"As Above, So Below" review

Intro
So, "As Above, So Below" got panned pretty hard: 38% on Metacritic and only 26% on Rotten Tomatoes (39% audience review). This post is my attempt to defend the movie and call the critics a bunch of lame sophisticati ... my own coined term comparing "sophisticated" critics and commentators to the mysterious, legendary, and evil Illuminati ... although, if Tolkien were alive and did agree with me, he might have classed them with "the monsters and the critics" (his essay that, according to some heavy scholars in that field, single-handedly saved Beowulf from the obscurity of being considered an incoherent hodge-podge of a plethora of disparate sources by demonstrating an amazing literary unity of theme and execution) ... but I'm not sure he would have been much of a horror fan, although I can think of a way that "found footage" could fit with his general outlook on theater as Aristotelean katharsis.

Anyway, The movie is in the "found footage" sub-genre of the "horror" genre. But, as with just about everything that I write here, I am going to toss the whole "genre" thing out the window as, at best, very confused, and more likely a complete load of bunk. It's not totally that, but I do think people rely on it as a crutch for seeing themselves as erudite ... knowing what is in what genre, what elements works in a specific genre are "supposed" to have, etc. And, to be honest, people talking about the genre of "adult high fantasy" in particular makes it a little difficult to keep my lunch down. From what I have read of Tolkien's thinking, he would be a bit bewildered by what passes popular muster in the genre of which he was supposedly one of the founding fathers. But, I do like some things that get put in or arise in that genre, and he did have an idea of faerie stories as a distinct class of narratives, so I will leave that all behind and get on with the real task at hand.

The movie is horror, and maybe I'm a wimp, but it did satisfy me as that because I did have to check my underwear for skidmarks a few time.

But what holds it together for me is a couple sources and themes of which I think your average "educated" critics are not too aware. The two sources of which I speak are alchemical thought and Dante, which it mixes. The themes are self-revelation and confronting interior things that one has relegated to the realm of "horrors within," buried in the subconscious to come out only in nightmares, or in this case, the bone-laden catacombs under Paris.

I'm going to leave it up to the reader to watch the film on their own, rather than giving a synopsis outside of what naturally occurs in discussing those elements.

Alchemy
So, they are going down into the catacombs beneath Paris in search of the tomb of Nicholas Flamel. If you have read Harry Potter, you know that he is supposed to have been an active alchemist in the 14th and 15th centuries. The record on this is spotty. Wikipedia authors say that nobody has found any evidence that he actually practiced. I suspect there may be a confusion. I need to dig my John Granger books out (TIME referred to him once as the "dean of Harry Potter studies"; you can go to his site at www.hogwartsprofessor.com ... I have gotten together with him a couple times, the first in Vegas in 2006 at the Lumos conference and the other seeing him speak in the Samsung lecture area at the Columbus Circle shops in NYC while I was in grad school, and we ate in wholefoods afterwards on the lower level ... really good guy, and I'm not just saying that because he credited me in his book on ring composition in Harry Potter; he's a genuinely good man and a great human being).

Granger has done a lot of work on "literary alchemy," which is not the same as trying to actually make gold from lead or even practicing any form of physical magic. It is taking the symbolic principles of the "method" described for the alchemical processes and applying them to literature. He even claims that the Globe theater was designed on literary alchemical principles. I'm not knowledgable enough in the area of Shakespeare and the Globe to know if he is right. But my main point in bringing it all up here is that it is possible that Nicholas Flamel did do literary criticism, or maybe even writing himself, along the lines of the principles of literary alchemy.

To give an example of what literary alchemy is, the alchemical crucible has four elements surrounding it: White on top for pure spirit, black on the bottom for pure matter, red sulfur on the left, and quicksilver on the right. In the middle of the crucible is produced the gold. In literary alchemy, the four represent character traits and in the middle is the golden soul, produced in the fire of trials and tribulations. In Harry Potter, Albus (Latin "white") Dumbledore is on top, Voldy, as a materialist who thinks material death is the worst thing, is black on the bottom, redhaired Ron with his volatile nature is sulfur on the left, and cool-reasoned Hermione is quicksilver on the right (another name for quicksilver is mercury, who is the Roman god modeled on the Greek god Hermes, and that sounds like? ... there you go, now you got it) . I have theories about that whole thing, but this is not the time or place. The point is that you see what literary alchemy looks like.

One way or another, this movie associates Flamel with alchemy and Scarlette and her cohort are going down there to find his bones, or hopefully an empty tomb that proves he made the philosopher's stone and is still alive somewhere on the elixir of life made from the stone. And what they really hope is to find the/a stone itself down there.

 Now, here is the thing about literary alchemy, basically what I just said, it's about finding the golden soul, which is the transformed soul. Many people think of alchemy as only the forerunner of chemistry, but I think really, at least on this level of literary alchemy, it's the forerunner of pscyhology, which is about the healing of the soul. Carl Jung even has a whole book called Alchemy and Psychology (which I have but have been too lazy and distracted to read yet). I think this movie works on the healing level.

I think some who have interpreted the movie have gotten it wrong, and maybe even that the film-makers might have been sloppy in one passage, allowing the misinterpretation. Those interpreters take the face in the golden mirror and the "as above, so below" to mean that "I am the key ... as I think it, so it will be," as in magic powers. The stone is the person who realizes this, and they get magical powers from realizing it. I don't think this is it, especially with the other elements I will describe. I think the film is appealing to personalist, and even spiritualist alchemy. I don't think "spirituality" as such is their point, but it is one aspect of the concept of "person." But while I don't think it is meant to be a fully "spiritual" film, I do think that the title, "as above, so below," is seen better as an allusion to heaven and earth, especially after what I will describe from Dante, rather than the magical power thing of "as I think it, so it will be."

I think Scarlette seeing her face in the golden mirror is not that she is the stone, but that she is the golden soul, the healed soul, the goal of personalist alchemy. People taking the magical powers line point to the fact that after she sees this she is able to pass over the blood channel and bash back the stone wall zombies and then heal her friend. BUT, I think that what they fail to notice is what intervenes. I think they see surviving the encounter with her dead father's corpse as an effect of having those powers, when really it is a cause.

After she is healed, she knows what she has to do to survive ... she has to confront the "horror within" - her doubts and feelings of guilt over her father's suicide (remember, that phone ringing was the first of the odd things from their life above ground encountered by the group in the catacombs). That was the point in the movie when I realized what was going on fully with the alchemy aspect as the core of the film (I picked up on some Dante aspects earlier but was waiting to see where they went, but more on that in a minute). When she went to hug the hanging corpse, I thought, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!?! It's going to kill you! Dead!" But then it is all right after she hugs him and says she is sorry. That's the key, that's what makes the other magical stuff possible.

Now, I think this whole "healed soul" thing plays out in the three remaining characters as representing two aspects of human soul: the psychological and the moral. Her friend George's horror within is purely psychological: he blames himself for the death of his brother, but there is no way that as a child he could have prevented it; he simply got lost in the woods while desperately trying to help because he was a kid ... but he blames himself (and that is what he keeps seeing). Zed's horror is moral: he keeps seeing the son he fathered and then denied was his. Scarlette's is a mix or an intersection of the two: her father committed suicide; she didn't realize he was psychologically that close to doing that; but she could have answered the phone anyway ... and whichever is the case (it is meant to be a tension between the two explanations, I think), she blames herself. All three confront their inner horror, and all three survive, after a leap of faith.

(Aside: not everyone's "sins" are revealed, or at least not fully. We can figure that Benji, the cameraman, had something with the mystery girl, and we know Papi's had something to do with the kid in the car. We don't really see anything about Souxie, EXCEPT that La Taupe is the one to get her, and this is after she steps up to be the one to go talk to him when they find him the second time and he gets weirder ... they had something going before, something romantic I think, and maybe hers is that, more than anybody else, she should have been the one to try to find him when he disappeared ... just my guess though)

Dante

Dante and St John of the Cross are the two famous ones for the concept that "the way down is the way up."

I'll just set these up and knock them down. The first is the inscription they find at one point, "abandon all hope, ye who enter here." On the wikipedia or somewhere, somebody said that this is a thing in several mythological accounts of descent into the underworld. I know it is on the gates of hell in Dante's Inferno, but I haven't found it being anywhere else in any mythological literature. I have not dug out my copies of the Odyssey and the Aeneid, but I am assuming that if it were in those accounts, I would be able to find somebody mentioning it online in google searches etc. Either way, Dante is the most well known. And combined with the next two elements form Dante, especially the finale, I see no way this is not Dante.

Next is the death of Papi. He gets dragged into a burning car and is entombed. In the 6th circle of hell in the Inferno,  Pope Anastasius II is trapped in a flaming tomb along with other heretics. While scholars note that Dante here erred in confusing him with the emperor Anastasius I of the time, it still remains that Dante had the pope there, even if he was confused about the identity, and Papi's name is significant as an element that is sort of a tip off to Dante. This isn't one that is so thematically central, are the issues of the three who survive. For that matter, neither is the inscription just mentioned. The real Dantea element is the descent and then the re-ascent only by being willing to descend further. These tow are just clues to the fact that Dante is the source of the descent structure.

Finally, after the trio makes the leap of faith, they are in a small cavern that no longer has an opening in the ceiling. Instead it has a circular plate set down into a circular depression in the floor, about the size of a manhole cover. They try to get it "up" out to no avail.  Why do I put "up" in quotes? Well, because, it IS a manhole cover in a Paris street ... on the other side of it. They find this out when they accidentally push down on it and it shifts. So they work and get it pushed down enough to slide to the side, almost as if (before they realize what is going on) is is magnetically pulled to the roof of a chamber below them. BUT what is really happening is that their down is the up of the other side, and their up is the down of the other side. "The way down is the way up." In the center of the 9th circle of Dante's hell, Satan chews on Judas, Brutus, and Cascius, the three greatest traitors. Dante and Virgil have to climb down Satan's belly and then the direction reverses and they come out going upwards at the base of mount purgatory ... just like the direction reverses for Scarlette, George, and Zed as they climb down/up out of the manhole.

Conclusion: The movie got panned because the critics didn't know how to analyze anything that involves any literary elements earlier than about Friday the 13th, IMHO. I'm sure that's not entirely true. I am sure they have seen and respected older "horror" like Hitchcock. And I am sure that they are at least somewhat knowledgeable about older movies in other "genres." But that's the real problem, the genre classification. Movies are supposed to obey the rules of the determined "genre" like good little boys and girls ... which get pretty boring.