How a British Detective Novelist Can Help Us
Understand an American Film Obsession.
The first and most theologically sophisticated
tradition is the fallen angel motif that
stretches back into pre-Christian Jewish
antecedents. Sayers isolates the "dark angelic
melancholy" as the primary quality in this
tradition which gives Mephistopheles in Marlowe's
Doctor Faustus and Satan in Miltonâs Paradise
Lost their nearly tragic splendor that arises
from their recognizing the loss of proximity to the Creator.
The second tradition is rooted in a kind of
Manichean vision of a dark force pervading the
cosmos, a vision of evil in which the Devil
appears more as a spirit of negative energy set
counterpoised with the positive energy of God.
The cosmos is dualistic in this vision, with God
and the Devil balanced. Instead of being a fallen
angel who simultaneously longs for the splendor
of what was and who also hates the splendor of
God and heaven, seeking to destroy it by
corrupting human beings (the Marlovian and
orthodox image), devilsor the Devilare but
instantiations of thishis negative energy. Devils
or demons are thus interchangeable, merely
variable images of one pervasive and apparently
necessary part of reality, thereby rendering
distinctions between Lucifer and his minions,
like Mephistopheles, unnecessary. Though one can
detect elements of this dualism in Jewish,
Christian, and Muslim demonologies, this second
tradition is more Gnostic, a bit uncomfortable
with the intense monotheism of these three
Western religions in their orthodox forms. Sayers
claims that the more Manichean Mephistopheles of
Goethe's Faust is the literary version that has
most influence in the subsequent tradition in
contrast to Marloweâs more traditional depiction of evil.
The third manifestation of the Devil, according
to Sayers, is the one that grew from
pre-Christian folklore, that pervades much of
Medieval literature, and that continually pops up
in the literature of post-Christian culture. This
devil is the prankster, a trickster figure who
engages in nefarious horseplay and whom the
audience of Medieval theater expected to see at
some point for comedic effects. Sayers argues
that by the end of Part II of Goetheâs Faust,
Mephistopheles has transformed into this kind of
buffoonish figure. The puppet plays that grew out
of Marlowe's Faustus perpetuated this comedic
aspect of the Devil through the Reformation, and
it tenaciously hangs on in film today.
In American film, the Faust tradition mostly
gravitates toward the third category, the Devil
as buffoon, with number twoDevil as necessary
cosmic forceeappearing nearly as often,
sometimes combining with the third cateegory.
American cinema has done poorly with the first
category, in which the Faust figure is tragic and
damned, and also in which the Devil is portrayed
as a created being subordinate to God and whose
motivation is destruction of humans simply because they belong to God.
<http://metaphilm.com/index.php/detail/sympathy-for-the-devil/>Link
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