A Paradise Lost Movie? Really?

24Apr/060

A Paradise Lost Movie? Really?

Various news outlets reported this week:

Paradise Lost, John Milton's epic poem about Adam and Eve's temptation and fall, is to be turned into a feature film for the first time since its publication more than 330 years ago. Hollywood producers aim to keep the screen version faithful to Milton's 1667 original, a complex work comprising 12,000 lines of blank verse. The production is described as "epic in scope and size".

Please. I'm a fan of the poem, but there's no way it's going to transfer faithfully to film. Screenwriters Phil DiBlasi and Byron Willinger are going to have a rough time of it, even if they are theology PhDs. And beyond that, I think that there is almost zero audience that will go see this. Just me and a few English teachers. The Evangelicals who showed up for Passion of the Christ will stay home for a sympathetic portrayal of Satan.

That's right. In Paradise Lost, Satan is the most interesting and well-developed character. Adam and Eve are dullsville. You might compare it to Gangs of New York, which drags any time Leo and Cameron Diaz show up.

Let's look deeper into why you'll never see Paradise Lost on the big screen...That self-appointed guardian of the canon, Harold Bloom¹, asserts that Paradise Lost's striking feature is the dense allusions:

A reader, thinking of Milton's style, is very likely to recognize that style's most distinctive characteristic as being the density of its allusiveness.

--"Milton and His Precursors." A Map of Misreading. Oxford UP, 1975.

And to whom, according to Bloom, does Milton frequently allude? Homer, Virgil, Dante, Tasso and especially Edmund Spencer. (The Bible seems curiously absent from Bloom's list; perhaps it needed no saying.) These allusions are not basic ones about broad episodes from these earlier epics, but rather their more obscure footnotes. Take the first sentence -- please:

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of Chaos: or, if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

Do the screenwriters really propose to be faithful to Sion hill, Siloa's brook or the Aonian mount? Going to Israel and shooting a plate of Mount Zion isn't going to make Milton's point that he's transporting the traditional invocation of the epic muse ("Sing, goddess") out of Greece and to the Holy Land. And without great movie versions of The Iliad, The Odyssey² or The Faerie Queene from which to pull visual allusions, that dimension of the poem is pretty much out.

One could easily imagine the screenwriters trimming the opening narration to:

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
Sing, Heavenly Muse.

Cut to the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve supine beneath, naked as newborn babes.

Of course, Milton's style is not all allusion. For a blind guy, Milton could be remarkably visual. But his visuals are encumbered by sheer encyclopedicity. Milton's imagery comes in catalogues, as in the famous line:

Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shades of death

It can be filmed, sure, with copious CGI. The filmmakers might as well be adapting Leaves of Grass.

As far as Milton's majestic language goes, once you've gone through with a thesaurus and Fliesher-Kinkaiderized the vocabulary for Multiplex Mike, you're not left with much Milton. That deliberate density that sets the scholar's heart a-palpating begs for actors whose vowels are so sonorous the American public will mistake them for the saxophone of Kenny G, and promptly fall asleep. Only a cross-woodyallenation could make cinematic a scene of devils debating the proper way to make war on God...

DEVIL ONE
I'm agnostic about God. I pray, but I don't expect anything.

DEVIL TWO
Hey, Hell's not so bad. It's no gulag archipelago.

There are probably executives somewhere in the sulfurous lake of Hollywood whining to their development demons, "Why didn't we think to adapt Paradise Lost? Every other Shakespeare play has been turned into a teen comedy!" But they'll be crowing 'I told you so,' if it ever does hit the box office. Because even based on plot alone, it wouldn't entertain.

Though grouped together in survey courses, Milton, for all his blank verse, is no Shakespeare. He doesn't have the same popular appeal, nor was he trying to have popular appeal. Shakespeare wrote for the stage. He was a dramatist and a master of creating plots and characters that speak to the human soul. Milton is interested in speaking to the human soul as well, but instead of doing it via entertaining plots and charaters, he places the collect call of theology.

The story of Adam and Eve is told pretty succinctly in the Bible. Milton expands on the logline mostly by fleshing out the fallen angel Satan. His backstory, and some sermons by the angel Raphael to Adam, fill the first eight books of Paradise Lost. It isn't until Book IX that Satan takes serpent form and commences to flatter Eve into chowing down on the forbidden fruit.

After that all hell breaks loose -- literally. Sin and Death enter the world. Meanwhile, Satan goes around bragging about his infiltration of Paradise. But he can hardly brag since God allowed the whole thing to happen and already knows how it ends.

God in Paradise Lost is sort of like the Chinese communist party, keeping the people on a need-to-know basis to maintain His hold on power. Jesus, on the other hand³, is a big softie, always trying to get Adam and Eve off the hook. This dynamic on film might work as a Laurel and Hardy routine, but that wouldn't be faithful to Milton's pretzel-theology, a brilliant mind contorting itself every which way to justify the Father-and-Son-in-One paradox.

With plot and style in the unfilmable column, a celluloid Paradise Lost looks hollower than a chocolate Easter bunny. Despite my pessimism, a big Hollywood Paradise Lost might still be able to take advantage of the remaining filmable elements -- after all, if you can't give the audience a good story, you can at least give 'em plenty of nudity and special effects!

FURTHER STUDY:
I recommend the Norton Critical Editions, which has the full text with a medium amount of glosses and several pertinent essays appended, including Harold Bloom's.
If you would like an abridged -- but only slightly -- version, the CD set put out by Naxos and read with demonic glee by Anton Lesser is superb. It also contains a booklet with most of the text of the poem. (The few abridged chapters are still around in the form of Milton's own prose summaries.)

1. Bloom is the A.O. Scott of the literary world, living in a private hall of mirrors where every work of art is made from the reflections of a dozen others that only he has the genius to adduce.
2. Save perhaps 2001: A Space Odyssey.
3. God's right hand, to be precise.