I watched Roger Corman’s 1964 opus The Masque of the Red Death last night. I’ve wanted to see it for years, but always missed it on the tube. I finally bought a DVD and watched it. Much better than I expected. A good and surprisingly adult screenplay by veteran fantasy (and Twilight Zone) author Charles Beaument and a big budget and shooting schedule (and sets left over from the big budget epic Becket) all made it good.
But one thing, in retrospect, bothered me. The film starts out with the Red Death personified (he looks like ordinary Death, except he wears a Red robe while he plays soitaire with his Tarot deck) talking to a peasant woman. “Take this back to your village,” he says, giving her a white rose muraculously turned red, “and tell them that their deliverance is at hand.”
She nods and accepts the rose as if this is normal.
Aha! you think – they’re gilding Poe’s lily and setting up Prince Prospero as a real meanie weho gets his comeuppance. Movies always turn tyhings like this into little morality plays.
Except that the old lady catches Red Death (which looks like a really bad case of the measles) and dies right off the bat. All the rest of the villagers, it later develops, die off from the plague well before the climax. The survivors go to Prospero’s castle and beg to be let in. Prospero has them shot.
I imagine some poor peasant going up to Red Death and complaining to him:
“Gee, thanks a lot. I guess we were all ‘delivered’ pretty well. Nice going, R.D.”
“Don’t be pettty, peasant. I delivered you through death.”
“We were doing that pretty well before you came. And you didn’t even kill that bastard Prospero.”
“Yes, I did. He was the last to die.”
“Great. So you killed off everyone else, first. Especially all the ones that didn’t do anything. Heck, if I’d known that, I would’ve spent my life sinning and swearing and dribnking the blood of virgins.”
“You are too coarse to understand. He suffered by seeing all around him dying first.”
“That wasn’t any punishment. Prospero was a psychopath. The other deaths just meant that he was happy his time wasn’t up yet. He laughed when his close friend suffered a painful death.”
“No, it’s a psychological thing. Even if he doesn’t show it, each death diminishes him a little, and by the time of his own death he is broken inside. Trust me on this.”
“I think we’d have preferred if you “diminished him a little” by putting him on the grindstone feet first and didn’t stop grinding until only his wig was left. Less wear and tear on the villagers. I’m surprised you didn’t suggest that prospero would suffer because there wouldn’t be anyone else left to grow his food for him and his guards. You know what I think? I think you just didn’t want the show to end in fifteen minutes. That’s why you killed off everyone else first, even the innocents. If Prospero dies in the first few minutes there’s no movie left.”
“Death always does think of the bottom line. No one likes me agt the Box Office.”
I always see this in movies and books – the chief villain getsd to live, “so he can suffer as those around him dies first”, and very often doesn’t even die himself. But the villain is usually portrayed as one of those psyhopathic cases who offs his own underlings. as far as I can see, thye only difference between him and Death is that Death doesn’t try to restaff the vacant positions.
The Red Death is neither good nor evil - it’s just a disinterested force of nature. It doesn’t hunt Prospero down because of his misdeeds, but rather because he had the temerity to believe he could run away from it. You can’t cheat Death… of any color.
I’m not criticizing Poe’s story. I’m commenting on the common trope I see in movies about the villain (or sometimes the hero) of being “punished” by not being killed.
I’m also complaining about the opening scene (not in Poe, again) where Red Death tells the woman that the village’s “deliverance” is at hand. Some Deliverance!
I also like that, at the end of the flick, Red Death goes off with six other Deaths, in matching but differently-colored robes. You’ve got Yellow Death and Mauve Death and Black Death and other colors as well. It’s Designer Death!
You have to admit, there’s something satisfying in that. Villains often suffer from excess pride, and there’s nothing we humans enjoy more than watching shattered hubris. Death is a dime a dozen, but utter humliation is much more precious.
Hey - it worked in the Princess Bride
Well, he’s Death. Stands to reason he has a different perspective on things.
My opoint is that I hear or read this, but it doesn’t convince – the villain is often shown as utterly unsympathetic to human life. It’s usually taken in the form of killing an underling without a qualm, a la Blofeld in the Bond flicks. In Masque Prospero doesn’t bat an eye when a closwe friend buys it. It’s a nice shorthand way of sghowing that the villain is an utter loss morally, and we want to see him die (and won’t feel bad about it when he does). And it lets us watch a little gratuitous violence as the underling/friend buys it.
But you can’t then try to combine this with the “I’ll let you live, so you can suffer more.” Because he won’t – he’s already proven that he’s indifferent to the suffering and death of others.
But in story terms, that’s the way it has to be. Once the chief baddie dies, the story is pretty much over. all that’s left is for the hero to escape before the castle self-destructs. The hero has to work his way through a chain of henchmen first, or it’s gonna be a short film.
Besides, the punishment for the bad guy is not seeing his friends die - he doesn’t have any - it’s the horror of seeing his empire collapse around him, and knowing that the hero is coming closer and closer. That’s torture for an evil overlord.
The villain may not care about human life/the lives of his underlings, but this type of villain does care about being in control. If his underlings are going to die, they’ll be because he decided he doesn’t need them anymore.
So for him to be put in a situation where he loses control…where his underlings are being killed without his permission or consent, where his plans are being unraveled and there’s nothing he can do to stop it…that’s hell for him, and that’s why he suffers.
Somehow the pain of losing control obver your underlings seems somewhat less than slowly being shaved from the soles of your feet up to your neck. I kinda think that’s hell for just about everyone. And it;s not as hard on the underlings and villagers.
Some of those major-league bad guys are pretty resistant to pain. Pain passes, even onto death, but to know you’ve lost everything you have - especially when you were on the on the verge of having everything - can be much worse to the egomaniacal type. Even Sauron himself wasn’t killed: his powerless spirit was left to wander Middle Earth until the ending of the world
They are if they follow your prescription. They just don’t have to inflict physical pain.
Prospero in the Corman version of “Masque” doesn’t seem affected by the loss of his friends, his underlings, his main squeeze, or his livelihood. His “punishment” doesn’t seem to punish him at all, although it’s hell on the downtrodden masses.
isn’t that sort of implicit in The Princess Bride’s To The Pain! soliloquy? after Wesley’s describes all the pieces that will be removed from the Prince …“except for your perfect ears. Those you shall keep, so you can hear the screams of children as they see you on the street, and the shrieks of ‘Dear God, what is that horror?’ as women snatch them from your presence.” (paraphrased)
what, me? watch that movie repeated, after reading the book? don’t be silly…
One of the more famous is Homer’s Odyssey (which I’ve just “reread” on audio). Odysseus gets to see all his belongings lost and all his men killed, but he is fated to live to be separated from Penelope on the island of Ogygia with Kalypso, then to get home and have to fight the suitors to set things right.
That’s always struck me as incredibly unfair – because of Odysseus’ arrogant boasting to Polyphenus he gets to see his command stripped away and his men lost, but his men, of course, get killed. You could say that Odysseus’ fate is a terrible suffering for a commander, seeing his men lost and all, but he seems to get over it well enough, and to dally with Kirke and Kalypso, get gifts from the Phaiakians, and finally get his wife and home back. His men get killed. And, considering the bleak view of the afterlife in Homer’s world (all of book 11. See especially Akhilles’ speech: “Better to be a poor fieldhand than to lord it over all the exhausted dead!”), that’s pretty bleak. No happy hunting grounds for Odysseus’ companions. They got a raw deal which wasn’t even their fault.
Captain Amazing pretty much wrote what I was going to write: Prospero’s punishment wasn’t death - it was losing his control over the lives of other people.
As for the other people that died - everybody dies. It’s a morally neutral act to Death. He didn’t kill them as a punishment or reward; he killed them because he kills everybody. The only moral decision Death made was to time Prospero’s death so he would suffer from it.
We’re talking Roger Corman movies so I feel no obligation to be high-brow.
In the recent House of M comic book mini-series, Magneto has taken over the world. He allows Dr Doom to continue ruling Latveria as his puppet. Dr Doom organizes a revolt against Magneto by giving himself and his immediate family superpowers. But Magneto beats him and kills Doom’s family.
Doom figures he’s going to be killed as well. But Magneto says he’s not going to kill Doom; he’s sending him back to continue ruling Latveria as he has been. Magneto tells Doom he knows he hates being a puppet so that’s his punishment and that he just defeated Doom’s best plan to overthrow him and knows Doom is too smart to ever try again with a weaker plan. So Doom will spend the rest of his life doing something he hates for the benefit of a man he hates.
“Go and tell your village that your deliverance is at hand,” says Death. Me, I’d sue Death for breach of promise.
And Prospero doesn’t seem to be suffering at all, until the axe falls on him. The net result of killing off everyone else is … nothing. Prospero could’ve been offed at the beginning for all the effect it had. And then the townsfolk would’ve been delivered.
Another sufferer who gets to live when everyone else dies is The Ancient Marineer, in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (sic). For the dreadful crime of killing an albatross, he gets to see everyone else die, get revived as corpses, and sail him back home. Then he has to tell everyone the story.
1.) At least the AM seems to suffer for his transgression. It’s pretty petty – killing an innocent bird – to merit the punishment. I would’ve thought dragging a dead bird around was enough (Albatrosses are a lot bigger than Coleridge thought they were. The AM probably would’ve been dead after a week of this.)
2.) The rest of the crew getting killed and zombified because of something some other idiot did seems more than a tad harsh, as well.
3.) At least the AM has steady employment.
Geez, the AM really suffers for what he did =-- and he wasn’t particularly evil or anything. Never killed off a fellow crewman or laugh at the death of a friend.
The one that I thought of when I saw the thread title was a cop movie (the name escapes me.) Drug cops stop a drug runner by the roadside. They take his million-dollar cache of somebody else’s heroin out of his car and scatter it to the winds. Then they just let him go. He pleads with them to arrest him, realizing he’s a dead man.