Analysis:
For this creative project, I chose Option 2 and performed lines 46-78 from Book 4 of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. I was most inspired by the lines, “Me miserable! Which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? / Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell” (Milton 4.73-75). I was particularly interested in exploring the depth of Satan’s self hatred and deprecation as he realizes that he has only himself to blame for the situation he is now in. Although he has often been seen as a character with great confidence, a spunkiness that makes him likable, Book 4 places the readers directly into his inner thoughts. There is such pain in his lines, “So burthensome, still paying, still to ow” (4.53) as Satan comes to grips with the errors he has made in his life. I wanted to show a transformation of his character through the performance of the lines, as well as display his volatile nature. To do so, I began the “monologue” quite sarcastically, almost bitterly as he speaks of God. When I speak line 53, there begins a shift in how his mocking tone turns to deep unhappiness and loathing towards himself, as he ponders how no other Angel fell but him. The rest of the performance is meant to increase in intensity, showing greater and greater resentment until Satan finds himself so trapped that he finds there is no place to escape or find closure. He realizes, with great defeat, that he could fall further and it is this fear that makes the “Hell I suffer seem a Heaven” (4.78).
While Satan is considered to be a male figure, I thought it would be interesting to portray him as a female, with makeup, and large and heavy earrings. I wanted to show that if we consider Satan to be an encapsulation of pain and suffering, then there is no gender that can “accurately” portray it, so long as one is able to evoke a sense of sympathy and to display agony. Initially when I filmed, I was not wearing any makeup or any earrings but in looking back at the videos, I realized that I still looked too “good” so I shrouded my eyes out with black eyeshadow, messily applying it so that it went out even further than my eyelid and placed some on my cheekbones to hollow out my face. I was also going to apply black lipstick but then I decided that a bright red seemed more in character for Satan: while the eyes act as windows to the soul and as such, show the darkness within him, bright red lips portray a fake sense of confidence, as all the words that slip through his tongue reveal the complete opposite. In this interpretation, I was able to practice the lines several times to gain new insights into the original character, proving him to be multifaceted, with such a confusing and shell shocked mind that it was hard to navigate the performance of certain phrases. Throughout the lines, he travels from a sense of self reflection, to anger, to hatred, to a deep depression, and then to defeat. In this adaption, I believe I portrayed him in a more sympathetic light, hopefully portraying his torture yet accepting that it was he who has placed himself in this situation. While I lost the reflection of him deserving his situation because of what a horrible person he has become, I chose to focus solely on his inner thoughts rather than on the story as a whole: if we examine the situation from an objective point of view, it is quite easy to see Satan as a villain and one dimensional character who deserves his place in life; however, I was portraying him individually and as such, had to elicit the emotions I believe he would feel, the self pity and burden he carries.