Hi, My Name Is Satan 4

Hey, it's the 4th installment of looking at the prince of darkness and his many guises in pop culture and culture culture. What does humanity think of the concept of "the devil," how do artists and writers use Satan as a character, and what does that say about us? Last time we looked at four versions of Beelzebub. This time we're back to good ol' Satan, with interpretations from Dante to Tenacious D. 

Hi, My Name Is Satan 1
Hi, My Name Is Satan 2
Hi, My Name is Satan 3

Hi.

"Beelzeboss" - Tenacious D

Just like "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," this song (from the Tenacious D movie The Pick of Destiny) features a musical contest between humankind and the devil. But there are no genteel fiddles here - just rock, profanity, and rape jokes. This is an amped-up battle with Dave Grohl belting out "I'm the devil! I love metal!" as he dominates a demonic set of drums. Unlike fiddler champion Johnny, protagonists Jabels (Jack Black) and Kage (Kyle Gass) don't win as much as get lucky, 'cause, you know, it's Dave fucking Grohl they're up against. Like South Park's Satan, Grohl's devil bears the popular red skin and satyr-like horns and goat legs that have become Satan signifiers. It's thought the goat horns and hindlegs were adapted as characteristics of Satan as a Christian reaction against pagan emphasis on Pan. He also has an upside-down pentagram, a symbol of Satanism, carved on his chest, making him everything early freaker-outers about rock-n-roll worried about. The song's title shows the Satan/Beelzebub conflation. The name "beelzebub" (looked at as his own character here), came from Ba'al Zebub, a Semitic/Philistine god. 

The Temptation of Christ - Ary Scheffer

Oh, Ary Scheffer, hipster, using light and dark skin to represent goodness and badness is so mainstream. Try to subvert a little, bro. 1854's The Temptation of Christ is one of the better known works of this Dutch-born, French-trained painter. The painting illustrates the story in the Bible where Jesus, at the end of  his 40-day/40-night fast, is tempted by Satan with stuff like snacks and real estate to no avail (paraphrased from Matthew 4.1-11, Mark 1.12-13, and Luke 4.1-13). This non-horned, non-hoofed Satan is a different classic take on the figure: Satan as fallen angel. Although not disfigured, Scheffer's Satan is dull and dim, devoid of any of his former Lucifer luminescence, and while his angel wings are still there, they're gray and bat-like.

"Turn these stones into bread." "No." "I've got Nutella." "..."

The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri 

Like Hieronymus Bosch, Dante does away with any charisma when it comes to imagining Satan in his 1308-1321 epic poem. Shown briefly at the end of the Inferno section (a.k.a. the only section anyone cares about), Dante's Satan is as ugly as he was beautiful before the Fall ("Were he as fair once, as he now is foul"). His depiction is in stark contrast to the later Miltonic Lucifer, who keeps soldiering on and never runs out of inspirational speeches. This Lucifer, on the other hand, has three heads, is trapped in the very center of the 9th circle of Hell, is half-frozen in a lake, and is forever eating Brutus and Cassius (Caesar's betrayers - I guess Dante's a Caesar stan), and Judas. Dante writes, “He wept with all six eyes, and the tears fell over his three chins mingled with bloody foam. The teeth of each mouth held a sinner, kept as by a flax rake: thus he held three of them in agony." So this Satan is a gross crybaby who needs a napkin.

William Blake's illustration of Mr. Pouty Face(s).

Reaper - Ray Wise

As a grieving father dealing with a literal demon, Ray Wise was one of the awesome aspects of awesome Twin Peaks. In the CW's series Reaper, he completely stole the show as the demon of all demons. You can watch the pilot (directed by Kevin Smith) here. Wise plays Satan as a modern evil - the slick businessman who's so charming you forget he's screwing you over. The show focuses on Sam, a young hardware store clerk who finds out his parents sold the soul of their firstborn - him - to the Devil (who had gotten their doctor to tell them they were infertile). Now that he's an adult, Sam is put to work by his new master, who has him rounding up evil souls that have escaped from Hell. Wise does a fantastic job exemplifying how dangerous charm and deceit are when combined. With wit and tough love, his Devil provides his slacker protege with direction and character-building, and you start to think maybe he's not so bad. Then Wise unleashes the malice, you remember this is goddamn Satan. 

Even in a cheap plastic chair, Ray Wise is a fucking boss.

Hi, My Name is Satan 3: Beelzebub Edition

Hi, My Name is Satan Beelzebub. 

So here and here we looked at artists' representations of the devil, from Power Puff Girls to Hieronymus Bosch. But what about Beelzebub? He's sometimes conflated with Satan and sometimes his own character, and is also known as Lord of the Flies. You might know him from Queen as someone who plans ahead and delegates.

Heya.

Paradise Lost - John Milton

In Milton's Paradise Lost, Beelzebub is a high-ranking angel and Lucifer's bestie. The whole "war on Heaven" thing comes out of their late-night bitch session about Jesus, and after the Fall, Beelzebub is the de facto second-in-command in Hell. He's the perfect best friend character, too, setting up "but who could possibly be brave enough to venture into Chaos?" situations like a champ.

Lake of burning sulfur? Nothing these two bros can't handle.

The Sandman - Neil Gaiman

Poor Beelzebub. While Neil Gaiman goes with a suave Miltonic Lucifer in his Sandman series, he demotes the Lord of the Flies to a sniveling, literal interpretation. Like Hieronymus Bosch's Satan, Gaiman's Beelzebub is stripped of any vestige of allure or dignity, resigned to the sewers of existence.

He just needs a wig and some speech therapy.

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

If you went to middle school in the USA, you probably read Lord of the Flies, from which you learned that 1) British schoolboys are creepy as fuck, and 2) the totalitarian governments of Battle Royale and The Hunger Games could have skipped the whole "fight to the death or we'll kill you" thing and just thrown a bunch of kids on a beach with the same result. On this adultless island, humanity either fades away or is enhanced to its purest form, depending on how much of a misanthrope you are. Oh, you got a conch to symbolize order and civilized discourse? We raise you a severed pig head on a stake. Not scary enough? Just wait until you start hallucinating and the Lord of the Flies possesses it and talks to you. Humans: the real rotting monster.

AAAAHHHHAHHHHHHHHAHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Beelzebub - Ryuhei Tamura

Gonna be honest: I have never read this manga or watched this anime. But when my image searches for Paradise Lost illustrations of this character kept turning up not Dore or Blake artwork but a green-haired, clothes-adverse baby, I had to find out why this was. In this manga-turned-anime, a high school student discovers a baby - Beelzebub IV - who has been sent to Earth from Hell to destroy humanity. But first he has to grow up, and this lucky high school student is the one who gets to raise him! Hijinks ensue.









Images:
Engraving from 1678 edition of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress
Illustration by Gustave Dore for Paradise Lost 
Sandman panel from Comic Vine
Soul-killing still from Peter Brook's 1963 Lord of the Flies adaptation

Paradise Lost Lost

Well, that was a short, bumpy ride. Tragically, just days after it was announced filming would start in June, the plug was pulled on Alex Proyas's Bradley Cooper-studded adaptation of John Milton's 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost. Let's have a few stanzas of silence.

My emotional relationship with this hypothetical movie has been fraught and exciting. When I first heard that a big-budget action movie of Paradise Lost was being made, and that romcom everydouche Bradley Cooper was playing Lucifer, my facial expressions ranged from 0_0 to >:| .

I've never gotten the Bradley Cooper thing. People think he is sexy, I guess? Men have even said the whole "I'm not gay at all, but..." routine to me re: Cooper. I just don't see the hotness. And this role? For Lucifer/Satan, I could see them going brawny & broody (Javier Bardem) or snottily pretty (Michael Pitt), but Cooper's kind of a weird in-between. His popular image - hair gel, polo shirts - also seems very modern, so it was hard to picture him as a character predating the solar system.

Branded windbreaker, newsie hat...Lucifer is set!

But something good happened with all my smug assholery. I realized that I couldn't really complain about an adaptation of a book I hadn't studied since AP English, and decided to re-read it. And I realized that, uh, there's a reason it's a classic.

Milton's Lucifer is a flawed (understatement) but very understandable, very human, character. He's prideful, but also second-guesses himself. He's impulsive at the worst possible times, but then overthinks his way into even more trouble. His conniving ways have gotten his fellow fallen angels into this mess, but he wants to do right by them now that they're here...yet he isn't regretful enough to stop with the manipulative trickery. He can be very brave but also feels fear. He's capable of love and friendship but stubbornly insists on revenge. He's hardly literature's least likeable protagonist. You don't want to kill him; you just want to grab him by the shoulders and say, "STOP. Stop right now and we are going to really talk this over!"

Also, snakes do not count as pants, Satan.

The more I read, the more I became interested in what Cooper would do with the role. It's a complex, timeless part, and I began to see why Cooper was a good choice for it. Another actor I was looking forward to watching was Camilla Belle, cast as Eve. Milton's depiction of Eve is famously, um... Rep. Darrell Issa-esque, but even in scenes where we aren't offered Eve's voice or thinking, Belle would have had a lot to work with. Eve is talked down to and talked over a lot in the pre-fall scenes. Adam takes a "don't worry your pretty little head" approach to her, and when archangel Raphael comes to warn the couple after Lucifer has breached Eden security, he ignores Eve almost completely. What might Eve be doing during those scenes? Would she be complacent in the background, or might Belle's eyes have shown something deeper, an emotion Eve can't yet express aloud? A frustration with her passive state? A budding thirst for knowledge? With his philosophical musings on the nature of the universe and many references to cutting-edge (17th Century) science, it's hard to argue that Milton argues against knowledge in Paradise Lost.

Also Casey Affleck was going to play Gabriel. Casey Affleck. Gabriel. A Bostonian archangel. We lost that.

One of the other wonderful things about the poem is the power of Milton's imagination when it comes to settings. His descriptions of varied but uniformly despairing landscapes of Hell, the extremely efficient fallen angels mining their new home for metals and building a palace out of them, the disorienting Chaos of drifting elements, the farthest reaches of space (or at least as far as Milton's friend Galileo had been able to see), the cosmic battlegrounds...these are all breathtaking, and tempting to imagine in HD on the big screen. But what might have been one of the film's greatest strengths was also its downfall (oh, the irony!) - the movie would have required a ton of very expensive special effects, and cost was why the film was axed.

I agree, Satan.

Image credits:
Photo by David Shankbone
Watercolor by William Blake
Etching by Gustave Dore