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John Safran
‘If there’s a curveball thrown at you, or a criticism, it can be helpful in that it’s the next thing you can address,’ John Safran says. Photograph: Audible
‘If there’s a curveball thrown at you, or a criticism, it can be helpful in that it’s the next thing you can address,’ John Safran says. Photograph: Audible

John Safran on the occult, obstacles and 'bad faith' criticisms: 'It's a bit rich'

This article is more than 4 years old

His new podcast treads safer territory than past shows, which saw him crucified, exorcised and disguised in blackface. What’s it like being Safran in 2019?

What wonderful symbolism for John Safran’s new mission my choking fit is. We’re sitting in a bar. I’m trying to relay some renewed criticisms made of his work, when my throat seizes up and I can’t get the words out. Is it psychological disturbance or witchcraft?

That question is a central theme of Safran’s Audible Original podcast, John Safran vs the Occult, which reignites his fascination for religion and ritual. He travels to Texas to track down former Salvadoran gang members purported to be Satanists (by accusers including President Trump); to the South Pacific to unravel the deaths of two men accused of being witches; and back home to Melbourne where he meets a Muslim woman who believed herself to be possessed after having a baby.

Pertaining to the choking fit, either I hit a blockage upon asking Safran an awkward question, or he put a hex on me. You can make up your own mind. As a storyteller, Safran deals in ambiguity, never trundling towards some foregone conclusion.

It was Audible that originally pitched him the idea of investigating witchcraft in Vanuatu. Part gumshoe, part one-man flashmob, Safran is the perfect man for the job. He has been nailed to a cross in the Philippines in 2009 and underwent an exorcism in the 2004 ABC series John Safran vs God, but he doesn’t immerse himself as physically in this show – although he does get a nasty staph infection while under the influence of kava.

The podcast taps into his longstanding interest in ritual, which makes it far safer territory than his previous forays into race. As Safran observes, even secular people often give the dark arts a free pass (rather like the heathens on Instagram believe the Universe will deliver) because such beliefs serve as a lubricant, to release what’s inside. He himself found value in that when his televised exorcism, shortly after his mother’s death, gave him legitimate reason to wail.

The flipside is that accusations of witchcraft and Satanism have long been a preferred method of control by those in positions of power. “People harness these forces to get shit done, for better or worse,” he narrates – but ultimately, he defends the individual’s right to their beliefs. In fact, there’s a scathing sign-off addressed to Richard Dawkins, the curmudgeonly atheist who Safran interviewed live in 2018 – and who then, he says in the first episode, publicly mocked Safran’s exorcism.

For the podcast, Safran travelled without security, but he’s sat through a few high-risk-scenario workshops in his time. “I remember us learning how to kill someone with a water bottle,” he says. “In self-defence.”

I wonder out loud if he has an underactive amygdala, so uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous are the situations he inserts himself into.

“I think it’s a bit like when you go driving you’re not thinking about, is this gonna make me a quadriplegic?” he says. “You just assume this won’t be the one where you get sideswiped by a truck.”

John Safran’s 2017 book investigating extremist groups drew criticism that he describes as ‘a bit rich’. Photograph: Audible

What’s it like being John Safran in 2019? Even since his previous project, the 2017 book Depends What You Mean by Extremist (in which he got stoned with the United Patriots Front), there’s been a firmer shift towards not giving airtime to extremists or a voice to killers. Certainly it’s hard to imagine some of the stunts he pulled in his 2009 ABC series Race Relations getting the green light now. So has the noose tightened on his work, or do the changing times add a new dimension?

“There’s a layer to it that’s annoying, in that often people – in our smug media bubble but also in the wider community – only know about things like, say, the alt-right, because people went out and spoke to the alt-right and wrote about it … It’s a bit rich to pretend that [alt-right] knowledge somehow just floated into their head from nowhere,” he says tartly. He references a Mother Jones piece about white nationalist Richard Spencer, which opens with a description of him using chopsticks “to deftly pluck slivers of togarashi-crusted ahi from a rectangular plate”.

“I noticed the people going, ‘Huh! We don’t need to know that.’ It’s like, ‘No, you idiots. Clearly, the journalist’s intention – and they were successful in it – was to say, ‘Hey, you might think far-right people are on the back of pickup trucks going yee-haw, but they’re not.’”

Warming to the theme, he continues: “With my style, I just assume everyone’s going to get what I’m getting at, without me wagging my finger. Clearly, if I’m talking to someone who’s a huge racist and violent, the starting point is, ‘I think that’s awful.’ If people are going to have that much bad faith [in their misinterpretation], I reckon in response I’m allowed to have bad faith in them, and say, how much do you actually think that and how much are you just trying to have an angle for your own think-piece?”

He shakes it off. “Anyway.”

The criticisms of his methods that had me frantically drinking water largely pertain to Race Relations, produced by Princess Pictures (on whose watch both Safran and Chris Lilley have donned blackface). Told from the perspective of Safran, who is Jewish, the satirical comedy-documentary series was about the limits of interfaith and crosscultural love. In it, Safran encourages a Palestinian film crew member to covertly provide a sample to an Israeli sperm bank in an attempt to bridge the Middle Eastern divide by making a half-Palestinian, half-Jew (a Jewestinian); disguises himself as a black man (in part by painting his skin) and uses the N-word in Chicago, in order to experience life in someone else’s shoes (as he later told Vice); and is transformed into a ladyboy while wondering if his desire for Eurasian women is creepy or not.

Back then, a reviewer from the Age condemned it, and the Herald Sun wondered if he’d gone too far. The Australian Family Association spokesman John Morrissey described the show as “filth” and “the lowest point in the history of Australian television”.

But many saw value in it too. Alice Pung’s sympathetic Monthly essay on Safran’s Race Relations, cannily titled Border Crossings, reflected: “In Safran’s world, there is no sanctioned way to behave in a social setting … There are no set rules or rituals … no moral compass points, because ‘everything is just so confusing’.”

Of the critiques, which were circulating again last week, Safran says, “I don’t assume everyone’s coming from a good place … It’s a case-by-case thing, whether I take on board a criticism.

“Often, if there’s a curveball thrown at you, or a criticism, it can be helpful in that it’s the next thing you can address. There’s been so much in my work that has been me responding to an obstacle. I don’t just think, ‘This is bad’.”

Perhaps the last word should go to the anonymous woman who speaks at the beginning of each Audible episode. “This program contains disturbing content,” she says. “Listener discretion is advised.”

John Safran vs The Occult is available on Audible on 19 November, and is free for a limited time.

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