Back when James Franco was going through his phase pretending to be a lover of literature, he made this test sequence for a proposed Blood Meridian movie.
He also directed this adaption of Child of God, one of McCarthy's earlier works. The actor who played the main character was pretty good, the rest is unremarkable.
And for any of you true nerds, this Yale lecture talks about how Cormac McCarthy "intended" to frame
Blood Meridian as a retelling of
Moby Dick, and that
Moby Dick was itself a retelling of Milton's
Paradise Lost.
It's a little wonky because Milton wrote PL a century before America was even founded, but MB and BM are obvious parables for the violence inherent in Manifest Destiny and man's primal and foolish aim to conquer Nature.
PL begins with Lucifer holding a congress of demons in Hell's capital, Pandæmonium, where he explains how they'll use the materials God has left them in the earth (minerals) to wage war against Heaven.
The Yale lecturer argues this is mirrored in the MB chapter in which Melville spends far too many pages of boring exposition explaining how whales are hunted.
And finally this same scene is mirrored in BM (the scene I posted above for which James Franco spent 32 minutes of test footage, or reason 14 of 23,871 why it was never greenlit) in which the Glanton Gang - spent of gun powder and hunted by Comanches - suddenly comes upon The Judge sunning himself on a mountain top without a horse or water. He then calmly shows them how to mine minerals from the rock formation, mix it with their own urine, and use it to make gunpowder to annihilate their attackers.
In this context:
- Heaven = Nature (the White Whale) = The West (Comanches)
AND
- Lucifer = Ahab = the Judge
Each of these three works is ultimately a story about a charismatic psychopath leading men to wage a Forever War against Nature and thus, themselves.
"You read books, we get it" - Sue Lightning/Mustard
