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A Devil of a Decade: The Rise and Fall of the Paradise Lost Film: Part 2 of 2

After the years of silence which followed preproduction of the Scott Derrickson-directed Paradise Lost film, it was announced on September 16 of 2010 that Alex Proyas—the visionary director behind such films as The Crow (1994), Dark City (1998), and I, Robot (2004)—had been given the directorial reins of the Paradise Lost project, described as “the story of the epic war in heaven between archangels Michael and Lucifer, and…crafted as an action vehicle that will include aerial warfare, possibly shot in 3D.” The prospect of a 3D Paradise Lost film seemed far too gimmicky to me, but the goal was obviously to follow in the footsteps of the groundbreaking Avatar (2009), immersing IMAX audiences in the fantastical world the filmmakers create—which, in the case of Paradise Lost, would take moviegoers on a promising cosmic tour through Heaven, Hell, and Eden.

“Chaos Portal” – concept art for Paradise Lost by Marek Okon

Under Proyas, Paradise Lost began picking up steam in ways the project never had with Derrickson at the helm, especially when news broke on May 4 of 2011 that rising star Bradley Cooper would be playing the Miltonic Lucifer himself, Cooper wasting no time to enthusiastically advertise the project on media outlets like Charlie Rose when promoting The Hangover: Part II. In July of 2011, Proyas and Cooper appeared at the San Diego Comic-Con to promote Paradise Lost, then in preproduction, the director expressing his aspiration to live up to Milton’s epic poem:

Basically, this film is based on Milton’s Paradise Lost, a seventeenth-century epic poem. We’re pretty much going to live up to that. We’re going to make this incredible, epic film about the war of the angels, Lucifer’s fall from grace, his battle with the archangel Michael. So it’s a pretty big canvas, and I hope we can live up to that.

Cooper and Proyas
Paradise Lost star Bradley Cooper and director Alex Proyas

Proyas demonstrated that he was the first person attached to the Paradise Lost project to truly understand the gravity of the endeavor of adapting Milton’s vast vision to the screen:

We try to stay as faithful as we can. In fact, we have one particular Milton scholar [Eric C. Brown] who’s been working with us, to keep us in check, to make sure we’re doing the right thing. But I think we achieved a great narrative within the scope of Paradise Lost. It’s been a bit of re-editing the flow of the story, but I think it’s working very well now.…When you go into something as deep and as beloved as Milton’s Paradise Lost, you try to be as respectful of the source material as possible. We were actually surprised by how respectful we had been. We were very pleased by the reception that the script got. So that was a real great surprise.

Paradise Lost storyboard - Anthony Michael Jackson
Paradise Lost storyboard by Anthony Michael Jackson

As overjoyed as Proyas was about the onscreen supernatural spectacle he would be able to play with, the director expressed that he was far more enthused about the opportunity to bring one of English literature’s greatest characters to life on the silver screen: “The story and the characters are really the thing for me…That’s what gets me excited, and I think particularly with Lucifer we have a really wonderful opportunity to create the most extraordinary character that we’ve never seen on film before.”

Despite the heartfelt excitement expressed by both Proyas and Cooper, as well as the considerable progress the audacious project had made, the Paradise Lost film was once again simply not meant to be. Discussing the technological innovations required to properly adapt Paradise Lost to the medium of cinema, Proyas ominously stated, “This film couldn’t have been made a few years ago, and in fact we’re not even sure we can make it now.” The Comic-Con crowd laughed along with Proyas, who reassured the audience, “We’re hoping we can,” but the would-be Paradise Lost director’s words rang true. While the project continued to advance, with casting news popping up throughout the summer and fall of 2011—Benjamin Walker as the archangel Michael, Djimon Hounsou as Abdiel (here “the Angel of Death”), Casey Affleck as Gabriel, Camilla Belle as Eve, Callan McAuliffe as Uriel, Dominic Purcell as Jerahmeel/Moloch, Diego Boneta as Adam, Sam Reid as Raphael, and Rufus Sewell as Samael—principal photography for the film was repeatedly delayed at the tail end of 2011. There was talk about attempts to reduce the cost of the production so that it would not exceed $120-million, but Legendary Pictures finally pulled the plug on Paradise Lost in early 2012, and the project has remained in limbo ever since, bits and pieces of concept art and storyboards emerging every so often to show viewers what the film might have looked like.

“Pandemonium” – concept art for Paradise Lost by Paul Gerrard

I imagine my former Miltonist Professor from about a decade ago was relieved. “Miltonists have not traditionally been interested in popularizing, in the way Shakespeareans have,” explained Milton in Popular Culture co-editor Gregory Colón Semenza to Michael Joseph Gross in his March 4, 2007 New York Times article on the Paradise Lost film. Semenza added, “there’s the sense that Milton is the last figure that can be protected from the tentacles of pop culture, so there is some resistance to this movie…” To a certain extent, I understand this, particularly as someone who is concerned with preserving the Miltonic-Romantic Lucifer’s legacy. Having Milton’s sympathetic Satan dominate the silver screen as the star of a blockbuster film is an incredibly thrilling notion, but of course there is the risk that the filmmakers will fail to do the Devil proud, which is reason enough for me to be somewhat apprehensive. (After all, consider what happened when Vertigo Comics writer Mike Carey’s Lucifer was brought to the small screen.)

There were certainly reasonable concerns that “the tentacles of pop culture” threatened the endeavor of a Paradise Lost film. (Watching the tragic Fall of Man with 3D glasses on just doesn’t seem appropriate to me…) What’s more, that this mega-budget attempt at bringing Milton’s multifaceted masterpiece to the big screen was being headed by several filmmakers who were either novices or whose films were hit-or-miss was cause for concern as well. Failure to properly bring Milton’s Lucifer to life would transform the prime example of the fallen archangel’s current cultural ascension—what I identify as a nascent neo-Romantic Satanism—from a blessing into a curse. And as far as the Miltonic-Romantic-Satanic tradition is concerned, a misguided film adaptation of Paradise Lost would be a lasting blemish, as, once released, a remake of Paradise Lost emerging any time soon thereafter would be highly unlikely, and even then there is no guarantee a subsequent attempt would get it right either.

Concept art for Paradise Lost by Brian Matyas
Concept art for Paradise Lost by Brian Matyas

It’s been nearly a half-decade since Legendary Pictures shut down Paradise Lost, but I imagine the project will reemerge at some point within the next half-decade. (Producer Vincent Newman apparently made an attempt to start things up again in 2014, “determined to finish it ‘sooner than later.’ ”1) Despite the apparent danger of making a movie out of Milton’s Paradise Lost, I still believe this film is something that needs to happen at some point, as the Miltonic-Romantic Lucifer must at long last stake his flag on cinematic soil, which has up to this point been predominantly saturated with Satans either medievally monstrous or lightheartedly comical. I can only hope that the Milton scholar employed as a script consultant on the film was as impressed by the project’s faithfulness to the spirit of Milton’s poem as Proyas claimed he was.

 

Notes

1. See Eric C. Brown, Milton on Film (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2015), p. 332.↩

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Lucifer for President? On the Return of Reactionary Satanizing

Among the many peculiar things about 2016’s heated election season in the U.S., perhaps the most interesting aspect of the ensuing chaos is the reoccurring invocation of Lucifer by the political Right, which is a distant echo of the nineteenth-century phenomenon of Romantic Satanism. Romantic icons Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley were demonized as heads of a “Satanic School” by first-generation Romantic radical turned reactionary Robert Southey, whose co-option by the political establishment had been consecrated in his laureateship. In his elegy for King George III, A Vision of Judgement (1821), Southey demonized the wayward second-generation Romantics Byron and Shelley for following Milton’s fallen archangel in having “rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society,” Southey identifying an intense diabolism in their works, “characterised by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety…”1 Southey’s Satanic School diatribe against Byron and Shelley was in part a call for the English government to censor the irreverent writings of these Satanized poets and their circle, which the Poet Laureate believed threatened the social order. “Men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations,” thundered Southey, “labour to make others as miserable as themselves, by infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul!”2 Nearly two centuries later, on the other side of the Atlantic, the political landscape is witnessing a return to this reactionary Satanizing—this time at the presidential level.

The Christian tradition has a long history of demonizing undesirables, which began as early as the New Testament with the demonization of the Jews, Jesus himself casting the Pharisees—who not only disbelieve the messianic Jesus but seek to kill him—as sons of Satan: “If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God.…Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do” (John 8:42–44). Christian Scripture is unequivocal with regards to the Satanic status of the Jews: those who “say they are Jews, and are not”—i.e., those Jews who fail to accept Jesus as the Son of God and their savior—are said to belong to “the synagogue of Satan” (Revelation 2:9, 3:9). Indicting the Jews as “Christ-killers,” who had invited their own doom when boasting of the condemned Christ, “His blood be on us, and on our children” (Matthew 27:25), helped foster anti-Semitism throughout the history of Christendom,3 and in fact it wasn’t until the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) that the charge of the cosmic crime of deicide was officially dropped. The Jews were originally demonized because Christians (erstwhile Jews) believed they’d gone astray from “the good shepherd” (John 10:11, 14) while believing themselves still part of the flock (they “say they are Jews, and are not”). This remained the inspiration for demonization in the Christian Church, fellow Christians with unorthodox views accused of heresy (Greek for “choice”) and persecuted accordingly.

Former Speaker of the House John Boehner, in an April 28, 2016 interview hosted by Stanford University, followed the Christian tradition of marginalizing one of his own by way of demonization, describing then struggling Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz as “Lucifer in the flesh.” Boehner’s demonizing dismissal of Cruz was not based upon theological or ideological differences, but a vehement dislike of the man: “I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.” Things only got more colorful when the media sought actual Satanists to weigh in on the matter, co-founder of The Satanic Temple Lucien Greaves immediately responding:

Boehner’s comment is illustrative of how well past time it is to adjust our mythologies to reflect our realities. Cruz’s failures of reason, compassion, decency, and humanity are products of his Christian pandering, if not an actual Christian faith. It grows tedious when pedophile priests and loathsome politicians are conveniently dismissed as Satanic, even as they spew biblical verse and prostrate themselves before the cross, recruiting the Christian faithful. Satanists will have nothing to do with any of them.

The Satanic Temple is known for its political—and politically progressive—slant on Satanism, but the Church of Satan, which is normally devoid of official political positions, was also asked to respond to Cruz as “Lucifer in the flesh.” On April 30, 2016, incidentally the 50th anniversary of the Church of Satan’s founding, the organization’s High Priest, Peter H. Gilmore, took exception to the comparison of Cruz to Lucifer:

Having a conservative Christian likened to Lucifer — one who opposes equal rights for same sex couples and promotes the ability to deny services to any with different values — we Satanists see as besmirching the positive, heroic aspects of that character as portrayed by Milton in his epic Paradise Lost.

Boehner’s blanket dismissal of Cruz as Lucifer incarnate was, again, more of a personal insult than an ideological condemnation. Conservatives have reserved full-fledged demonization for their political counterparts on the Left. In his speech at the Republican National Convention on July 19, 2016, former Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson—a retired neurosurgeon who apparently considers Darwin’s theory of evolution a deception of Satan—explicitly aligned Democratic rival Hillary Clinton with Lucifer:

One of the things that I have learned about Hillary Clinton is that one of her heroes, her mentors, was Saul Alinsky. Her senior thesis was about Saul Alinsky. This was someone that she greatly admired and that affected all of her philosophies subsequently.…He wrote a book called Rules for Radicals. On the dedication page, it acknowledges Lucifer, the original radical who gained his own kingdom. Now think about that. This is a nation where our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, talks about certain inalienable rights that come from our Creator. This is a nation where our Pledge of Allegiance says we are “one Nation under God.” This is a nation where every coin in our pocket and every bill in our wallet says “In God We Trust.” So are we willing to elect someone as president who has as their role model somebody who acknowledges Lucifer? Think about that.

Carson here misrepresents the Declaration of Independence (the reference he cites is to the non-interventionist designer God of Deism, hence “Creator” and “Nature’s God” as opposed to “Jehovah” or “Jesus”) and is likely ignorant of the phrases “one Nation under God” and “In God We Trust” having been placed in the Pledge of Allegiance and on U.S. currency, respectively, in the 1950s. These are subsidiary issues, however; what screams out from Carson’s speech is the garish reference to Lucifer. Naturally, there can be no more focused demonization of Hillary Clinton than aligning her with none other than Lucifer himself, but Carson was merely bringing to new heights a topic/tactic familiar in right-wing circles.

Saul D. Alinsky, though now an extremely marginal historical figure, has been viewed as the archetypal community organizer. His Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, published a year before his death in 1972, was designed as a guide to challenging and ultimately overcoming the sociopolitical establishment, the crux of which is infiltrating the system in order to change it from within. “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power,” Alinsky explains, whereas “Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”4 Contrary to what Carson and his ilk claim, the book is not dedicated to Lucifer but “To Irene,” Alinsky’s wife. Flipping the page, you then find the Lucifer reference, which follows two quotations—one from Rabbi Hillel and the other from Thomas Paine—and Alinsky describes Lucifer as “the very first radical…who rebelled against the establishment,” and he is clearly invoking Lucifer the idealized arch-rebel imagined by the Miltonic-Romantic tradition:

Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins—or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.5

Ben Carson is surely ascribing more significance to this cheeky quotation than is appropriate. British-Indian author Salman Rushdie—who, as the target of an Islamic witch hunt ever since the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, knows what it feels like to be truly demonized—quite rightly derided Carson for his inability to “recognize irony or humor.” Clearly, as far as Carson is concerned, the mere “over-the-shoulder acknowledgment” of Lucifer is enough to summarily dismiss Alinsky—and, by extension, Hillary Clinton—but other conservatives have gone further, demonizing Alinsky/Clinton by way of aligning his/her political stratagems with the Devil’s. In a June 5, 2014 interview with The Blaze, neocon and Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza gave the following analysis of Alinsky and his political disciples:

…Alinsky was obviously not a Christian; in fact, he was an atheist. So why would an atheist dedicate a book to Lucifer? I think to discover the answer, you have to pay careful attention to what Lucifer represents in the Western tradition. So I did a close reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and you begin to see how Lucifer operates. First of all, Lucifer is a master of organizing resentment, and so is Alinsky. Lucifer is also a master at making G-d [sic] the bad guy. So even though Lucifer rebels against G-d, even though G-d justly expels Lucifer from Heaven, Lucifer goes, “G-d, you’re a tyrant. I don’t have to follow you. I want my own kingdom.” So Lucifer practices, you may say, demonization against G-d. And finally, Lucifer is a liar. He is a master of dishonesty and deceit. Now, Alinsky adopted these Luciferian techniques.…And I think here, we begin to see the Obama and even the Hillary playbook.…: Seeming very respectable, being very self-disciplined, and ultimately pretending to be a friend of the middle class, whose values you are trying to undermine.

Paradise Lost’s Lucifer, the charismatic character Milton brought to life as a celestial insurrectionist who scorns “Knee-tribute” to the King of Heaven as “prostration vile” (V.782) and, despite damnation, pledges himself to forever defying “the Throne and Monarchy of God” (I.42), was extremely appealing to the radicals of Romanticism living in the wake of the American and French Revolutions.6 The Miltonic-Romantic Satan continued to be channeled throughout the nineteenth century by antiestablishment figures, such as the anarchists Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin.7 Alinsky’s Lucifer reference surely owes much to this tradition, but more than anything else it appears to be a simple satirical aside. D’Souza takes the “over-the-shoulder acknowledgment” of Lucifer and runs riot with it, and what emerges from his intricate demonization of Alinsky, Obama, and Clinton is something that seems straight out of the reactionary assaults on the Romantic Satanists back in the nineteenth century, “close reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost” and all.

While demonizing or Satanizing political rivals appears to be growing increasingly commonplace on the American Right (the Left is inclined to a more modern-day form of demonization by way of employing accusations amounting to secular Satans: fascist, racist, sexist, homophobe, xenophobe, etc.), it is doubtful that anyone within the political landscape will follow the Byronic-Shelleyan precedent in response.

Byron and Shelley had initially been demonized in part because of their combination of licentious lifestyles and radical politics, both spiced up by cultivation of provocative and mischievous diabolical personas. These rebellious poets escalated the matter by responding to their public demonization by styling themselves as Satanic—in the tradition of the heroic Satan out of Milton—to sardonically mock and forcefully challenge the forces of reaction. For example, Byron, who was the central target of Southey’s Satanic School tirade, when preparing his drama Cain (1821)—the poet’s retelling of the biblical story of the first murder, in which Lucifer emerges as a noble opponent of a tyrant God and a Promethean patron of Man—vowed to “give…Mr. Southey – & others of the crew something that shall occupy their dreams!”8 Any such response today is highly unlikely, especially at the level of the presidency. Indeed, in the case of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—the first black and potentially the first female presidents, respectively—there are already enough obstacles in their political paths without attempts to disarm reactionary demonization by embracing it. If anything, just as Byron responded to Southey’s Satanic School charge with a countercharge (“If there exists anywhere, excepting in his imagination, such a school, is he not sufficiently armed against it by his own intense vanity?”9), Clinton and her campaign may perhaps turn Ben Carson’s Luciferian demonization back around and liken the egomaniacal Donald Trump to Lucifer, the one who aspired to the Throne of God.

As far as I’m concerned, though it may be interesting and amusing to hear the Devil’s name bandied about in my country’s current election season, comparison of either presidential candidate to Lucifer is quite simply downright insulting—to Lucifer.

 

Notes

1. Quoted in C. L. Cline, “Byron and Southey: A Suppressed Rejoinder,” Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. 3 (Winter, 1954), p. 30.↩
2. Ibid.↩
3. See Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer: the Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, [1984] 1986), pp. 192–93; Peter Stanford, The Devil: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1996), pp. 122–27.↩
4. Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage Books, [1971] 1972), p. 3.↩
5. Ibid., p. ix.↩
6. See Maximilian Rudwin, The Devil in Legend and Literature (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, [1931] 1959), pp. 263–65, 286–87; Jeffrey Burton Russell, Mephistopheles: the Devil in the Modern World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, [1986] 1990), pp. 168–69.↩
7. See Ruben van Luijk, Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 116–20.↩
8. Quoted in Peter A. Schock, Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley, and Byron (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 101.↩
9. Lord Byron, Preface to The Vision of Judgment (1822), in Lord Byron: the Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., [1986] 2008), p. 939.↩

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A Devil of a Decade: The Rise and Fall of the Paradise Lost Film: Part 1 of 2

John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) is widely revered as one of the greatest masterpieces of English poetry, Milton’s Satan one of the greatest characters in all of literature and mythology. Yet no one in the century-plus history of cinema has been able to bring Milton’s sublime vision to the silver screen. While there have been many visual and verbal allusions to Paradise Lost and its critical reception in a myriad of movies,1 Milton’s epic poem itself has never made it to theaters. Over the past decade or so, however, filmmakers have come as close as ever to translating Paradise Lost to the big screen, but the endeavor ultimately failed, and the rise and fall of the production made for a devil of a decade.

I first heard about the Paradise Lost film back in a March 4, 2007 New York Times article by one Michael Joseph Gross, “It’s God vs. Satan. But What About the Nudity?” I was an undergraduate student, taking a “Bible and Later Literature” class, which was the first time Milton’s Paradise Lost was assigned reading in my college career. My Miltonist Professor—who was both impressed by my knowledge of the Bible and the Miltonic-Romantic tradition and horrified by my fervent insistence on the tyrannical nature of the Judeo-Christian-Miltonic God and my promotion of the Romantic reading of Milton’s Satan as hero—had rather low expectations about the prospect of a Paradise Lost film, but I was overall optimistic. After all, what could be a more glaring example of the fallen archangel’s current cultural ascension than Milton’s sympathetic Satan as the star of a blockbuster film?

Gross’s article revealed that a spec script for Paradise Lost had been pitched to big-time Hollywood executives back in 2004 by two novices by the names of Philip de Blasi and Byron Willinger, the writers explaining that the reception they received was less than enthusiastic, to say the least. Yet their own enthusiasm for the ambitious aim was less than stellar, Willinger remarking matter-of-factly, “We figured someone’s going to make a movie of it someday, and it might as well be us…” It’s certainly not what you’d expect someone taking on the monumental responsibility of at long last bringing Milton’s magnum opus to the screen to say.

“Angel Lucifer” – Ryan Meinerding concept art for Paradise Lost (under the direction of Scott Derrickson)

Nevertheless, in 2006 the de Blasi/ Willinger script for Paradise Lost was purchased by independent film producer Vincent Newman, who, according to the article, had been fascinated with the story of the War in Heaven since he stumbled upon the biblical Book of Revelation amidst the boredom of Sunday school. Newman was captivated by Revelation’s story of the celestial battle between Michael and “the great dragon…, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” (Revelation 12:9), and Milton had given this war to start all wars its most magnificent poetic treatment. With a Paradise Lost film project now in his hands, Newman successfully enlisted the co-financing help of Legendary Pictures, whose chairman and chief executive, Thomas Tull, wryly remarked that his initial response to the project was, “that’s going to make a lot of older folks relive bad college experiences.” Tull came to realize, however, that “if you get past the Milton of it all, and think about the greatest war that’s ever been fought, the story itself is pretty compelling…”

Getting past the Milton of it all is a very suspect sentiment, but Newman was on the same page as Tull, requesting alterations to the original screenplay, which was apparently a bit too faithful to Milton’s text for his taste. Newman believed a Paradise Lost film should have “less Adam and Eve and more about what’s happening with the archangels,” not only because the revolt of the angels and their fall from Heaven, along with their vengeful rise from damnation in Hell, is more exciting material (and would make for a promising SFX-heavy $100-million action epic), but because “In Eden there’s the nudity problem,…which would be a big problem for a big studio movie.” Despite the many challenges and potential pitfalls, Newman was enthusiastic: “This could be like The Lord of the Rings, or bigger…” Gross was right to point out in his article that it would seem Newman’s “passion is more for the idea of the poem than for the poem itself,” even if “he speaks of the project with unflagging enthusiasm…”

“Rebel Lucifer” – Ryan Meinerding concept art for Paradise Lost (under the direction of Scott Derrickson)

Newman plainly explained that Paradise Lost would be “a war movie at the end of the day,” while also emphasizing that his aim was for the angelic war film to be “made with total adherence and respect to any of the three religions’ involvement in the story of God, the Devil and the archangels…” Reshaping Paradise Lost so as to make it more of a universal story for a broader audience would inevitably involve alterations to Milton’s unequivocally and unapologetically Christian story. Yet while Newman maintained that the film was not “a Christian endeavor or Christian movie,” Stuart Hazeldine, who in 2006 penned the second draft of the Paradise Lost screenplay (which would undergo additional revisions by Lawrence Kasdan and Ryan Condal), was hopeful that his treatment would prove to be pleasing to Christian crowds: “I’m adapting Milton, and then Milton’s kind of adapting Genesis, and I wanted to make sure that for the faith audience, I guess, that they will see it more as The Passion of the Christ than The Last Temptation of Christ…” This is to say, essentially, that the Paradise Lost film should not simply be an epic fantasy action movie, but also a religious film insofar as it invests the faithful in the theological sentiments beneath the spectacle—which could prove disastrous for the film’s presentation of Milton’s Satan.

Scott Derrickson

Gross acutely observed in his “It’s God vs. Satan” article that Paradise Lost may have more than a nudity problem; the film may have a Satanic problem: “The depiction of Satan may be a polarizing one among scholars. Some, in line with Romantic poets like William Blake, will want the dark prince to be the hero; others won’t be happy unless Satan is a self-deceiving hypocrite, and the story an education in virtue and obedience.” That I would prefer the former depiction (which would be my Passion of the Christ) hardly needs to be noted, but I would be open to a film version of Paradise Lost which, like the poem itself, was fundamentally ambiguous in its presentation, allowing for radically different interpretations. Yet with the anxiety over appeasing rather than potentially offending “the faith audience,” there was room for doubt that this would be the Paradise Lost the filmmakers would bring to the big screen. What’s more, Scott Derrickson, the man highlighted as the likely director for the film, was a fervent Christian. Hazeldine explained that the endeavor of a Paradise Lost film would ultimately prove “a challenge for people like Scott and I, who have a faith, but we just love movies…We often find that we are wondering, are we too worldly for the church and too churchy for the world?”

To be fair to Derrickson, his 2005 film The Exorcism of Emily Rose did present the kind of ambiguity a Paradise Lost film could benefit from. The Exorcism of Emily Rose is at its core a courtroom drama, centering on the death of the titular young lady, which occurred during a prolonged exorcism conducted by the priest on trial in the film. The audience is repeatedly shown two versions of the same flashback events—one from a religious or supernatural perspective and another from a scientific perspective—leaving much open to interpretation. This sort of openness did appear to be at the heart of Derrickson’s vision of Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, as he voiced in an MTVNews interview back in July 2008:

What’s interesting to me is that you cannot help but feel that his initial feelings of being disgruntled are merited, and I feel a lot of empathy for the Lucifer character in the beginning of the story…I would want the audience to be sympathetic with him at the beginning, and what happens — what he’s up against and what he’s wrestling and struggling with — you certainly feel that.

Derrickson added that Paradise Lost “would not be an easy movie to make, but it would be groundbreaking…It’s really worthy of the attempt.” Indeed, but the attempt would not ultimately rest with Derrickson.

 

Notes

1. See Eric C. Brown, Milton on Film (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2015).↩