Chuck Crisafulli - Go to Hell: A Heated History of the Underworld

A HEATED HISTORY OF THE UNDERWORLD

By Chuck Crisafulli and Kyra Thompson

SIMON SPOTLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT

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To a pair of old devils, Shine and Doc, with love

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Text copyright 2005 by Chuck Crisafulli and Kyra Thompson

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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Designed by Yaffa Jaskoll

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First Edition 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Crisafulli, Chuck.

Go to hell / by Chuck Crisafulli and Kyra Thompson.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-0602-5

ISBN-10: 1-4169-0602-9

ISBN 978-1-451-60473-3

1. Hell. I. Thompson, Kyra. II. Title.

BL545.C75 2005

202.3dc22

2005010341

With grateful acknowledgment to John Rechy for granting his permission to include his My Hell essay, copyright 2005 by John Rechy

First and foremost, huge thanks to our agent, Bonnie Solow, whose unflagging dedication and enthusiasm made this trip possible. Big thanks also to Patrick Price of Simon Spotlight Entertainment for his support, understanding, and guidance. We received invaluable feedback along the way from Jacoba Atlas, Patti Crisafulli, Lex Flesher, and Nina Thompson, all of whom served as brave test readers.

We are deeply appreciative of the time, thoughts, and words we received from the special contributors to this work: Jeanine Basinger, George Dalzell, Molly Haskell, Andy Kindler, John Kricfalusi, Bob Newhart, Mark Mothersbaugh, Rosie ODonnell, Patton Oswalt, Greg Proops, John Rechy, William Shatner, and Matt Stone.

Lastly, humble tips of the hat to Alice Turner, Elaine Pagels, and Alan Bernstein, whose works on this topic set the highest of standards for those who follow.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Dante Alighieri

Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company.

Mark Twain

There is one immutable fact of life: It does not last forever.

And for as long as humans have been capable of pondering their own mortality, they have pondered most deeply upon one crucial question: What happens when life on earth is over?

Around the globe, throughout the centuries, across all manner of cultures and religions, the answer to this question has been twofold: We go to heaven. Or we go to hell.

The basic concept of a postearthly reward or punishment is one of the most enduring in all of human history, and it remains a bedrock tenet of faith in most modern religions. Some form of heaven is there for souls that have lived lives of essential goodness and for believers who have followed the dictates of their religion and embraced the will of their God. Hell is there to receive the darkened souls of sinnersthose who have caused pain and suffering among their fellow humans and who have turned their backs on their deity.

But there is a strange corollary that accompanies this heaven/hell concept, one that has also endured through time, place, culture, and belief: Heavens have almost always been vaguely, sketchily defined as places of peace, happiness, oneness, comfort, or bliss, while hells, rife with twisted passions and bloody violence, have been meticulously mapped out almost inch by inch, with every torture and torment awaiting a condemned soul vividly imagined in excruciating detail.

Heaven has been a place where mystery is part of the appeal, a place so wonderful it is literally beyond comprehension. And perhaps humans have not wanted to jinx any chances of getting into that place by appearing to be celestial know-it-alls.

But we havent shied away from hell. After a few thousand years of civilization, it seems fairly clear that humans have been, and remain, deeply, darkly fascinated with the place. We mortals have written about it, imagined it, painted it, filmed it, dreamt it, and debated its very existence with a level of specificity and a degree of passion rarely mustered in considering the better place.

It would seem that we humans want desperately to end up in heaven. But in the meantime, we cant get enough of hell.

Maybe thats because, by nature, we feel a little closer to hell. Heaven is a place of perfected spirit. Hell is the final destination for corrupted flesh. There arent too many of us who walk around feeling perfect, but just about everybody can think of a fleshly stumble or two to call their own. We may not be certain who the angels among us are, but we sure as hell can spot the wicked. And so hellfrom religion to religion and century to centuryhas become a landscape where all our darkest, basest, most corrupted impulses run rampant. In Hollywood-speak, hell has proven to have some legs: its got conflict, drama, villains, sex, violence, fire, darkness, torment, and ultimate justiceeverything we might demand and expect of our late-night entertainment.

Which raises another interesting twist in hells history. For as long as the place has been a focus of fear, its also been a setting for wicked fun. Homers descriptions of Hades in the Odyssey werent intended as religious instruction; they were rip-roaring adventure tales. The mystery plays of the Middle Ages often made hell a crowd-pleasing showcase of vulgar slapstick. And today, when many of us still believe in hell as a very real place of final, eternal punishment, we can still root for a Demons sports team or watch an actor dressed as the devil hawk a brand of spicy salsa without feeling our souls are in particular peril. The proverbial Martian glancing upon our culture-in-general would observe that the hell we might hear about in churches coexists in an oddly symbiotic fashion with the hell of horror movies, heavy metal bands, video games, New Yorker cartoons, South Park, and pizzerias with Inferno in their names.

It is in that mixed spirit of fear and fascination that we have assembled our chapter-by-chapter tour of hell. This work isnt intended as a soberly academic one. And its not a heavy-duty study of comparative religion. Our goal has been to offer up a laypersons look at the way hell has been imagined and reimagined over time, and across cultures and religions. The work also takes a look at the way hell has been able to serve seemingly contradictory roles, as both the scariest after-earth destination imaginable for human souls, and as one of the deepest and richest sources of art and entertainment for those very same souls while theyre still earthbound. Weve tried to balance a fairly thorough examination of hells religious history with a more playful look at its shifting significance as a fixture of pop culture around the globe and through the centuries.

As a part of our look at hells heated presence in pop culture, weve included throughout the book some segments titled My Hell. These are varied, brief, personal thoughts on hells makeup, drawn from our interviews with a mix of creative folks from the worlds of film, television, books, music, and academia (and ranging from the generally beloved to the decidedly controversial). Their responses are meant to play off a larger point: Our worlds ongoing, unsettled religious and philosophical debates on the nature of hell indicate that the place below might still be considered a work in progress, continually reshaped, restoked, and reconsidered by all humans still interested in pondering lifes imponderables.