I have enlisted Mr. Matejka to work on the facsimile of the White Witch’s prop the Golden Ratios, as I work on crafting the book oft mentioned but only sparsely quoted in all of the manuscript: the Chaos Gospels. I find it odd how specific and detailed fantasy authors can be about heroes, their backstories, ethnicities, races, and locations, and how vague with regard to the villains. They are labeled or drawn as evil, yet evil is ill-defined and largely abstract: darkness, sin, libidinous, monstrous, but few if any recognizably human cultural traits. If there are backstories at all, it is a retelling of either the Fall of Lucifer, the ejection from Eden, or the betrayal of Cain, yet divorced of any ideological underpinnings or moral statements, and certainly of political leanings.
But, does not all evil we experience spring forth from an ideological font? Perhaps, like horror stories that do not horrify, it is writers’ fear of confrontation with the actual evils of the world, or within themselves that leads to flat, ineffectual writing. Hitchcock frightened us by showing us what he himself feared of mothers, heights, even creatures as innocuous as birds—and, perhaps, that he was a beautiful blonde woman at heart. We must be ironically fearless, if we are to accurately inspire fear, if only in our pursuit of it, and we must be able to inspire fear if we are to tell a story with any resonance. No element of good storytelling can be both good and fully separate from the storyteller—we must bring our own experiences to bear. What is evil, to us? What is evil, within ourselves? What evils have been visited upon us? These are the things that should feed our ideas of what Evil is, indeed what it must be at least some of the time. If we do not use the proof of our own experience, we will speak of things we know not and say things we do not mean.
To wit: fantasy villains are often clearly stand-ins for say, Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, the evils Tolkien and his ilk saw up close. Yet Sauron and his Orcs or Darth Vader and his Stormtroopers bare none of the ideological traits, racism1, or warped worldviews other than faceless antagonism to the hero’s wishes and an accumulation of monstrous visual signifiers. It is a child’s Wehrmacht. Their fathers, who saw it up close, could not see their archetypal potential. Their children, and Tolkien who was composing a fairy tale, did not include their literal faces. Because of this, they inherit the dark skin (or negro voices) of the previous eras.
Meanwhile, romanticized versions of things like monarchic regimes, special bloodlines, ideas of ancient races, idealized pasts, remain manifest in their heroes’ worlds—the very fundamentals of Hitler and Mussolini’s, if not Stalin’s ideologies. Perhaps it is that ambiguity, that Communism and Fascism were both villains but come from the Left and the Right, that muddies the face of the villain. We must find the uniting imagery and ideology of both of these forces of death. What do they have in common? Of course, the previous draft had implications of some of these features and this may be the only reasons they occur to me2. But still, the book of the villains’ religion is only alluded to, while the other grimoires such as the bible I gave Matejka to replicate3, had been at least partially fleshed out. I think perhaps the prior writers just did not have the time.
I thought it prudent for the two items to have differing voices, being as they are diametrically opposed texts. Therefore I have left the manuscript’s passages, details, and quotes about the Golden Ratios in the hands of Jerry, in the hopes that he can flesh out some of the intermediary ideas of it to forge a full document that I will not see for now. I will be crafting the Gospels from scratch based on how the villains materialize on the page.
Matejka took some cajoling but ultimately saw both the worth of the endeavor (it is quite above and beyond the normal call of duty) and how genuinely exciting it would be to get fully into character in order to construct a prop—possibly as an ancient god.
Of course, it will differ in intent, now. The religious groups and censors have cowed the studio—in their defense, it is a small studio betting the house on a single film—into altering not the substance of the plot but the imagery and symbolism of the the ideologies. Which, in a way I am only now become aware, completely alters the substance of the plot without changing a single event. Still I see the virtue in it. The changes will soften the heroic groups’ appearance and make the villains scarier. As it is now, the usual monsters or devils are portrayed as innocent victims or corrupted innocents, while our villains wear uniforms of Light. I appreciate the originality of it, but the studio and censors are right that it can be confusing for audiences, harder to illicit fear of the villains, and in fact may invert how they interpret the story. At worse, lead them toward Satanism or some other dark path. Given that we only have 90 to 120 minutes to get it all across it is near impossible to convey. A novel or series of novels would of course be capable.
George Lucas allegedly did only cast white Englishmen in most of the Empire roles of Star Wars because the Empire was supposed to be imperial and racist in an implicit way. The diversity of the Rebellion contrasts nicely with this. Having only experienced the first film, this pattern would not have been as apparent to Smith, and he would still have a point—Nazis did not imply their racism, but screamed it, and did not hide cultural appropriation, but wore it on their sleeve.
Smith inherits Peter Alan’s inverted symbolism, ironically dark, even as he tries to outthink it.
Here is another interesting artefact of the strange history of the film’s authorship. The Chaos Gospels were the document that had been fleshed out, but as part of the dark-light inversion, renamed as the Golden Ratios. The Golden Ratios, now called the Chaos Gospels, were left vague and quoted because Orenda had intended them as a biblical version of Chambers’ King in Yellow play. In a way, both Matejka and Smith worked on variations of the same document: one claiming to be the Light but was a rewrite of the night’s book into light imagery, and one claiming to be evil and darkness but that would end up containing the fascist imagery that was originaly put into the light. Jenna Orenda’s actual vision of goodness had been effectively lost.