[With The Devil Finds Work] James Baldwin has written a commentary on the movies as visionary, and unusual, as D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classical American Literature.

The nature of his theme is hinted at in a recalling of a moment (the moment) of apostasy—when Baldwin decided to go to a proscribed theatre matinée, and in so doing, put in peril his religious calling…. He sees The Exorcist as an example of the power to possess that movies may have in an age almost without faith—and dismisses it for its 'hysterical banality'. In dismissing it, though, he enriches us by invoking once more his vision of life as an experience both terrible and terrifying (favoured adjectives in his apocalyptic). He believes that black people, and certain other threatened (and threatening) social outsiders, are the last custodians to this experience—which movies, in general, betray.

Apart...