Thursday, 28 December 2017

THE TWELVE CLIPS OF CHRISTMAS - DAY 4: SANTA CLAUS VS. SATAN

Well, yesterday's match-up between Santa and the Frankenstein Monster turned out okay in the end. But that was just a warm-up. Now, thanks to some weird fever dream writer/director René Cardona had back in 1959, Santa has to go up against Ol' Scratch himself...


Hopefully, the first thing everyone learned from this clip is that you should really invest in some sort of home security system, otherwise just about anyone will be able to waltz in anytime they feel like it. Given who might take advantage of the opportunity of an open door, a good home blessing with holy water and salt might not be a bad idea either.

The second thing to be learned from this clip is... Satan isn't always the brightest person in the room. As C. S, Lewis wrote in his rather lengthy preface to Paradise Lost (seriously, it's as long as some books), "What the Satanic predicament consists in is made clear... by Satan himself. On his own showing he is suffering from a 'sense of injur'd merit.' This is a well known state of mind which we can all study in domestic animals, children, film-stars, politicians, minor poets; and perhaps nearer home... What we see in Satan is the horrible co-existence of a subtle and incessant intellectual activity with an incapacity to understand anything. This doom he has brought upon himself; in order to avoid seeing one thing he has, almost voluntarily, incapacitated himself from seeing at all... He says ‘Evil be thou my good’ (which includes ‘Nonsense be thou my sense’) and his prayer is granted."

The short version is, if you purposely make yourself blind to what is right in order to be able to do something wrong unimpeded by conscience, you will almost always screw up by missing something important. This may even include not noticing a fat guy crawling in a window behind you and setting up a cannon to shoot you in the ass with a dart.

The even shorter version is... sin makes you stupid.

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