I Am the Man in the Dark Room: The Puppetmaster from Cosmic Adversary to Cosmic Villain

Luke Seaber

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I Am the Man in the Dark Room: The Puppetmaster from Cosmic Adversary to Cosmic Villain

In: Global Perspectives on Villains and Villainy Today

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Luke Seaber

Luke Seaber
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 201–208

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848880528_023

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This chapter focuses on the ‘puppetmaster’ villain: that is, one who is in fact organizing both sides of a struggle for their own ends. I shall suggest that one of the most productive sources for this figure is Sunday in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). I wish to examine two figures inspired by Sunday, O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the Architect in the Wachowski brothers’ film, The Matrix Reloaded (2003), and one situation (in which the villain of the piece remains hidden), that of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens (1990). It will be argued that the puppetmaster figure in these works comes out of a highly productive misreading of Chesterton. Whereas Sunday is an adversary in The Man Who Was Thursday, he is eventually revealed not to be a villain. I shall explore how successive misreadings transformed a figure that Chesterton ultimately intended to be understood as representing Nature and, behind the mask of Nature, God into representations of evil. O’Brien and the Architect, although differing greatly in aims and characterizations, both share Sunday’s puppetmaster role, yet use their plotting to entrap the hero into a course of action meant to lead to the hero’s downfall. Chesterton’s Christian puppetmaster is Gnosticized into an evil demiurge. In Good Omens, however, we find a more generalized misreading in which the absolutes of Evil and Good are collapsed, as it were, into an overarching non-humanity contrasted with humanity and its mixture of good and evil. The concept of the negative and positive poles of the cosmos being in fact equivalent to each other is explicitly stated to be something recognized by Chesterton. It will be explored how this misreading is in itself a greater distortion of Chesterton’s work than that practised by Orwell or the Wachowskis yet nonetheless has an ideological message nearer to Chesterton’s.

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Global Perspectives on Villains and Villainy Today

E-Book ISBN:: 9781848880528

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 08 May 2011

Subjects
- Social Sciences
  - Comparative Social Sciences
  - Cultural Studies

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I Am the Man in the Dark Room: The Puppetmaster from Cosmic Adversary to Cosmic Villain

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Global Perspectives on Villains and Villainy Today

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