Vizzini, flies, and full fathom five

In past comments on this blog, Bill has associated me with the character Vizzini from The Princess Bride (starring, incidentally, Cary Elwes), with particular reference to the famous scene where he has to guess which of two drinks is poisoned, not knowing that in fact both are poisoned. Bill also connected The Princess Bride (novel by William Goldman) with Lord of the Flies (by William Golding). He suggested that I was the lord of the flies and tried to connect me to various giant insect characters, such as Gregor Samsa and a character called the Bug from the movie Men in Black. All of this was in the context of Bill’s understanding that I “am” in some sense the Tolkien character Pharazon.

(Comments are not searchable. The bug comments are on the post "Can you metamorphosize?" Vizzini is mentioned in the comments on "Don't be fooled by fake yellow flowers" and probably elsewhere, too.)

In “Shem and the dry Jack,” I referred to Pharazon as being “full fathom five,” meaning in a watery grave. I had forgotten that Tolkien actually has him buried in a cave rather than underwater like his countrymen. Since I’ve been advised to spell out all allusions to poetry, that’s a phrase from Ariel’s song in The Tempest.

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea change

Into something rich and strange.

Last night I read a scene in Last Call where the main character, Scott Crane, is scuba diving in Lake Mead, looking for a severed head. When he finds the head, which turns out to be that of the murdered mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, he sees that some of the skull has changed to coral and that one of the eyes is now a pearl. Coral and pearls aren’t found in lakes, so this is clearly a deliberate allusion to Shakespeare. The phrase “sea change” is even used; I guess “lake change” didn’t have the same ring. (Bill recently asserted, in an unrelated context -- a comment on "The modified Book of the Lamb" -- that lake could refer to the sea.)

When Crane touches the pearl eye, he enters a mostly-hallucinatory vision in which, while his physical body is still scuba diving, he finds himself in Siegel’s casino and meets Siegel himself as he was when he was alive. Siegel shows him a gambling trick: You put two sugar cubes on a table and, before releasing a fly, place bets on which of the two it will land on first. You rig the game by treating one surface of each sugar cube with DDT. By turning one cube poison side up and the other poison side down, you can control the behavior of the fly, which will not land on the poisoned surface. But, as Siegel proceeds to demonstrate with a monstrous fly “the size of a plum,” as the fly eats the seemingly unpoisoned sugar, it eventually reaches the DDT and dies anyway. Like Vizzini, it is doomed because it does not realize that both options are poisoned.