tippett's inferno: Mad God annotated (pt 1)

This way into the city of woe.

Mad God is a weird film. Decades in the making, it has only now been released in its entirety on Shudder. It has no dialogue and little plot in the strict sense of the word, but it’s deeply allegorical. Director Phil Tippett is one of the most storied animators in Hollywood, having worked on everything from Star Wars to Jurassic Park to Robocop, and his film has much to (vaguely) say about the process of artistic creation. For most of the movie’s runtime, though, Mad God — which after all is about a man descending into the depths of the earth to a nightmarish realm below — is also an almost step-by-step interpretation of Dante’s Inferno. In this post, I’m going to trace out those steps, and show how Dante’s work structures Tippett’s own.

Opening shot: The opening shot of the mob attacking the tower establishes one of the main themes to which the film will return: neverending cycles of violence and destruction. The motif of the spiral (the stairs winding up the tower) is this theme’s visual representation, and you’ll notice it again and again: in the great ammonite during The Assassin’s descent, in the staircase that his replacement folllows into the depths, and so on. The film’s Biblical framing — the full text of Leviticus 26 — further intoduces this theme, as well as the Jewish undertones that will run through the rest of the film. Israel’s history in the Hebrew Biblel is cyclical, a repeating pattern of 1) divine salvation, 2) turning from God to false deities and idols, 3) divine punishment, 4) repentance and divine salvation again, at which point the pattern begins anew. This cycle culminates ultimately in the destruction of the Temples (twice, in fact), which we’ll see represented later in the film.

Given the Biblical opening, we’re probably witnessing the destruction of the Tower of Babel here. Compare the tower’s appearance to, e.g., this famous painting by Brueghel

In that both are towers which are struck by lightning, it’s safe to assume a reference here to the Tower, the 16th of the Tarot’s Major Arcana. It’s usually taken to represent sudden change, often disastrous; the irruption of chaos, and sometimes divine revelation.

5:50 — I’m not going to point all of these out, but the film is riddled with references to other stop motion films, espcially ones Tippett worked on. You’ll catch allusions to Jason and the Argonauts, the Voyages of Sinbad, and Star Wars. Here we have dinosaur skulls, probably a nod to Tippett’s longstanding role as Dinosaur Supervisor for the Jurassic Park series.

6:20 — In keeping with the opening chapter from Leviticus, there are a few long shots of roomfuls of dead idols. In this one I caught Egyptian canopic jars, a meditating Buddha, what seems to be a bloodily defaced Virgin Mary, a terra cotta warrior, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss it cameo of Pazuzu, a Mesopotamian wind demon made famous by his appearance in the Exorcist. We’ll see him again later, during the destruction of the Temple.

12:00 — Another descent. From here on out, we’re on solid allegorical ground. You could maybe tentatively intepret the house in the previous scene as Limbo, and the butcher monster as Minos (the judge of the damned, who allocates them to their destined circles), but it’s kind of a stretch. In 12:34, though, we enter what is pretty clearly Lust, the second circle. The masturbating doll is hard to misread. On top of that, we have two animals fighting to get to each other through the walls of their cages (hard to tell if they’re driven by lust or aggression or both), a lizard (a reference to the mostly-discarded model of the brain in which our deepest impulses like hunger and lust are governed by the reptilian brain), and a monkey. The monkey is probably animalistic nature again. It has weirdly human eyes.

14:00 — We are now in Gluttony, the third circle. Huge figures are endless tortured and made to shit upon an even larger figure, which eats the shit. In Dante, the gluttonous are immersed in a freezing shit slurry. Note another descent here, which parallels Dante’s; note too that the Assassin is descending past what looks like giant stomachs with eyes.

16:15 — A syringe endlessly filling and emptying at the bidding of great mechanical bellows signals our entrance into the Fourth Circle (Canto VII), where lie the Hoarders and the Wasters. In Dante, these are those who lacked moderation in their spending, and either piled up their wealth like misers or dispersed it like profligates. They are damned to endless combat, rolling great stones at one another for eternity. Tippett’s equivalent seems to be a condemnation of the endless consumption of industrial capitalism, which can only build by destroying. The “people” here are a product of it, made in molds from the refuse of this place at 16:20, and exist to advance it and then be consumed by it. In turn, they create more of themselves.

We see a great line of them slouching into a factory like the walking dead, recalling Romero’s critique of consumerism in Dawn of the Dead. This is a machine that runs on suffering; even the manufacturing equipment is built from bones.

17:40 — It is difficult to distinguish the people from the machiens they operate. They move in repetitve, mindless clockwork motions. Only at the end — when one tries to flee this place — do we see anything like humanity in them.

17:55 — Some seem forced to endlessly build, while others casually destroy them. There is no distinction between the two; all are both hoarder and waster. There is no malice in the destruction, nothing personal. It’s just business.

18:10 — The ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia. The cruciform shapes carried by the workers offer no salvation. This level is not just about modern industry, but ageless systems of human exploitation. The scenes of labourers straining to carry great blocks of stones recall images of Jews building the pyramids, as in Charlton Heston’s Ten Commandments.

18:40 — Cycles again. The creatures here are labouring to set up these monoliths which will be knocked down and set up again, endlessly.

20:00 — I can only assume that the stacked corpses here are deliberately reminiscientt of the Holocaust.

20:50 — Factory farming. I have no idea what to make of the rats with giant testicles at 21:45.

24:00 — Another descent. In Dante we are in Circle 5, the Wrathful. Dante himself exhibits wrath in Canto VIII, shoving a pathetic soul into the boiling river to be torn apart by others. The Assassin, too, participates in the sin of this level, adding his own briefcase — a bomb, a wepaon of wrath — to those of the countless others who have tried before.

In the Inferno, a crowd of demons bar the way into the lower depths of Hell at this point, and it takes a visit from an annoyed and dispassionate angel to disperse them. There is no angel here, and the monstrous and violent creature stops the Assassin from completing his task.

36:00 — Baby here is a pretty clear Eraserhead reference. That thing was also animated with stop-motion, although famously no one knows what David Lynch made it from (maybe a cow fetus?).

37: 00 — In the Inferno, this is one of a few major crossings. Dante and Virgil cross the river Styx with the help of a sinister boatman, are stopped at the gates of the damned City of Dis by the aforementioned demons, and must be allowed passage by an invading angel. There is a similar disjunction here. The original Assassin does not cross — he’s either dead or the baby now — but we do, getting a brief glimpse of the world above before a new Assassin begins his journey.

I hope you enjoyed part 1 of this. I’ll be posting part 2 on Tuesday. Let me know if you think there’s anything important I missed.