In modern American/British society, manifestations of imagery pertaining to hell and damnation are everywhere. This imagery is frequently silly or even cute, such as the ghost in the Halloween decoration pictured above. To picture a smiling soul enjoying the feeling of being boiled in a cauldron would seem quite irreverent to earlier generations (except, perhaps, as an example of what not to do), but in today's world the idea of hell has, in many cases, lost its edge. It is difficult to say whether the edge has disappeared due to decreasing levels of belief in Christianity or for some other reason. What is certain is that biblically-based plays--like the ones which make up the York cycle--are no longer a well-known or generally popular form of entertainment. It takes brilliant artistry to bring the old ideas of heaven and hell into a new work to be appreciated by a broad modern audience. Jim Henson is one artist of this caliber, as he proves through the movies The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.
Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal occur in their own worlds, each with its own manifestations of heaven and hell. Both movies seem to demonstrate that evil is not possible without good, but they make this point in different ways. Therefore, each must be considered on its own merit.
Labyrinth
The primary plot of Labyrinth begins when the heroine, Sarah, angrily wishes that the goblins would take away her baby half-brother, Toby. Right on cue, the child is taken away; Jareth, King of the Goblins, stands in the room instead. Jareth has learned from Sarah's wish that selfishness is her weakness, and he offers her the perfect gift for a selfish person: a crystal which, when turned a certain way, will show her her dreams. This temptation on Jareth's part is similar to Satan's temptation of Eve; he even follows up with a goblin disguised as a snake (Fig. 1). Since even real snakes typically represent evil or Satan, and the goblins are mischievous creatures who lurk in the dark, one can clearly see that Jareth is the lord of an underworld which most people never encounter.
When Sarah refuses the crystal in favor of getting Toby back, Jareth tells her that she must solve the Labyrinth--if she doesn't, her brother will be turned into a goblin forever. So begins the heroine's quest. After flippantly remarking that solving the Labyrinth doesn't look so hard, she starts on her way.
The tricks and turns of the Labyrinth seem complicated enough, but Sarah soon learns that there is more at stake than she thought. In the Oubliette, she encounters the skeletons of people who could not solve the Labyrinth (Fig. 2); later, she meets Ludo, a beast who is experiencing torture at the hands of small men with multi-horned helmets (Fig. 3). The scene of Ludo's torture is reminiscent of the torture of the damned which appears in medieval imagery. According to Clifford Davidson, the Winchester Psalter features a scene where one damned soul "is being gnawed upon," while another "is pushed downward by a devil with a flesh hook" (Davidson 51). The little goblins combine these tortures to attack Ludo; they have sharp-toothed fetuslike creatures on sticks. The creatures bite anything they encounter--namely Ludo.
At this point it becomes clear that Jareth is playing the role of God as well as of Satan. Ludo is a gentle creature who has done nothing wrong, so it seems that Jareth's standards decide who is to be punished and who is to be treated well. This point is made beyond a shadow of a doubt when Ludo falls in the forest (Fig. 4). Like Lucifer in the medieval cycle plays, Ludo physically falls; unlike Lucifer in the N-town "Creation and Fall of Man," he does not crack a fart for fear. Unfortunately, he lands next to the Bog of Eternal Stench, a place which does have gaseous problems, as evidenced by its sounds and smells (Fig. 5). Luckily for Ludo, Sarah and Hoggle fall close to the Bog shortly afterward. Ludo and Sarah work together to get a guard, Sir Didymus, to let them cross a bridge over the Bog. Hoggle sneaks to the other side while Ludo and Sarah get Didymus and his somewhat loyal steed to join their ranks.
Hoggle, unfortunately, has been familiar with the Bog of Stench for some time. His worst fear is to become, in Jareth's words, "Prince of the Land of Stench!" Therefore, Hoggle lives in terror of Jareth, who can cast him into the Bog at will. He is willing to offer Sarah Jareth's magic peach to avoid Stench-related punishment.
After all this time in the Labyrinth, Sarah is hungry, so she bites into the peach without thinking twice (Fig. 6). Now Hoggle has grudgingly accepted the role of Satan, and Sarah is Eve again--but this time, she is completely unaware of the consequences of accepting the gift. She is innocent about the peach's nature until she notices its strange taste and says, "Hoggle, what have you done?" Hoggle, feeling guilty, leaves Sarah to her own devices, and she enters a world of Jareth's creation.
The first level of this world is a ballroom full of what seem to be people in goblin masks (Fig. 7). These creatures may be the souls of humans Jareth has captured and turned into goblins, since such souls might well appear as humans with masks that represent their altered nature and appearance. Sarah is uncomfortable in this world, but she is drawn to Jareth from across the dance floor. Rather than give in to his magnetism and forget her purpose, she throws a chair through the glass wall (Fig. 8) and breaks the imaginary world apart, falling from Jareth's grace into a junkyard. In the junkyard, she discovers that a worm--synonymous with "serpent" in medieval plays, and thus another manifestation of evil--is crawling out of the peach. Disgusted, she throws it away. After getting up, Sarah runs into an old goblin woman who shows her a recreation of her room at home, trying to distract her from her purpose, but she suddenly remembers Toby and breaks a mirror to escape into the outer world.
Once the mirror is broken, Sarah is immediately reunited with Ludo and Sir Didymus. The group proceeds to the castle. Hoggle joins the motley crew during a battle with a large robotic goblin who asks "Who goes?" three times. There is a striking similarity between this break-in and Christ's break-in to hell in the Cornish Ordinalia, when Lucifer repeatedly asks, "Who is the King of joy?".
Sarah and her tiny army defeat the mechanical goblin and move into the castle walls. With the help of Ludo's friends the rocks, the goblin army is overcome. Sarah's companions then accompany her to the inner reaches of the castle, where she must face Jareth alone.
Jareth's dual role as God and Satan is accentuated in his final confrontation with Sarah. Sarah, like Lucifer in the York and N-town plays, has attained full realization of her power. To reach Toby in a maze of Escheresque stairs, she jumps downward. The world seems to fall with her; this phenomenon of everything falling also appears during Lucifer's descent in the York Cycle, when he cries "All goes downe!" Since Sarah is doing the falling, it seems that she is the equivalent of Lucifer in this scene, and Jareth is the equivalent of God. Yet Jareth takes the role of Satan to tempt Sarah again, offering her the crystal again; this time, he even offers her anything she wants (Fig. 9). There is a catch, however: she must let him rule her. Here she takes the role of Lucifer again, since Lucifer supposedly had the power to do anything as long as he let God rule him. Sarah, however, firmly refuses Jareth. "My will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom as great," she says. "You have no power over me!" With these words, Jareth's world falls apart and Sarah's is restored. Thus, a reversal of power takes place; Jareth is no longer in the role of God.
"Things are not always what they seem" is a recurring theme in Labyrinth. It sometimes becomes difficult to tell the difference between good and bad, and then gray areas emerge. Heaven and hell, in this movie, can be painfully close.
The Dark Crystal
The Dark Crystal opens with a narrated rundown of the current situation in the world of the protagonist, Jen. The race of the urSkeks has long been split into two new breeds: the Skeksis and the urRu, or Mystics. The Skeksis are evil and harsh; the Mystics are good and gentle. Under the rule of the Skeksis, good creatures undergo torture, such as having their souls drained out of them (Fig. 10). All this came to be when the urSkeks split the Great Crystal and created the Dark Crystal. Only a Gelfling, like Jen, can heal the Crystal.
But now Jen's master, the wisest of the Mystics, is dying. He cannot teach Jen all that the Gelfling needs to know. He can only tell him where the Crystal's missing shard is. So Jen sets out on his quest. As his master dies, the Emperor of the Skeksis dies as well. The Emperor, an ugly creature in and out, crumbles when he dies; the wise Mystic's body shimmers and fades away (Fig. 11). Interestingly enough, Jim Henson left out the funeral scenes he had created for the two creatures; in the missing scenes, only clothing and similar possessions are left for the Mystic's funeral, while crumbles of the Skeksis emperor still remain to be dealt with.
Deaths are not the only physical evidence of the differences between good and evil in the world of the Dark Crystal. The Mystics' and Skeksis' dwelling places further express the gulf between the two races. The Mystics live in an open area, surrounded by life; the Skeksis live in a huge, dark castle in the middle of the desert.
Jen has many adventures on the way to the Dark Crystal. He finds the home of Aughra, the last of her race. Aughra gives him the shard he needs to heal the Crystal. Later, he meets Kira, another Gelfling. After an arduous journey, Jen and Kira arrive at the castle and prepare to enter it. In order to make their way in undetected, however, they must go through the back entrance, which is a clear example of hellmouth (Fig. 12). The imagery of entering hell through a mouth was much more common in medieval times because, as Pamela Sheingorn notes, "the mental image of the world included heaven and hell somewhere, and therefore it should not surprise us to find a representation of hell, or at least its entrance, on the stage of the world as well" (Davidson 3). Hellmouth appeared not only on stage, but in paintings in churches as well; these paintings could inspire fear of hell in parishioners. This iconography is not nearly as common today, but it still ignites a sense of foreboding.
The Mystics, upon arriving at the castle after a long pilgrimage, have no need to use hellmouth to sneak onto the premises. Like Christ at the gates of hell, they simply walk up to the front door and make their way through the guards (Fig. 13). The Garthim protecting the Castle, like the devils protecting hell, are painfully inept when faced with true power.
Meanwhile, the Gelflings make their way to the Crystal Chamber. The Skeksis kill Kira as the Great Conjunction, the moment when Jen must heal the Crystal, arrives. Jen, full of sorrow for his lost soulmate, thrusts the shard into the Crystal with all his might. The Skeksis react with panic as a beam of light connects the Crystal and the three suns above. Mystics are filling the room, and the Skeksis cannot stop them.
The Crystal and the Castle are purified of darkness, and the Crystal's beam draws the Skeksis and Mystics to it in matched pairs. Each good creature is rejoined with an evil one to recreate the race of the urSkeks (Fig. 14). The urSkeks restore Kira's life and leave via the beam of light (Fig. 15), much like the beam of light which supposedly shows good souls the way to heaven. Balance returns to Jen's world, for evil and good have come together again.
Both Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal seem to draw the same basic conclusion: good and evil must coexist; one cannot operate without the other. Each movie treats the balance between the two in a different way, however. In The Dark Crystal, good and evil come together to form halves of a whole. In Labyrinth, they intertwine and even switch places; the division between them may not be entirely clear. Still, in both movies, heaven and hell go hand in hand.