When writing the introduction to the Wordsworth edition of Shakespeare’s King Lear, I pointed out that Shakespeare had departed from his sources in order to give the play’s finale an exceptionally sceptical, anti-providential quality. ‘The gods defend her!’, cries Albany; but, half a line later, Lear enters bearing Cordelia dead in his arms. Has Shakespeare thus revealed his own scepticism?

Assessing Shakespeare’s religious outlook is notoriously difficult. Sometimes he seems traditionally pious, even credulous; sometimes, instead, he seems sceptical, even atheistic. Broadly, the earlier Shakespeare is more orthodox, the later Shakespeare more heterodox, but the pattern is not straightforward; it is wavering and uneven. Indeed, in the last of his history plays, Henry VIII (also known, ironically, as All Is True), the combination of sycophantic politics and conventional piety is blatant: God, we are assured by Archbishop Cranmer in prophetic mode, will pour blessings upon Elizabeth, destined to be Queen, and her successor, King James.

In the Sonnets, notably sonnets 141, 142 and particularly 152, the poet confesses his sinfulness in pursuing the dark-haired lady and thus betraying his wife. Sonnet 146 (‘Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth’) expresses traditional Christian doctrine: the poet rebukes himself for sinfulness, and says that he should curb the senses and nourish his soul in order to attain heavenly immortality. The sonnets are certainly personal and autobiographical: some of them, for example, a pun on the name of ‘Will’: 57, 80, 134, 135, 136 and 143. Generally, the sequence of sonnets is certainly heterodox (though not unique) in celebrating intense love for a beautiful and effeminate young man: a love condemned not only by the Bible but also – hypocritically – by the bisexual James I. (The Earl of Southampton, the most likely identification of the beautiful loved one, was so effeminate in appearance that for centuries the Cobbe portrait of him was thought to be a portrait of a woman, Lady Norton.) The sequence is also heterodox in describing the poet’s infatuation with a courtesan who is not beautiful and who is certainly promiscuous: ‘the bay where all men ride’. In sonnet 129 (‘Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame’), he denounces lust – but concedes that ‘none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell’; and in 141 he ruefully concludes that he has this gain: ‘That she that makes me sin awards me pain’. Repeatedly the sonnets voice the paradox that sin is recognised yet indulged.

The history plays often align God with the cause which (to Elizabethan eyes) was rightly victorious. Thus, in Richard III, ghosts of Richard’s victims denounce Richard and encourage Richmond. In the second tetralogy (the sequence combining Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V), the biblical story of the Fortunate Fall is re-enacted politically on a vast scale. After the Fall occasioned by the killing of Richard II, and after the wasteful civil wars during the reign of Henry IV, the fortunate culmination arrives with the successes of Henry V; and the astonishing victory at Agincourt is repeatedly ascribed by Henry to the will of God. Here, however, we may notice that the last speech of Henry V is a choric epilogue which says that all Henry’s French conquests were annulled in the ensuing reign of Henry VI. This epilogue completely subverts the sense of providential triumph. In addition, Shakespeare’s first tetralogy of history plays (Henry VI, Parts 1, 2 and 3, and Richard III) had already shown that though Henry VI was an exceptionally pious, God-fearing king, he was politically disastrous.

Of course, the histories often suggest, patriotically, that England is especially favoured by God. This point is most resonantly made by John of Gaunt in Richard II, Act 2, scene 1, the ‘sceptred isle’ speech. (The real John of Gaunt, far from being a patriotic seer condemning corruption, was a highly unpopular, corrupt magnate.) In King John, the king defies Cardinal Pandulph, the Pope’s legate, terming Roman Catholicism ‘juggling witchcraft’; and Pandulph says that the Pope will bless anyone who assassinates King John. This would have resonated in Elizabethan England, for Elizabeth had similarly been threatened with assassination by a Pope. John eventually dies in agony, ‘poisoned by a monk’. Certainly, King John indicates no Roman Catholic sympathies in Shakespeare.

The first and particularly the second tetralogy of history plays are enriched by their Christian dimension, which gives them a moral and thematic depth and complexity lacking in the Roman plays Titus Andronicus, Julius Cæsar and Coriolanus. (In Antony and Cleopatra, Roman austerity is offset by Egyptian luxury, so there is a compensatory richness.) The English histories repeatedly dramatise the difficulty of being a monarch who is both Christian and martial, both ‘the Lord’s anointed’ and an erring mortal.

Among the comedies, we may note that The Merchant of Venice predictably supports the Christians and opposes the Jew, Shylock (so that the play was popular in Nazi Germany); but the Jew is at least permitted some shrewd thrusts at the Christians, and the Christians’ eventual treatment of the Jew appears vindictive rather than merciful. Or so such treatment appears today; in Shakespeare’s day, it might not have done. (In 1594 the Queen’s physician, Dr Rodrigo Lopez, a Jew, was publicly hanged, drawn and quartered for supposedly plotting to poison her, after confessions had been elicited by torture. In Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, the Jew is a disciple of Machiavelli, who says: ‘I count religion but a childish toy.’)

Representatives of the church are sometimes depicted by Shakespeare in a critical light. In Romeo and Juliet, Friar Lawrence seems well-meaning, but he eventually flees from the burial-ground, leaving Juliet unaided. In Measure for Measure, the Duke disguises himself as a Friar to learn more about his subjects, but he meets his match when the convict Barnardine refuses to cooperate in his scheme (which would entail the hanging of Barnardine). Furthermore, the Duke, speaking as the Friar, envisages the after-life merely as a long sleep – an Epicurean or stoical rather than a Christian concept. He says:

Thy best of rest is sleep,

And that thou oft provok’st; yet grossly fear’st

Thy death, which is no more.

In Hamlet, the priest complains that since Ophelia committed suicide, she should not be buried in consecrated ground, and this provokes a splendid outburst from Laertes:

I tell thee, churlish priest,

A minist’ring angel shall my sister be,

When thou liest howling.

This evidently means that Laertes envisages her among the angels serving in Heaven while the priest’s soul howls in Hell. (We are surely meant to sympathise with Ophelia and to share Laertes’ hostility to the pharisaical priest.)

This is a reminder that Shakespeare sometimes looks with remarkable lenience upon people who commit suicide. In both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant faiths, suicide was then a sin guaranteeing damnation in Hell. In England until 1961, attempted suicide was a crime. But in Romeo and Juliet, after both Romeo and Juliet have committed suicide, their deed, far from being condemned, is regarded as a reproach to the survivors. Cleopatra’s death is a regal act, confirming her loyalty to Antony and defiance of Octavius. Othello’s suicide seems poignant and inevitable. When Horatio, appalled to see the dying Hamlet, is about to commit suicide by drinking the poison, Hamlet stops him, saying:

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw they breath in pain

To tell my story.

‘Absent thee from felicity awhile’ appears to mean ‘Postpone for a while the happiness that suicide would bring’ – a highly unorthodox notion. (It is to Hamlet, incidentally, that we owe what is possibly Shakespeare’s most sceptical utterance: ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’)

Of course, the Roman plays remind us that, traditionally, heroic Romans responded to calamity by suicide – ‘the high Roman fashion’, as Cleopatra calls it. Brutus, Cassius and Antony achieved such deaths. But suicide is also the course taken by failed ruthless schemers – Lady Macbeth (‘as ’tis thought’) and Goneril. Incidentally, a characterisation does not necessarily end with that character’s death. Julius Caesar lives on after his assassination – his ghost addresses Brutus ominously, and, as Brutus and Cassius die, they acknowledge that Caesar has prevailed. When Richard III prepares for his final battle, his defeat seems inevitable, since ranged against him are not only the forces of Richmond but also the ghosts of his victims, who appear nocturnally to curse him and encourage his foes.

The Ghost in Hamlet is a perplexing special case. Roman Catholics believed that ghosts were spirits from Purgatory. Protestants, however, had abolished Purgatory; so, for them, ghosts were devils in disguise, on the loose from Hell. Hamlet is uncertain about the Ghost’s provenance. The play of ‘The Mouse-Trap’ is used by Hamlet to test the Ghost as well as Claudius; for, if Claudius evinces guilt, this will show, Hamlet thinks, that the Ghost is a good ghost – truthful. But, of course, as Banquo in Macbeth reminds us, the Devil or his agents can utter truths when to do so serves wicked purposes: ‘oftentimes, to win us to our harm, / The instruments of darkness tell us truths’. So the ambiguity about the Ghost remains. (In one production that I saw, the 2000 National Theatre version, in the closing moments of the tragedy, the Ghost entered, looked with evident satisfaction on all the corpses lying about the stage, and withdrew.) In Henry VI, Parts 1 and 2, and in Macbeth, witchcraft is (alas) demonstrated to be real and hellish, the work of Satan, as King James argued in Dæmonologie. Richard III, however, shows that Richard falsely blames witchcraft for his withered arm.

In Measure for Measure, Act 3, sc.1, Claudio has a fine, impassioned speech beginning ‘Ay, but to die, and go we know not where’, in which he speculates on the torments which might await one in death. There you may even, he speculates,

be worse than worst

Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts

Imagine howling.

In other words, you might be in a worse plight than the worst of those victims who, according to the now-forbidden and unsound doctrine, can be imagined howling in Purgatory; for you would actually be suffering the torments of Hell. By abolishing Purgatory, Protestants had deprived believers of a posthumous ‘second chance’ of reaching Heaven.

Of course, Shakespeare was often dramatising the situations he found in his sources. Nevertheless, in Promos and Cassandra, the source of Measure for Measure, Andrugio, the counterpart to Shakespeare’s Claudio, has no speech equivalent to Claudio’s ‘Ay, but to die’ speech. One way of establishing Shakespeare’s own dramatic intentions, and possibly his beliefs, is to see what happens when he departs from the sources. Here, in a strongly dialectical drama, Shakespeare has chosen to dramatise contrasting views of death, as well as contrasting views of sexual morality. As George Bernard Shaw recognised, Shakespeare has constructed Measure for Measure as a paradoxical problem-play. In Troilus and Cressida, although Ulysses claims that we are all part of a divinely-ordained hierarchy, he says that this hierarchy can be smashed irrevocably by human egotism, and the play accordingly depicts a breakdown in order which is reflected in the very disorderly structure of the play’s own fifth act. As in King Lear, we encounter the extremely heterodox idea that human actions may destroy a supernaturally-ordained moral order. Eventually, in Troilus and Cressida, chivalry is outmoded, love proves false, and divinity is conspicuous by its absence.

I mentioned at the outset of this essay that Shakespeare departed from all the known sources of King Lear in order to give the play its peculiarly bleak, anti-providential ending. Only in Shakespeare’s version does Cordelia’s death precede Lear’s. And Shakespeare has so arranged events that God, or the gods, seem absent from the finale of the action. The play may even, like Troilus and Cressida, suggest that a God whom we deny is a God who then may die. Whether Shakespeare is expressing his own scepticism, or is simply choosing (as if in a literary experiment) to dramatise a sceptical mood, is almost impossible to establish. If it was personal, it may have been temporary or intermittent rather than durable.

We are given a clue in The Tempest. As is well known, this play has distinct autobiographical resonance. It is the last play solely by Shakespeare. The playwright was then contemplating retirement, as Prospero is; and Prospero repeatedly refers to his magic as his ‘art’, thus helping us to relate the career of the magician to the career of the dramatist. In what is probably the finest speech of the play, Prospero (having dismissed the performers of the masque) says to Ferdinand:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors

(As I foretold you) were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vexed.

It’s a moving, poignant, and persuasive speech. It says that if the masque vanishes, that is not surprising, because the whole world, and all of us who inhabit it, are part of one great cosmic vanishing trick. Everything will dissolve away, and we with it. We are as insubstantial as dream stuff, and, at the end of our lives, there is merely sleep. Perhaps, finally, Prospero is ‘vexed’ because he has remembered the conspiracy of Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo; or perhaps he is vexed because his reflections have led him to envisage such total dissolution. No talk here of an afterlife, of a Heaven to be attained by the virtuous; no, after the dream of life comes the sleep of death, from which no wakening is envisaged. Here Shakespeare expresses a memorably lyrical and thorough scepticism. There was no source text for this speech; we are listening to Shakespeare’s original creativity.

The question looms: Is Shakespeare here creating a speech which is appropriate to the character and the themes of this play, but which does not express Shakespeare’s own viewpoint; or is he creating a speech which is not only appropriate to the character and the themes of the play but which also expresses his own viewpoint? And, if the latter, is it a viewpoint which he entertained briefly or held more enduringly? In Shakespeare’s day, heretics (who could in theory include atheists) were burnt at the stake, and in any case, there would be immense pressure upon dramatists to express a conventionally pious view. This means that expressions of scepticism, particularly when delivered by a good character (such as Prospero) and not by a villain (such as Macbeth, in the speech beginning ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’), deserve special attention. Such utterances required courage from the author. Christopher Marlowe, more heterodox than Shakespeare, was silenced by assassination in 1593.

At the end of The Tempest is a strange epilogue in which the voice of Prospero becomes the voice of the actor playing Prospero, and finally the voice, it seems, of Shakespeare himself. That Epilogue, introduced as ‘spoken by Prospero’ is as follows:

Now my charms are all o’erthrown,

And what strength I have’s mine own,

Which is most faint. Now,’tis true,

I must be here confined by you,

Or sent to Naples. Let me not,

Since I have my dukedom got,

And pardoned the deceiver, dwell

In this bare island, by your spell;

But release me from my bands,

With the help of your good hands. 10

Gentle breath of your my sails

Must fill, or else my project fails,

Which was to please. Now I want

Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;

And my ending is despair,

Unless I be relieved by prayer

Which pierces so, that it assaults

Mercy itself, and frees all faults.

As you from crimes would pardoned be,

Let your indulgence set me free. 20

This Epilogue combines three layers of meaning. In the first, Prospero incorporates the audience into the fictional action, saying that their cooperation is needed if his return to the mainland and the successful completion of his project are to be achieved. In the second layer (which emerges strongly in lines 9-13), the actor of the rôle solicits the applause and goodwill of the audience. In the third layer (which emerges strongly at lines 13-20), it seems not only that Prospero begs for prayers for divine help and that the actor seeks the spectators’ indulgence, but also that the playwright, contemplating retirement, asks the hearers for their intercessional prayers on his behalf: for these acts of prayer (he says) have the capacity to be so effectively penetrating that they forcefully solicit God, source of all mercy, and thus obtain the playwright’s liberation from sin and error.

Given the repeated attacks on the theatre, players and playwrights by Puritans and by influentially pious figures in his lifetime, it would not be surprising for Shakespeare to feel some religious guilt about his profession: indeed, some guilt had already been expressed in sonnets 110 and 111:

Alas, ’tis true, I have gone here and there

And made myself a motley to the view…

And almost thence my nature is subdued

To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.

Shakespeare, however, loved paradox. He didn’t delete from The Tempest the heretical ‘Our revels now are ended’ speech: he let it stand, splendidly. It is the combination of such an utterance with the concluding epilogue which displays the richness of his questing imagination. The late romances (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest) offer a complex fusion of Christian and classical theology, but Christianity has the last word.

Shakespeare’s will, completed in the year of his death, 1616, contains a conventional but nevertheless notable religious affirmation, Protestant in spirit:

I Comend my Soule into the handes of god my Creator hoping & assuredlie beleeving through thonelie merittes of Iesus Christe my Saviour to be made partaker of lyfe everlastinge And my bodye to the Earth whereof yt ys made[.]

To conclude. In the great diversity of his works, Shakespeare gave expression to a diversity of religious and anti-religious ideas. Some of the sceptical ideas may have been his, for a while, and not merely those of literary characters in the plays. Certainly, in King Lear and Troilus and Cressida, the sceptical imagination seems strongly and extensively at work. In The Tempest, the relationship between Prospero’s ‘Our revels now is ended’ speech and the contrastingly pious Epilogue indicates that Shakespeare, late in life, relished sceptical imaginings but yet experienced guilt for them and sought religious forgiveness. Finally, I see no reason to doubt the sincerity of the expression of faith in his will. That it was conventional does not render it insincere.

The post Cedric Watts writes about Sceptical Shakespeare appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

For the cynics among us, Christmas can be a…complicated time of year. Sure, the festive atmosphere is fine, I guess. The eggnog and Christmas Eve tamales are nice. Pilar certainly makes a killer tamal, especially the pork ones. She makes them and seasons them just right, with more filling than masa. Once in a great while, where I live at least, nature graces us with a blanket of snow, or at least a 100 thread count top sheet of snow, which I guess is pretty magical or whatever. The Black Friday sale is pretty good, too, especially for stocking up on cheap presents for yourself (don’t even try to be outraged, we all do it, even you….I saw what you did on Black Friday, Paul). And of course, the pièce de résistance, that fat stack of juicy presents under the tree from everyone’s favourite old Christmas trespasser, Santy Claus, and his cadre of mercilessly horsewhipped and abused magical flying beasts of burden (I’m sure the ASPCA would be very curious to examine the reindeer’s stables and living conditions up there at the ole North Pole).

As a practising celebrant of not only Christmas but also Festivus, I’m obliged at this time of year to perform the Airing of the Grievances. It’s time to put my foot down on this Christmas humbug. The whole holiday is all just so….cheerful. So wretchedly merry, so disgustingly cutesy, and usually in a painted-on, plasticky way. Beneath the paper-thin façade of seasonal joy lies a hollow, empty ocean, a gaping black maw of nothingness. It’s as though a month-long season of a handful of holidays can mask another year of failures and disappointments in our friends, our family, our governments, and most of all, in ourselves. Nowhere is this bizarre phenomena of denial, rationalization, and compensation more apparent than in our Christmas media.

Every December we are swept away by a flood of Christmas songs, the same old songs we’ve heard 10,000 times over, covered over and over and over and over again by every pop star, boy band, Youtube a cappella group, rock band, drunken barroom crooner, and elementary school choir in the Western world. On film and television, we’re forced to endure an unbearably relentless cavalcade of sweepy, weepy, happy, sappy, faith-affirming, life-affirming, and maudlin stories, a revoltingly positive avalanche of heartwarming and tenuously defined “family values.” From a scientific perspective, there is a serious problem with such heartwarming entertainment. You see, the body is medically in a state of fever at just 100.4 F, or 38 C. Our corporeal forms literally cannot tolerate much heartwarming until we become physically ill, and seriously so.

Considering that Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” is the single most popular Christmas story in all fiction, it has naturally fallen victim to many a heartwarming adaptation on the screen over the years. Some of these versions have been quite heartwarming indeed, often veering dangerously into the fever zone, inciting such symptoms as flushing, elevated blood pressure, heart palpitations, dizziness, nausea, profuse sweating, vomiting, and instant, painful, and extremely permanent death. Sometimes I get tired of the same old story. After watching over a dozen versions of the story, you’re sick to death of Tiny Tim and his Christmas blessings.

Sometimes, when I’m alone with my thoughts and no one is looking or listening, Evil Me wonders what it would be like for poor little Tiny Tim to finish out the story by croaking out “God is dead!” before keeling over in a fatal coughing fit. Evil Me wants to see Mrs Cratchit’s Christmas pudding turn out into a rancid, brandy-soaked flaming disaster that makes everyone cry. Evil Me wants Scrooge to immediately backslide on December 26th, and mosey on down to the nearest child slavery workhouse to hand out Ayn Randian proto-Objectivist pamphlets to the children with the title, “You Deserve This, or: 40 Good Reasons Your Parents Abandoned You and You Should Be Grateful For This Opportunity To Be Useful” with a nasty Cheshire cat grin on his face. But there are three adaptations of “A Christmas Carol” that I hold close to my coal-black heart during this unforgivably jolly and gay time of year, three versions that darken my fireplace and elicit an involuntary and dimly lit sinister grin in me. And so I present the Christmas curmudgeon’s guide to the three least heartwarming versions of “A Christmas Carol,” and its hero, Ebenezer Scrooge.

The BBC’s “Blackadder’s Christmas Carol” from 1988 is delightfully cynical, sardonic, and sarcastic, and completely flips the Dickens tale on its head. Rowan Atkinson stars, once again, as Ebenezer Blackadder, “the loveliest man in all England,” a significant departure from all his deliciously evil and awful Blackadder ancestors and relatives. His Scrooge does indeed live very frugally, but not out of greed. Blackadder is practically destitute to the point of hunger because he is ruinously generous to his local charities and fellow citizens. He gives away his literal last penny, as well as his own Christmas turkey, a bowl of nuts, and all of his own gifts. He’s so magnanimous and munificent that everyone not only takes advantage of him but openly mocks him for it.

He is visited by one consolidated Spirit of Christmas, played by Robbie Coltrane, who ostensibly visits him to show him the value of his good deeds (but is really only there to drink Blackadder’s stash of whiskey). Blackadder is shown visions of his horrible ancestors, who trick and connive and lie their way to great wealth, favour and success. He sees two competing visions of his future: one where he succumbs to greed and power and becomes emperor of the universe, and another where he becomes a half-naked slave boy. He learns from his supernatural visitation that the greedy, cunning, and unscrupulous are those who truly prosper and succeed, or as he plainly states, “It points to the very clear lesson that the bad guys have all the fun!” And so he becomes the Scrooge we all know and love. Or hate. Whichever. Ice cold.

Blackadder’s Heartwarming Ability: -2 C/ -3.6 F

The next entrant on the list comes from the unlikeliest of places, the multinational greeting card giant Hallmark Cards. In 1986, artist John Wagner created a surly, sarcastic, and utterly amazing character named Maxine for the brand’s more daring “Shoebox Greetings” division. Though she began as a humble greeting card character, Maxine, the crabbiest old cooter west of the Mississippi, and her trusty ole pooch Floyd have evolved into veritable greeting card royalty. She’s a TV movie star, an off-broadway hit, and you can currently purchase her likeness spouting irreverent wisdom in a host of household products, including cards, fridge magnets, calendars, mugs, tree ornaments, tote bags, and more. Following a faithful and relatively big-budget, live-action, period-accurate adaptation of “A Christmas Carol” in 1999 starring Patrick Stewart, Hallmark Entertainment revisited the story in 2000 as a low-budget animated short film starring voice acting legend Tress MacNeille (of “The Simpsons” and “Futurama” fame, and countless others) as Maxine in the remarkable and highly uncharacteristic film “Maxine’s Christmas Carol.” To understand why this film is special, a brief explanation of the Hallmark Channel and its production studio Hallmark Entertainment are in order.

Hallmark Channel needs to be stopped, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. If it were a person, it would need to be institutionalized and mercilessly sprayed down daily with a fire hose. It is currently infamous for its tradition of an annual tidal wave of sickeningly wholesome and inspirational and hopelessly derivative Christian-themed Christmas movies. To give you an idea of the sheer scope and scale of their Christmas onslaught, Hallmark Channel has made ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-SIX Christmas-themed TV movies since 2008. Their holiday film addiction has escalated so much that they made TWENTY-ONE new films in 2018 about Christmas alone. These films are almost exclusively romantic comedies starring grown-up sitcom child actors and washed-up pop singers with botox, bleached teeth, $400 haircuts, and, I assume, exponentially mounting gambling debts. TRIGGER WARNING: Here is just the faintest little sampling, nay, a mere hors d’oeuvre of just this year’s Christmas offerings: “A Gingerbread Romance,” “Jingle Around the Clock,” Mingle All the Way,” “Christmas Made to Order,” “Christmas in Love.” I could list them all, but I choose not to, because it’s better for everyone this way.

This is why “Maxine’s Christmas Carol” stands out so much today. It’s remarkably weird, hilarious, and kind of not really for kids at all, despite all appearances. Maxine has some essential Scrooge traits: she’s antisocial and a total sourpuss, especially around Christmas. But she isn’t rich, or a miser. She’s actually a good person who defends the weak and can’t stand bullies. She hates Christmas for its shallowness and commercialism. She opts to spend Christmas alone with her dog and some frozen burritos, and she hates overpriced Christmas-themed coffee. She cracks all kinds of edgy and borderline inappropriate jokes about sex, fat former lovers, her sagging breasts, flipping the bird, and alien anal probes. She’s disgusted to see “It’s a Wonderful Life” on TV instead of old kung fu movies. This film is oddly self-referential and even ventures into commentary on American politics and driving insurance rates. Best of all, after Maxine’s ghostly visits, she does have an epiphany and make a change, but it’s infinitely more subtle than Ebenezer Scrooge. Rather than radically change overnight and become an entirely different person, Maxine simply decides to attend a Christmas party for her new friend Billy, and to become a nicer person only on Christmas. She asserts, “I’ll give ‘em Christmas, but the other 364 days are mine to be as crabby as I want!” It’s refreshing to see such honesty and character restraint. It’s also worth noting that a modified version of this story, also titled “Maxine’s Christmas Carol,” has been performed as a stage show in Branson, Missouri, starring Cathy Barnett as Maxine.

Maxine’s Heartwarming Ability: Neutral

At last we come to what is by far the greatest, most beautiful, most epic holiday-themed film ever set to celluloid. No, it is not “It’s a

Wonderful Life,” “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” John Carpenter’s “Halloween,” or “A Christmas Story.” It’s probably not any film you’re thinking of, because my opinion is in the minority (but it is also correct, while yours is incorrect). I speak, of course, of Richard Donner’s masterful “Scrooged,” starring Bill Murray, who is the best thing since the discovery of penicillin, and written by Mitch Glazer and Michael O’Donoghue, two of Murray’s favorite writers from his “Saturday Night Live” tenure.
“Scrooged” is absolute gloriously irreverent film adaptation perfection. It respects its source material in spirit but not in letter. It captures the essence of “A Christmas Carol” entirely, but with a cynical late 20th-century twist full of raw honesty, social commentary, politically incorrect humour, zombies, nipple slips, and laugh-out-loud ridiculousness about the absurdities of modern life and media at literally every turn. “Scrooged” is, in many ways, an unfaithful film. It’s completely metafiction, and totally tongue-in-cheek. It’s an adaptation of the novella, about a TV executive who is producing a film about the novella, and the film’s story closely mirrors the story they’re rehearsing and filming at every turn. None of the character names matches up, some characters are consolidated or split up, and plot points are dropped, moved, or mixed around, but Bill Murray’s Frank Cross is undoubtedly a modern Ebenezer Scrooge. If the film has any flaw that I can see, it’s that it makes his romance with his lost love a major story element, which occupied all of two pages of the novella, but the love story here is done so well and played so convincingly by Murray and Karen Allen that it’s entirely forgivable.

The production of “A Christmas Carol” that Frank is working so hard to bring to fruition throughout the film deserves some discussion. It is a fever pitch of hyperbloated, big-budget TV hysteria, to rival the Super Bowl of the 2010s. Inexplicably called “Scrooge” instead of its actual title, this film, if it were actually to be made, would be, by far, the most ridiculous, absurd, bloated, and overcooked monstrosity that television had ever produced. It’s a $40 million live TV production (or $83 million in 2018 dollars), telecast from New York City, Bethlehem, Helsinki, the Great Barrier Reef, and featuring a live mass-baptism of the entire Zulu nation by the Pope (certainly uninvited and highly racially questionable). This laughably misguided television abortion features John Houseman narrating the Solid Gold Dancers, scantily clad and dancing in London’s freezing winters to hip hop musical numbers and Olympic gold medalist, Mary Lou Retton, as Tiny Tim, who instantly casts off his crutches and vaults into a somersault and a fancy 360 backflip. I could die happy if I ever saw this interpretation of Dickens’s story. Not only was a $40 million live TV film bombastically absurd at the time, but even today, the most expensive TV show is “Game of Thrones” at around $15 million per episode. The shooting script differs a bit from the film in the occasional scene that’s missing from the film, but most notably for its explicit casting of Marlon Brando as Scrooge, and Chuck Norris as Santa’s flamethrower-toting saviour in one of the network’s ultraviolent Christmas movies. One assumes that most of the budget would have gone to Brando so that he could buy the tropical island adjacent to his.

If this bizarre version of “A Christmas Carol” were to be shown on an American network today, it would likely be even more ridiculous than was predicted in the film. Not only would a dazed Gary Busey play Scrooge, with an army of washed-up celebrities from reality TV filling out the cast, but Tupac Shakur’s hologram would fill in all the scene gaps with performances of every song from his latest undiscovered album. There would also be a “Dickens Blowout Bash” halftime show after the third stave, featuring Jay Z, Justin Bieber, Drake, Post Malone, and Ed Sheeran in frock coats, sideburns, and mustachios, and Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, and Adele in bonnets and lace-bedecked bell dresses. With special appearances by Cirque du Soleil and Toto, performing “Africa” for no apparent reason, and David Copperfield with a special magic act where he makes all of Damien Hirst’s pickled sharks disappear (arguably the man to beat for the Guinness record for the world’s largest gefilte fish), much to England’s relief.

In “Scrooged,” Bill Murray takes an already wonderful script and makes it his own. He ad-libs dozens of jokes that make up most of the best comedy in the film. This film could never be made today, with its politically incorrect humour, and especially due to the character Eliot’s transformation from a fired, depressed employee into a psychotic, murderous would-be workplace serial killer at the urging of Murray during an extreme bipolar manic episode. A film like this will never be made again, and I understand why and love it all the more for its flaws and as a product of its time. But Frank Cross’s manic televised revelation at the end of the film about the true meaning of Christmas, and the value of love and generosity to mankind, is genuinely affecting. Director Richard Donner thought Bill Murray transformed from a comedian into a genuine dramatic actor in his performance of the last scene of the film: “Billy really became an actor to me during Scrooged. I had always thought of him as an entertainer. Now, having worked with him, I could see him playing a heavy.” Bill Murray went on from “Scrooged” to deliver many great performances that were both dramatic and comedic, from “Groundhog Day,” to “Rushmore” to countless others.

Bill Murray’s Heartwarming Ability: 1 C/ 1.8 F

And so, dear friends, I conclude my curmudgeonly review of the least heartwarming film and TV adaptations of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” All three of these versions happen to be outright comedies, which are certainly outliers for the totality. There truly is a Scrooge for every mood, and I have plenty of love for many different kinds. These sarcastic and sardonic Scrooges are certainly more on my wavelength, but I don’t begrudge those who prefer the more vanilla Scrooge. I kinda like that guy, too, even after his Christmas epiphany and transformation into a nice guy.

May it be said that both you and I can always keep Christmas well if anyone possesses that knowledge. May it be said not just of us, but all of us. And as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, all of us!

………….Just kidding.

The post “Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!” appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

Well, friends. It’s Christmas. Again. Yaaay. Once again, we celebrate this, the most wonderful time of the year, with deadly Walmart, flash sale stampedes to the soundtrack of Wham!’s “Last Christmas” set on repeat. Once again, we dance beneath the mistletoe to soul-soothing covers of the classics and heartwarming original tunes of holiday joy by such crooners as Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, Patti LaBelle, Michael Bublé, Bob Goulet, Wild Man Fischer, and of course, the inimitable Eric Idle. It’s Christmastime in the city (and in the country, too, I suppose), and children are laughing, and people are passing, meeting smile after smile, and on every street corner, you hear silver bells. But it doesn’t stop there. Oh, no.

Everywhere you go, you’re treated to an aural onslaught, a sadistically violent assault on your delicate eardrums, with the incessant, relentless and maddening RINGA-DINGA-LINGA-CHINGA-RINGA-LINGA-SHINGA-DINGA-RINGA-RINGA! of the deafening handbells furiously swung by the dreadful army of panhandling Salvation Army Santas permanently camped outside of every department store, gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse, cathouse, and doghouse in America. Even at your Christmas dinner table, for some reason, someone let one of them in. They’ve breached the castle walls. While you’re delicately nibbling your nana’s spice cake and ham, the Salvation Army Guy (whose name is most likely Greg) is asking for spare change while thunderously banging his little bell in your face until the concussive shockwaves of sound cause spinal fluid to leak out of your ears and you begin to suffer from short term memory loss and blurred vision. Even when you turn the shower on and pull back the curtain, Greg is there, soaking wet in full Santa attire, staring into your soul with a haunted thousand-yard stare, smashing that bell until the mirror cracks. The Gregs of the world, dedicated and professional Santas that they are, will never eat. They will never sleep. And they will never stop. Ring-a-ling. Hear them ring.

And so it is that we find ourselves lucky enough to be in that time of year again for forced merriment, massive credit card debt and payday loans to afford another haul of presents, drunk relatives aspersing your political affiliation over dinner, and, of course, an obligatory annual reading of Charles Dickens’s classic novella, A Christmas Carol. I suppose that being flooded with so much stomach-churning Christmas cheer from all sides might actually make one’s Christmas somewhat merry, even if only by accident. So bring on the book and the eggnog, I say. Carol is the quintessential Christmas story, and the overwhelming (and still growing) number of adaptations that have been made of the story in every medium of entertainment attest to its enduring popularity. It seems likely that even after homo sapiens has relocated to another galaxy in the 24 ½th century, we’ll still be flocking to the movies and to the theatre in our flying horseless carriages to see men in shiny foil spacesuits (which is what people would be wearing all the time in the 24 ½th century, obviously) acting out the cherished old tale of Scrooge the miser and how he reformed his selfish ways on Christmas day.
Lovers of Dickens’s book are absolutely spoiled for choice among the sea of excellent adaptations of the story, especially on film, but also on TV, stage, and in archived radio plays. Being a character who transforms completely from a revoltingly cruel misanthrope to a loving, generous honorary city father, the role is especially difficult to act, and requires the talents of a skilled veteran leading actor. Consequently, the list of actors who have played the part of Scrooge is as diverse as it is impressive. As “A Christmas Carol” is one of the most adapted works of fiction in any medium, in good company with the likes of “Dracula” and “The Three Musketeers,” there’s a Scrooge for every mood, plus a few leftover for Mom and Dad and the kids, and even 31 flavors of Scrooge at the ice cream parlor. So it seems that a breakdown of some of the best, worst, and most notable versions of the tale may be helpful.

When watching almost any film version of the book, one notices a remarkable trend that is unique to “A Christmas Carol.” While there are some exceptions, most film and television versions of the story are extraordinarily faithful to the original, with virtually every scene and character intact, as well as nearly all of the dialogue. This is true to such a degree that by about the third or fourth version, you can recite every line of dialogue along with the actors, and get about 90% of it right. Filmmakers over the decades have seemed to operate under an unspoken understanding that the book is much more of a play than a novel, and it is treated as such with absolutely minimal deviation or improvisation.

“A Christmas Carol” goes hand in hand with film history’s earliest years, with the first adaptation being a silent short film dating from 1901. The next dates from 1908, after which there was a new version on average every 2 years or so, until the advent of television, and there has been on average about one new production of “A Christmas Carol” on film or TV every year since the ’50s.
Being such a popular story, there are, inevitably, some more distinguished and beloved versions than others. The 1938 adaptation starring Reginald Owen and the 1951 film with Alastair Sim are traditionally thought of as the “classic Scrooges,” and are both fine films. For my money, the 1984 TV film with George C. Scott is a highlight. The film is good, but Scott stands out, for me, as the best incarnation of Scrooge. Being one of Hollywood’s best leading men, with a vast range across genres, as seen in Dr Strangelove, Patton, and The Changeling, he delivers by far the most satisfying performance. His miserly Scrooge is a genuinely frightening sociopath who isn’t just indifferent to the suffering of the poor, he delights in it. In contrast, his enlightened Scrooge is brimming with joy and cheer, like a benevolent grandfather one hasn’t seen in years.

While the 1970’s musical “Scrooge” with Albert Finney is good enough, the one that has the musical Scrooge market absolutely cornered is “A Muppet Christmas Carol” from 1992 with Michael Caine. Not only is Caine an excellent Scrooge who very nearly brought a single tear to my weary old bone-dry eyeball, but the musical numbers are great, and the film is both hilarious and cute enough as to nearly induce vomiting. It’s so endearing and loveable, in fact, that it made me run outside to skip betwixt the dewberries and tiptoe through the tulips. It made me a kid again….and not at all in a figurative sense. It’s so funny and childishly innocent that it literally turned my body 6 years old again. Count Chocula, here I come!

Disney’s 2009 computer-animated “A Christmas Carol,” directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Jim Carrey, is my overall pick for the best “classic” adaptation of the novella. With a stellar cast and budget and production quality far exceeding any other version to date, the film captures the scope and scale of 1840s London and Dickens’s extraordinarily rich period detail much better than any other adaptation. It is also the only film to properly explore the horror and surreal elements of the story (it is a ghost story, after all). There are numerous other versions worthy of mention, including Hallmark Entertainment’s respectable 1999 telefilm with Patrick Stewart, Disney’s “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” from 1983 (which marked Mickey Mouse’s first appearance in theatres since 1953 and was nominated for the Oscar for a best animated short film), the hilarious “Rich Little’s Christmas Carol” from 1978 (with the master impressionist playing 18 different characters), Rankin/Bass’s “The Stingiest Man in Town” from 1978 (featuring the appropriately cast Walter Matthau’s perennial sour frown), and the Doctor Who episode “A Christmas Carol” from 2010 (with Michael Gambon in a truly bonkers episode featuring flying sharks as Santa’s reindeer, benevolent human trafficking, and a Stockholm Syndrome ice princess, to name a few).

There are two questionable versions worth a bit more discussion. The first is the TV film “Ebenezer” from 1998, with the story set in the Wild West. Jack Palance was exhumed and rudely awakened from his eternal slumber to play a gruff, rough ‘n’ tough, rootin’-tootin’, gun-totin’, card-cheatin’, stogie-smokin’ Scrooge at the ripe age of 79. He shuffles, winces, naps and mumbles his way through the film at a tortoise pace, and rumor has it that a team of EMTs was on set at all times with defibrillators and syringes full of adrenaline to jumpstart his heart in between takes. He somehow survived another 8 years after making the film. What more can be said about this version other than….it exists? It’s OK, Jack. You’ll always be my number one guy.

The next is “An American Carol” from 2008, directed by parodist David Zucker of “Airplane!” fame. This half-baked lost bet caught on film is a political “satire” version of the story, with Chris Farley’s brother (pretty sure that’s his actual name) as a parody of Michael Moore who openly plots to end July 4th as a holiday and to help Muslim terrorists destroy America (those wascally wabbits, up to their old tricks again!). He is visited by the ghosts of George Washington, George Patton and country superstar Trace Adkins to make him see the error of his ways and become a good person. This film really captures the spirit of Dickens’s original, in that the true meaning of human kindness and goodwill towards man actually lies in being a hyper-partisan hardcore conservative, a fundamentalist Christian, a lover of country music, and a zealous, bellicose and racist nationalist. If you’re a bit confused, it’s because all of those themes were buried deep beneath layer upon layer upon layer of subtext in Dickens’s story, like a literary onion, or a baklava. Buried so deep, in fact, that they’re not even there.

The story has also inspired many stage productions over the decades in America, the UK, and elsewhere, including plays starring Frank Langella, F. Murray Abraham, Tim Curry, Roger Daltry, Jim Broadbent, et al, musicals, and even ballets and operas. Even Dickens’s great-great-grandson, Gerald Charles Dickens, regularly performs the story in a one-man show around the world. In radio, Scrooge has had an impressive run as well, being played by such greats as Michael Gough, Laurence Olivier, Alec Guinness, Claude Rains, Orson Welles (he played the role quite well at 23 years old), and most famously, Lionel Barrymore for 18 nearly consecutive years for CBS’s Campbell Playhouse from 1934-53.

And there we have it, friends. A fairly thorough, if not exhaustive, run-down of the surliest and iffiest Scrooges to grace the screen, stage, and radio. But wait. “A Christmas Carol” enthusiasts may have spotted one or two beloved versions, a bit more liberally adapted from the source material, missing from this survey (while shaking your heads in disbelief and wishing that I be boiled with my own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through my heart, no doubt). You may have noticed that the GREATEST HOLIDAY FILM OF ALL TIME was nowhere to be seen. Fear not, and stay tuned, dear readers, for…..

The Christmas Curmudgeon’s Guide to the Three Least Heartwarming Versions of ‘A Christmas Carol’

And in parting, I offer this bit of holiday wisdom:

Now, more than ever, it is important to remember the true meaning of Christmas…..your life might just depend on it.

The main image features the classic Christmas artwork of Norman Rockwell 1894-1978

The post Peter Lancaster on the many faces of Scrooge appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

“Just Before the Dawn, I Awake and Find Yuggoth”

This is a time of Wilfred Owen commemoration. Last weekend I attended a conference dedicated to Owen and his legacy, and this coming weekend I’ll be in France to mark the hundredth anniversary of Owen’s death on November 4th, 1918, one week before the cessation of hostilities. And all over the country, in the Midlands where Owen lived his younger life, in Craiglockhart where he had his seminal encounter with Siegfried Sassoon, in Ripon where he spent his last creative period, he and his poetry will be remembered. There is a savage irony in this huge remembering of Owen. As a young poet, he wanted nothing so much as to be known as a poet among poets, a reincarnation of his beloved Keats. And so he was, and so he was remembered – but, like Keats, knew nothing about it.

Owen prefigured this not-knowing to some extent in his sonnet ‘To My Friend (with an identity disc)’, which I’ve written about before on this site. In that poem, he reflects on himself as dead (so this is a self-elegy), and reflects too on how then he might be remembered. And he rejects the obvious forms of remembering, the signs of fame – the proclamation of the ‘dead name’ inscribed ‘High in the heart of London’, the more hidden glory of the much-visited but ‘quiet place’ like that of Keats’s cypress-shaded grave. Instead, he imagines his name persisting through the simple token of his identity disc, worn against the heart of his friend.

But when Owen wrote this poem, did he really imagine himself dead? Hard for any of us to do that, though arguably easier for those faced with imminent death in battle, particularly with the high odds of dying that a junior officer such as Owen faced. But when any of us imagine our dying, the paradox is that we’re still in the picture – there to see its effects. There’s still that romanticism in ‘Identity Disc’ in that Owen sees himself dead, but alive to see himself dead.

There was a thread in the conference I attended that linked Owen to the post-Vietnam poets – poets like no other in the American tradition, yet drawing on an American form of poetic speech and breath and that large poetic imagination for which we can’t find an equivalent in Britain or even in Europe. It goes back to Walt Whitman, as indeed, tangentially, do the First World War poets, who saw in Whitman’s ‘Drum Taps’ (about the American Civil War) a model for their own response to war.

One of the Vietnam generation of poets, W. D. Ehrhart, said that he went off to fight thinking that he could be the Wilfred Owen of the Vietnam War – but that he had neglected to realise that the Wilfred Owen of the First World War had in fact ended up dead. Ehrhart survived, as did others – John Balaban (a conscientious objector who went to Vietnam as a member of the Peace Corps), Yusef Komunyakaa – and they wrote searing poetry out of a conflict that was, if possible, even more, brutal than the First World War. Dreadful damage was inflicted on the Vietnamese population, but dreadful damage was also done to the American soldiers who inflicted it.

There’s a direct line between these two conflicts and a direct line between the poets who have written of them. In each case, the lack of foreknowledge is implicit, as in Ehrhart and Owen, both seeing themselves as remembered poets – but neglecting to realise that their own deaths were entailed in that. Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Send-Off’ captures this tragic not-knowing which also carries in it a sort of knowledge which can’t be acknowledged.

So secretly, like wrongs hushed up, they went

Although the first line of the poem pictures the soldiers singing – ‘Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way’ – that ‘darkening lanes’ immediately imposes a sense of foreboding. Similarly

Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray

As men’s are, dead.

The supposedly celebratory sprigs of flowers become funereal even before the men have left (proleptic echoes here of Seamus Heaney’s ‘bloom of hawthorn’ in ‘In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge’).

I might dismiss this poem of Owen’s as too doom-laden, foreseeing dread even in what was in reality often a triumphal send-off, in the First World War anyway. But when I was a graduate student in America in 1971, I was on my way home to England, passing through JFK airport, when I saw a bizarre procession – young men followed by a small band of friends, one of the piping on what I remember as a sort of tin whistle, part celebration, part threnody. This was a funeral march before the funeral had happened; the young men were Vietnam conscripts going off to war. I have never forgotten the image and all that was contained in it. Owen’s poem catches some of that. And when he writes

Shall they return to beatings of great bells

In wild train-loads?

I think first not of First World War returnees but of Vietnam veterans who came back for the most part to silence and often to despair.

A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,

May creep back, silent, to village wells

Up half-known roads.

But then: those few imagined soldiers did at least comeback. Owen et al didn’t. I guess they’d rather have returned, even with the attendant griefs. John Balaban has a poem ‘If Only’ in which he imagines the happy life of survival. Its last line is

This is how it should have been.

There was a pervasive feeling as we celebrated Owen at the conference, that he should have known how he was remembered. He should have known that he was remembered. He should have known that the remembrances he imagined and then rejected – engraved name high up in London (now in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey), shaded grave visited by many pilgrims (as at his burial place in Ors, France) – came to pass. His poetry remains and sustains – but it would have done anyway. What we mourn is the irreplaceable life. This is how it should have been.

The Poems of Wilfred Owen, Introduction and Notes by Owen Knowles, Wordsworth Editions, 2002

Seamus Heaney, Field Work, Faber and Faber, 1979

John Balaban, www.johnbalaban.com

W. D. Ehrhart, www.wdehrhart.com

Yusef Komunyakaa, Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, 2001, Wesleyan University Press

The post Sally Minogue looks at the poet, Wilfred Owen appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

“Vote: n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.”

– Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

As all small-d democrats the world over know, democracy is a government of choices. And not easy choices, like Paul or John, Coke or Pepsi, In n Out or Shake Shack, Mom or Dad (where my children of divorce at, y’all?). Taking the fate of one’s country and community into one’s hands is no easy task and no small responsibility. For an informed citizen at the ballot box, choices are often difficult and sometimes morally compromising. It’s legitimately hard work to find reliable sources of information and study every measure and proposition. It’s exhausting trying to find CVs, platforms, endorsements, and voting and campaign contribution records for every candidate for President, Senate, House, Governor, State Assembly, Deputy County Commissioner, Comptroller, District Attorney, Assistant District Attorney, Assistant to the Assistant District Attorney, Assistant to the Regional Manager…you get the picture.

Participating in a democracy is inconvenient (mostly by design) and more often than not, the payoff for investing dozens of hours of research into your ballot is to have most or all your people and issues lose and lose hard (while you’re at it, world, why not send a cloud over to rain only on me?). But this is, as they say, decidedly a First World problem. Regardless of how often I lose, and even if I lose every political battle for the rest of my life, I’m still glad to have a voice and a choice. Every fight has winners, losers, and plenty of lip-licking spectators who had nothing better to do than watch more courageous people get hurt. If monarchies, aristocracies, and castes are passive systems for their subjects, with virtually every major life decision already made for everyone at birth, then democracy is an active one, full of risk, adventure, and free will, and it requires everyone to put a little skin in the game.

Democracy is a power that we, the people, have deliberately and painstakingly entrusted to ourselves after millennia of inferior, immoral, irrational, and unjust political systems the world over. But like all great powers, it can be a double-edged sword. A responsible citizenry can be a sheepdog, standing tall, selfless, and vigilant to protect the herd, with a glossy coat of well-groomed hair gloriously whipping in the wind from atop its high rocky sunset perch for an epic helicopter shot. Or it can be a rabid, cross-eyed, cackling chimpanzee with a huge scar across its face, an AK-47 in one hand, a Molotov cocktail in the other, and a big fat stogie in its mouth. In America, we’ve chosen the latter path. It’s over folks. It’s all over. We’ve jumped the shark. We’ve gone full chimp. We’ve gone fishing. We’ve gone coocoo for Cocoa Puffs. This is America now. Don’t pray. It won’t work. Either God is dead or he hates us with the hot hot heat of a trillion quasars.

As befitting our self-destructive human nature, there comes a time in the history of most democratic nations wherein the skies turn red and reality is subsumed by an unending waking nightmare that curdles the blood, quickens the beatings of the heart, disquiets and distempers the brain, and makes men’s minds unsound. Owing to an avalanche of fatal institutional mistakes, flaws, and corruption far too long to list here, and some stretching back even to the founding of the nation, the American people recently found themselves with just two “viable” and “practical” choices, both of which happened to be malodorous, revolting, hissing sewer rats.

But not all sewer rats are created equal. Some are just your run-of-the-mill soul-sold hellions, who think and act in accordance with what one expects from this contemptible species. Others are another breed altogether: the rare Sumatran giant sewer rat. The kind of rat you might lift the toilet lid one day to find winking at you and doing casual, lackadaisical backstrokes in the bowl. And flush him though you may, flush him though you might, over and over and over again, like the Terminator, he will be back. Like whatever the thing from It Follows is, he will always be back, each time more sinister and resolute than before. Like Poe’s maddening raven, he’ll be scratching, tapping away from inside the bowl at all hours of the dark of night. Like Bob Wiley, as many times as you think he’s gone, he’s not gone. He’s never gone, and each time he returns, his wide, sickly, ghastly grin is somehow even wider, more sickly, more ghastly than before. By some dark elvish magic uttered from a cursed ancient vellum grimoire written in the blood of the innocent, the abominable creature is still alive. It’s alive…it’s alive……it’s alive! It’s going to haunt your dreams for the rest of your life, with its horrifying hairpiece and that nasty smile with the pursed-lips kissy face. The prophecies foretell that only when the Blood Moon rises and the planets are aligned in a pentagram, such a creature is summoned forth to bubble up from the rancid, fetid tar pits of hell to be elected Prime Minister of Mixed Metaphors, and more importantly for our purposes, President of the United States. And worst of all, it will never, ever stop tweeting.

What to do when faith in one’s country is shaken to the core? We live under the tiny iron fist of a bonafide fascist, a semi-literate, breathtakingly incompetent, bedentured McDictator, spray-tanned daily well past the point of lightheadedness. This lecherous old misogynist and racist demagogue openly calls for violence against the press, even in the midst of a nationwide rash of record-breaking mass shootings and massacres (including against the press). He uses racial slurs against political opponents and puts immigrant children by the thousands in borderline concentration camps. He blows through civilian death records and drone strike body counts all over the Middle East with ease. He despises and mocks fallen and captive American soldiers, ethnic and religious minorities, women, the poor, the disabled, checks and balances, judges, due process, and the general principle of the rule of law that he fetishized so intensely for his credulous voters on the campaign trail. His enabling administration (a rogues’ gallery of corrupt sycophantic bootlickers, sociopaths, lobbyists, opportunists, and unlucky children and in-laws) is just as abhorrent and scaly as the id incarnate whom they serve. Our government is literally one shocking scandal after another on a daily basis, in a constant state of a constitutional crisis and damage control.

Sadly, this is a problem I don’t think we will be able to blow out of the airlock (with or without the benefit of a power loader), or cast out of this mortal plane of existence with a reading from the Necronomicon or a hosing down with positively-charged ghost goo fished out of the gutters of New York City. For those who care for the welfare of their country, a political crisis is a personal crisis as well. And so it is that I find myself in dire, urgent need of a vacation (or at least a daycation, or, at the very very least, a staycation), and a thorough physical and mental delousing. After a shower to soothe my chemically burned and inflamed skin, a good bender, and a quality ugly-cry sesh, I sober myself and turn to my trustiest and most reliable old pals for comfort: books. These days, they make for better companions than my fellow countrymen. To get some perspective on America’s current predicament, and to quiet my doubts about the democratic experiment, there is no title more apropos than Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

Tocqueville’s masterpiece, long and detailed as it is, stands in stark contrast to the political analyses of today. Surely owing to social and technological limitations of the time, and the adolescent state of political science as an academic discipline, the book is relatively light on hard facts and figures (by way of example, the first straw poll ever conducted in America was done only 11 years prior to the first volume’s publication). Rather, Tocqueville went the long way around, geographically and otherwise, and accomplished much of his research through good old-fashioned conversation to get a sense of the American character and identity. Months and months and months of it, with Americans from most, if not all, walks of life. Statistics, polls, census data, meta-data, pie charts, and so on, are certainly essential to modern political science, but Tocqueville’s book stands out for how glaringly human it is. The humanity of the book extends to its author as well, particularly in the chapters that reveal his own biases and cultural blinders on the issues of women, slavery, free blacks, and Native Americans. As comprehensive boots-on-the-ground documentation of American life, its like was not to be seen again in America until FDR’s establishment of the ambitious Works Progress Administration, exactly 100 years after the publication of Democracy in America. It’s a complex work, a literary gumbo of psychology, sociology, history, ethnography, politics, economics, religion, and more. Many of his minute observations on human folly and hypocrisy within a particular political system ring true to this day, and clear as a bell.

Tocqueville’s conclusion that democracy, and likely the republican kind, was soon to be the way of the world, proved to be true. That republican democracy is to be America’s future is still true today. We’re the world’s largest Energizer bunny. We just keep going and going and going. Maybe that won’t always be the case if we don’t reverse our empirical urges, but it seems as though democracy is here to stay. Sure, there are some holdouts where they still haven’t heard of that whole “Enlightenment” thingymabopper. It’s telling that even the most transparent psychopathic dynastic dictatorship in the world, North Korea, feels the need to hold sham elections and even go so far as to call itself a “Democratic People’s Republic” (a remarkable 0 for 3). Though democracy is and will always be under constant threat of coups, corporate takeovers, privatization of public institutions, hysterical religious fundamentalism, and more, it remains the gold standard of governmental frameworks. These days, it is simply a given that people everywhere expect to have a say in their own affairs and sovereignty.

There’s a popular delusion on the Right, and even on the Left, called “American exceptionalism.” This is the notion that God specifically favors America above all nations in all matters (sorry, all you good people of Fort Frances, Ontario, you were born only a stone’s throw away from eternal blessings). I reject this claptrap. If America does have a destiny, then the clouds on the horizon are dark and heavy indeed. Our “destiny” is less of a shining city on a hill, and more like a well-used copy of a volume in R.L. Stine’s late-90’s “Give Yourself Goosebumps” spinoff series (Reader Beware….You Choose the Scare!!!). That is to say, our national destiny would smell moldy, be smeared in old pizza grease, and have about 24 possible endings, mostly involving getting turned into werewolves, giant insects, or being subjected to wedgies and wet willies for all eternity. You guys believe any fantasy you’d like. I’ll be over here with my books and I’ll make my own luck, thanks.

Parker Lancaster

Image: Detail from ‘The Avenue in the Rain’ by Childe Hassam (1917)

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Stephen King once said, “I don’t have nightmares, I give them all to you.” That’s really what horror is all about, isn’t it? Maybe horror fans are gluttons for punishment, but we love this stuff. Whether it’s on film, in print, or in a haunting piece of artwork, we revel in fear and the unknown, and the more clearly the bearer of nightmares can express his or her vision, the more enticing the invitation into their weird little worlds. We treat these trips to the dark side like commodities, almost like they were Magic: The Gathering cards. We want to trade them, hoard them and collect them all (or catch ‘em all, if you’re into Pokemon). We are a greedy little lot, and often not too picky. We want nightmares of all kinds to fill in all the cracks and crevices and zigs and zags in our demented little brains.

This is the staying power of Edgar Allan Poe. Probably no other author in horror has more disparate and widely read journeys into the mad and the macabre. And a good narrative can’t truly be said to be a good story unless it is told well. Poe shines here too, with a mastery of the English language that few other horror writers of the 19th century or even today can boast. I’m of the opinion that to be a master of prose, one must also be a poet. It’s a testament to Poe’s talent that he’s just as celebrated for his poems as his short stories. But his prose is special in its own right. Any of his short stories has dozens of memorable turns of phrase and a vivid sense of twisted imagination and creativity, especially in all the juicy and bloody parts.

Sadly, the wonderfully devious imagination and craft on display in Poe’s writing have rarely translated well into film. As of this writing, his works have been adapted on film or television over 340 times, the vast majority being nano-budget independent short films that have never been seen by anyone but the production crew and the director’s spouse and/or pets. Pity the poor souls. In film history, Roger Corman is really the name of the game with respect to Poe films, a fact which those who have seen all of these films will find both pleasing and irksome in equal measure. Corman was and is a master of the low-budget film, especially in his directing heyday in the ‘60s. He produced and directed seven different film adaptations of Poe’s stories (sometimes more than one story per film), and they are competently made, to be sure. He knew how to stretch his dollar and effectively use and re-use sets, props and matte paintings to build his cinematic worlds. His frequent casting of legends like Vincent Price, Ray Milland, Jack Nicholson, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff, and directing scripts by horror heavyweights Richard Matheson and Ray Russell (author of the novella and screenplay of the utterly awesome William Castle film “Mr. Sardonicus”), lends these films a considerable store of credibility and class, with charm, wit, and memorable dialogue to spare.

Unfortunately, his strange obsession with avoiding any semblance of “reality” at all costs lends these films an air (or rather a thick choking atmosphere so dense you can’t see your hands in front of you) of cheese. And not good cheese. Stinky cheese. That European stuff that emits the comical green wavy fumes and that your local grocer won’t sell because it stinks up the whole store and makes babies cry. Corman’s Poe films are universally silly and occasionally downright unfaithful to the source material.

That’s not to suggest that there are no good Poe films out there. Jean Epstein’s 1927 silent adaptation of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Michael Reeves’s loose adaptation of “The Conqueror Worm” from 1968, Brad Anderson’s “Stonehearst Asylum” from 2014, and Raul Garcia’s visually striking “Extraordinary Tales” from 2013 all come to mind as worthwhile endeavours. And while not based directly on any Poe stories per se, James McTeigue’s “The Raven” from 2012 and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Twixt” from 2011 showcase some good performances of Edgar Allan Poe himself from John Cusack and Ben Chaplin, respectively.

This brings me to one final Poe film adaptation and the most interesting for horror fans. Horror is a wild and crazy genre and has been for about 60 years, but it really wasn’t until the ‘70s that it blossomed into its true weird, gross, violent, gonzo potential. Ever since then, the market has been awash in all manner of violent delights and violent ends, including ghosties, vampires, werewolves, demonic possessions, killer clowns, killer ghostie demon clowns, witches, goblins, pumpkin-shaped creatures, leprechauns, man-eating Trolls (oh my Gaaaaaawwwwd!), other assorted beasties, dream-dwelling child killers, zombies, sinister genies, mutant cannibal cults, creepy vivified dolls, creepy children, incarnate evils, and a plethora of good old fashioned psychos, creepos, wackos and serial killers (with or without masks, and usually with deep-seated mommy issues and obsessions with partially nude post-coital teenage girls…who also probably look like their moms).

There are two directors who stand tall in the small field of great horror directors who have had their hands in several of these abominable pies and have both made numerous masterpieces in the genre. And they both teamed up with one of the best makeup effects artists in film history in the middle of their long and illustrious careers for a 1990 anthology film based on Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and “The Black Cat.” That film was “Two Evil Eyes,” and its directors and writers were George A. Romero and Dario Argento, respectively, with makeup effects supervised by Tom Savini.

The facts in the case of M. Romero: father of the zombie film, monkey farm-runner, director of three of the four greatest zombie films (the “Dead” trilogy) AND the greatest anthology horror film of all time (“Creepshow”) and occasional dabbler in vampires, surreal revenge fantasy, demented demon monkeys, and other horror subgenres with films like “Martin,” “Bruiser” and “Monkey Shines.” He also wore some pretty sweet grandpa glasses. Presently presumed dead.

The facts in the case of M. Argento: master of surreal and colourful Giallo horror, conjurer of cinematic witches (“Suspiria” is his unqualified masterpiece), murderous glowy-eyed beasts, psychically-controlled insect swarms, secret societies and ancient conspiracies. Looks alarmingly like someone out of a 16th-century portrait by Carpaccio or Bartolomeo. Presently presumed alive, though frequently alleged to be a living corpse owing to his gaunt, skeletal and haunting physical appearance.

The facts in the case of “Two Evil Eyes:” it’s a somewhat faithful, if padded out, adaptation of two of Poe’s better horror stories, with solid production values and performances, but some narrative misfires. Romero’s “Valdemar” half stars Adrienne Barbeau in glorious shoulder pads as Mrs Valdemar (a character created for the film), is a wholly invented plot with a gold-digging wife and her physician/hypnotist accomplice who scheme to make off with the titular and terminally ill Mr Valdemar’s fortune and end up accidentally condemning him to a supernaturally comatose existence straddling the living world and a vengeful spirit-filled limbo. It takes a nod from Hitchcock and gives the characters clearer motivations and narrative momentum, which work in the film’s favour, but mucks up the ending with a nonsensical scene of the baddie getting his comeuppance from what basically amounts to the Blue Man Group from hell, and a rather on-the-nose closing shot of ill-gotten money dripping with blood (do ya get it!?). It’s a far cry from the simple original tale of the mysteries of mesmerism, the mind’s hidden power over the body, and the horror of paralysis and protracted death.

Argento’s “Black Cat” segment fares a bit better, sticking fairly closely to the original story, albeit with numerous embellishments and a hodgepodge of random Poe references. Harvey Keitel plays Rod Usher (no relation to the other guy, one assumes), a nihilistic crime scene photographer with sadistic and abusive tendencies who is driven to depravity and debauchery by the presence of his girlfriend’s new cat. The film gives nods to “The Wicker Man” and features a great line that is sadly missing from Poe’s text. The mad protagonist succinctly explains his life philosophy: “To be evil only for the love of being evil.”

It’s easy to see why Romero and Argento chose their respective stories. One could argue that “Valdemar” is one of the first zombie stories in American literature. And “Black Cat” with its witch and pagan undertones are certainly in Argento’s wheelhouse. Part of the beauty of Edgar Allan Poe’s writing is in its variety and longevity. When you have film adaptations of your work stretch over a 110-year period and counting, when one of the best Halloween TV specials ever made is based on your poem (“The Raven” segment in the first-ever “Treehouse of Horror” episode of “The Simpsons,” as masterfully read by James Earl Jones), and when a great bluegrass ballad (“Anabelle Lee” by Sarah Jarosz), of all things, is written 162 years after the poem, you’ve done something right.

In closing, what is my final verdict on “Two Evil Eyes,” a film of immense promise, uniting three of the great evil minds of our era? 8 evil eyes out of 13.

Meh.

Oh well. We’ll always have Poe.

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If you ask most Americans, we will tell you we love freedom. We fetishize it, we worship at its altar. It is our national pastime, our anthem, our official national bird. Practically every day in the USA is treated as Independence Day, but July 4th is a special day. The smell of gasoline, gunpowder, and charred sausages linger in the air while we celebrate freedom by shotgunning beers, polishing off handles of rotgut whiskey, lighting illegal fireworks in the desert, starting brushfires, flocking to stadiums by the thousands to watch the sky explode, and getting into all manner of shenanigans, ballyhoo, monkeyshines, and scofflawery.

However, the freedom that’s popularly associated with July 4th is, in my view, mostly nominal, hypocritical, and predicated upon ignorance of American history. We celebrate our history of liberty from British tyranny (and taxes), our willingness to fight for our rights, our remarkable Bill of Rights, and its guarantees of free speech, a free press, freedom of religion, and due process for all. We also deify our country as a shining city on a hill as we claim American exceptionalism and status as God’s final chosen people, the messengers and arbiters of truth and justice around the world. While there are freedoms, triumphs, and wonderful moments and people in American history to celebrate, there are just as many things we’d much rather forget.

This year, I will do my patriotic duty and dissent from these hollow and farcical proceedings. July 4th is, more than anything, a holiday of national amnesia. And who could blame us? Our history is one full of regrets. Regrets like slavery, genocide, lynch mobs, segregation, preemptive wars for profit, nuclear war, double tap drone strikes, illegal prisons and rendition sites, toppling democracy abroad to install dictatorial and fundamentalist theocratic regimes friendly to corporate interests, crippling debt and wealth disparity, disastrous laissez faire capitalism in banking and fossil fuels, a rampant global surveillance state, legalized bribery of elected officials, prosecution of whistleblowers, the largest prison population on the planet, marriage and gender discrimination, and so on, and so forth.

No wonder so many of us treat Independence Day as a blackout-drunk holiday. The “freedom” we are led by our pastors and politicians to idolize on Independence Day is a fiction, a shadow of what we imagine it to be, and we seem to delight in denying it to each other and even to ourselves, generation after generation. Those who put on the biggest show of patriotism, it seems, are the most eager to make scapegoats of, denigrate, and deport religious minorities and refugees, curtail personal liberties in the name of security, and blame their no-longer-beloved free press at every turn for their own incompetence and failings.

This July 4th, I’m celebrating a different kind of freedom, one more fundamental and lasting than any one man, country, or coveted government document. It will be my holiday for the liberation of the mind from ancient, outdated, and malignant modes of thought, and for the legacy of the historical champion of that liberation, Benedict Spinoza.

Spinoza was a peaceful radical, gentleman’s gentleman, freethinker, genius, and a reviled and notoriously unapologetic heretic. A man after my own heart. He was the first philosopher in the world to marry rigorous religious scepticism to a political theory of a democratic state. He invented the notion of secular democracy in his “Theological-Political Treatise”. If Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, et al, are America’s Founding Fathers, then surely Benedict Spinoza must be numbered chiefly among America’s Founding Grandfathers. History is decidedly on Spinoza’s side. It has been well-demonstrated, in Spinoza’s time and our own, that tolerant secular democracies (in the case of the United States, a democratic republic) or constitutional monarchies that essentially operate under the same democratic framework, are the only proven and sustainable model for a lasting, peaceful, just, and prosperous state. Or at least the most peaceful, just, and prosperous form of government yet devised. It would be a grave mistake to pretend that Spinoza was a perfect man free of his own prejudices, that his complete corpus is flawless, or that the political state he advocated for is, or could ever be, a utopia or panacea for the moral failings and ills of mankind. But all options considered, it’s certainly the least awful form of a society we’ve discovered to date.

Spinoza’s “Ethics” was radical in its own way. A treatise far more about human psychology and emotions than religion or theology, and structured as a complex web of propositions and axioms akin to a set of foundational mathematical proofs, it is remarkable for its complete independence from Scripture. There is one citation of Ecclesiastes, several of the Apostles’ names are used (probably with a little irony) as ordinary stand-in characters wholly unrelated to their Biblical counterparts, and a total of one paragraph is given to discussion of Adam and Eve, Christ, and the Patriarchs, and even this prefaced by the sceptical introduction, “We are told…” All of the few references to Scripture in the Ethics are only examples to illustrate a point, and Spinoza never uses the circular reasoning of the inerrant word of God as justification for philosophical claims. Inconsequential religious references and a handful of brief citations of Ovid and Cicero aside, the Ethics is an utterly self-contained work.

In Spinoza’s time, church and state were completely integrated virtually everywhere, in every nation, every walk of life, university, and most fields of study. Scholasticism had tethered philosophy to theology with an iron chain. The Scholastics had a well-worn adage, “philosophia ancilla theologiae.” “Philosophy is the chambermaid of theology.” This was not a reversible schema. But the Ethics is no handmaiden, and it represented a resounding break from the longstanding philosophical tradition. Spinoza litters the Ethics with references to God and His perfection, but no one would mistake this for a religious text. Spinoza’s God, of course, is far from orthodox. He (or she, or it) and nature itself are one and the same. His conception of God has no throne, no corporeal form, no Commandments, prophets, temple, holy book, or church. His universe is a rational one, in which miracles and the supernatural are not possible.

Spinoza’s unspeakably evil, blasphemous, and monstrous prescription for how to love and serve God, for a person of any faith, is simply to live with justice and charity toward others. The following items are therefore superfluous in Spinoza’s philosophy to leading a happy, ethical, and righteous life: dusty tomes, Bronze Age wisdom, obscure rites, bizarre rituals, crusades to take and take back and retake and retake back holy lands one final, final time….again, chosen peoples, ethnic cleansing, final solutions, suicide bombings, iconoclastic furies, honor killings, vaguely sinister-sounding incantations in dead and/or manufactured tongues, tithes, fancy robes, miscellaneous fancy accoutrement, tabernacles, relics, headgear, specified hairstyles and facial and body hair grooming regimens, rosaries, idols, ceremonial daggers, special prayer rugs, particular things to say during prayer, particular cardinal directions to face during prayer, particular numbers of prayers per day, compulsory prayer in schools, prayer, pilgrimages, exorcisms, witch hunts, dancing bans, music bans, book bans, book burnings, designated times for sexual intercourse, appropriate positions for sexual intercourse, acceptable partners for sexual intercourse, forbidden erogenous zones during sexual intercourse, auditing sessions, patron saint car fresheners, genital mutilation or manipulation of any noodly appendages, holy liquids, holy foodstuffs (gefilte fish is particularly forbidden, though an exception must surely made for matzo ball soup), and much, much more.

Naturally, the Amsterdam congregation to which Spinoza belonged had no choice but to excommunicate him forever, and to write his herem with such eager vitriol that one can’t help but imagine the authors licking their lips and foaming at the mouth. Amusingly, the herem reads, in part, “all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven.” Oops. Maybe the Lord decided to just smudge his name, or lightly scribble over it instead. Spinoza made no attempt at formal amends for his grievous sins and heresies. He never reverted to Judaism, converted to any other religion, or apologized for his beliefs. He spent the remainder of his life as a humble pensioner, lens grinder, and correspondent with many of the great scientific and philosophical minds of his day, and occasionally published his treatises. He decided against publishing his Ethics in his lifetime, directing close friends only after his death to ship his writing desk, the manuscript locked inside, unmarked to his publisher. It is equally ironic and horrifying that the only surviving manuscript of the Ethics in the world resides in the Vatican Library. The same Vatican prohibited every Catholic from reading any of Spinoza’s works for nearly 300 years.

It is a tragedy and a blight on history that Spinoza was so forcefully expelled from and ostracized by his own community, but what revolution was ever won without pain? Would the Ethics or the treatises ever have been written had Spinoza not first incurred the wrath of his religion, his peers, and even his own family, simply for espousing beliefs that, in retrospect, are perfectly reasonable and necessary for a modern world? Spinoza’s work shows the vital importance of reading things that “can’t” be read, asking questions that are not allowed to be asked and demanding answers, and breaking the status quo in half if need be.

If the unfalsifiable whisperings, revelations, divinations and pronouncements of the ancient prophets, apostles, messiahs, and acolytes of the world are true, and if Spinoza the heretic is indeed in hell, as his critics gloated upon his death, then perhaps my own stubborn insistence on reason and scepticism on matters political and religious dictate that I will join him there in due course. If so, I think we’ll have an awful lot of good conversation and good company (and a little bit of bad), and I’ll be sure to bring plenty of hot dogs, Colman’s mustard, fireworks and beer. While I’m at it, I’ll bring along my copy of Terminator 2. Thinking of Spinoza this July 4th, I can’t help but be reminded of the iconic line from the film. “No fate but what we make for ourselves.” If we truly want to live up to and live with the ideals of freedom, truth and justice in our world, we have to seek out the wisdom of bold visionaries and actively and relentlessly pursue those ideals ourselves, both as individuals and as a body politic. It will be difficult, and nothing and no one can destine it for us or gift it to us on a silver platter. As the philosopher said, all noble things are as difficult as they are rare. And so I bid my fellow Americans and fellow freethinkers everywhere a happy Independence Day.

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James Whale’s film adaptation of The Invisible Man was an immediate critical and commercial success, so the engine of the sequel factory was gassed up and set to work. Though Universal’s sequels have their merits and their own highs and lows, it’s safe to say that they’re all pale imitations of the original (Yes, a complexion pun, I couldn’t help myself). 1940 saw two film sequels, The Invisible Man Returns and The Invisible Woman. Returns come out relatively unscathed, with effects to match the first film, a capable screenplay by the talented and underrated Curt Siodmak (who also wrote The Wolf Man), horror legend Vincent Price in his first leading role, and first horror film. It’s a new story, but familiar territory all around. If we’re being kind to The Invisible Woman, we’ll simply say that it’s a screwball comedy about a woman who can turn invisible. Laughter and nudity humour and secret stolen kisses abound. That’s about it.

1942’s Invisible Agent and 1944’s The Invisible Man’s Revenge make for a strange double feature. The agent is an unabashed war propaganda film, with evil Nazis doing evil Nazi stuff, and Peter Lorre in a shameful turn in yellowface as an equally evil Japanese baron. Jon Hall plays the grandson of the original Invisible Man in a decent spy thriller that logically carries the premise into a wartime context. Revenge is refreshing in that it returns to the series’ roots with a properly villainous, murderous invisible protagonist, but the peculiarities of the casting and character names are baffling. Jon Hall returns in the lead, this time as Robert Griffin, a man completely unrelated to all the previous Griffins, in a story completely unrelated to all the previous films. And he’s evil this time. Maybe it’s like The Terminator and Terminator 2 but in reverse. Or something. The series returned to comedy with Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man in 1948, a film that may be the silliest and least substantial of the whole series, but ends up as one of the most entertaining, for its effective, nonstop use of invisible gags in the hands of capable slapstick comedians. Universal rolled out the trusty old invisible guy one last time for its classic cycle of films in a small cameo at the end of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1951, voiced again by Vincent Price.

Universal Pictures shelved the Invisible Man film series, but the larger film and television world wasn’t nearly done with the poor man. One of the weirdest and laziest attempts to cash in on Wells’ original premise and the popular film series was MGM’s The Invisible Boy in 1957, essentially a feature-length commercial for Robby the Robot from the classic Forbidden Planet from the year before. It’s a film with truly rock-bottom production values, a baffling script, and featuring an utterly irrelevant invisible boy who is shoehorned into the story. NBC’s short-lived The Invisible Man tv series of 1975 was one of several series to actually cite Wells and his novel in the credits. As 70s tv shows with bowl-cut-sporting protagonists go, it’s not half bad, but its transformation of the lead character into a spy engaged in secret missions of espionage and crime-fighting is a far cry from the source.

That pesky “film rights in perpetuity” clause that Wells signed with Universal didn’t prove to be much of a problem for Sony Pictures when they made their thinly veiled adaptation Hollow Man in 2000, directed by Paul Verhoeven. The invisible man’s name is Sebastian Caine instead of Griffin, and the film is mostly set in a lab instead of a West Sussex village, but the brilliant scientist’s discovery of an invisibility formula, physical transformation, and subsequent delusions of grandeur and homicidal streak, are all oddly familiar. Where the film noticeably differs from previous efforts is in its portrayal of the invisible man as a certifiable, world-class pervwad. The very first thing Caine can think to do while invisible is to sneak around and sexually assault a sleeping woman. He later sneaks a peek at a woman on the toilet, and just for good measure, sexually assaults another sleeping woman. Oh, and did I mention the part where he sneaks yet another peek at a nearly-nude ex-girlfriend? The 2006 direct-to-video sequel Hollow Man 2 starring an invisible Christian Slater, continues the proud pervwad tradition. This time, not only does the invisible man exploit his condition to sexually assault women, but he graduates to “barely legal” territory when he spies on an undressing girl who looks so young I paused to wonder with mild concern whether I was committing a crime by watching the film. As a wink and a nod to the Wells estate, Slater’s homicidal invisible man is named Michael Griffin.

The Invisible Man, or something more or less like him, has made appearances here and there in other films and media, including the 1992 John Carpenter comedy Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Sony Animation’s Hotel Transylvania and its sequel, and Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s graphic novel series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and its 2003 film adaptation.

After dozens of attempts to re-cast and re-imagine and update and contemporize and sexualize H.G. Wells’ classic story, it is Whale’s original film that unquestionably stands tall above all others, and I argue two basic reasons for this. The first is that Whale properly understood the wry humour and charming prose of the novella and Wells’ acute observations of the inherently funny side of human nature. In the film, we see the barfly in the parlour, gingerly hammering away at the player piano and basking in unearned applause, Una O’Connor’s Mrs Hall shrieks hysterically at threats both real and imagined, and Griffin delights in singing nursery rhymes and playfully skipping like a schoolboy while assaulting and terrorizing the poor denizens of Iping. Compare this to the novel, filled with henpecked husbands, constantly bewildered and soused country bumpkins who speak in thread-barely discernible English, and respectable homeowners apparently more concerned with the very real and practical matter of preserving their pristine vegetable gardens than defending themselves from the vague and unlikely threat of an invisible maniac on the loose.

The second reason Whale’s film stands so triumphant is Claude Rains. Remember the opening song from Rocky Horror Picture Show, “Science Fiction/ Double Feature”? The simple declarative lyric says it best: “Claude Rains was the Invisible Man.” Rains really IS the Invisible Man, isn’t he? He’s simply marvellous, unforgettable, and a dozen other superlatives. Rains delivered a performance almost entirely with his voice, a voice is so rich, so salty, so creamy, so luscious as to impart a palpable mouthfeel of fine French butter on the palate. He was perhaps the most handsome, suavest, most debonair creature to have ever been loosed upon this world.

It may come as a shock that The Invisible Man was Rains’ film debut. Well, to be precise, he had played a bit part in a 1920 silent film that is now lost, but it sounds much more impressive to say that Griffin was his first role on screen (and it’s almost true). The performance relies on his years of experience as a stage actor in London and on Broadway to effectively portray a larger-than-life character whose face is shown on screen for all of five seconds. He uses his voice to magnificent effect, with his raucously rolling r’s and his unforgettable dry, mad cackle, to portray the manic mischief maker. All the more impressive considering the young Claude Rains grew up with a speech impediment and a thick Cockney brogue, both of which he had to unlearn through years of speech therapy and theatre training, and his voice dramatically changed yet again after suffering a gas attack in France during the Great War.

Almost as memorable as his voice is the febrile gesticulations that burst out of Griffin’s body during his sudden fits of rage, wherein he is utterly enraptured by himself. One can’t help but be reminded of the speech and performance patterns of Adolf Hitler at his rallies, and it’s probably no coincidence that the film was released just ten months after his appointment as Chancellor of Germany. Claude Rains’ performance is powerful and arresting, and it launched him into a prestigious film career that would include four Oscar nominations and roles directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Curtiz, Frank Capra and David Lean. Tragically, while James Whale was the same age as Rains, Whale didn’t enjoy the same sterling reputation or live long enough to see The Invisible Man begin its meteoric rise to popularity on television. His suicide in 1958 came just months before his beloved Frankenstein and Invisible Man made their television debuts, where both films would reach larger audiences than they ever had before, and would begin to snowball into the untouchable masterpieces of classic horror that they are today.

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H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, first published in 1897, isn’t all that complicated of a story, especially by science fiction standards. There aren’t many characters or locations, the plot is straightforward, and the science is mostly inconsequential to an appreciation and understanding of the story. It’s a fantasy and a character study, not just of the titular invisible man, but of provincial England at the turn of the century (or at least an imagined version of it). The trouble with it being a character study, of course, is that it can be difficult for readers to identify with an invisible man.

As an audience, we have a subconscious urge to put a face and a name to our fears. And so, with The Invisible Man, we have the perfect segue of a story from the page to the screen. One artificially snowy day in April 1933, a bandaged, bug-eyed, very warmly dressed, and profusely hot and sweaty British stage actor named Claude Rains opened a door and stepped onto the set of a British country inn on the back lot of Universal Studios as a curious fellow named Jack Griffin, and a pop culture horror icon was born. Wells’ The Invisible Man, its famous 1933 film adaptation directed by James Whale and written by R.C. Sherriff, and the many sequels and copycats on film and television in decades to follow, demonstrate clearly and forcefully the importance of source material in adaptations, fidelity to the author’s original intent and premise, and how in the right hands, a memorable story in print can become a lasting and invaluable part of the cinematic zeitgeist.

Wells’ novella had a long, arduous, and unlikely journey from London bookstores in 1897 to movie screens around the world in October and November of 1933. Before production began, Wells and producer Carl Laemmle Jr. suffered through a hand-wringing development hell populated with four different directors, nine writers, six treatments, and ten different screenplays, none of which were deemed satisfactory or had any resemblance to the source material. By 1933 it was already a Hollywood cliché for films to play fast and loose in adapting fiction for the screen (though not always for the worse; e.g. Universal’s own Dracula and Frankenstein from ’31, the latter also directed by Whale). Wells was unhappy with all previous attempts to adapt his work on the film, and he wanted to be involved in his own adaptations, so he sold Universal a ten-year contract for the film rights to The Invisible Man for $10,000 (later re-negotiated to give Universal the film rights to the franchise in perpetuity), with a clause that he must have guaranteed script approval.

These failed attempts to adapt The Invisible Man make for a worthy addition to the Book of Might-Have-Been. At one point, Frankenstein co-writer Robert Florey was attached to write and direct the film. Whale himself, experienced as a director and to a lesser degree as an actor, but not as a writer, wrote a maudlin, florid early treatment that was painfully rejected by Wells. Preston Sturges wrote a version as a sweeping romance set amidst the Russian Revolution (pity the poor actor who would have had to dress even more warmly than Claude Rains under Universal’s studio lights). Remarkably, even John Huston, the inimitable master of noir and drama, wrote a draft that was rejected. In the end, it was writer R.C. Sherriff’s radical idea to simply tell the story of the novel that was agreed on by Laemmle and Wells as the best course of action.

Once the script had been decided on, Whale quickly came back on board to direct, and the film was cast and a crew assembled in short order. The production was mostly unremarkable. It went over schedule and over budget, there was a fire that prematurely destroyed a farmhouse set, and Rains passed out a few times from heat exhaustion, but none of these things is much out of the ordinary during a film shoot. What was remarkable, and to a large degree what the film is remembered and praised for to this day, were the ground-breaking special and visual effects, many of which were invented for the film and have had a profound and lasting impact on the film industry. John P. Fulton, then the head of Universal’s “Trick Department,” made the Invisible Man live up to his name when he invented a travelling matte technique using black velvet image compositing that predated the blue and green screen digital matte effects that are now ubiquitous in the industry. Cinematographer Arthur Edeson sold the illusion by inventing the wirework and practical effects for scenes in which Griffin was completely invisible. Finally, a team of artists were set to work with microscopes, fine brushes, and opaque dyes to manually smooth over minute flaws in the in-camera and optical printing effects for over 64,000 individual frames of the film negative (nearly 45 minutes of the film’s meagre runtime).

It’s worth mentioning that while Whale’s film is mostly faithful to the narrative, characters and tone of the novel, there are a few key differences in the adaptation (and not all of them for the better). The Hays Office’s suffocating moral guidelines and Hollywood studios’ maddening insistence on creative interference in the name of mass appeal may be to blame for some of the film’s “quirks.” An entirely superfluous love story was added to boost the film’s feminine bona fides, and Griffin’s lengthy expositional monologue was omitted. Most obvious of all the differences, especially to fans of Universal’s monster movies, is that the Jack Griffin of the film is exponentially more bloodthirsty than his literary counterpart. With a total body count of over 130 victims, Jack Griffin beats his “peers” Dracula, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s monster, the mummy Imhotep, et al, by a country mile (120-year-old spoiler alert: Griffin in the novel may not be a killer at all; he’s merely implicated in one murder and he later tries and fails to kill a police officer). Somehow, a man who became invisible turned out to be a bigger threat to humanity than an entire cavalcade of unholy, flesh-eating, blood-drinking, child-murdering, undead abominations. Go figure. Griffin’s tragic and complicated psyche, personal history, and descent into madness were all washed away in favour of the simple explanation that the invisibility formula drove a good man murderously insane. In short, Universal Pictures turned Claude Rains into a serial killer with a heart of gold. Sigh.

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