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

Hi, My Name Is Satan

Being on my Paradise Lost kick has made me think of all the different artistic interpretations of Satan we see, and how very different they can be from each other. What counts as satanic? I can only assume Milton's Satan would give Marilyn Manson the side-eye and that the Satan of South Park would be horrified by Lars von Trier's Antichrist. What do we, as humanity, think Satan is? The embodiment of pure evil? A victim of circumstance? A champion of free thinking? A ridiculous superstition? A metaphor for a necessary component of balance in the universe? With the devil-as-character, writers, musicians, and artists can express their thoughts on these age-old theological/philosophical questions, regardless of religious affiliation. Here are the first four in a series I have no idea how long will be.

Hi.

South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut - Trey Parker and Matt Stone
In 1999's landmark movie musical from future Tony Award winners Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Satan is a gentle red giant who dreams of experiencing the innocent joys of Earth like flowers, mountaineering, and gay cruises. Sadly, he's stuck both in Hell and in an abusive relationship with Saddam Hussein. But maybe our favorite young Coloradans can help him find the strength to stand up for himself? Seemingly neither evil nor a charismatic leader, it's unclear how this guy ended up ruling the underworld. Of course, with Parker and Stone both being snarky atheists who yet have a big ol' soft spot for religion, it makes sense that from them we'd get a cartoonish but sympathetic Satan.





The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
Bulgakov's complicated, censored, beloved novel was written mostly in the 1930s, but not published until decades after the author's death. A satire of Soviet Russia, the novel deals with the censorship faced by writers at the time (hence the not-being-published-for-decades-and-even-then-censored thing). The plot concerns Margarita, a party official's wife, whose lover, known as the Master, has been institutionalized for writing a novel about Pontius Pilate - a big no-no in the atheistic and paranoid USSR. But Margarita finds an ally when Woland (Satan in disguise as a professor) arrives in Moscow with his vibrant entourage, including fan favorite Behemoth, a wisecracking demon in the form of a large black cat. They're preparing the most Tim Burtonesque party of all Tim Burtonesque parties, and they've chosen Margarita to play hostess.

Besides some witchcraft and the over-the-top ball for Hell's elite, there's not much traditionally evil about Woland. Although his name references Faust, the bargain here is a force for good. When Margarita is offered a wish from Woland in exchange for being hostess, she uses it to secure mercy for one of Hell's inhabitants and is then rewarded with reunion with the Master. Woland and Jesus (called by the Hebrew Yeshua here) even agree upon eternal peace for Margarita and the Master and salvation for Pilate. Other interpretations of the devil would be so embarrassed!

Woland trolls in Klimowski & Schejbal's graphic novel adaptation.

The Powerpuff Girls - Craig McCracken/Cartoon Network
Him was the most dastardly of all the villains in Cartoon Network's clever, pop-artsy series, and he totally counts as an interpretation of the devil, right? Yeah, Him totally counts. I mean, look at the guy: the red skin, the black goatee, the penchant for evil, the otherworldly realm...classic Satan. But then there's the flouncy pink trim on his outfit, the thigh-high high-heeled black boots, and that eerie falsetto (provided by the prolific Tom Kane). It's a little disconcerting to see another cartoon that has the gender non-conforming character be the devil, but while South Park's Satan is a salt-of-the-earth guy and "out" in a matter-of-fact way, The Powerpuff Girls' Him is mysterious, malicious, and a badass. He's truly scary, and not just because his appearance and mannerisms threaten the gender binary. Plus, his character design - with its stylized lines, bold color blocking, and quirkiness - perfectly encapsulates the series' aesthetic. Props to Cartoon Network for taking a chance by allowing a transvestite devil on TV.

Rock on with your bad boots!

"Devil Went Down to Georgia" - Charlie Daniels Band
This song is awesome and fun. The devil apparently has some sort of soul quota, is a skilled musician, and enjoys a good ol' country hoe-down. He's under deadline to get more souls (seriously, who is he reporting to?), so he challenges fiddler Johnny to a fiddle contest, which is apparently the demonic and fiddle-themed version of a cop waiting for someone to not turn on their turn signal exactly X feet before turning so you can give them a ticket. This Faustian bargain involves the classic elements of pride and promises of a material reward, but here humanity triumphs. Not that there's much fanfare over it. Johnny's more interested in his fiddle skills than salvation, and the devil is a good sport about it. They probably both prefer BBQ to manna.

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

Broadway Eponine & RomCom Lucifer

Lucifer has a case of the dramaz in Gustave Dore's illustration.

Oh, whew. After all the drama surrounding Taylor Swift as Eponine in the upcoming movie adaptation of the musical adaptation of Les Miserables, it looks like Eponine vet Samantha Barks has the role. I'm much happier with this. Barks has reality show roots, but she has done this role many times, is a strong Broadway-style singer, and looks like she could have been birthed by Sasha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter.







Though hopefully she'll be less mascara-y in the movie. BRB, Marius, but now that I've dressed up as a boy I gotta put on my makeup before taking a bullet for you.

In other controversial-movies-that-haven't-started-filming-yet news, Paradise Lost, a big-screen, big-budget adaptation of John Milton's 1667 epic (like 10,000+ lines epic) poem - with Bradley Cooper as Lucifer - is apparently starting filming in June after delays. Now that the shock of this casting has worn off (will Lucifer wear polo shirts and get into a ridiculous shove-fight with Michael?), I'm looking forward to seeing how this project develops.