The Devil's Body Pool

Sometimes Satan requires assembly. A farmer digs up some bones and a strange skull in his field and before long young people in the village start going mad and growing Satan's body parts in 1970's The Blood on Satan's Claw. A surprisingly pretty, well researched film, its accurate representation of rural, early 18th century England a bit more impressive than its plot about a Satanic cult--which is still fun. You will see no tricorn hats in this movie.

The skull has an eyeball in it still but the pragmatic judge the farmer shows it to still isn't convinced anything supernatural is going on. Patrick Wymark plays the judge--he gets top billing and this was his last film--he died later that year. Perhaps it's ill health that explains his absence for much of the film.

Despite rejecting superstition the judge foretells his return as he leaves for unclear reasons about a third of the way through the film. When he does come back, he decides to track down the cultists and kill Satan, if he's among them. Good plan.

His son (Simon Williams) comes home early on with a fiance (Tamara Ustinov, daughter of Peter) the judge and his wife don't approve of. They let her sleep in the attack where she becomes one of the first people to start sprouting Satan parts. Her being an unapproved bride sets up a seeming link between the Satanic manifestations and sinful behaviour but then a few totally innocent people start getting patches of fur as well, like poor little Wendy Padbury.

This was a year after she'd last appeared on Doctor Who as the Second Doctor's companion, Zoe. The film also features a future Doctor Who star, Anthony Ainley, who would play the third incarnation of the Master, the one who appeared on the show throughout the 1980s. He plays a reverend in The Blood On Satan's Claw and we meet him catching snakes in the farmer's field.

He also has a pet rabbit at home, his character given a peculiar amount of attention. Later, Angel Blake (Linda Hayden), the ironically named leader of the Satanic cult, tries to seduce him.

I guess it might be a reference to William Blake and Blake's thoughts on John Milton's Satan but maybe I just have Milton too much on the mind lately. In any case, she's quite good, very pretty, coming off like a mischievous child playing with bigger stakes.

The concept of the Satan body parts growing on people like an infection is nice and eerie. It has the feeling of a seventeenth or eighteenth century supernatural explanation of a real disease which gives it an effective psychological resonance.

Shots focusing on the beautiful locations also help emphasise the film's rural spirit. The climax is slightly ineffective but sort of intriguing in its awkwardness.

Women Who Lived

Maureen O'Hara, who has died to-day at the age of 95, could've been a great action star. Watching her trading blows with John Wayne in The Quiet Man you kind of get the feeling a serious fight between the two wouldn't be one sided. She certainly had the tenacity. I wrote about two of her movies this year, both pirate movies, one, The Spanish Main, in which she was somewhat awkwardly put in the damsel in distress role, and another, Against All Flags (pictured above) in which we got a glimpse of O'Hara's rightful place on a pirate ship, on deck in command rather than tied up below. She seemed to maintain a lot of that trademark fire into her old age and if you come across one of the old DVD releases of The Quiet Man it's well worth buying for her wonderfully relaxed, conversational audio commentary.

It's Saturday, Doctor Who Day, and I will write about the new episode. Ironically, to-day's episode is called "The Woman Who Lived" and we catch up with Ashildr, the Viking girl played by Maisie Williams the Doctor turned immortal in the previous episode. Now she's a robber in 1651 England. I was overjoyed to see the seventeenth century--it's rare enough for the Doctor to go into the past nowadays, it's great seeing him visit what's become my favourite period lately. He references one of his previous visits, too, the Fifth Doctor story The Visitation and reminds us the Great Fire of London was caused by an alien menace.

But where did Ashildr get a tricorn hat? No-one wore a tricorn hat in The Visitation, set in 1666, which makes sense because it would still be at least a decade before England had tricorn hats. It's particularly a shame because Englishmen generally wore much better hats than tricorns in 1651.

The plot of "The Woman Who Lived" is the usual pain of eternal life story but the burglary stuff is fun. Clara is absent for most of the episode and it's interesting how much more grave Capaldi's Doctor seems without her. He very much gives the impression of being thousands of years old which really helps the episode's concept of immortals struggling to engage with the lives of mortals.

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Lovecraftian Spurs

There's not much sex in H.P. Lovecraft's body of work--conscious sex, anyway. Caitlin R. Kiernan has demonstrated time and again how naturally sexuality can be expressed in Lovecraft's mythos. There is a wrong way to go about it, though, as demonstrated in the 1970 adaptation of The Dunwich Horror. A not an altogether bad film featuring a pretty decent cast it was directed by Daniel Haller who does to "The Dunwich Horror" almost exactly what he did to "The Colour Out of Space" with Die, Monster, Die--he made a more human-like villain, he added women for eye candy dead weight, and, of course, he turned the farmhouse into a mansion.

This is also like Roger Corman's adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and it's not surprising to see that Corman produced this Dunwich Horror. One possible reason it now occurs to me this kept happening was budgetary--it's easier to recreate the interior of a mansion on a sound stage than the interior of something much smaller which would require more naturalistic lighting while providing less scenery to chew.

In the role of Wilbur Whateley, an infant who grows to adulthood in just a few years in the original story, is Dean Stockwell, wearing a brown corduroy sport coat very similar to one I own, as it happens.

Lovecraft described Wilbur as, "exceedingly ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy; there being something almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears." An effect difficult for a makeup artist to produce though avoiding it was probably more to make him a love interest for the woman who has top billing in the film, Sandra Dee, who plays Nancy, a student of Dr. Armitage (Ed Begley).

Armitage does most of the protagonist stuff he does in the story, Nancy is impressively superfluous for being centre stage most of the time. She drives Wilbur home after he attempts to obtain the Necronomicon, he talks her into staying over when he sabotages her car, he drugs her, and from then on not only does she not make a decision for the rest of the film it's difficult to discern what any of her thoughts or feelings might be, mutely following Wilbur around as his casual conversation starts to turn into discussing sacrificing women to Yog-Sothoth. Here's some dialogue that most assuredly did not come from H.P. Lovecraft:

"And they placed the girl's virginal body upon the altar, naked to the elements, and their black robes blending into the night they lighted candles. They gathered round, to observe and to relish her nakedness. And then they waited." One wonders if Yog-Sothoth cultists would have gotten anything done if they'd had Internet porn.

Stockwell plays Wilbur in an eerie, soft-spoken manner that inevitably reminded me of his character from Blue Velvet. Whatever he said in the movie on some level I could always hear, "Here's to your fuck, Frank." But it wasn't exactly bad. Maybe the coolest bit of casting is Sam Jaffe as Old Whateley who has just the right energy for a panicked old man fearing the impending arrival of the Old Ones.

The film has an animated opening sequence reminiscent of Saul Bass that kind of works. Certainly it works better than the score which consists of soft, romantic brass counterpointed by football rattles. It's a score that might have been appropriate for a Western starring Cybill Shepherd.

Fight for Your Right to Doze

In the late 70s, Joey Ramone wanted to be sedated, in 2008 a film called Berlin Calling looks into the life of a musician for the current generation that seems to look at sedation as the default state of being. The title, of course, is reminiscent of The Clash's masterpiece London Calling, made not long after the Ramones' song and by referencing the seminal punk album Berlin Calling invites comparison. Mostly the film is a run of the mill story of addiction inhabited by character types more than characters and shot in the obsessively clean manner of modern film but there is a charm to its protagonist's ordeal and music by real life electronic musician Paul Kalkbrenner is nice.

Kalkbrenner plays the protagonist, too, DJ Ickarus, a successful artist in a romantic relationship with his manager, Mathilde (Rita Lengyel). She, like everyone else, tries to put up with his angry outbursts.

They both belong to a club going culture of widespread, casual drug use and open relationships, both comfortable having sex with other partners while considering themselves loyal--this isn't even remarked upon. One night Ickarus gets some bad ecstasy and finds himself making trouble in a hotel restaurant the next day.

Mathilde takes him to rehab where he's diagnosed with schizophrenia. For the most part, the film fits comfortably into a prescribed pattern of star addict movies--he's brilliant but he trashes his record label's office, he seems level after getting a prescription then goes off his meds, he manipulates a weak link at the rehab, the doctor in charge doesn't quite understand his music, etc.

Maybe it shows how out of touch I am but I couldn't help feeling the contrast between London Calling and Berlin Calling was a lack of passion in the latter. Ickarus' music is nice in a background way, but there doesn't seem to be any examination or real motive in the film beyond making a film. While London Calling makes the troubled observation that people are lost in the supermarket, normal lifestyles promote sedation and complacency, Berlin Calling, in its inability to break its characters out of type with its clean, commercial imagery of invariably pretty performers with perfect skin, seems to embrace that very complacency. I think the thought behind the film may be best exemplified by the character Corinna (Araba Walton).

A walking deus ex machina, Corinna must be the most self-possessed person in the world. Mathilde's lover, she doesn't mind when Ickarus spontaneously joins in when they have sex right after he and Mathilde had had a loud fight. A couple days later, she's able to physically restrain him and knock him to the ground when he's on something bad again and he's trying to get into Corinna's apartment to see Mathilde. When Ickarus has finished his album and Mathilde is listening to it with her producer, Corinna is also somehow there and her thumbs up is what gets the album released. You got a problem? Corinna will solve it. I half expected to see her receiving a visit from Nick Fury after the credits. But she's part and parcel of a movie that allows very little mess or complication into its story. Of course a superhero would turn up.

Mask of the Beholder

Identity is defined by our experiences and, more importantly, how we process those experiences. Choosing not to process an experience is also a character defining choice and these decisions manifest a personality others might or might not recognise as "you". That's the idea behind 2015's Goodnight Mommy (Ich Seh Ich Seh, literally "I See I See"), a film I admire more for its intentions than what it actually accomplishes. Your mileage may vary, but I found the storytelling instincts of directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala to be unequal to their concept. Though, considering the presence of two directors, maybe I'm liking one and disliking the other.

The film takes place almost entirely in a large, harshly modern house deep in the woods. A pair of twins, Elias and Lukas (Elias Schwarz and Lukas Schwarz), greet their mother (Susanne Wuest) who has returned from the hospital with bandages covering most of her face, turning it into a strange mask.

The brothers spend most of their time wandering the woods or playing with their strange collection of cockroaches. They listen to old recordings of their mother and soon begin to question whether the woman with them is really the same person, especially since this woman is less willing to play with them or sing to them and even becomes quite angry with Elias at one point for something that seems trivial. Before long, they become afraid and take to monitoring the woman and sleeping in shifts.

This is a movie with a twist ending so I won't give you much more of the plot. I will say there are quite a few red herrings that seemed at the time like red herrings, things that are really in the movie to make it more of a standard horror film and end up not making any sense. Like a scene where the brothers climb a hill of human bones or a scene where the mother swallows one of the cockroaches. I almost wonder if one of the directors had made a version of the film without all this stuff and then the other was brought in to pad it out with things that could be packaged in the trailer. Though there is also a sense of bad instincts in editing, the film generally feels sort of stiff and academic.

There is something interesting still in the basic idea of exploring identity and experience, though. At first I thought the woman had had cosmetic surgery but then we learn her injuries were the result of a car accident. The mind is led down a certain road about how people try to change who they are by changing their appearance only to be stopped at the realisation that it wasn't her choice. Assuming she's the same person.

Twitter Sonnet #802

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Eventually the Day for Night Shots

Two attractive young women decide to spend their vacation cycling on isolated roads in countryside where they don't speak the local language. Jane and Cathy might be forgiven when we consider the two English girls have chosen to vacation in France but we can anticipate little good fortune in a movie called And Soon the Darkness with a screenplay co-written by Terry Nation, creator of the Daleks. This 1970 film feels more like television than cinema with a story featuring endless baits and switches, unremarkable but serviceable visuals, and average performances. It's a mystery with a lot of red herrings that plays fair for the most part but is more satisfying for its escalating sense of dread.

In all this empty space, these desolate stretches of road between isolated villages, the two young women stop to rest by a little patch of woods where a girl just like them had been raped and murdered a few years ago, something Jane (Pamela Franklin) learns much later. After a little while, Jane wants to move on but Cathy (Michele Dotrice) wants to stay and doze a bit longer. Somehow this turns into a big fight--and a line I suspect was improvised as Jane, moving her bike, says, "Get your great fat legs out of the way!" and Cathy can't suppress a grin. But in any case, the girls separate, Jane goes on to the next village and Cathy says she'll catch up. Of course, she never does.

As Jane becomes increasingly worried, going back and forth between two villages and the spot where they'd stopped, the film gives us a series of suspects who all seem suspicious in each their own way--a man claiming to be a detective who'd investigated the previous murder (Sandor Eles), a Gendarme (John Nettleton) an innkeeper hastily warns Jane to beware of, an English schoolmistress who invites Jane to stay with her.

When we do learn at the end who the villain is, one or two things done by the suspects meant to mislead our suspicions don't add up. But for the most part, the film succeeds in a suspense created by a vulnerable, fish out of water character who suddenly finds herself surrounded by strangers who are all sinister in one way or another.

The Colour has Awakened and Wants Our Women

In 1927, a story by H.P. Lovecraft called "The Colour Out of Space" introduced readers to an innovation in horror, its conception of madness caused by contact with fundamentally alien phenomena was weird and eerily, undeniably insightful. In 1965, the story was adapted as Die, Monster, Die!, a tale about how a disease turns people into monsters that want to kill people and about how a young man has to find the courage to save a helpless, pretty young woman. It's an entertaining, slightly campy film with beautiful sets that probably would be a lot more enjoyable if one has no knowledge of Lovecraft's superior short story.

Maybe Lovecraft wouldn't have hated everything about the film, I suspect the unabashed Anglophile would be somewhat delighted by the idea of his fictional town of Arkham being moved to Britain. Elements like the bizarre, large plantlife growing in the area of the "blasted heath" and the deformed animals are also kept. A term Lovecraft borrowed from Macbeth, instead of a heath blasted by winds or battle, Lovecraft literally blasted his heath, rendered in Die, Monster, Die! in a couple really bad matte paintings.

It looks like to-day Bert has been drawing the blasted heath on the side walk and Mary Poppins has let us jump in and explore.

The protagonist is Stephen, played by Nick Adams like a perpetually irate TV cop, the only American character in the film. He's come to England to hook up with his former classmate, Susan (Suzan Farmer). But no-one in town will tell him how to get to her home, a reluctance to confront the topic which made more sense in the story when it was an all but abandoned farm house. In the movie, as in Corman's adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, a humble abode has become a sprawling, gothic manor.

A really lovely one with intricate sets. Dig the model ship in the background of this shot:

That's no ordinary prop but it's never even mentioned.

Nahum, from humble farmer, has been upgraded to a gentleman played by a wheelchair bound Boris Karloff who's intent on harnessing the terrible alien power. His wife, Letitia (Freda Jackson), confines herself behind the shrouds of a grey canopied bed and begs Stephen to take her daughter, Susan, away from the house.

Susan is possibly the single biggest problem with the film, a perky, happy college student in bright pink clothes she's somehow maintained almost total ignorance of the weird shit going down around her until Stephen shows up to irritably lead her around and point things out to her. The happy little lady is like an earnestly drawn Marilyn Munster.

Director Daniel Haller also has a distracting tendency of using false deep focus shots--deep focus meaning things in foreground, middle ground, and background are all in focus. But technology didn't permit deep focus compositions keeping extreme foreground and background simultaneously in focus. Orson Welles got around this in Citizen Kane by creating subtle process shots, combining two sequences of footage. William Wyler later used this technique in movies like 1961's The Children's House. In Die, Monster, Die!, Haller employs this technique with no restraint, resulting in perplexing artificial shots like this one:

Here Stephen's just asking a shop keeper the way to the Witley place, did this need to be deep focus so badly?

There's certainly a lot of fun to be had in this film and it's great seeing Boris Karloff still creating atmosphere even confined to a wheelchair most of the time (and inexplicably finding his way up staircases off screen). But do yourself a favour and read "The Colour Out of Space" before seeing this.

The Pinnacle of Colour

If you took Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, mixed them together with Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, and set the whole thing in the greatest hits of Hammer and Roger Corman set designs with absolutely gorgeous costumes you'd have something like 2015's Crimson Peak. An exceptionally beautiful film by a director, Guillermo del Toro, already known for exceptional visuals, I said in my reaction to footage from the film I saw at Comic Con, "if it ends up having the worst screenplay ever written I'm still going to like it." And it didn't have the worst screenplay ever written, which is nice. Actually it's a good screenplay--most people will guess the mystery early on, I think, but the attention to creating characters, particularly the two female leads, is wonderful. It'll be a film that's more enjoyable for most people on the second viewing when they're not worried about the mystery so much. I was more than pleased.

So far I've liked Mia Wasikowska in every movie I've seen her in that's not Tim Burton's version of Alice in Wonderland. I don't think she's as good as Jessica Chastain but she's perfectly adequate here as the young wouldbe novelist, Edith Cushing (a name I assume is a nod to Peter Cushing), daughter of a self-made American tycoon (Jim Beaver). He's the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps type who doesn't approve when the English gentleman, Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), who was born into his large but impoverished estate, courts his daughter.

Edith can see ghosts but she has no reason to suspect the ominous warning delivered by the beautifully hideous ghost of her mother, "Beware of Crimson Peak", has anything to do with Thomas or his tight lipped sister, Lucille (Chastain). We, the audience, immediately know better, of course.

It's not long before Edith is setting foot on the fully built for the movie Sharpe house interior wearing one of my favourites of a whole series of gorgeous costumes.

It's like blueberries and raspberries in vanilla ice cream. I wish I could take better screenshots but I'm working from the trailer here.

Chastain gets her share of lovely dresses, too. I love the subtle leafy breast on this blue frock:

It's 2015 and Cary Grant can't come in now and carry away the damsel in distress. A woman in trouble has to sort everything out herself, which is gratifying in this case, not the compulsive score-keeping in a film like Jurassic World. This does leave the male characters feeling slightly superfluous but Hiddleston's charm is certainly crucial to the film.

Del Toro does buck the spirit of the times, though, in giving us creatively designed ghosts--as usual in Del Toro's films performed by Doug Jones--instead of the same old plain looking children or plain corpses.

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Game of Vikings

There's something kind of hypnotic about listening to Peter Capaldi translate the secret language of babies in to-day's new Doctor Who. Am I remembering right, the Doctor hasn't done that since he was Matt Smith? "The Girl Who Died" felt oddly like it was written for the Eleventh Doctor, it's strange hearing Twelve be so comical after he was so sharp and serious in the previous episode. But I liked "The Girl Who Died", written by Steven Moffat and Jamie Mathieson, the latter having wrote my favourite episode of last season, "Mummy On the Orient Express".

Of course, the big news about this episode was the guest star, Maisie Williams, better known as Arya Stark from Game of Thrones. In a way, one could look at the episode as Doctor Who vs. Game of Thrones. The episode was much about the contrasting philosophies of the two shows--Williams plays a Viking girl who believes in resolving problems with fighting while of course Doctor Who is all about showing how it's best to avoid conflict if at all possible. The episode certainly comes out in the Doctor's favour with Clara in her continuing subplot of acting like the Doctor almost talking the alien menace out of obliterating a Viking village until Arya comes on the with bluster.

I happened to have watched an episode of the History Channel's Vikings last night and the comparison, to say the least, was not in favour of Doctor Who in terms of recreating a sense of the time and place in history. But I guess the Vikings look better than they did in "The Time Meddler", the last time we saw Vikings, if I remember right, on Doctor Who, a First Doctor story.

This episode certainly made me look forward to next week's part two. Hopefully in the Doctor Who universe at least Arya can finally catch a break.

With a Broken Filter

It's not easy to feel happy for a friend or family member when everything you've done in your life has been devalued and derided by those same friends and family. Fifteen year old Mia in 2009's Fish Tank has been conditioned to express rage so casually it's a wonder she attempts to create anything or reach out to anyone. The film is in many ways an impressive work of realism despite some flaws.

Mia (Katie Jarvis) lives with her mother, Joanne (Kierston Wareing), and prepubescent sister, Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths), in public housing in East London. All the children in the neighbourhood listen to hip hop and in one of the more effective early scenes Mia loudly criticises a group of girls practising a dance routine while a few boys quietly look on.

The real, imperfect and quite child-like look of the girls in cheap clothes is an illuminating contrast to the standard, oily music video that obviously inspires them. The disposable sexuality of the videos imitated by children is slightly pathetic and sets up a main plot about unwise sexual encounters.

Joanne starts dating Conor, played by Michael Fassbender. Both she and him are improbably pretty with the kinds of bodies that only come with a gym membership, one of the things that really diminishes the sense of realism in the film. But Fassbender is good here, as he can be under the right directors, quickly adopting a paternal attitude towards Mia and her sister. Joanne can only mock Mia's attempts to become a dancer and generally seems jealous of Mia's youth while Conor introduces a genuinely supportive parental presence. Of course, we're constantly put on edge, wondering when his attitude towards Mia will turn sexual while her need for a father figure is confusingly mixed with a sexual attraction to him. But even with him, when he says something to her that could possibly be construed as negative, she immediately begins yelling about how she hates him and stalks off. Almost everyone in this movie has only two settings--angry or numb.

For the most part, the film maintains an interesting examination of character, augmented by a subplot where Mia tries to steal an emaciated horse from owners she thinks are starving it. When all we hear from her up to that point is that she fucking hates everyone, the gesture is appropriately weird and unattainable. For all the bluster, Mia and her mother mostly just come off as intensely vulnerable.

The Mask Behind the Mask

Well, in case you hadn't figured it out, yesterday's post was also my midterm for my Milton class. I ran out of time to make a separate blog entry here and there were formatting problems on the school site where the assignment was supposed to be uploaded so I cross posted it here. I spent more time than I meant to on it, reading through C.S. Lewis and William Empson and Percy Shelley all day and then I just barely managed to get to a showing of Phantom of the Opera I'd bought a ticket for earlier this year to see with my parents, sister, and brother in law. It occurred to me that writing an essay on Paradise Lost and then immediately afterwards seeing Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera is a bit like studying The Odyssey and then going to see Clash of the Titans. Certainly the Phantom is modelled on the Satanic Hero after the Romantic's conception of Milton's character. The Phantom's opera-within-a-musical, Don Juan Triumphant, even recalls Lord Byron's Don Juan which, along with Manfred, really crystallised Romanticist theory on Milton's Satan to create the Byronic hero. Wikipedia tells me "Don Juan Triumphant" was originally the name of a song the Phantom wrote in the 1909 novel that Andrew Lloyd Webber created a larger place for in the story.

The original tale of a disfigured man living under an opera house seems more in line with stories reacting against the Byronic hero like Frankenstein or Moby Dick but Lloyd Webber brings it back full circle by emphasising a rock star quality to the phantom and heightening chemistry between Christine and the Phantom. It's even hinted that the Phantom and Christine eventually end up together since the play opens with the Phantom's rival for her affections, Raoul, evidently abandoned and heartbroken.

I liked the musical a lot when I was a kid, with Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman in the lead roles, this new production by Cameron Mackintosh is still a lot of fun. The set designs are really good, particularly during the masquerade ball in a mirrored hall which looked like it was modelled on a Degas painting. Katie Travis as Christine, a ballerina who becomes singer in this version, was pretty good though rather like a Disney Princess. With Elsa in Frozen being Satanic Hero, maybe that's not inappropriate.

Unfortunately, the most crucial role, the Phantom himself, was given to someone named Chris Mann whose singing was so academic and utterly devoid of emotion it was like seeing a teenage amateur. Never does one think he could hold any sex appeal for Christine and he displays a corresponding lack of interest in anything but hitting notes. The "Music of the Night" scene falls totally flat where it was supposed to be selling the character to us.

But, aside from the most important aspect, it wasn't so bad.

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A ladybug astride Falstaff ascends.
The opened book library best amends.

Eternal Darkness

"The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things."
-Oscar Wilde from the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

Who is John Milton in Paradise Lost? Is he Satan, is he God, is he the narrator? Is he anyone? The question provoked by the extraordinary nature of the text, written by a man known for his love of scripture in a time when atheism was all but unthinkable and certainly not something one admitted, regards primarily a wonderfully crafted and sympathetic Satan. The debate has now gone on for centuries and will likely continue for centuries more, if Earth survives that long. The work survives partly because of the questions but even more because of the artistic beauty of the work which, as William Empson says, "is not good in spite of but especially because of its moral confusions" (Empson, 13). Empson disagrees with a preface C.S. Lewis wrote for Paradise Lost primarily on the grounds that to Empson Satan resembles more Oliver Cromwell and Satan's forces the leaders of the Commonwealth while God most resembles Charles I. Lewis rejects this idea, affirming the goodness of God and the badness of Satan. Yet it's in taking their contradictory ideas both at once that one most appreciates the work as, with all great works of art, it rises above allegory.

C.S. Lewis was not altogether against allegory as can be seen by anyone who's read his Narnia books and spotted the obvious parallels between Aslan's torture at the Stone Table and the crucifixion of Christ (The Chronicles of, 177). In his Preface to Paradise Lost, Lewis begins by discussing at length the nature of epic poem. In discussing the advances Virgil made to the form, Lewis remarks "It will be seen that in these two lines Virgil, with no intention of allegory, has described once and for all the very quality of most human life as it is experienced by any one who has not yet risen to holiness or sunk to animality" (Preface, 39). What Lewis refers to is a superior utility in art that is not allegory in that it touches on a larger subject by not aiming to be just one. The sentiment is better expressed by Lewis' friend J.R.R. Tolkien in a preface to The Fellowship of the Ring.

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author. (Tolkien, xxiii)

The usefulness of Tolkien's idea can be seen in his own Lord of the Rings where the Ring of Power in the story has variously been interpreted as representing nuclear power or drug abuse. In fact, since Tolkien intended it to be neither, it can be both along with many other things besides. It speaks to a fundamental aspect of human nature that applies to many human problems.

Therefore, Satan in the first two books succeeds as a character not by being Oliver Cromwell or John Milton or even by being the biblical Satan. He succeeds by being Milton's Satan.

Th' infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile
Stird up with Envy and Revenge, deceiv'd
The Mother of Mankinde, what time his Pride
Had cast him out from Heav'n, with all his Host
Of Rebel Angels, by whose aid aspiring
To set himself in Glory above his Peers (PL, lines 34-39)

Like Milton, Satan seeks excellence in his endeavours, like the King, he seeks glory above peerage. Either interpretation is applicable. Meanwhile, the beauty of the language enchants us. Witness the tumbling alliteration of "Had cast him out from Heav'n, with all his Host." Like in his prose, Milton loves long sentences which compel the tongue to continue reading without pause. At all times because of it there is a sense of movement and energy in the first two books.

Lewis refers to the fact that all contemporary readers of Paradise Lost would have been aware that Satan rebelled against God for pride alone, that obviously Satan and his cohorts did not face the same injustices that drove the Republicans to rebellion. Empson, though, argues that this ignores the power of the rhetoric in isolation from Christian consideration. He remarks on the beauty of the speech Satan gives to his followers:

that fixt mind
And high disdain, from sence of injur'd merit,
That with the mightiest rais'd me to contend,
And to the fierce contention brought along
Innumerable force of Spirits arm'd
That durst dislike his reign, and me preferring,
His utmost power with adverse power oppos'd
In dubious Battel on the Plains of Heav'n,
And shook his throne. What though the field be lost? (PL, lines 97-105)

The average reader, coming to the work without the context of the Christian religion, "vaguely invents enough background to justify the emphases which the rhetoric and the music require" (Empson, 45). Empson would know, too, having delivered the speech himself to a group of Chinese refugees. "It was received with fierce enthusiasm, but also with a mild groan from some of the older hands, who felt they had been having enough propaganda already" (Empson, 45). In a context so far from Milton's time and place, the words still work because they are in themselves good.

However, the characters in Paradise Lost cannot be wholly divorced from their biblical counterparts. In describing Satan's cohorts, the pagan gods, the poet invokes specific details related to their biblical stories.

And when Night
Darkens the Streets, then wander forth the Sons
Of BELIAL, flown with insolence and wine.
Witness the Streets of SODOM, and that night
In GIBEAH, when hospitable Dores
Yielded thir Matrons to prevent worse rape. (PL, lines 500-505)

One cannot fail to recognise Belial by the incident in Judges 19, surely not actions Milton would wish to ascribe to his comrades any more than the human sacrifice he ascribes to Moloch in impressively gruesome lines. The shadow of Milton himself, though, is still clearly visible in the description of Satan as is asserted by both Lewis and Empson. "The force and music of the poetry here proved that he had been feeling this pent-up comment deeply" Empson says when referring to a line from Satan lamenting the lot of he and his cohorts. Percy Shelley, in an introduction to his Prometheus Unbound, provides an explanation for how Satan can simultaneously be Milton and not Milton.

A poet is the combined product of such
internal powers as modify the nature of others; and of such external
influences as excite and sustain these powers; he is not one, but both.
Every man's mind is, in this respect, modified by all the objects of Nature
and art; by every word and every suggestion which he ever admitted
to act upon his consciousness; it is the mirror upon which all forms
are reflected, and in which they compose one form. (Shelley, 6)

This mutability of identity in an artist is reminiscent of a curious line in Paradise Lost included as part of the description of Satan's host:

For Spirits when they please
Can either Sex assume, or both; so soft
And uncompounded is their Essence pure,
Not ti'd or manacl'd with joynt or limb,
Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones,
Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose
Dilated or condens't, bright or obscure,
Can execute their aerie purposes,
And works of love or enmity fulfill. (PL, lines 423-431)

The idea that the fallen angels are not of any fixed sex opens the way to intriguing interpretations of Satan's relationship with Sin and Eve, neither of which can apply if one sticks dogmatically to an interpretation based on the English Civil Wars or the Christian Bible. For me, the beauty, the tragedy, of Satan is best expressed in this early speech:

Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n. (PL, lines 250-255)

Often cited as evincing an admirable quality of the human mind and its ability to make any place heaven or hell misses the significance of a "mind not to be chang'd by place or time." Satan embraces horror rather than contemplate the possibility that he might be wrong, his damnation is truly at his own hand. In such a case, what can one feel but terrible and profound despair? Milton, in his grace, puts a very human sensibility to it so his Satan becomes something much bigger than a biography of one man.