Zitat:
Paradise Lost, rediscovered
November 5, 2005
Hollywood has taken on an epic task as it lines up Milton's masterpiece for the big-screen treatment. Catherine Gander reports from London.
GOD is big box office. With US religious fundamentalism helping to produce huge DVD sales for Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, it is little wonder that Hollywood wants once more to consult the Heav'nly Muse for inspiration.
As a result, 20th Century Fox has announced an even more ambitious project: to justify the ways of God to men through John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost.
Its producer, Vincent Newman, has claimed that the intention is to keep the script faithful to the original 1667 text. But such good intentions have already paved the road down which Newman is attempting to follow the poem's protagonist.
Gibson's task of translating the linear narrative prose of the New Testament into the medium of film was technically a straightforward one, but in adapting a great and timeless epic poem, any director must employ a subtle yet assured touch, a firm understanding of myth, structure and language and an innovative method of applying modern techniques to the ancient art of storytelling. Or they could employ Brad Pitt in a loincloth.
When Troy was released in 2004, the cinema-going public was treated to an attractive array of flesh and sandals, distracting nicely from a patchy plot and acting more wooden than the set's biggest prop.
Homer's Iliad had been borrowed from, yet no amount of Pitt's squinting into the middle distance could lend profundity to the film. The makers of Paradise Lost have an even harder task: the (anti)hero of the tale is physically hideous.
Tackling what is perhaps the greatest epic poem in English literature is a tall order. Then one needs to think carefully about the religious and political implications, for this is not a project to bring the scriptures to life (contentious enough), but an attempt to cinematically transmit Milton's interpretation of those scriptures. Embedded in all this are 340 years worth of interpretations of Milton's text.
The production finds itself in chaos before even beginning its journey, and as Milton's Satan reminds us: "Long is the way and hard that out of hell leads up to light."
Yet will a production of Paradise Lost enlighten its audiences? The Christian precepts of Satan's rebellion and expulsion from heaven and his subsequent role in the fall of man comprise an interesting choice of material for a US-made big-budget movie, given the political climate.
More than this, Milton's Satan is a thoroughly sympathetic character. True, dictators the world over have borrowed from Satan's rhetoric when rousing their own legions to war.
True also that Satan plays the most important role in Milton's version of events. But in Satan, Milton created a figure for the pressures we find ourselves under to interpret our situations within a social and psychological context.
Perhaps the reason I find it so difficult to envisage a film version of Paradise Lost is the same reason it is being made: it is more than a religious epic, it is the projection of the chaotic realms of the mind, crossed with longing, pain and retaliation.
Milton understood that "the mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven". Difficult, then, to share that place with a film theatre full of other fallen souls.
Milton wrote Paradise Lost at a time of personal and political crisis, his aim being to "justify the ways of God to men". As we struggle to cope and come to terms with the devastation caused by natural disasters and as we arm ourselves against global terrorism, perhaps someone needs to remind us of what it's all for.
The producer said his reason for filming Paradise Lost was that it represented "the timeless story of the human quest for meaning". However, his alternative reason throws more light on his ambitions: "It's also the first human love story." Fig leaves are only a few removes from loincloths.
Catherine Gander teaches and researches in English literature at King's College London.
