SOURCE: Updike, John. “Milton Adapts Genesis; Collier Adapts Milton.” New Yorker 49, no. 26 (20 August 1973): 84-86, 89.

No clue is offered, on the jacket flap or in the author's rather testy “Apology,” as to what possessed John Collier to turn John Milton's “Paradise Lost” into a screenplay. Was this a commercial, practical project—after all, Cecil B. De Mille mined Exodus and Judges for a pretty penny—from whose shipwreck the writer salvaged his script? Or was it always to be a curiosity purely literary—a “Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind,” as the title page advertises? Milton's Paradise Lost: Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind (sumptuously produced by Knopf in a kind of Loew's Orpheum Art Deco) begins as space opera, “2001”-plus: “We are moving upward into a region where the blue is lighter and clearer;” a distant star becomes a comet; the comet's tail becomes a torrent, a waterfall whose mist is bubbles, and each bubble “is made of six or eight living creatures. These are gigantic and glorious beings with beautiful, stricken faces and flying hair. They wear minimal golden armour, such as we are accustomed to associate with demigods or angels.” They are angels, dressed like Barbarella, millions of them, and then we see them charred and writhing in a lake of lava, and Satan himself, “burned to incandescence, like a log that is red all the way through, ready to fall to pieces.” But he does not fall to pieces; instead, inventing magic on the spot (one of Collier's anthropological updatings of Milton's version), he pulls himself together and then invents oratory, announcing to the lake of the tormented, “All is not lost. The unconquerable will, and study of revenge, immortal hate, and courage never to submit nor yield.” These three lines from Milton are the only ones Collier quotes entire; elsewhere he resists the delicious thunder of Milton's pentameters and for cinematic speed substitutes his own tinny vers libre. Satan's rhetorical question in Milton

“… But first whom shall we send
In search of this new world, whom
          shall we find
Sufficient? who shall tempt with
          wand'ring feet
The dark unbottom'd infinite Abyss
And through the palpable obscure
          find out
His uncouth way, or spread his
          aery flight
Upborne with indefatigable wings
Over the vast abrupt, ere he ar-
          rive …”

becomes in Collier's script

“Who'll fly through night, and
chaos and the endless void?
And find this race called Man?
Who'll dare?
Who'll go?”

The loss in magnificence is well-nigh total, but Milton is already on record, and Collier is attempting a new thing.

His description of the Burning Lake and charred angels evokes Dresden, Hiroshima, and napalming; the conclave of the damned in Pandemonium draws imagery from Fascist rallies, even to a clenched-fist salute. Space flight—the fact and technics of it—infuses the heavy epic with easy momentum. In Milton, Satan's passage from Hell to earth is a sloggy business, a piece of Renaissance exploration: “the fiend / O'er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare / With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way, / And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies. …” In Collier, he generates speed as smoothly as an equation, and travels as a “dark ripple in space.” We ride “that wave of darkness, which is Satan in flight,” and, as under the eyes of our astronauts, the huge, curved horizons of earth and sun float into view. Milton, after Gabriel confronts Satan in Paradise, has Satan hide by circling the earth on the side of darkness; though the possibility fits with Newtonian astronomy, it seems far-fetched and uncomfortable in the verse, mixed with antique imagery:

          … thrice the Equioctial Line
He circl'd, four times cross'd the
          Car of Night
From Pole to Pole, traversing each
          Colure. …

For Collier, such an orbiting is a familiar stunt; Satan hangs in darkness “like a surfer awaiting the wave” and exultantly teases both sunset and sunrise in the course of his confident free fall. “Free Fall,” for that matter, would be a pretty good title for this movie, were it ever made.

When Satan arrives in Paradise, we arrive at hackneyed territory. Mr. Collier refreshes the fable with a lot of delightfully precise botany, some clever lighting, and an attentiveness to Eve's dreams worthy of a psychoanalyst. But his retelling founders where most modern retellings do: he does not believe in God, and God is the most interesting character in the story. He has a plan and a hope; He experiences love and regret. Satan is just a successful saboteur by comparison, and Adam and Eve are a pair of gullible yokels. The God of Genesis brims with surprises; his question of Adam, “Who told you that you were naked?,” has all the cunning innocence of do-your-own-guilt paternalism since the world began. How affably, without a blink, the blame having passed from Adam to Eve to the serpent, does He curse the serpent first and how obligingly, having delivered the curses to all three, does He squat down like a tailor and make for His two errant children, grown out of nudity, “garments of skins.” Adam and Eve are banished from Paradise not spitefully, as punishment for what cannot be undone, but as a simple Self-protective measure, to prevent the created pair, who have already eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and become “like one of us,” from eating now also from the tree of life and living forever; the cherubim and the flaming sword guard not the gates of Paradise but the path to the tree of life—not the way back but the way out. This pleasant plantation owner, safeguarding His prerogatives against a slave uprising, is a remote rustic ancestor of Milton's God, a defensive monarch always ready to argue the legalities of his own decisions. To “justify the ways of God to men” was Milton's announced purpose, and the thorny conundrums of Justice and Mercy, Free Will and Divine Foresight, Liberty and Order frame the Biblical events in a continual dialectic of serious political argument. Foreseeing Man's Fall, God sends Raphael to Adam to

          “… advise him of his happy state,
Happiness in his power left free to
          will,
Left to his own free Will, his Will
          though free,
Yet mutable; whence warn him to
          beware
He swerve not too secure: tell him
          withal
His danger. …”

Milton then assures us, “So spake th' Eternal Father, and fulfill'd / All Justice.” And Adam, when Eve complains that his failure to command “absolutely” permitted her to sin, answers in echo of God:

“I warn'd thee, I admonish'd thee,
          foretold
The danger, and the lurking Enemy
That lay in wait; beyond this had been
          force,
And force upon free Will hath here no
          place.”

Mr. Collier is a modern atheist, and will have none of this. The long middle of Milton's poem—Raphael's exposition to Adam of the Christocentric universe—he almost entirely omits. The theological reasoning that Satan was permitted to perpetrate evil “but to bring forth / Infinite goodness, grace, and mercy” elicits from Collier the scornful paraphrase “In other words, the prisoner was paroled in order that he might commit fresh crimes and incur a yet heavier sentence. Man, at the cost of death to all and damnation to many, was to serve as bait in this outrageous trap.” Mr. Collier then goes on to praise Satan as morally superior to God (“… he is the rebel against the Establishment, the defeated, the exile, the endungeoned, the resurgent, and the guerrilla. … We watch in vain for some example of his wickedness. … He inflicts no tortures”). Mr. Collier is of course entitled to his humanist pieties and left-wing wrath, but he has no artistic right to pump the Voice of God into the end of his scenario. The Voice has been labelled hollow. The plot that turns on the strictures of such a moral nonentity as Mr. Collier's God falls to nonsense. You can have a sentimental Satan, and an adorable Jungian Adam and Eve, and an apple that is all vitamins and eroticism, but you cannot have these and Jahweh too. By the time this script reaches its last shot (Satan smiling out of the screen at us, just like Walter Huston in that old Hollywood make of The Devil and Daniel Webster), the corniness betrays an inner chaos. The God of Genesis walking in His garden in the cool of the day had a blunt corporeal reality. The God of Milton derives actuality from the believer's tortured strenuousness. Collier's God is just a black hole in a funny old story that must (“Must! That's the word now,” Adam says) have something profound about it.

What did attract this excellent British fantasist to “Paradise Lost”? Possibly its superficial shimmer of the fantastic, of the hallucinatory. The conceit of making it into cinema recalls an image Santayana uses, of Dante, in “Three Philosophical Poets”: after pages of praise for the medieval poet, Santayana adds the devastating demur “… he has no true idea either of the path to happiness or of its real conditions. His notion of nature is an inverted image of the moral world, cast like a gigantic shadow upon the sky. It is a mirage.” It may be that some such mirage-sense of Milton's poem is at the root of the curious metamorphosis Collier has wrought. Of the assembly in Pandemonium his scenario says, “Perhaps this vast, dark sphere is Satan's brain, and the luminous seraphs are the brain cells, glowing or flashing or dimming according to the electrical impulses that pass through them.” A frequent (and, I would think, technically implausible) feature of his script is the specification of elaborate trompe-l'oeil effects:

… a reddish flush emanating from the maddened seraphs hangs like a luminous cloud in the centre of the vast, dark sphere. Soon it coalesces into a tangle of fuzzy, incandescent lines which form a fiery tracery, semi-abstract, showing an imagined assault on the battlements of Heaven.

Satan ruffles a tree of dark leaves with light undersides so that from a hundred yards it exactly resembles Eve; Mulciber's body goes transparent and becomes his palace; a vast horde of devils so disperses itself as to shadow forth the forms of Adam and Eve, like a marching band at halftime. What does Collier intend by such illusions except to transfer the entire cosmic epic to the realm of dream and subjective psychology? A movie screen has no substance; it exists only for our eyes, which in turn—physiologists tell us—are specialized segments of the brain, the only ones that have surfaced.

But would these grandiose tricks—mist into angels, angels into “semi-abstract” tracery—work? Much is possible to the movie camera, but it remains a camera, a mirror of the external world's texture and accidents. Though there is immense visual ambition in Mr. Collier's directives to his hypothetical technicians, there is little that is effortlessly concrete. Phantasmagoria eclipses the luminously mundane. The human protagonists, for instance, are presumably naked until their fig leaves descend, but the script never brings Eve's body to our awareness like these lines of Milton:

                                                                                                                        … but Eve
Undeckt, save with herself more lovely
          fair
Than Wood-Nymph, or the fairest
          Goddess feign'd
Of three that in Mount Ida naked strove,
Stood to entertain her guest from
          Heav'n. …

Collier's “Apology” announces that his hero is Eve, yet she seems more the subject of speculation than an object of vivifying love. This kind of love Milton shows her when he has Adam say:

“Neither her out-side form'd so fair, nor
          aught
In procreation common to all kinds …
So much delights me, as these graceful
          acts,
Those thousand decencies that daily
          flow
From all her words and actions. …”

Collier's Adam says:

                                        “… she grew so lovely that
all she does and says seems
wisest and most virtuous and best.”

Which is indeed bleak praise, if not blank verse. Milton has not been generally prized for the virtues of psychological tenderness or lively sensuality; Mr. Collier's script leads us to realize how much of those virtues Milton possessed. And it leads us to suspect that in a fictional universe there is no borrowed gravity; unless an author is writing for his life, images become mere “effects” and fly into space. Precision is a function of attention, and attention is a function of concern. Too diffidently Mr. Collier tells us, of the poem's Christian content, “I do not share these beliefs, and I have substituted other ideas, also not profound in themselves, but which are more in accord with those commonly held today.” There are ideas here, but no possessing idea. Milton's God may be a tedious old bluffer, but he fascinated Milton, and aligned the poet's inspirations in one magnetic field. A phrase like “those thousand decencies that daily flow” holds a piece of felt reality up to a moral light, and transfigures all women, all wives. Mr. Collier's Eve, on the other hand, is conceived unsteadily: eating the apple on her knees like a drugged porn queen, voting for life like some vociferous Shavian heroine, snivelling like a groupie when the angelic fuzz arrives, jerked through a series of attitudes by the dead strings of Genesis 3. The script ends—for this viewer, at least—as a flicker of unweighted significances and symbols. The projector throws not a beam of light but a tatter of brilliancies.