I haven't read The Witches of Eastwick. I haven't read The Widows of Eastwick. I haven't seen The Witches of Eastwick. So let nothing I say in this post be taken as endorsement or rejection of John Updike, Jack Nicholson, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, or Cher.
But I've been thinking about Eastwick a lot since Wednesday when, procrastinating wildly on a freelance assignment that got sent back for major rewrites anyway, I decided to watch the second episode after Glee. And while Emily Nussbuam's Eastwick-hate makes me feel really nervous for what I'm about to write, I think I'm going to do it anyway: the show is really charming me (and Emily, if you're worried that the show isn't nasty enough, watch that second episode. The ladies, albeit accidentally, use their newfound powers to kill the creeptastic kid who tried to rape Rebecca Romijn's daughter.). And I think the reason for it is this: of all the fictional characters ever, the one I care most about, and have cared most about for a very long time, is the Devil.
In The Club Dumas, about which too many good things cannot be said, one character asks another:
"Why are you so interested in the devil?"
"I saw him once. I was fifteen and saw him as clearly as I'm seeing you. He had a hard collar, a hat, and a walking stick. He was very handsome. He looked like John Barrymore as Bargon Gaigern in Grand Hotel. So, like a fool, I fell in love."That's basically what happened to me. It wasn't so much as a physical appearance as the English teacher who assigned us Paradise Lost (there are now at least five copies of it in my apartment), but I was 15, and the effects were essentially the same. My college thesis was about the aesthetics of the Devil in Paradise Lost and Athanasius's Life of Anthony (woo hagiography!), and I'd love to turn the whole thing into a book someday, with chapters on Jacques Cazotte's The Devil In Love, and Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita among others. I always regret that Dogma settled for a demon rather than a full on Satanic appearance to counter Alanis Morisette's God. The Devil is the repository for our desire for freedom, our desire to be bad, to be powerful, to be charming and seductive, to admit that really, the world is a vast and entertaining mess. Satan changes in every epoch because we change and he is a reflection of us.
So is it any wonder that I'm crazy for Paul Gross as Darryl Van Horne? Nussbaum complained that he's wasted, but I disagree, mostly because he's unpredictable. He sets up one character for a divorce she thinks she wants, then redeems her husband. He wants to sleep with another character, but isn't actively trying to seduce her: rather, he's blunt about what he wants to the point of boorishness. And he gave a third character the power to bewitch, but is trying to keep her from getting to know him or about him. In other words, Gross is doing what the devil does best--playing with things and people around him with reasons that will only become clear to us in retrospect. Lots of folks out there are complaining that Chris Noth might have brought more menace or soul to the role, but I think that's precisely the point. Modern society would have a devil shallow enough to want to be sculpted in the nude, who wants to play, but not actually to engage. There may prove to be something more to Darryl Van Horne, but I wonder if that might not be exactly counter to the point.