Sunday, June 5, 2016

Mephistopheles of the Vegetal Kind

 For some time I've wanted to do a post devoted to permutations of the Faust legend; this could probably be attributable to political campaign season, when deals with the devil are a dime a dozen. But I was a bit stymied on just how to focus the topic. A simple overview of the various incarnations of Faust was tempting; I could begin on the theatrical/literary front with Marlowe's Dr. Faustus(1592), than move on to Goethe's Faust(1808), then on to Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita(written between 1928 and 1940, published in book form in 1967) ; moving to cinema,  some space could be given to FW Murnau's 1926 silent version, to Stanley Donen's Bedazzeld(1967), to Istvan Szabo's Academy Award winning Mephisto(1981). A nod could even be given to the The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror IV, where Homer sells his soul for a doughnut. But the sheer glut of material was overwhelming, and ticking off an assembly line of adaptations has been done before. Was there any particular variation of this story that encapsulated its unique staying power in our culture? Then I had a revelation: One of the most uncannily revealing adaptations of Faust, one that serves as an unexpected yet wholly fitting companion text to Marlowe and Goethe, is the musical Little Shop of Horrors, specifically the 1986 film directed by Frank Oz.


True, the musical's most immediately apparent source material is Roger Corman's ultra-low budget cult quickie The Little Shop of Horrors(1960). The musical takes the basic plot and characters from the Corman movie(Jack Nicholson made one of his earliest film appearances as the masochistic dental patient, a cameo supplied by Bill Murray in the movie), as well as a hefty dose of dark comedy. But this doesn't negate the musical's uncanny parallels with Faust, particularly Goethe's version, which has succeeded in permeating Western culture to the extant that even people who have never actually read it or recognize the author's name will be familiar with the general outlines of the story. Both Goethe and Howard Ashman and Alan Menken produced visions of mortal vulnerability and the impulse to overreach, spurred on by the wily verbosity of supernatural beings with an appetite for human souls(or blood).
"Faust and Mephistopheles" by Delacroix
Seymour(Rick Moranis) and Audrey II(voiced by Levi Stubbs)
This struggle is made apparent in openings that highlight what is to follow. Goethe begins Part I of his poetic drama with a prologue in Heaven. Hearkening to the Biblical book of Job,  God and Mephistopheles make a wager for the soul of the scholar Faust. The beginning of the musical has a portentous announcement, delivered with  voice-of-God narration: "On the twenty-third day of the month of September, in an early year of a decade not too far before our own, the human race suddenly encountered a deadly threat to its very existence. And this terrifying enemy surfaced, as such enemies often do, in the seemingly most innocent and unlikely of places..." While it may be the human race writ-large under threat, the locus for the struggle in the musical is Seymour Krelborn, a Faust by way of Kennedy-era America. The musical's three chorus girls, Crystal(Tichina Arnold), Ronette(Michelle Weeks), and Chiffon(Tisha Campbell) can be read as displaced versions of spiritual agents, though unlike in Goethe their role is predominately that of a witnessing Greek chorus. They comment on the actions that transpire, rather than seeking any particular outcome.

 It is commonly asserted that Goethe's Faust sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge; it would be more accurate to say that he sells it in exchange for experience, for the sensuous delights that have eluded him in his life of scholarly pursuit. The crux of the Faustian bargain in Little Shop of Horrors also falls under the bracket of experience, though in the musical it is specifically tied to the American Dream. This is a story populated by desperate characters, their desperation encapsulated by economic depression and crippling social immobility. It is a long standing musical theater tradition that the second or third song in a show will serve as the "I want" song. "Skid Row" serves this function not just for Seymour, but for all of the inhabitants of Skid Row.



The  condition of life on Skid Row is entrapment and hope of escaping.That escape is framed in terms of financial success and bourgeois materialism is less a matter cynical satire than the poignantly inevitable result of what a broken society will allow  desperate humanity to hope for. When Audrey(Ellen Greene, reprising her iconic performance from the original off-Broadway production) croons "Somewhere That's Green", imagining a life out in a "matchbox" house in the suburbs with "a fence of real chain-link" where she and Seymour can raise children and watch I Love Lucy on "a big, enormous, twelve inch screen", there is an impulse to mock the vision of uber-consumerism on display. But the raw, naked yearning Greene invests into the song--indeed, into her entire performance-- prevents it from descending to the level of easy mockery. Yes, her dreams may be limited, but as her life has been characterized by grinding poverty, and a series of cruel boyfriends from "the guttah'", you can't laugh at her or judge her for having them. Like Goethe's Gretchen, also born poor and victimized by men, Audrey emerges as uniquely innocent in the view of fallen humanity the musical depicts.



 Seymour, of course, is the one offered the chance to achieve earthly temptations  by Audrey II(voiced by Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops), the mysterious plant whose presence produces a huge spike in business at Mushnik's Skid Row Florist. Like Goethe's Mephistopheles,  the Audrey II has a wicked sense of humor and is immensely entertaining; we as an audience know logically that they are both evil, but we are able to recognize their villainy while still being enlivened by their presence on stage or screen. The song "Get It" functions as the Mephistophelean contract moment: the world will be yours,  if you sign in blood. Where Faust is offered the chance to go drinking in bars, cavort through the streets, regain lost youth, and bed young women, Seymour is offered a guest spot on Jack Parr and a date with Hedy Lemarr.


Seymour does sign on, providing Audrey II with the body of sadistic dentist Orin Scrivello (Steve Martin) and, by tortured proxy, his boss Mr. Mushnik(Vincent Gardenia). Most versions of Faust at some point have the hell-bound protagonist question the immorality that occurs as a part of his wish-fulfillment, though how deep this introspection goes varies widely; Marlowe and Goethe both present Faust as hugely self-unaware. This also raises the issue of Faust's eventual damnation or salvation. Dr. Faustus famously concludes with Faustus being dragged down to Hell by demons at the stroke of midnight; Goethe ends Part II of his Faust with Faust's redemption, though this hasn't stopped Part I, which concludes with the death of Gretchen and Faust's fleeing from her dungeon with Mephistopheles,  from being far more popular. Little Shop of Horrors, in its transition from stage to screen, neatly encapsulates both variants of Faust within its history. 

Still from the "original" ending of the film
  
In the theatrical version of the musical, Audrey II eats Audrey and Seymour, and sets off to conquer the world(the plant's victim's appear as flower-heads on the extended puppet to sing the song "Don't Feed the Plants"). Frank Oz kept the ending of the stage show, and expanded upon it, with several minutes of Godzilla-style carnage as multiple Audrey IIs attack cities across America. Previously enthusiastic test audiences hated it, and a compromise ending was shot where Audrey survives her near consumption, and Seymour manages to destroy the plant, leaving he and Audrey to escape from Skid Row. Many fans of the musical longed for the original ending to be restored for years, and they got their wish with the release of the Blu-ray, which included the roughly twenty-three minutes that had been cut from the theatrical release. Yet, as Darryn King so eloquently puts in his Dissolve essay on the two endings, 

"Now that the pined-for alternate ending has emerged through the topsoil of obscurity, it has begun to feel less and less “alternate”—inevitably obliterating people’s memories of the simple sweetness of the test-audience-approved cut. But considered side-by-side, the alternate version seems to highlight the virtues of the ending we had all along. It may be the 1986 ending, not the much-hyped alternate one, that starts to feel rare and special...Certainly, there’s an undeniable sense of closure in seeing Seymour get his just desserts—and, in a more literal sense, Audrey II get his—in the alternate ending. It’s the natural satisfaction of the story’s dark themes arriving at a plausibly dark conclusion. But after witnessing the senseless orgy of chaos and destruction, the 1986 version doesn’t seem as sickly, egregiously naïve as it used to. Seeing Seymour and Audrey resurrected and reunited is now more heartwarming than ever. That feeling is enhanced by the realization that those test audiences longed for a feel-good ending not out of feeble-minded selfishness, but out of a genuine conviction that those characters deserved for their story to end in a major rather than minor key."

I personally fall into the camp that prefers the redemptive ending for the film(which may be one of the rare occasions where a test-audience-mandated-happy ending was the right thing to do), while having the stage version retain the damnation. Both conclusions to the musical end up working as a demonstration of the elasticity of the Faust legend within contemporary storytelling. We can be redeemed or damned; it all depends on what is right for the story.


 


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