Great Characters: Col. Vincent Kane (“The Ninth Configuration”)

The Ninth Configuration is a little known movie, but I saw it when it was in theaters in 1980 because I’m a fan of spiritual thrillers. Here is a plot summary from IMDB:

A new commanding officer arrives at a remote castle serving as an insane asylum for crazy and AWOL U.S. Army soldiers where he attempts to rehabilitate them by allowing them to live out their crazy fantasies while combating his own long-suppressed insanity.

That commanding officer is Colonel Vincent Kane, played powerfully by Stacey Keach:

Here is a video that features the writer-director of the movie William Peter Blatty, famous for his novel and film The Exorcist:

Given my theological background, you can see from these dialogue excerpts one of the reasons why I was interested in this movie:

Colonel Kane: You’re convinced that God is dead because there’s evil in the world.
Captain Cutshaw: Correct.
Colonel Kane: Then why don’t you think He’s alive because of the goodness in the world?

Colonel Kane: Maybe we’re just fish out of water.
Col. Richard Fell: What was that?
Colonel Kane: I just think about sickness, cancer in children, earthquakes, war, painful death. Death, just death. If these things are just part of our natural environment why do we think of them as evil? Why do they horrify us so?… unless we were meant for someplace else.

Col. Vincent Kane: In order for life to have appeared spontaneously on earth, there first had to be hundreds of millions of protein molecules of the ninth configuration. But given the size of the planet Earth, do you know how long it would have taken for just one of these protein molecules to appear entirely by chance? Roughly ten to the two hundred and forty-third power billions of years. And I find that far, far more fantastic than simply believing in God.

Kane is a great example of a Protagonist in a Disunity state and in Jungian terms, deeply in denial of his shadow. Given the fact Blatty based “The Ninth Configuration” on an earlier novel called “Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane,” you can imagine what type of shadow Kane is trying desperately to repress.

Any fans of The Ninth Configuration?

Thanks to Daniel Martin Eckhart for the suggestion of Col. Vincent Kane.

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