The Mysterious Stranger: A Close Reading

This piece of youtube ephemera is spooky, but is there something more to it?

You may have, in wandering some of the darker corners of the internet, come across a video clip purporting to show a cartoon that was banned from television (or perhaps movie theatres - these sorts of internet urban legends are typically rather vague) for being too disturbing. The video in question, which is about five minutes long, is certainly unsettling, featuring a headless being that refers to itself as Satan, performing various supernatural feats for an audience of three children, who eventually grow so disturbed by its actions that they flee into a doorway that has appeared out of nowhere, while the being continues to opine about the nature of existence.

As happens with these pieces of internet ephemera, the video has been robbed of its context. First of all: it wasn’t banned; it’s just kind of obscure. Just because you haven’t heard of a movie and it’s kind of creepy doesn’t mean it was banned, and the government - at least in the US - doesn’t do a lot of film censorship. Instead, we see self-censorship from the film industry, frequently out of fear of offending people; there’s nothing stopping United Artists from releasing the Censored Eleven, but they choose not to out of fear of attracting negative attention (the cartoons are really, really racist). A cartoon - particularly a completed one, and particularly one done in claymation - an especially time intensive, and thus expensive, style - isn’t going to get pulled from wider circulation for being kind of creepy. Plenty of cartoons are kind of creepy: see Watership Down, Coraline or The Secret of NIMH.

Second of all: this clip is just one part of a relatively mundane children’s movie adapting some of Mark Twain’s lesser known works (though still, improbably, starring Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Becky Thatcher). The frame story - Mark Twain, having been born the last time Halley’s Comet approached Earth, has built an airship in hopes of reaching it upon its return some seventy-four years later; Tom Sawyer and company, having snuck aboard the ship, seek to stop him, fearing that they’ll die when the ship reaches the comet - is pretty paper-thin, and most of the adapted vignettes - The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, Eve’s Diary, Extracts from Adam’s Diary, and Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven - are equally forgettable. There’s a reason this movie has fallen out of the slaughterhouse of literature - it mostly isn’t good. Mostly.

But that five minute clip - Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Becky Thatcher conversing with the devil - has, somehow, managed to stick around. It takes place about halfway through the movie, and marks a turning point in the children’s relationship with Twain. After a storm has battered the ship, they have grown concerned that Twain’s trip to the comet will leave them unable to return home. Departing the deck of the ship using the Index-o-Vator - a magical elevator that can transport them to scenes from Twain’s books - they discuss what they plan to do. The Index-o-Vator - which has a bit of a mind of its own - first opens to the fence painting scene from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer before shifting to The Mysterious Stranger.

Unless you’re a scholar of Mark Twain, you’ve probably never heard of this particular story. Twain never actually finished it; the ‘complete’ version is a hoax created by his biographer and a publisher. It’s kind of disjointed - the Stranger, called ‘Satan’ in this version, though apparently not the Satan of the Bible, is rather sinister in how he manipulates the lives of the people of Eselfdorf, but as the story continues the Stranger makes arguments that the narrator, a boy named Theodor, finds difficult to refute. One recurring theme in the story is how hard Theodor finds it to actually get the Stranger to improve anyone’s life, despite his supernatural powers. The Stranger ends up being a sort of malicious genie; several times in the story, improving someone’s life means ending it quicker or making it materially worse. In one incident, the Stranger reveals that improving a man’s life ends with him spending his afterlife in Hell, but towards the end of the novel the Stranger claims that no afterlife exists at all - and Theodor, apparently forgetting some of their earlier conversations, doesn’t challenge him on this. The cartoon is probably drawing from this version, rather than one of the incomplete versions (The Chronicle of Young Satan, Schoolhouse Hill, and No 44, the Mysterious Stranger); most of the events in the short happen in completed text, and towards the end of the movie, when Twain is attempting to unburden the airship by throwing various items overboard, he stops one of the children when they almost throw out a book titled The Mysterious Stranger, saying “hold on there, keep that manuscript; it won’t be published for years yet,” implying that it will, eventually, make it to print.

The movie’s version of The Mysterious Stranger plays out differently than any of the extant versions - perhaps not surprising, given that this it is a five minute adaptation of a thirty-six thousand-ish word novella. The Index-o-Vator’s door opens, and the Stranger manifests itself out of an otherwise barren island, floating in the void. When the children ask who the Stranger is, it introduces itself as an angel - but, specifically, Satan. Despite their concern about his name, the children enter the void, where the Stranger then demonstrates its power. It makes the barren island bloom and summons the children’s favorite fruits for them, before creating a castle and having the children sculpt tiny clay people, which it subsequently animates. It is at this point that the clip takes its infamously dark turn - when two of the clay people begin to fight over an ox, the Stranger expresses its contempt for humanity and squashes them flat. The Stranger then inflicts various disasters on the people - storms and earthquakes - and as it does, its face changes, first becoming explicitly demonic, then skeletal. The children, frightened by the Stranger, flee back into the door, leaving it alone to deliver a strange soliloquy to the audience.

So who - or what - is the Stranger? It refers to itself as Satan - and unlike the Stranger in the 1916 version, gives no indication that this name is an unfortunate coincidence. The Stranger claims not to be evil - a rather common devilish canard - but its reasoning is that it can do no wrong because it does not know what wrong is. It doesn’t try to tempt the children into evil or argue against Christianity; it simply asks the children to join it while it amuses itself. Unlike the Devil, the Stranger seems to be omnipotent, at least within the void where the children meet it. When it demonstrates its supernatural power to them, it generates things ex nihilo, simply waving its hand and manifesting whatever it wants.

This is not a description of the Devil. It is a description of God (albeit a very negative description). The Stranger creates a world and peoples it with inhabitants - the Christian Devil is a corrupter, not a creator. But more to the point, after creating them, it condemns them for being a “worthless and greedy lot” - even though, as their creator, the Stranger is presumably responsible for their nature. The standard Christian answer to this problem of theodicy - why does evil exist if God is both all-powerful and all-good - is usually free will. But what of less human evils - disease, famine, natural disasters, and the like? If God is the architect of the world - if it unfolds the way it does because He wills it - then why would He cause these things to happen? The Mysterious Stranger strips away any pretense of justification. The Stranger is the direct cause of the lightning and the earthquake that strike the little clay people; they suffer because it is its desire that they suffer.

And the Stranger brings into focus an unsettling aspect of an omnipotent God - that such a being would be so above humans that it might not even think of them as people at all. In the clip, the little people are made out of clay - and this is a claymation movie. The Stranger and the children function as the claymators in miniature, and the Stranger treats the people just as the creators of The Adventures of Mark Twain (or any other work of literature) treat their creations - as characters, not as actual people. The Stranger’s last words (both in the movie and in the novella) echo this: “Life itself is only a vision, a dream; nothing exists except empty space and you, and you are but a thought.” Twain himself, within the frame of the movie, is a sort of author-as-uncaring-God; he, after all, created the conflicts that Sawyer, Thatcher and Finn overcame in their novels, as we are reminded when he summons Injun Joe using the Index-o-Vator.

On the whole, it is actually remarkable that this movie got away with what it got away with. Pulling out from the Stranger, most of the rest of the movie deals with God and the afterlife as well - Eve’s Diary, Extracts from Adam’s Diary, and Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven all explicitly about religious topics, and Twain’s motivation in the frame story is his desire to unite with Halley’s Comet at the end of his life. In real life, Twain was an atheist, and some of Twain’s dialogue in the movie is taken from things that he actually said in real life; he notes of Heaven and Hell that he has “friends in both places” and that he would prefer “Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.” That’s the sort of thing you’d expect a children’s cartoon to get censored for - not being mildly creepy to someone surfing Youtube at three in the morning.