Americana. Scott's studio set looks like something out of a Syberberg flick royal blue wallpaper; driftwood candelabras; plush ranchero furniture; Navajo knickknacks; a backdrop that conflates the Manhattan, San Francisco, and Chicago skylines; a handy toy monkey to be punished with an outsized Ping-Pong paddle. The look is Liberace povera and the show's musical interludes are provided by a combo that sounds like a cross between a Disneyland barbershop quartet and a Las Vegas lounge act, fronted by a sanctimonious baritone whose bizarre facial contortions suggest a soused Arthur Godfrey doing his living room impersonation of Scatman Crothers. But, of course, Herzog's best discovery is Scott.
Despite Herzog's political naivete - his romantic representation of show biz hustler as cracked conquistador - God's Angry Man sheds a more revealing light on constitutional rights, media politics, and the American psyche than the similar, committed film - Saul Landau and Frank Diamond's Quest for Power reviewed here last week- (As Marx proved with Balzac, the correct line does not necessarily yield the most illuminating social insights.) Libidinally speaking, Scott's racket is a form of soft-core bondage where people who can afford it pay to hear themselves abused. The Nazis, to take only the most obvious example, knew that this sort of masochistic relationship to authority was powerful stuff, particularly if the ruled and their rulers shared the same social resentments.
"When I yell I want to be heard," Scott asserts, echoing the populist ploy of the TV demagogue in Paddy Chayevsky's Network. But, in his ceaseless yammering for money, he's the American everyman writ large. Scott feeds on frustration but it's his success that makes him a potent ego-ideal. He's the pot of gold at the end of the chain letter, Norman Vincent Peale at the O.K. Corral, the raging Stakhanovite of American capitalism.
Americans," Herzog once observed, "believe that they are normal, that they make sense, and that the rest of the world is exotic. They do not seem to understand that they are the most exotic people in the world right now. "Believe me," the German filmmaker added, ''I say this with a lot of sympathy."