Month: October 2016

The Miltonic-Romantic Lucifer makes an interesting appearance in Castlevania, the action-adventure videogame series that made its U.S. debut in 1987 (debuting a year earlier in Japan), spawning a plethora of sequels spanning several gaming platforms. Castlevania was essentially a great homage to the horror genre, paying tribute to Dracula in particular, the series’ vampire-hunting Belmont family incessantly hunting the immortal Count from game to game. Castlevania was rebooted with 2010’s Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, which resulted in a 2014 sequel, and in these last two installments of the undying series, homage was paid to a character far greater than Dracula: the Devil himself, as descended from the Miltonic-Romantic tradition.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, set in an apocalyptic eleventh century, follows Gabriel Belmont of the “Brotherhood of Light,” an order of knights responsible for protecting the world from otherworldly enemies. The Lords of Shadow of the title have disrupted the natural order by casting a malevolent spell keeping the deceased in a perpetual limbo, preventing them from crossing over to the afterlife. Gabriel’s quest to defeat the Lords of Shadow is personal, as his wife was slain by a supernatural creature (or so he believes). An elder member of the Brotherhood by the name of Zobek (voiced by Patrick Stewart) informs Gabriel of “the God Mask,” which has the power to restore life to the dead. Longing to bring his wife back to life, Gabriel ventures to defeat the three Lords of Shadow and obtain the three pieces of the God Mask. When Gabriel’s journey reaches its climax in the Land of the Necromancers—a tempestuous, ethereal realm not dissimilar to the Hades of the second act of Lord Byron’s Cain (1821)—Zobek reveals that he is the nefarious Lord of the Necromancers, who deceived Gabriel to set him on a journey to eliminate the competition of the other two Lords of Shadow. Zobek explains that he had ventured to Hell in search of the power that would enable him to disrupt the natural order and set the events of the story in motion. Orchestrating this charade included compelling Gabriel to take the life of his own wife, which, when revealed to our hero, naturally plunges him into despair.

As Zobek, with the God Mask in his grasp, revels in his victory before the subdued Gabriel, he suddenly hears a diabolical laugh, followed by a sinister voice. “Hail, Mighty Zobek,” mocks the unseen speaker, who proceeds to explain to the frightened Zobek that it was he who granted the supernatural strength beyond Zobek’s own reach. It is revealed to the manipulative, self-serving Zobek that he, like Gabriel, was but the tool of another’s plan. “I planted the idea for this whole elaborate ruse into your tiny mind in order to serve my own higher purpose,” announces the voice. “I no longer need your assistance. The power is now mine!” With that, Zobek spontaneously combusts, crumbling to the ground. Casually walking through the flames and stepping over the corpse of Zobek, Satan enters the scene and takes possession of the God Mask.

Satan now in full sight, it is clear how indebted this interpretation of the fallen angel is to the Miltonic Devils depicted by Romantic artists. Like the portrayals of Milton’s Satan wrought by Barry, Lawrence, Fuseli, and Blake, this Satan is wingless (although he can summon “shadow wings” at will during the actual boss battle) and nude, with the superhuman form and the dignified bearing befitting a Greco-Roman god. This Satan has no horns, hoofs, or tail, but an athletic figure, his head crowned with long black hair (with little of the character of many a Romantic Lucifer’s locks, it must be said), which drapes down his back and chest. Satan’s demonic aspects are relatively subtle: translucent skin, menacing eyes (pitch-black sclerae punctuated by glowing pupils), and an ethereal darkness that swirls about his lower half. A convincing portrayal of Satan as “Arch-Angel ruin’d,” as he is “Majestic though in ruin” (PL, I.593; II.305), this Satan’s majesty and menace are complemented by his haughty voice, executed perfectly by Jason Isaacs, who in the 2000 film The Patriot had played the English Colonel William Tavington, who was, in the words of proud Englishman and Satanist Gavin Baddeley, “absurdly evil…”¹ Castlevania’s less absurd Satan, gripping a massive staff much like Milton’s Satan grips his mastlike spear (I.292–96), lifts his malevolent gaze skyward and vaunts his “higher purpose”: “Father! I come for you… Before the end YOU will bow down to ME!”

As Gabriel is miraculously restored to life by spirits at the behest of his wife’s ghost, Satan attempts to form an alliance with the man, drawing parallels between their doomed dispositions: “So… he has abandoned you, too? So be it. Join me. I will love you more than He!” Turning to face Gabriel, Satan reminds the devout knight that he, first of the damned, was once Heaven’s preeminent angel: “I was adored once above all others. I too didn’t deserve to be cast out… abandoned. Now you know what that feels like, don’t you…? Hate can bring us back, give us strength. Embrace it!” It is a moment very much reminiscent of Lord Byron’s Lucifer, who approaches Adam’s firstborn son Cain as something of a Promethean patron, professing, “I know the thoughts / Of dust, and feel for it, and with you” (I.i.100–01), styling himself and his human counterpart as reflections of one another: “Souls who dare look the Omnipotent tyrant in / His everlasting face, and tell him, that / His evil is not good!” (I.i.138–40). Yet, while the Byronic Cain can relate to the arch-rebel Lucifer—“Thou speak’st to me of things which long have swum / In visions through my thought” (I.i.167–68)—Castlevania’s Gabriel Belmont is not swayed in the slightest by the Tempter. “He loves you as he loves me,” Gabriel reassures the fallen angel, the knight reaffirming his faith in God: “We have only to ask for forgiveness deep within ourselves and be welcomed back.” Ever the arrogant angel, Satan gibes, “You monkeys don’t deserve redemption.”² Satan’s scorn for mortal “monkeys” may betray the dishonesty of his proposed alliance, but then again we are once more reminded of Byron’s Lucifer, who expresses respect for Cain in his likeminded defiance of Jehovah, yet as a spirit—indeed, a “Master of spirits” (I.i.99)—holds humans in disdain as “dust” and “clay.”³

The Satan of Paradise Lost’s “Monarchal pride” (II.428) and ambition “to have equall’d the most High” (I.40) are overstressed in Castlevania’s portrayal of the Prince of Darkness: “It is MY divine right to rule by his side as an equal… Or perhaps more than that…”⁴ “You would rather rule in power and might than to offer forgiveness and love?” asks Gabriel, pitying the fallen angel for his waywardness: “This is why you are cast out, unholy one!” Satan’s pride is needled by Gabriel’s “blasphemy,” which underlines his sense of his own godhood, and so Satan promises to deliver Gabriel his death. After a Castlevania-style slugfest, Gabriel subdues the God-Masked Satan, and a pillar of divine light envelops the two. Despite his contemptuous defiance, Satan is unmasked and vanquished by the unseen hand of the Almighty, the tempestuous Land of the Dead calming with the Devil’s disappearance.

In the game’s epilogue, set in modern times, it is revealed that Zobek still lives and that Gabriel has been cursed to live on as the immortal Dracula. Zobek has come to inform Gabriel/Dracula that “Satan’s acolytes are readying for his imminent return.” Knowing full well that Gabriel yearns for the release of death, Zobek promises to free him of his vampiric immortality in exchange for his help in dealing with the Satanic crisis.

In Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, which largely (and jarringly) takes place in a modern urban setting, Gabriel/Dracula and Zobek work together to hunt down Satan’s acolytes. At the end of the unevenly paced game, the third acolyte—a demonic-looking Crowley type by the name of Guido Szandor (after Anton Szandor LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan)—successfully summons Satan to the mortal plane in appropriate supernatural spectacle. The third acolyte falls to his knees before his Lord, who spreads his dark wings to reveal himself. It is immediately apparent that this Satan possesses none of the subtlety of his incarnation in the previous game. Satan is now a massive, hulking figure with a pallor more haunting than Dracula’s, his lower half covered in spiky silver armor, his forearms dripping with tar. Satan’s black hair is shorter and stringier, and his eyes are now pronounced by their glowing purple irises. The only interesting aspects of Satan’s significantly altered appearance are his tremendous black-feathered wings—albeit strangely protruding from his lower back—and his facial scars, which was a feature of Milton’s portrait of Satan (I.600–01) missing from all artistic renditions.

While Satan’s last acolyte stares up at his Lord in awe, Satan looks down with disgust, clearly irritated by the sight of Gabriel/Dracula, still alive and well after all this time. Satan slowly steps forward and lifts up the bowed head of his acolyte, as one would a loyal dog, but suddenly jags his fingers into the acolyte’s throat and peels off the man’s face, delivering his faithful servant a painful demise. Satan tosses the shocked face of the acolyte aside in disdain and remarks with a shrug, “I despise incompetence.” Satan once again proposes an alliance with Gabriel: “We could share this world…you…and I…” Dracula and his son, Alucard (“Dracula” reversed), remain silent, Satan chuckling, “But you desire to destroy me… I see that now.” Satan then shifts his motive from conquest of the world to its wanton destruction: “I’m very well aware of your power, Gabriel. However…I desire to destroy this world.” With that, the room begins to quake and split apart, and as the surroundings crumble, Satan vaunts, “If I cannot rule the world of men…then no one will!”

A massive, wormlike leviathan bursts through the floor, Satan surfing the beast into the sky. Dracula and Alucard mount the ascending leviathan and, of course, manage to slay the monster before it is able to carry out Satan’s command to destroy the world. As the debris falls, Satan transforms into tarry ethereal form and possesses the body of Alucard, as he believes Gabriel will not be able to harm the body of his son. After the game’s final boss battle, the two fall from the sky and crash into a city street like meteorites. “You won’t kill your son to destroy me,” mocks the incapacitated Satan/Alucard. Gabriel begs to differ, and as he proceeds to stake the body of Alucard in dramatic slow-motion, Satan dives out of the boy’s body and assumes his own form. Having anticipated this, Gabriel thrusts Satan against a gate and daggers him, at which point the impaled Satan goes limp and collapses. In an anticlimactic ending, Gabriel revives his son Alucard with blood from his own veins and exits before sunrise, leaving the demonic corpse of the fallen angel lying on the pavement.

Satan’s first Castlevania incarnation was subtle, the Prince of Darkness given an angelic beauty slightly sullied by his exile from Heaven, much akin to Romantic renditions of Milton’s Satan in the visual arts. Satan likewise possessed the Miltonic-Romantic arch-rebel’s aristocratic demeanor and titanic ambition, and his mixed sympathy and contempt for the Gabriel character recalled the ambiguity of the Byronic Lucifer. Satan’s second Castlevania incarnation is as different from his first as could possibly be. While he formerly sought to re-ascend into Heaven and bring the Almighty to his knees, here Satan’s ambition is far more measured, as he wishes only to rule the mortal world and settles for demolishing it. While he formerly reflected on his prestigious place in Heaven, brooded over his infernal ruin, vaunted his patricidal/deicidal endeavors, and exuded an air of monarchal divinity, here Satan is given few lines (a terrible waste of the vocal talent of Jason Isaacs), all of which completely lack the complexity of his dialogue in the first game. The entire Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 game builds up to an epic confrontation between Dracula and Satan, but they hardly exchange words and their battle is terribly brief, the payoff in terms of story and gameplay tremendously unfulfilling for the player. Alas, if Castlevania summoned the Miltonic-Romantic Satan in the first Lords of Shadow game, its sequel vanquished him with little care, having recast the regal apostate angel as a monstrous, muscle-bound brute roid-raging through the cosmos.

 

Notes

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<sup>1. Gavin Baddeley, with Dani Filth, The Gospel of Filth: A Bible of Decadence & Darkness (Godalming, Surrey: FAB Press Ltd., [2009] 2010), p. 42.↩
2. This Satan’s dialogue, it must be said, appears to be somewhat indebted to the Lucifer of the 1995 film The Prophecy: Lucifer, as played with relish by Viggo Mortensen, asserts, “I was the first angel, loved once above all others,” and in the end amusingly pleads for the male lead’s alliance thus: “I love you! I love you more than Jesus!” Mortals are routinely referred to as “monkeys” by the disdainful angelic characters throughout the film.↩
3. Certain critics of Byron’s Cain have insisted that its portrayal of Lucifer is traditional, the rebel angel’s companionship with Cain a false face. See, for example, N. Stephen Bauer, “Byron’s Doubting Cain,” South Atlantic Bulletin, Vol. 39, No. 2 (May, 1974), pp. 80–88, and Wolf Z. Hirst, “Byron’s Lapse into Orthodoxy: An Unorthodox Reading of Cain,” Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. 29, (1980), pp. 151–72.↩
4. This is also reminiscent of St. Anselm’s unique assessment of Satan’s self-sought apotheosis in his essay On the Fall of the Devil (ca. 1080–1086). Anselm explains that Lucifer aspired to godhead not by attempting to overpower the Almighty—an impossible act that a supernatural being as intelligent as Heaven’s highest angel could not possibly have believed—but by merely being prideful, which is to say, by valuing his own self-will above the will of God. In exalting his own will above God’s will, Satan’s ambition, according to Anselm, was to be not only equal to but in fact greater than God: “Even if he didn’t will to be completely equal to God, but instead willed something less than equality with God that was contrary to God’s will: by that very fact he willed inordinately to be like God, since he willed something by his own will, which was not subjected to anyone else. For it is the prerogative of God alone to will anything by his own will in such a way that he does not follow any higher will.…Now he did not merely will to be equal to God by presuming to have a will of his own; he willed to be even greater than God, in that he placed his own will above God’s will by willing what God didn’t want him to will.” (Anselm, On the Fall of the Devil, in Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Thomas Williams [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2007], p. 178.) See also John M. Steadman, “Satan and the Argument from Equality,” in Milton’s Epic Characters: Image and Idol (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, [1959] 1968), pp. 160–73.↩</sup>

Milton’s Paradise Lost has proven to be popular within the horror genre.¹ The latest example of horror’s homage to Milton has come in the form of the video for the song “Arise” off the 2016 album Non Paradisi by GosT, the skull-masked, synthwave solo act. GosT’s label, Blood Music, is described as an organization “dedicated to anthropological and cultural preservation of extreme metal music,” yet “Arise” is very much reminiscent of a 1980s, John Carpenter-style, synthesized horror film soundtrack. Proudly donning its Miltonic influences on its sleeve, GosT’s Non Paradisi album is described as “a loose musical adaptation of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, concerning Lucifer’s fall from Heaven and ensuing ascent from the Lake of Fire.” The video for “Arise”—itself a reference to the call with which Milton’s Satan summons his fallen legions in Hell (“Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n” [I.330])—charts this Satanic epic, with imagery commingling traditional illustrations of Paradise Lost and Halloween-style horror.

While the video for Delta Heavy’s “White Flag” had a smooth and cartoonish Super Nintendo look, the video for “Arise” has more of a gritty and violent Sega Genesis style, which works well for GosT’s 80s horror aesthetic. I’m not convinced that it works for the Miltonic-Romantic Lucifer, however. “Arise” highlights the ambivalence of horror’s adoption of Paradise Lost, as the genre’s homage to Milton’s masterpiece can have a negative impact on the epic poem’s unique vision of the Satanic. With the exception of the video’s original opening—the silhouettes of rebel angels in their retreat and Lucifer’s ejection from Heaven—most of the imagery is lifted straight from the artwork of Gustave Doré and John Martin (in some cases depicting moments preceding and following those captured by the artwork). Yet the majestic artwork of Doré and Martin does not mesh well with the Halloween imagery the “Arise” video is suffused with: an overabundance of skulls, skeletons, inverted crosses, and monsters.

Paradise Lost has some elements of the monstrous, such as the native denizens of Hell—“worse / Than Fables yet have feign’d, or fear conceiv’d, / Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimeras dire” (II.626–28)—and Sin and Death (II.648 ff.), but such monstrousness does not quite extend to the fallen angels. Of course, Milton does in the end bring Satan and his coconspirators horrifyingly low: when he returns to Hell after triumphing in Eden, Satan is transformed into “A monstrous Serpent on his Belly prone” (X.514) at the conclusion of his exultant speech, Satan’s supporters suffering the same ignominy, “all transform’d / Alike, to Serpents all as accessories / To his bold Riot…” (X.519–21). Satan’s judgment seems reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno insofar as his punishment in Hell correlates to his crime on Earth, Satan “punisht in the shape he sinn’d, / According to his doom” (X.516–17), but in truth Milton’s judgment is far less harsh than Dantean torment because it is a temporary punishment. Milton writes of his writhing fallen angels, “thir lost shape, permitted, they resum’d,” explaining to the reader that this ignominious metamorphosis is merely an “annual humbling certain number’d days, / To dash thir pride, and joy for Man seduc’t” (X.574, 576–77).

The lost shape Paradise Lost’s fallen angels resume is rather dignified: Milton likens the Hell-doomed host to a lightning-scorched but nonetheless stately forest (I.612–15)—a far cry from the horribly deformed faces of the angels tossed into the fiery pit of Hell in the “Arise” video. No, Milton’s rebel angels, despite their diminished glory, bear “Godlike shapes and forms / Excelling human, Princely Dignities…” (I.358–59). None are as princely and godlike as Satan himself, who stands “above the rest / In shape and gesture proudly eminent / …like a Tow’r…” (I.589–91). As the heavenly Lucifer he was “Sun-bright” (VI.100), yet even as a ruined archangel in Hell he retains much of his “Original brightness” (I.592), Satan still likened to the Sun, but as obscured by a misty horizon or eclipsed by the moon (I.592–99)—“Dark’n’d so, yet shone / Above them all th’ Arch-Angel…” (I.599–600). The only trace of genuine deformity in Milton’s Satan is that “his face / Deep scars of Thunder had intrencht” (I.600–01), yet these battle scars only serve to make him seem more heroic, Satan’s thunder-scarred visage merely magnifying the impressiveness of his “Brows / Of dauntless courage, and considerate Pride” (I.602–3). To its credit, the “Arise” video depicts Satan’s facial scars, which have been entirely ignored by all artists of Milton’s poem. Unfortunately, the scars do not stop at a cracked porcelain face; by the end of “Arise,” Satan’s face has decayed to an almost skeletal state, and the horns protruding from his head are no less unflattering—no less unMiltonic.

“Arise” delights in depicting such monstrous decay, and the triumph of the horror elements over the Miltonic-Romantic iconography is illustrated by the precedence the GosT character assumes in the video. Among the many Doré pieces the video employs is Doré’s towering Satan summoning Beëlzebub, but in this case Satan is recast as Beëlzebub, now looking up in awe at the towering figure of GosT, which makes for a jarring image. GosT’s eponymous frontman explained in an interview that the video’s variation on Paradise Lost was “casting GosT…as the right hand of Lucifer. In our version, GosT is instrumental in helping Lucifer rise from the lake of fire and triumphantly claim his new throne without the unjust hand of God controlling his every move.” Within the walls of “Pandemonium – the City of Satan,” however, it is GosT who is crowned the king of Hell and ascends the infernal throne, once again replacing Satan—this time, the Satan of Martin’s image. Satan’s seat is not only usurped but reduced in significance, Pandemonium reimagined as a gothic horror rock concert, GosT presiding over bestial demons. Meanwhile, Satan ascends to Eden (with raptured skeletons), and in the final shot of the demonic angel (“O how fall’n! how chang’d…” [PL, I.84]) overlooking Eden, it is quite clear that the Miltonic-Romantic Lucifer invoked at the start of the video has been consumed by the horror element.

With “Arise,” Paradise Lost is exploited as a means of exalting the GosT brand—the symbolic significance of which is the GosT character’s coronation—but at the expense of the imagery of Milton’s poem, particularly as brought to life by Doré and Martin (and many others). GosT’s “Arise” was a nice attempt at playing with traditional Miltonic iconography, but the video highlights the double-edged sword of horror’s homage to Milton’s Paradise Lost.

 

Notes

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^{1. See, for example, Laura Lunger Knoppers and Gregory M. Colón Semenza, eds. Milton in Popular Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, [2006] 2007), “Part II: Milton in Horror Film,” pp. 83–124; Eric C. Brown, Milton on Film (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2015), Ch. 6, “ ‘All Hell Broke Loose’: The Horror Film,” pp. 283–324.↩}

Milton’s Paradise Lost as an SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) RPG (Role-Playing Game)—that is what the music video for English electronic duo Delta Heavy’s “White Flag” delivers. The Super Nintendo-style video for “White Flag”—a track off of Paradise Lost, Delta Heavy’s debut album of 2016—was directed by Najeeb Tarazi, who had previously worked as a technical director on Pixar blockbusters Toy Story 3 and Monsters University. Tarazi’s vision for the “White Flag” video was inverting the Miltonic treatment of the fall of Lucifer: “ ‘White Flag’ is about letting your guard down in love…I wanted to try turning the myth of Paradise Lost on its head and tell a story where Satan apologizes after his defeat and seeks a path of love. In reply to Satan’s apology, God brutally punishes Satan again.”

The video for “White Flag” starts with an unmistakably SNES-style title screen, and once the unseen “player” starts the pretend Super Nintendo game, we open to a cherubic (albeit bat-winged) Satan—with curly golden locks and a toga—lying prostrate on Hell’s lake of fire, just as we first see Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost. In this video(game), Satan soon awakens and takes flight across the lake of fire, which is littered with his fellow fallen angels. Magma erupts like rising pillars toward the sulfurous sky, wherefrom more angels haplessly descend like meteorites. Before long, Satan gracefully lands in front of the gates of Hell (a simple sign replacing Sin and Death in this version), and he is soon approached by his second-in-command, Beëlzebub, who is here imagined as a cartoonish, somewhat Lovecraftian “Lord of the Flies.” This buzzing Beëlzebub speaks to Satan in the simple dialogue familiar to SNES games: “SATAN! Only you can save us. Defeat GOD.” With that, Satan “Springs upward like a Pyramid of fire” (PL, II.1013) through the smoke-clouds of Hell and starts his journey through the cosmos (in this case, skipping over the difficult course through Chaos).

Satan darts past the Earth and, with fierce determination in his bright red eyes, heads toward a cosmic chasm, through which Satan enters into Heaven (the steps of which Satan stops at in Paradise Lost [III.498–543]). Satan confidently wings his way up to a cloud, and though he wields a spear, Satan passively takes the blows as he is stormed by a swiping flight of hostile cherubs. The video gives the impression that, as an RPG, the player is given options: “FIGHT,” “RUN,” “APOLOGIZE.” As Almighty God—uniquely portrayed as a cloudy matriarch—descends from up above, Satan chooses to apologize, but he is met with further hostility by the archangel Michael and the Son of God, with amusing messages to the “player”: “GOD summons MICHAEL!” and “JESUS casts LIGHTNING II!” Satan retaliates with only a bright pink cartoon heart that appears above his head. God and His/Her Son disappear, however, and the heart hovering over Satan’s head is replaced by a question mark. As the song’s beat drops, Satan is repeatedly shanked by a titanic hand thrusting down from above, the apologetic angel screaming out in unimaginable pain. Satan collapses onto his cloud, and is soon unceremoniously dumped out of Heaven by two cherubs.

Falling back through the chasm into the cosmos, the unconscious Satan tumbles through the stars like a piece of fruit falling through the branches of a tree. Back in Hell, Beëlzebub pokes through Hell’s clouds to see Satan streaking through the starry sky like a comet. A wide shot of the Earth then shows Satan’s descent through a shaft of light. Now in the Garden of Eden, we see Satan crash-land face-down—not unlike how he started on Hell’s lake of fire—and while the only option the “player” now seems to have is to “DIE,” two shadowy figures (surely Ben Hall and Simon James of Delta Heavy) from behind the bushes toss Satan an apple, the fallen angel transforming into a sort of “Super-Satan,” with red skin, bulging muscles, flaming hair, and horns. Turning his determined gaze heavenward, Satan re-ascends back through the shaft of light. Back in Heaven, Satan—hell-bent on gaining God’s forgiveness—clinches the Son in his arms, transforming back into (fallen) angel form, and the Son’s face appears just as pained as Satan’s when he felt the wrath of God moments earlier. This time, a cataract descends from God’s cloudy throne through the chasm and out into the cosmos. In the Garden of Eden, the rainfall makes the infamous apple drop down onto the Eden serpent’s head—symbolic, perhaps, of this revision excising that portion of the story, Satan having turned over a new leaf. As flowers begin to sprout up amidst the arid soil of Hell, courtesy of the heavenly rainfall, Satan lands back in front of Beëlzebub, no dialogue exchanged between the two. The video then ends with a shot of the Milky Way, with a cartoon heart at its center, as the “game” announces to the “player,” “GAME OVER.”

The “White Flag” video starts and ends like a Super Nintendo game, but while this 16-bit reimagining of Milton’s Paradise Lost shares a very similar opening to the poem, the ending is entirely different. While, of course, Tarazi nods to the tradition of Satan’s salvation and reconciliation with the Almighty—more popular with the French Romantics¹—the conclusion to this video is a bit more ambiguous. In the end, Satan and Beëlzebub still appear fallen (Beëlzebub undeniably so). If this were a Super Nintendo game, this could be explained away by an inability to create any more sprites given the limited memory of the 16-bit system. This is not an SNES game, however; so what might the significance of the ending be? In Paradise Lost, when Satan sets foot on Earth and observes the glory of the Sun, which brings back the bitter memory of his former state, forever forfeited by his rebellion (IV.9–41), Satan contemplates the thought of repentance, ultimately rejecting the idea because he knows his pride would compel him to challenge the Almighty all over again (IV.79–102). God, Satan concludes, as “punisher” is “as far / From granting…as I from begging peace” (IV.103–04), and so “All hope [is] excluded…” (IV.105). The Christian tradition has always identified an element of pride in such despair, however, as people who believes themselves irredeemable essentially state that not even God Himself can save them, which is a curious assertion of superiority to the Almighty. Tarazi seems to turn this on its head, showing a Satan strong enough to force Almighty God to forgive him after a futile attempt at apologizing. After all, Tarazi’s explanation of his vision for the video makes no hint of God actually accepting Satan’s apology: “…Satan apologizes after his defeat and seeks a path of love. In reply to Satan’s apology, God brutally punishes Satan again.”

The God Tarazi describes is reminiscent of the Romantic view of God as omnipotent tyrant, and in turn Tarazi’s Satan, imagined as a fallen but forgiving angel, resembles Shelley’s Prometheus in Prometheus Unbound (1820). Whereas Byron’s vision of the Titan in his poem “Prometheus” (1816) was one of noble defiance of despair—much like the Lucifer of his Cain (1821), who “Prefer[s] an independency of torture / To the smooth agonies of adulation” (I.i.385–86)—Shelley envisioned a Prometheus who repents of his hatred for his oppressor, Jupiter. It is this Promethean power of universal love that leads to the tyrant’s overthrow and the ushering in of Shelley’s vision of a cosmic utopia.

While clearly not the arch-rebel of the Miltonic-Byronic tradition, the Satan of the video for Delta Heavy’s “White Flag” seems closer to Shelley’s scenario of the loving prisoner overcoming the coldhearted torturer than a reconciliation of God and the Devil. In short, Satan is triumphant, but he triumphs because he overcomes his hatred for the cruel God, thereby introducing love rather than chaos into the cosmos. Therefore, this cartoonish, Super Nintendo Satan, ironically enough, makes for an interesting fusion of the Romantic Satan and Prometheus.

 

Notes

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^{1. See Maximilian Rudwin, The Devil in Legend and Literature (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, [1931] 1959), Ch. XXII, “The Salvation of Satan in Modern Poetry,” pp. 280–308; Jeffrey Burton Russell, Mephistopheles: the Devil in the Modern World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, [1986] 1990), pp. 194–200; Ruben van Luijk, Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 74–76, 105–08.↩}

“Rattle That Lock” is the title track of David Gilmour’s 2015 stand-alone album, and the video for the Miltonic-themed song, carried out by the company Trunk Animation, brings to life Gustave Doré’s spectacular engravings for Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Polly Samson, wife of Gilmour and lyricist behind “Rattle That Lock,” explained that the inspiration for the song was “the need not to fall into an apathetic or despairing state” in the face of the seemingly unshakeable status quo, which makes would-be protestors feel increasingly hopeless, Samson asserting, “even if you can’t change anything, personally you’ll feel better if you go and kind of shake your fist…rather than just sort of slump.” Samson found the most dramatic expression of this sentiment in Milton’s Paradise Lost—both in the heroic journey the Hell-doomed rebel angel Satan takes through Chaos to reach Eden—in defiance of the God who expelled him from Heaven—and in the exile of Adam and Eve, who take “thir solitary way” (XII.649) out of Eden’s eastern gate. The lyrics for the song unmistakably allude to Milton—with a Satanic Romantic slant on the Miltonic treatment of the Fall:

Whatever it takes to break

Gotta do it

From the burning lake or the eastern gate

You’ll get through it

Rattle that lock, lose those chains…

Gilmour applauded the brilliant video for “Rattle That Lock,” which he found “highlights a darkness in the song that couldn’t have been shown any other way.” Samson commended the creators of the video for capturing that darkness by invoking the spirit of Doré’s vision of Paradise Lost: “I think the animators have done a fine job: paying homage to Gustave Doré…” Appropriately dubbed “the last of the Romantics,” the nineteenth-century French engraver Doré was almost superhumanly prolific, creating scores of incredible wood engravings for the Bible, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and of course Milton’s Paradise Lost. Doré’s fifty engravings for Paradise Lost were commissioned in 1866, and these genuinely marvelous pieces are the most popular illustrations of Milton’s masterpiece. If the layperson has seen Milton’s Satan, it has most likely been Doré’s interpretation of the ruined archangel, and it would be impossible for anyone who has laid eyes on Doré’s depiction of Paradise Lost and its Satan to miss their reappearance in the video for “Rattle That Lock.”

The very first moments of the “Rattle That Lock” video capture the spirit of Doré’s masterful work: serenity, interrupted by catastrophe, which appears somehow magnificent. Opening with celestial light shining through thick clouds in tune with the jingle repeated throughout the song—the jingle that precedes French railway station announcements, actually—robed shades ascend by way of a vast circular staircase, the peace suddenly broken by the lone figure of Lucifer, who plummets rapidly from the light up above. This Lucifer’s look is distinctly Doréan: beautiful and barefoot, but donning a Roman tunic and regal body armor. The shackled angel falls haplessly down through the middle of the spiraling heavenly staircase, his feathery wings molting as he falls. With perhaps a nod to the legend of the emerald crown of the fallen Lucifer residing somewhere in the world (the subject of Swedish metal band Therion’s “Emerald Crown,” incidentally), this Lucifer witnesses the emerald at the center of his armor released into the air. Before long, the armor itself is stripped off, and as the falling angel approaches the fiery lake below, we see true terror in his emerald-green eyes—the only color in the otherwise black-and-white video, made to resemble Doré’s engravings. His final feather plucked by the unforgiving winds, Lucifer is left with scabbed bat-wings, and, having failed to wriggle his wrists out of their shackles, he protects himself from the impending impact by encasing himself within his now leathery pennons, plunging into the lake below.

Even though this Lucifer falls from Heaven alone rather than with his legions of rebel angels, his fall captures the spirit of Milton’s dramatic description of Satan “Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’ Ethereal Sky” (I.45) at the start of Paradise Lost. After the fall, the video becomes much more abstract, but a number of Miltonic moments are still discernible. The fallen angel emerges from his wings as if from a shell, having assumed the form of a cormorant. In Paradise Lost, Satan assumes various animal disguises during his covert mission in Eden, first observing Adam and Eve as a cormorant, seated atop the Tree of Life (IV.194 ff.). In the “Rattle That Lock” video, as the Satanic cormorant makes his way through the waters and reaches the surface, we bear witness to the dreary Underworld, which is much more Dantean than Miltonic. While Paradise Lost catalogues mortal misfortune in its account of the Paradise of Fools (III.440–97), Milton curiously makes no mention of the tormented damned, and in fact his fallen angels engage in Olympian Games, mining, music, philosophy, and exploration in Hell (II.528–628). Doré followed Milton’s lead in his engravings for Paradise Lost, illustrating the native denizens of Hell—“worse / Than Fables yet have feign’d, or fear conceiv’d, / Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimeras dire” (II.626–28)—and the Paradise of Fools, but not human torment in Hell. The animators for “Rattle That Lock” opted for Doré’s gruesome depictions of Dante’s Hell.

In the midst of his flight, the Satanic cormorant snatches prey from the air and enters into Pandaemonium—here imagined as the Colosseum—which, unlike Paradise Lost’s “high Capitol / Of Satan and his Peers” (I.756–57), is desolate. The cormorant lands atop Hell’s throne, which actually resembles the throne John Martin imagined for Milton’s Satan, and feeds his prey to the newly hatched serpents seated on the throne, which I assume represent the “Discord, Chance and Rumor” mentioned in the lyrics—a reference to three of the various forces at work in the realm of Chaos in Paradise Lost (II.965–67). The proud Satanic cormorant then takes flight once again, heading toward the gates of Hell, soaring past the vast wasteland of classical ruins beneath him, his falling feathers bringing bad influence, such as the Dantean wood of the suicides.

Atop the towering gates of Hell are Sin and Death, who differ from their Miltonic (and Doréan) incarnations. In Paradise Lost, Sin—who burst unbidden out of the celestial conspirator Satan’s haughty head (II.749–58), a la Athena from the head of Zeus—is described as a fair woman from above the waist and a monstrous serpent from the waist down, reflecting her father’s transformation from glorious Lucifer to darkened Satan. Sin became so deformed, she explains to her fallen father, because of their incestuous union. “Likest to thee in shape and count’nance bright, / Then shining heav’nly fair” (II.756–57), Sin tells Satan, the prideful angel saw in his daughter his own “perfect image” (II.764), and in turn “Becam’st enamor’d” (II.765), Satan’s sinful self-love made literal. The fruit of their incestuous intercourse is Death, Satan’s “Son and Grandchild both” (X.384), who rapes his mother, marring the lower half of her perfect form into a monstrosity (II.761–802), not least of which are the barking Hell-hounds, which retreat into Sin’s nether region only to gnaw at her bowels. (In the “Rattle That Lock” video, Sin holds the unruly dogs by leash.) In their explosive first encounter, Death boasts that he is Satan’s “King and Lord” (II.699), only prevented from killing his indignantly incensed (grand)father by his mother, Sin (II.704–26). Playing on the biblical passage observing that “when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death” (James 1:15), Milton’s infernal parody of the Trinity with Satan, Sin and Death is meant to demonstrate—in horrid vividness—the self-destruction resulting from Satanic self-aggrandizement. While the “Rattle That Lock” video appears to connote a similar idea with the Satanic cormorant’s feeding of the three serpents, which are hostile to one another, there is none of the infernal family feuding here; indeed, Death—who resembles more the stereotypical grim reaper than Milton’s challenging description of a nebulous “shadow” donning on “what seem’d his head / The likeness of a Kingly Crown” (II.669, 672–73), which was a copout several Milton illustrators resorted to—in this case welcomes Satan, Death inviting him to enter through the Hell-gates.

The Satanic cormorant enters through the three layers of the gates of Hell—brass, iron, and adamant in Paradise Lost (II.643–48)—and enters into Chaos. The realm of Chaos proved another difficult Miltonic description, confounding artists who attempted to portray it. Doré’s engraving for Satan venturing through Chaos portrays the fallen angel straddling a mountainous cliff, but in the “Rattle That Lock” video Chaos is portrayed as more of a tempestuous, oceanic space—and, as such, is somewhat closer to Milton’s description (II.890–927). In the video, upon entering Chaos, Satan assumes his final, serpentine form, slithering through the air in defiance of the fierce winds, waves, lightning, and flaming rainfall. Finally, the Satanic serpent pierces through to our cosmos, our vulnerable world reflected in his glassy eye. Darting downward, the Satanic serpent descends toward the Earth in spirals. What follows next: “all Hell broke loose,” in the words of Milton (IV.918), a massive vacuum sucking the Underworld through the gates of Hell and Chaos, the debris (including the chain which bound the fallen angel earlier) swirling downward with the serpent, encircling the Earth. As Nature is disrupted by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, the “golden Chain” suspending our “pendant world” (II.1051–52) is withdrawn into the ocean as the serpent and the sulfurous swirls which follow in his wake enwrap the globe, the camera zooming out to reveal the planet free-floating, seemingly alone in the universe, alienated from Heaven.

As the “Rattle That Lock” video ends, we are left with the same ambivalent impression made by Milton’s poem: while we sympathize with the fallen angel who is cast down from Heaven into Hell, and while we admire Satan for his dauntless courage—exhibited not least in his temerity as a voyager—we are made to remember the end result of Satan’s heroic voyage: the infernal conquest of the world. All the same, the dramatic fall of Lucifer at the start of the video is genuinely Romantic: catastrophic loss and liberation intertwined. “Rattle that lock, lose those chains,” the chorus chants as Lucifer plummets toward the lake of fire, the voice of Gilmour reassuring us that “From the burning lake or the eastern gate / You’ll get through it…” The message matches that of the Romantic Satanists: “Whatever it takes to break / Gotta do it…”

Whether it’s the fallen archangel chained on Hell’s burning lake or our postlapsarian parents exiled through Eden’s eastern gate, what matters most is that, even if they could not break their fetters, they rattled their locks. Milton’s Satan could not overthrow Almighty God, but by his doomed defiance, Satan “shook his throne” (I.105) inasmuch as he refused to offer “Knee-tribute…prostration vile” (V.782), and even in Hell disdained “To bow and sue for grace / With suppliant knee, and deify his power,” which, the prideful Satan declares, “were an ignominy and shame beneath / This downfall…” (I.111–16). “Satan wants to go on being Satan,” observed Christian apologist and Milton critic C. S. Lewis. “That is the real meaning of his choice ‘Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n’ [I.263].”¹ We can all sympathize with the spirit of this: we face seemingly insurmountable forces in life, but trudge on, wading through the world in a struggle to stay true to ourselves. It a sentiment at the heart of Romantic Satanism, captured quite beautifully in Gilmour’s “Rattle That Lock” song and its accompanying video, which, if nothing else, is the closest we’ve come to getting an animated film of Paradise Lost, demonstrating the potential in such an endeavor.

 

Notes

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^{1. C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press, [1942] 1961), p. 103.↩}