In the movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still” Gort symbolizes the robotic servant.
In the original short story by Harry Bates , “Farewell to the Master” , it is Gort , not Klaatu. who is the “master” .
“Shit happens” is passive. It avoids assigning an actor. What happens to Job is active. God *makes *shit happen.
Irrational fear is still fear. The point of Room 101 where the torture takes place is that it contains what a person fears most- The “worst thing in the world” . So if eg. Smith had a phobia of butterflies they might have been used (though probably not for the necesssary literary dramatic purposes)
Well, he has his guy Satan do the actual scutwork.
Not exactly what the OP asked for but will mention anyway: Salieri was a competent composer and mainly a skilled teacher who seems to have had no real enmity with Mozart in real life, but is remembered due to his literary avatar from Amadeus as an obsessed mediocrity. Also from Shaffer, the personalities of de Soto and Pizarro are reversed in Royal Hunt of the Sun: in the play Pizarro is the advocate for the emperor Atahuallpa and plays Pilate in looking for ways to keep him alive while de Soto is the more bloodthirsty “the king must die” conquistador, though in reality the positions were closer to reversed (de Soto wanted him alive, albeit as a puppet emperor, while Pizarro wanted him dead to create a power vacuum).
Bureaucratic evil is the worst evil.
Hijack: Did you task some of your bees to come after me yet? Because apparently I have wasps living in the spot where my A/C and whatnot vents to the outside at my apartment, and I’ve noticed a few hovering outside the windows at work… twenty stories up.
You just motivated me to go back and take another look at the story, and I noticed a weird thing that I don’t remember seeing before: it’s unclear, even ambiguous, who actually makes the shit happen: God or Satan.
[QUOTE=the book of Job]
(from Chapter 1)
9 “Does Job fear God for nothing?” Satan replied. 10 “Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land. 11 But stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.”
12 The LORD said to Satan, “Very well, then, everything he has is in your hands, but on the man himself do not lay a finger.”
Then Satan went out from the presence of the LORD.
(from Chapter 2)
3 Then the LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil. And he still maintains his integrity, though you incited me against him to ruin him without any reason.”
4 “Skin for skin!” Satan replied. “A man will give all he has for his own life. 5 But stretch out your hand and strike his flesh and bones, and he will surely curse you to your face.”
6 The LORD said to Satan, “Very well, then, he is in your hands; but you must spare his life.”
7 So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD and afflicted Job with painful sores from the soles of his feet to the top of his head. 8 Then Job took a piece of broken pottery and scraped himself with it as he sat among the ashes.
[/QUOTE]
(bolding mine)
Those aren’t mine. That happened to me in a twelfth-story apartment once, though. Eventually we found that there was a bee hive on the roof.
Tarzan
First book is the familiar story, close to what we get in Greystoke and the Disney Tarzan, except Tarzan has to follow Jane to America to win her, but then decides that Jane’s fiancee really is better suited for her and gives her up. In the second book we see Tarzan smoking, drinking absinthe, playing cards and going up against Russian spies. Eventually he does settle down with Jane in England, taking his place as Lord Greystoke. Later they move to a plantation in British East Africa. And while he does end up fighting Germans in a loincloth in WWI, he serves in uniform in WWII.
Bear in mind that Satan, in the Book of Job, is not the enemy of God; he’s clearly a member of the celestial retinue. (Nobody yells “Security” when he shows up, after all.) But it’s clear to me that Satan is doing the actual smiting, as God sets conditions as to what he can do. (“Yeah, take all his stuff and murder his kids and servants, but don’t touch his body.” “Okay, since he’s still hanging in there, you can torture him personally, but don’t kill him.”) Nothing Satan does to Job is not ultimately God’s will.
In the apocryphal version Job is in a stall in the men’s room when he overhears Satan acknowledging he’s lost the bet and giving God his winnings- one dollar- after which he decides to take revenge against them both.
Not to mention that a lot of Tarzan’s adventures were a lot less rooted in the real world than people thinks and derived into straight science fiction and fantasy: a witch doctor made him immortal, he fought the Ant Men and traveled to the Earth’s core…
I see from the posts here that I’m going to have to read Don Quixote again. I read it once as a youngster (it may have been an abridged “young readers” version, I can’t remember, but it was before I started keeping track of every book I read at age 13), and I suspect I was too young to grasp it properly (or the possibly-abridged version I read managed to miss the point). I came away thinking Quixote simply had really, really poor eyesight.
God is Mortimer Duke???
Wow, that does explain why God’s Orange Juice Conentrate investments tanked!
Well, that’s the twist at the end. But in the film, IIRC the hierarchy is not addressed: we simply assume that Gort is the servant.
With regard to the OP, would John Rambo fit the bill? In the first movie, he goes to great pains to not kill people - though he doesn’t stop them dying - but in the later movies he’s a killing machine.
Naw, he tries to avoid killing American policemen. Vietcong are fair game.
Rambo would fit with the OP in the sense that he’s used to describe somebody with gung-ho recklessness, but in the first one he was barely more than a confused moron in a bad situation.
How is Nemo a terrorist? When does he violate the laws of war?
That’s my point.