Why Evil Shouldn't Live in Skulls

Back when I was a young British Adventuress, there was this show, He-Man, about this sort of fruity-looking strong man in a fur loin-cloth. He-Man was a Master of the Universe, and protected his world from the evils of the treacherous Skeletor. He-Man lived (unmarried, mind you -- and no sign of a girlfriend) in this clean white castle with his friends Man-at-Arms, Teela, and his pet tiger Cringer. Skeletor? Lived in a skull.

Good has to be impossibly stupid to allow Evil to build homes that look like huge gaping skulls. Like, at some point, someone would have said something about the choice of architecture. And Evil also has to be impossibly stupid, since there's nothing subtle about enormous castles, surrounded by bats, in the swamp, in the shape of a gaping skull.

Also -- they don't ever look comfortable, Castles of Evil. They look like they were hewn out of caves, and they look drafty and dank. If I were evil, I'd want something easy to heat in the winter and cool in the summer. I'd want walls that were walls -- not cave walls or walls made of bone. I'd choose flattering fabrics and comfortable chairs. If I'm evil, and I want to spread evil, I want to make sure that evil is seductive and easy to slip in to -- like last year's sweater or a good pair of slippers.

Shakespeare gets it right. Macbeth's castle is pleasant. It's a home. And Duncan is dumb, but he wouldn't be so dumb that he'd want to stay in some place that smelled like death and looked like a tomb. "Methinks the Macbeths aren't quite ready for our stay," he'd say. "P'raps we could find a Holiday Inn in town. And send the Macbeths some candles. Scented candles. And a lot of them."

Maybe the argument is that evil has so corrupted the souls of those in its clutches that they've lost all sense of goodness. All of a sudden a chair made of aborted babies and a tinkling fountain of pus seems like just the thing. But I don't think that's the case. I think evil can corrode a soul and not influence the soul's design taste that drastically.

Evil has to be seductive. It has to be allowed in your home. There's that wonderfully creepy line from the Cain and Abel story where God says to Cain, "Sin is crouching at your door." If Evil looks or smells distasteful -- I mean, blatantly, skull-dwellingly distasteful – you’re probably not going to let it in. And if you do? Then you're soul isn't just corrupted and corroded: you're completely blind as well.

Also, I don't know that evil twists forms into ugliness like that. I'm thinking back to Tolkien and his orcs. I understand that the evil wizards Sauron and Sauraman both needed an army of some kind to do their bidding (i.e., eeevil) -- but it seems to me just making normal looking human warriors who are maybe just a little bit quicker and a little bit stronger would work just as well. I don't know why evil monsters have to be created.

I think monsters are our safety net, so to speak. We have this fiction that evil will be easily recognizable -- that we'll know it when we see it -- because we're lazy and scared. Mostly lazy. And we should be scared. Evil is you and me and everyone we know; it sits at our door and at our table. And when evil is presented to us in art in this homogenous form -- I think it makes us less able to recognize and respond to it when it's in our government. Or in our church. Or ourselves.