I Made A Tik Tok Series (And It’s Very Embarrassing)

And it was very embarrassing so don’t watch these

I really hope that worked the way it was supposed to. I think they were out of order. That took about a million steps. You’d think we would be better at distributing videos by now.

Anyway.

Hi! For my last project, I took Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book 2, and turned it into a Tik Tok series. I love the concept of Paradise Lost. Having grown up Christian (but since abandoned much of the rhetoric), the aesthetics and narrative and symbolism still resonates with me a lot. Naturally, the idea of a bunch of devils in a room trying to win Heaven back sounded hilarious to me, so I wanted to explore the idea a little further. I thought that the concept may have been easier to understand if it was in a quick-video format with modern language. It’s impossible for me to take myself seriously, so I added some stupid jokes in there- there was not, in fact, a giant centipede hunting Satan in the book. I’m not totally sure the concepts came across like I wanted them to, so it only probably makes sense to someone who has already read it. I still think that making this book easier to swallow only serves people, as there are a lot of important concepts in Paradise Lost. It took me forever. In the first video, I didn’t know that you could rearrange clips on Tik Tok, so I was changing and switching that little symbol on my forehead every single time, while for the second I just did one character at a time. 

I think Tik Tok is a format that people don’t really take seriously a lot of the time (including me), but the videos are so short, that it’s much easier to share a concept and, more importantly, retain your audience’s attention for the whole thing. I have a hard time paying attention sometimes, so I thought making the Tik Tok series would best portray my style of processing a narrative. Oftentimes, the videos that make me laugh are the ones I learn the most from, so I wanted to recreate that, even if it’s a fraction of a massive text. I’ll admit, I got some of my information and ideas from this video, but after that, I listened to an audio book of the section, then wrote my script. 

I started reading some of the analysis for this section and it’s been said that Book 2 is a parody of political debate, and demonstrates how corrupted reason can switch the narratives of good and evil. I actually said in my last blog post that the way they spoke about Heaven made me sympathize with the devil. I’ve gone and made a modern parody of the book, and it does kind of look like a political debate (but not really because I’m no film director). Satan uses signifiers to try to assert the strength of his new kingdom, when in reality it’s just a bunch of exiled nobodies sitting in a room. Especially now, it’s interesting to place political allegories into a religious context because of how evocative the symbolism is, as well as how easy it is to assign “good guy/bad guy” roles with something as polarized as Christianity. 

This is what’s important about studying literature; critical thinking is not only an important component of processing writing, but it’s vital to processing the media you consume and what it’s covertly convincing you of. No, liberal media is not trying to brainwash you, but be mindful of the assumptions you’re drawing from what could be misleading, or just outright satire. Literature is a safe place to explore methods of critical thinking and exploring subtext.