@turtlethetaffer: The film is about the rise of satanism, and at the same time, the fall of the Holy Church. Yes that sounds crazy; yes that is as crazy as it sounds. If you can get past the first line of this reply without laughing, bravo. What 'follows' the youth is the corruption of moral code. Promiscuity is simply a vehicle for moral destruction, and is mostly used as a symbol here. Passing the 'curse' means that the person must accept the action of bringing pain and suffering to another human willingly, even to survive. In turn, that person brings it to the next. Detroit is used in the film because it once stood as a symbol of American pride and value. It has now fallen to ruin, like the youth. The use of older technology throughout the film symbolizes the old way--the moral value system. The 'new' way is symbolized by the one piece of modern-looking tech in the movie: the girl's strange clamshell e-reader. Clamshells come from the depths of the sea, or in other words, the Underworld. The girl is reading The Idiot on the clamshell. The 'idiot' in the novel is oblivious of the importance of seemingly innocuous acts; like the youth is oblivious to how simply having a little fun could possibly have a larger consequence. Moral decay is a gradual, all-consuming process that leaves one open to increasingly perverse acts that little by little become more acceptable. The entity is hidden in plain view, inside of the image of friends and family and so forth, and can only be seen by those that have taken the step and have become corrupted, or in other words, have become part of what the entity represents, yet those as yet uncorrupted are actively affected by what is going on, as the main characters' friends are affected, though they cannot see the Enemy; this is a statement on the presence of evil in media, in government--everywhere--right in front of the peoples' eyes, yet they do not see unless they are consciously part of the program, so to speak, though unconsciously they participate and are morally and spiritually eroded from the inside because of it. At the end of the film, the girl with the reader is reading aloud a passage about the fear of the separation of the soul from the body. This is an occult/metaphysical concept; the fear only occurs to those unknowing of the immortality of good acts, of the higher mind, that is; to fear one's death is to negate god, god being man himself deified through his acts of kindness, charity, so forth. In other words, idiots fear losing their soul, because on some level they know that they have lost themselves spiritually. At the beginning of the film, the main character is viewing a squirrel on a wire chasing a bird, which represents the animal impulse of hurting another being without thought of repercussion. The event is occurring literally above her, the symbolic direction of Heaven and God, though in this case it is used in an inverted sense; throughout the film she looks upward again and again, as if recalling that initial sight of lower animal behavior, which ultimately she must fall on herself to survive, essentially tossing self-sacrifice for the good of mankind out the window. At the end of the film, she and her old friend, who loves her though she does not seem to love him, not in 'that' way, agree to have sex. The very last scene sees them walking down a sidewalk at night, dressed in white and black, followed by the entity. The sidewalk represents the aisle one walks down on their marriage day; the black and white represents the duality of good and evil, or in other words, the acceptance of both, and, in this case, participation in the latter, which is no longer shunned; nighttime is the inversion of light, light being symbolic of good; the two are in a sense getting married, though they are marrying themselves to the night, symbolic of evil, overseen by the entity that follows--forever, as long as they fear death, and thus the immortality of the soul. The negation of god is their lot now.
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