Beyond The Veil

Chicago Farmer doing his thing in Delavan, IL

2011-08-27T17:27:00.000-05:00

Kickstarting Funds for the Chicago Farmer Documentary

2011-08-27T16:58:00.004-05:00

The film I am producing - a feature length documentary about Chicago Farmer, an amazing folksinger - is completely edited. We are looking to raise funds to complete the post-production and get the film in theaters and on dvd. Kickstarter - if you are not aware - is an amazing tool for artists to raise funds for their projects by offering the end product and other swag to those who donate.

ABOUT THE FILM: It tells a mythic tale of the modern folksinger, reviving the travels that used to be so common back when the economy was pretty much like today’s: not so good. Chicago Farmer straddles the State of Illinois, hailing from the small town of Delavan, IL and intimately familiar with the sprawl of Chicago. He finds the differences to be minimal, though the attractions quite different. With concert footage, as well as scenes from Delavan, Chicago and all points in between (his daily travel between gigs has made him say he hails from “Backenforth, IL”), the film explores the pulse of America – and finds that everyone’s heart beats basically the same.

If you want to see that story - on the big screen or on your home cinematic system - please check Kickstarter out. Pledge $20, you get the film. Pledge more, and Chicago Farmer will record a song or play a show for you.

The trailer can be seen here on YouTube. And please "Like" us on Facebook.

E(very) P(esticide) A(pproved)

2011-06-28T21:46:00.004-05:00

"Vanishing of the Bees" is a documentary about CCD - Colony Collapse Disorder. If you haven't been keeping informed, honeybee colonies have been basically disappearing in large numbers over the last few years.

Apparently it has come in conjunction with the uses of new systemic pesticides. These last a long time, but were only tested (by their manufacturer) in large doses in a one time application. The EPA approved their use. After honeybees are exposed, the pesticide gets into their food supply, into their offspring and about six months later, CCD. The bees abandon the hive, leaving only babies and the queen. The ramifications are widespread, for bees, our food supply and probably for humans and human children as well.

This film conveys a lot of important knowledge and I highly recommend seeing it. Two last thoughts: the French EPA (whatever they call it) supposedly runs on the basis that what you don't know can hurt you. Our EPA does not.

And perhaps the most obvious evidence from the film that we have a very screwed up relationship with the environment: the bee keeper that called his bees "equipment." That is an indication of a very serious problem indeed.

Resnais' "Night and Fog"

2011-06-09T16:17:00.005-05:00

I made a decision recently to try and write a post on this blog about every film I watch in its entirety. Unfortunately, I just watched Alain Resnais' "Night and Fog." After watching his "Hirsohima Mon Amour" for a class paper, and feeling a pretty deep connection to it, I felt I needed to finally see this earlier film of Resnais.

It is about the Nazi death camps, a documentary of the shells of the places which held such horrors. It is a short film, just over half an hour, and should be seen by everyone. It is not a film I feel the need to write much about. However, right before watching it, I caught a promo on TCM for "Judgment at Nuremburg" in which Spencer Tracy, as a judge, speaks the following line:

"...this is what we stand for: justice, truth... and the value of a single human being!"

Postscript on The Tree of Life

2011-06-08T09:44:00.009-05:00

"Exactly, it's the mystery," says Nino Quincampoix. "You won't find it here!"      replies the sex shop proprietress.

Avoiding the inevitable, I found myself re-watching "Amelie" this morning, right after my last post on "The Tree of Life." The above quote describes "The Tree of Life" perfectly.

This is the problem with Malick's film - there is no mystery. He presents the   world literally, expecting us to be awed by it.

"Amelie" presents a world of awe - mythically - and we ARE awed by it. Somehow, the theme of both films is the same.

One is presented literally, one mythically. Just re-watch "Amelie."

And the 2012 Academy Award for Cinematography Goes To...

2011-06-08T07:23:00.001-05:00

Emmanuel Lubezki, for "The Tree of Life." A very good cinematographer outdoes himself in collaboration with Terrence Malick. Every shot is excellent, camera movement amazing. I was compelled to watch simply because of the beauty of what was up on the screen.

Unfortunately, the cinematography was the only element compelling enough to keep me watching. When a couple stood and left just before the credits rolled, I realized I had wished to do just that many times over the last two and a half hours. Just how much did the jumbled concept and narrative contrast with the camera work? There are three young boys in the film. Sean Penn plays one of them as an adult. My friend and I, with a random third guy that heard us talking and sidled up, each thought Penn was playing a different child as an adult. I think I at least got that one right, but that says it all.

Just what was this film about? I am tempted to be swayed by my myth and depth psychology studies and say "the shadow." Some of the beautiful shots we see most often are of the shadows of children, and others, dancing and twisting along the earth, often on concrete. And the shadow side of a person, where all the unacknowledged, undeveloped yet still percolating traits sink to lie dormant, looking for ways to get expressed, easily explain the madness of every character here. Repression only lasts so long before the dam bursts.

But Malick's film tries so much more - I think - that this shadow play running through the film gets bombastically paralleled by what I can only guess is supposed to be the grandeur of the creator God. The film starts with a Bible quote from Job and proceeds to show the Big Bang and evolution, microbes and dinosaurs, planets and huge tidal waves. Set to some sort of religious choral music, it is the anti-"2001: A Space Odyssey." If these scenes of multiple and wildly messy upheavals as life and matter gets created in a billion random ways are supposed to suggest a human-like god planning every step of creation, I suggest it does the exact opposite.

So it then seems the film re-focuses on the smaller family story, on the choice humans have: to live in the state of nature, defined here as choosing pleasure for yourself or following a strict orderly life, or the state of grace, defined here as - what? The only explication I could find was that grace means living and loving. Truly loving, not just going through the motions as the father does.

But then there are those dinosaurs. One is shown lame, laying in a river bed. Another, different dinosaur comes running up to it, presumably for an easy meal. After stepping on the lame one's head, it looks down and then leaves. Without eating it. Is Malick suggesting the dinosaur chose grace - to love the fallen brethren - rather than nature - to eat it? While a really wonderful idea, it's rather silly.

There are other plot points from the narrative with the family that make little sense, mostly concerning when and how the youngest brother dies exactly. As a little tale of being raised in a 1950's family of conformity with bitter anger running through them behind the walls of their home, this works pretty well. Combine it with the scenes of god-creation and some incredibly ridiculous ending of dead people reuniting with the living, and you have a massive debacle.

But what an amazing debacle to watch. Perhaps the ad they are featuring, composed of multiple shots from the film, tells all. Come for the cinematography. Leave when it's done.

Voice Casting by Aardman Animations

2011-03-28T20:37:00.006-05:00

I was given an old videotape of shorts from Aardman Animations. I suppose they are best known for Nick Park's work - Wallace and Gromit. It is kind of amazing to me what they did on other films though. From a documentary on the end of the tape: Aardman took recorded conversations of real people and used the tapes for their soundtracks. They basically animated around these conversations.

"War Story," above, appears to have been a commissioned interview for use in this way. It is with a British WWII vet. Other films appear to have just taken some random conversations - notably a discussion by some folks at a Salvation Army location and one of a door-to-door salesman with an older couple he is trying to get to buy something. The clip of the older gentleman giving the salesman a bit of the business is classic:

Not for everyone's taste, I guess, but I'm really fascinated at how they were able to use these voices in service of some real - and interesting - movement.

BTW - I'm not quite sure of the legality of these being on YouTube or on this blog, but I'll certainly take them down if need be. If not, they are here because they are fascinating - and really great. They deserve a wider renown!

Tales From Earthsea - Voice Casting at Disney

2011-03-25T17:49:00.011-05:00

There is something very odd about Disney's choice to cast Willem Dafoe as the voice of the villainous female Lord Cob in Ghibli's "Tales From Earthsea." Dafoe is great, creating a very disturbing villain with a very incongruous voice. Lord Cob - as you question the "why" of the character's sexuality - is a truly creepy villain.

But then you watch the film in Japanese and find she really is a woman. You also discover it makes the parts of the movie fit together just a little better when it is obvious. I can't get over the controversy about this film, but in its original language, it is even more a "real" Ghibli film than even I thought a few days ago. Dafoe is seriously unnerving, and I really wonder why Disney made the decision to go this way. It makes Lord Cob a more intense villain, but does not make the overall film better. Interesting choice to have made.

I have also wandered the internet looking for reasons people don't like this film, and I honestly can say I don't understand any of them. I had previously written that there was a confusing moment in the film, and many have written that much of it is confusing. On second watch, I thought it was seamless and wasn't sure where my confusion had come from. I can only guess that many viewers want everything laid out in front of them, but I think you have to be able to linger in a little doubt or non-clarity to really appreciate any film. By the end, you should be able to think about it. If it's still totally unclear, perhaps you have watched a film that is not so good.

But I'll say it again - "Tales From Earthsea" is a fine addition to Studio Ghibli's impressive roster. Not as good as "Totoro," but nothing is. I look forward to Goro's next one.

Anime and Manga BLOGGERS FOR JAPAN

2011-03-25T10:49:00.003-05:00

Anime and Manga BLOGGERS FOR JAPAN are VERY close to their goals now - about $95 away from their Doctors Without Borders goal, near the same for Shelterbox.

Since I don't exclusively write about anime and manga, I wasn't sure I had anything to continue, but I think I'll keep trying till they get those last few donations. Below is an amazing animation short that - although absolutely nothing like what Hayao Miyazaki produces - has the same value at its core as one of my favorite films of all time, My Neighbor Totoro. Please donate a few dollars.

The Incident at Tower 37

2011-03-25T10:47:00.004-05:00

This fine short film really caught me off-guard, being a great example of what animation can do best: show "the other" as either being more like us than we usually think, or showing "the other" as being not like us but still completely, utterly valid. So many works do the former; showing others in a non-human way is much more rare. This film from Christ Perry at Bit Films is a beautiful example of that validity.

I think this is part of what Hayao Miyazaki does so very well. Totoro, the Ohmu, his landscapes in general really, are all alive in their own way, all definitely non-human. Maintaining that non-human quality while still allowing us to relate is animation's secret weapon.

Imagining just another human piece of the puzzle is how we maintain our dominant outlooks and attitudes. Imagining a fish out of water can tell us so much more.

Anime and Manga BLOGGERS FOR JAPAN

2011-03-23T15:58:00.006-05:00

As part of supporting the Anime and Manga BLOGGERS FOR JAPAN, below please find my review, a first for me, for the anime series "Naoki Urasawa's Monster." Earlier posts for the cause are on "Tales From Earthsea" and "A Town Called Panic" - both found by scrolling down.

Bloggers for Japan are really very close to hitting their goals in support of Doctors Without Borders and Shelterbox. I think I am safe in saying my 97-year old Japanese Aunty living near Hiroshima would be really pleased to know someone reading this blog was able to help her country in some small way. Huge thanks to you for your support, and huge thanks to Bloggers4Japan.com.

Naoki Urasawa's Monster - A Different Kind of Anime

2011-03-23T15:26:00.006-05:00

"Monster" is an anime series from 2004; the link above is to the Wikipedia page for the manga version. There is a section on the anime if you scroll down.

I had not planned on ever writing about "Monster" because there are seventy-four episodes, which I watched maybe two at a time on Funimation OnDemand. It took about a year to watch the whole series, and with so many characters, it is easy to get a little confused. Without being able to go back and re-watch, it's hard to write about the exact scenes in the right context. Those scenes are very powerful at times. There are DVD's of the first thirty episodes available, but I do believe you can watch them all on Hulu. Whatever that is. My viewing habits are pretty old school, and watching anime is pretty difficult if you want to keep up. I was glad I found this OnDemand, purely by accident. That said...

"Monster" is a really fine series, incredibly emotional and powerful. The main theme basically deals with how children are raised, and what it means to be a true, honest and loving person. The title Monster is a young boy who has grown up under rather poor guidance. He is either part of a fascist conspiracy, or perhaps he is really on his own, causing particularly violent and senseless chaos. There is no real reason to like him, other than a suspicion that he was mistreated as a young boy, so he makes a really fine villain.

Or the Monster is the one pictured above, who has lived inside the boy all through these years he has grown up.

Monster deals with adults and children as they relate to each other. It depicts the truly horrendous consequences of adults knowingly attempting to mold children in exceptionally unhealthy ways. The adult villains are truly reprehensible, which brings more emotion to the screen than even most films have. Over seventy-five episodes, there is an element of hit-or-miss, but in general, this is powerful storytelling. The plot is driven mostly by a fugitive, Dr. Tenma, so there are numerous vignette episodes in which humanity and inhumanity are explored through various situations and relationships.

There is also a revenge factor, a theme which is handled here by actually showing two sides - the reasonable and humane, against the chaotic and the despicable. It works well as it runs through the entire series.

The animation is pretty standard for anime, I think, which is not very exciting. However, this is not an action series - it is about emotion, and empathy, which is allowed to develop slowly for maximum effect. At times, there are some amazing scenes which elevate the animation and the content to a pretty high level. If you have time, and are maybe not usually thrilled by anime, this might be worth checking out. It seems to have a limited audience, but I found it thought-provokingly brilliant.

Anime and Manga BLOGGERS FOR JAPAN

2011-03-22T16:46:00.005-05:00

As part of supporting the Anime and Manga BLOGGERS FOR JAPAN, below please find my review, by request, for "A Town Called Panic." Please note: This film has nothing to do with Japan. My defense of "Tales From Earthsea" can be found below.

Bloggers for Japan are getting very near their goals of supporting Doctors Without Borders and Shelterbox to give direct support to those in need from the recent disaster. If you like the review below, can you make a small donation? If you don't like the review below, can you make a small donation?

A Town Called Panic

2011-03-22T16:38:00.004-05:00

"A Town Called Panic" is a very silly movie. I like the animals. I like the animation. I like the backgrounds a lot.

The end made me really happy and brought a smile to my face (because of the fireworks, not because it was the end). I like the farmer.

I wish the plot was more than just one thing leading to another, because it could have been sheer genius. But since it was just silly, I guess that's ok.

I like donkey.

Available on Netflix streaming. :-)

Bloggers for Japan

2011-03-21T14:48:00.008-05:00

Below is my review of Studio Ghibli's new US DVD release of "Tales from Earthsea." It is part of Anime and Manga BLOGGERS FOR JAPAN. The folks who have had their lives destroyed will need support to get back on track, so if you can donate on the Bloggers for Japan site, I thank you. The world will only truly become one by sharing culture and kindness.

Does Studio Ghibli's "Tales from Earthsea" Deserve the Bad Rap It Seems to Have?

2011-03-21T14:47:00.001-05:00

When I first heard Studio Ghibli was making "Tales from Earthsea," I was excited. I fondly remembered reading Ursula K. Le Guin's series of books. Ghibli, of course, makes perhaps the most wonderful animated films ever. Hmm, not perhaps. Yes, as a whole, Ghibli is the best. Though mostly due to the singular genius of Hayao Miyazaki, the Ghibli films by other directors that I have seen (Grave of the Fireflies, Whisper of the Heart and The Cat Returns) are all amazing in their own way. So as much as I believe Miyazaki to be a genius (so much so that my dissertation may be focused on him), the Ghibli magic may be that the production company he founded has a singular vision that works.

Unfortunately, reviews of "Tales from Earthsea" were troubling. It is directed by Goro Miyazaki, Hayao's son, and apaprently this caused problems - between son and father, but also with how the film was received by the core Ghibli fans. LeGuin herself - who had originally agreed to allow the making of the film as long as Hayao was at the helm - also found faults with the film. I will admit to not having read the details of any spat between father and son. I do believe Goro was a landscaper before being given this opportunity, though, so I assumed criticisms of the film were going to be valid. I trust LeGuin and have loved almost every word she has written that I have read.

However, I also know that film is a different animal. Faithful adaptations of books that make good films are not the easiest of projects to complete.

While recently re-watching as many Ghibli films as I could in order to ponder whether I could devote a dissertation to them (without ruining my appreciation), I was pleased to see "Tales from Earthsea" was being released. Only on Disney DVD though, which is just wrong. I recently read Miyazaki's "Starting Point," wherein it seems that early in his career Hayao was not too thrilled with Disney. I have been looking for information about how he felt when Ghibli and Disney formed a partnership - did his feelings change? I haven't yet found any comments, but I might guess he has simply stopped mentioning Disney when he doesn't have to. Maybe because Disney did not see fit to release this film to any theaters, where these films really need to be seen.

But that decision may have been based on fan's early and bad reviews. It's a shame, because this is another glorious Ghibli film that would have been that much more wonderful on the big screen.

First, is a bit darker than previous films. As the major theme is about the shadow side in all of us, this is to be expected. It includes a scene of graphic violence that I cannot recall seeing in previous Ghibli films, as well as some adult to child violence. These instances were shocking only because it is not what one expects from Ghibli. In the context of the narrative, however, they were utterly appropriate. The villain in the film - again, a true villain not often seen in Ghibli works - was for me one of the most disturbing villains I have seen anywhere in a while. The age for this film is rather higher than it was for "Ponyo."

I have also noticed criticism in some parts that the animation in "Earthsea" is not up to Ghibli standards. Specifically, some of the spectacular backgrounds we expect to see aren't present. I can't say I agree. Not only does the film look great, some of the animation is really outstanding. Toward the end, when the roof of some of the stonework is collapsing, and individual bricks are quaking and falling apart, I'd say is some of the best animation I've seen.

Some are criticizing the story, suggesting it is routine fantasy genre, or else that it's unclear and hard to follow. I found it to be a powerful story - truly mythic undertones spiking up through the disguise of placid narrative. I actually thought at one point that it reminded me of Carl Dreyer's films, which are paced notoriously slowly, languidly, but in service of powerful emotion.

Scenes in which Arren gets engulfed in what looks like black, oily water - also calling to mind the flooding water in "Ponyo" - hit a little too close to the heart, considering the ongoing crisis in Japan. This only adds to the tense drama that slowly unfolds in "Earthsea."

The calm demeanor of the character Sparrowhawk is matched here only by his genuine humility. When he apologizes to the boy Arren for an incorrect decision, choosing to leave him alone when there was every reason to believe the boy might need help, it is a moment rarely seen in any film - an adult apologizing for wrongheaded inaction. The powerful role Sparrowhawk owns makes it an even more touching scene - a leader with actual humility.

There was one moment when I was confused near the end. That confusion passed quickly, though, as I brought my own imagination to bear on what I thought had just happened. Too often everything in a film is telegraphed - we know what happened, or we are told how to feel. My ability to bring my own metaphor into this moment of confusion was a crowning achievement for a magnificent and powerfully emotional film.

I can understand Ursula LeGuin's criticisms. From what I recall of her wonderful words, this was not her story. But the Ghibli fan's outcry I don't understand at all. All in all, I'd say the son of the genius made a rather impressive debut.

The Wolfman

2011-02-10T07:34:00.005-06:00

There is a small segment of society that would deem the Universal monster films of the thirties and forties as classics. I am part of that group. I love these films for the same reason I prefer such special effects as stop-motion animation: the imaginal is meant to be just that - imaginal. If our monsters look too real, they become literal and lose the power we allow them to have in our imagination. They become slashers, and we know what it's like to linger on the blood. I prefer atmosphere to gore because what I can imagine in my thoughts is that much scarier than simply the disgust of violent death. The Universal monsters allowed death to be tragic. They were one step, sometimes more, removed from what was real. In that gap, between what we know is real and what we are able to imagine, is the full range of what is possible.

"The Wolfman" remake is a better film than I think it has been given credit for. More so than other Universal remakes, it honors the spirit of the original by taking its subject seriously. Yes, there is a fair amount of blood, but it is shown quickly, not lingered upon. Wonderfully balancing this is the atmosphere in every scene. Though I would not say I was ever scared, the feeling of dread was with me in every sequence. Dread in a film is more powerful than the shock every time.

As a fan of the original Universal film, there are many nice touches in this one. Benicio Del Toro comes across as the perfect actor to play the Lon Chaney Jr. role. Neither is exactly a pleasure to behold, and Del Toro does what Chaney Jr. could not - make Lawrence Talbot a likable guy. In the original, you feel for Talbot simply because he is forcibly turned into a wolf. Del Toro - playing the script perfectly - is the only male character with heart. I liked him, and it is truly unfair that he is the one to succumb to lycanthropy. My favorite nod to the original is the use of the telescope - which also delineates the characters of the two Larry Talbot's - Lon Chaney Jr. uses the telescope to spy on a girl; the remake uses it as intended - to view the moon, in a nice scene between Del Toro and his creepy father, Anthony Hopkins.

The original film is one of my favorites, and the remake is the kind of horror film rarely made anymore - gothic atmosphere, mysterious and imaginal. Not the kind of film a lot of people want to see any more. However, the psychological dimensions of the man who changes into a wolf are also rather interesting in this film.

This film truly reflects on the imaginal - who is able to imagine, what to do with life when what you imagine turns out to be possible. Perhaps the best scene is one in which Del Toro is imprisoned in an asylum. Strapped down in a chair, he is wheeled into a medical auditorium filled with the medical profession, leering and waiting for a show. His "doctor" is providing just that - forcing his "patient" to have to endure looking at a full moon, in order to embarrass him and prove that he will not turn into a wolf because of it.

The doctor is utterly incapable of imagining that something is possible, and this leads to the hubris of creating a spectacle in order to dismiss it. When the full moon does make its appearance, it is hard to feel bad for these spectators. When the "doctor" is taken by the Wolfman, the lesson may be that we should give a little credence to even something we cannot believe. Imagine it, and take precaution - don't be completely dismissive immediately.

The other interesting character is Hopkins, playing the Wolfman's father. He is also a lycanthrope. His full embrace of his alternate lifestyle led me to consider his character from the Jungian perspective. Jung suggests we cannot become whole unless we examine our shadow side and enable it to emerge in our lives at times. By allowing this, we are able to siphon off some of the power, disperse it while also engaging with it. In Hopkins' character, I found a man who fully embraced his shadow side. He created a powerful ego, one able to to stand up for his own individualism. He took that ego too far though - no one and nothing was important to him any more, except for himself. It's one thing to become a strong person. It's quite another to be so strong that others don't matter any more. This isn't Hopkins best role ever, but it's effective. He's a true creep here.

This is not a film for everyone. If you like your imaginal to be made utterly real, you can skip this. But if you like to suspend reality and slip into a world that is one step removed, dim the lights and enjoy.

HOUSE (Japan, 1977)

2010-10-28T15:53:00.003-05:00

"House" is a 70's horror movie from Japan. I say horror, but that hardly means anything with this film. It is about seven teenage girls vacationing at the home of an aunt. The aunt is a ghost, of course, looking for some redemption.

Here'e the thing - the seven girls remind me of something like the Goonies, but not really - there is not a great analogy to any American film I can think of. Each one goes by a nickname: Gorgeous, Fantasy, Sweet, Kung Fu, Prof, Mac and Melody.

The House comes to life in very strange ways as it picks them off, one by one (sort of a slasher flick M.O., but the slasher is any number of household items). There is also some odd Japanese humor - not all of it translates well, which is part of the charm here, maybe.

I believe it is basically about girls growing up, relating to each other and their mothers - somehow. There is a scene in the middle in which Melody plays a haunting - ah, melody - on a haunted piano, while Gorgeous comes to terms with mirror images of herself, her late mother and her ghostly aunt. It is fascinating, and works as ghostly cinema. At least it did for me. You might just groan and shut the DVD player off.

It is one of the strangest films I've ever seen. It left me shaking my head, but smiling. It was just released in the Criterion Collection, and is available on Netflix.

Monsters

2010-10-25T21:30:00.004-05:00

I found the above clip on Yahoo Movies the other day and got excited - it looks great. I then read the Yahoo user reviews which all universally panned it.

Luckily, I ignored that and watched it OnDemand this evening - a beautiful film that is hard to describe. I will say this - the humanity shown in the film - between people, one to one, is more often than not the way I hope we can treat each other. And though the film is low budget, the climactic scene, between two Monsters and two Humans, is amazing. The actor's face, Scoot McNairy, says it all.

I'm interested to see how this film fares from paid reviewers.

"You're either an activist or an inactivist."

2010-09-22T08:19:00.014-05:00

I am not usually at a loss of words when it comes to a film. The Cove, 2009 Academy Award winner for Best Documentary, has me at a loss for words. What follows is an attempt - I suggest getting the film and watching it. It's on Netflix...

I was going to watch the film for a second time before writing, but I really didn't want to. It's a powerful document of dolphin slaughter and I was rather emotional by the very end. Anything I write has a hard time competing with the film itself. James Hillman suggests, "Stick with the image." Since watching the film, an image has stuck, unfortunately. It is an aerial shot of the title cove, in Taiji, Japan, really a rather small landform. The water is bright red - the blood of slaughtered dolphins.

Other than the slaughter itself, what lingers in my disbelieving mind is how the town promotes itself with cute dolphin, whale and turtle signs, statues, billboards, etc. The veneer of the cute animal as tourism advertisement, when the underlying economic engine is to actually slaughter these same animals. And then the fishermen and authorities, who work so hard to try and prevent foreign visitors from understanding what goes on. When someone works so hard to keep others out, they know somewhere inside themselves that they are hiding something that is wrong at best.

There are, of course, politics involved. I have never understood the International Whaling Commission and how it allows any whaling to take place at all. Well, we see here there is no power behind the organization. But it's blatantly ineffectual. Japan buys the votes of Caribbean islands to get away with their "scientific" whaling. Whale meat still ends up in certain Japanese grocery stores, and as the film shows, sometimes that whale meat is mercury-soaked dolphin meat. I would think it would be relatively simple for like-minded governments to apply some pressure to end these practices, but I can only assume by sifting through the news of the day that most people are rather ignorant of anything other than their own selves.

I actually understand, without condoning, the Japanese fishermen hanging on to this barbarism as an act of defiance against Westernization. I have strong belief, though, that as the Japanese people learn of the actions in this film, they will bring a halt to it. I eagerly await a Miyazaki film about it. Please?

But I have a hard time understanding how anyone could actually do this - who could stick a harpoon in a dolphin? Or hunt down any animals really? I am never impressed. As I wrote about Ghost Bird, humans assuming privilege is messed up, and becomes more messed up every day human population grows. Anyone defending families with eighteen kids - or eight - or even three at this point - are simply not paying attention to the world they live in. In reading about the demise of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, it seems the main cause of extinction was the complete obliteration of the forests they lived in. The wood was sold off during Reconstruction to fuel the continued industrial growth of America. It's an endless cycle of precise connections - foul one up, others follow quickly.

"What are the chances of the world changing?" Well, as Ric O'Barry says in The Cove, if we can't stop the dolphin killing in the cove, one little cove in Taiji, Japan, we have no chance at changing the rest of the world.

Ghost Bird: Between Myth and Science

2010-09-21T13:56:00.001-05:00

The 2009 documentary Ghost Bird focuses on the 2005 declaration by the Department of the Interior, backed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, that the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker still exists. The film contends the proof this claim was made on was nowhere near conclusive enough to make that claim. As of today, there is still no concrete evidence of the extinct bird's continued existence. It was a wonderful bird - if you know the Pileated Woodpecker, the Ivory-Billed was a good degree larger. It is easy to understand why even a prestigious organization such as the Cornell Lab would say there is evidence - they want the bird to exist, as anyone in their right mind would.

Not everyone is in what I would call their right mind however. In the face of oncoming animal extinctions, I often hear the statistic that over 98% of the Earth's species have gone extinct already and it is simply the result of the natural world at work. Somehow, these are usually the same people who don't "believe" in evolution. Of course, the problem is that much of the environmental mess being made is because of our influence and has not been "natural". This too is often denied.

What I wonder though, is - even if, somehow - assuming if, even - what is happening is not man-made, or even if it is the natural world proceeding as normal - why would anyone just accept that? Why would we not work to try and keep alive the amazing variety of animal species we are aware of? Even if it were not our fault, it certainly seems reasonable to steer our actions towards rescue. But that would mean giving up the human advantages - reducing our scale to allow others to exist more fully. The human race does not give an inch. For anything.

In light of these thoughts, while I watched Ghost Bird I found myself wondering if the governmental announcement of the Ghost Bird's proven existence wasn't simply made to steer funds toward the economically hard-hit Arkansas region the claims were made from. I found myself imagining conspiracy, in which the former President Bush's Interior Department was able to take advantage of the Cornell Lab's good reputation in order to funnel funds over to a good Southern neighbor.

The industrial world has developed with the over-arching idea that human beings are more important than all other species on the Earth. Even more important than Earth itself. Why? What makes the human, with all of our obvious idiocies more important than everyone else? Our ability to kill and destroy on a massive level?

Ghost Bird really tries to move beyond the argument about the Ivory-Billed to make a case for spending funds more wisely to prevent any further extinctions. Of course we all wish the bird was found. And here is where myth and science come too close. Science can be a myth of course - when new ideas are floated out, those theories are indeed mythical. They suggest new knowledge, without being able to demonstrate that knowledge. This is the typical tension of myth - a story that holds the tension of both possibilities. The "real" and the "imaginal" are often found to be the possibilities.

But when there is proof, that science is myth no longer. It is either fact, or disproven theory. The problem with the tale of the Ghost Bird is that there is no on-going fact. It remains rather imaginal, a truly mythic bird at this point. And this movie fulfills my criteria as mythology - it tells the story of extinction and life, holding both up as the ends of a scale - and offers us the suggestion that the story we live in today carries both. Even if the Ivory-Billed exists, there are countless other species that soon may not.

If ever we are to recognize the possibility of mass extinctions on our world, now is the time. We must enter our myth and perhaps find the hero. Otherwise, the Ghost Bird will find many new neighbors, wherever it currently resides.

Satantango, Disc 3 - The Wasteland

2010-08-10T08:26:00.002-05:00

Satantango begins with a long shot of cattle, presumably emerging from a barn. They roam through what appears to be a deserted farm.

The film ends, seven hours later, with an alcoholic doctor, whose life previously shown was lived in a stupor, now somewhat renewed. He thought he had been imagining the hearing of bells tolling, announcing his death. He may have discovered bells really were ringing, and they were announcing an invasion of Turks. Though he seems clear-headed for the first time, he seals himself into his hovel, barricading the window and blocking out all light - fulfilling his own hallucination as he seals himself inside a tomb of his own making.

And there it is - the bleak message that cattle may be more free than the human race. Nature in this film is powerfully beautiful, but rendered in black and white, that power is stark. The awe and wonder are sucked out of the visuals, leaving a bare bones backdrop of nature as devastator. The rain, the darkness and the vast expanses of bleak land mirror the lives of the people - unable to find any reasons to dream, excel or strive. The landscape is as dark as the human soul.

These people are controlled by Irimias - designated a magician at one point - who can get them to do anything he wants. Irimias is a false magician though - he has no plans, no power other than that of the con - and it all shows through when he comes upon a dense fog in the forest. He drops to his knees - he seems to feel it is mysterious, as if this was something he had never seen before. Of course, such a fog can be magical. But from his more earthbound sidekick, the only response is "Have you never seen fog before?"

When an empty town is shown - and the sound of galloping horses gets louder and louder until the herd appears - running through the deserted streets as if they rule this former human space - the camera drops down, revealing the false magician and his cronies. Again, awe is vanquished, with even more power this time as one says, "The horses have escaped from the slaughterhouse again."

The band of truly beaten humans enters a decaying manor, expecting great things because the magician made them believe the manor contained such things - but there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. The humans accept their lot and go to sleep - as an owl perches, more movement from his eyes and neck than the humans had in the journey coming here. It is obvious who has more control and rules the manor.

Bela Tarr's film is a masterpiece, as almost every shot is beautifully composed and rendered. But Satantango is not for everyone. The long takes and running time are clues: if you cannot soak in such long shots. you will not be able to screen this. And as difficult as it is to suggest this - I would try and make a day of it. This needs to be seen in blocks of time as long as possible.

Satantango, Disc 2

2010-08-04T18:48:00.004-05:00

It is only appropriate that for any discussion of the second disc of this seven hour film the graphic used is of this young girl. She is tragically deviant, yet, quite probably, a victim of the backsliding adults that surround her.

Satantango has proven to be a film of the Wasteland, modern society in all its decay, with relationships broken, mangled and torn, and the landscape devoured by the endless rains.

Again, Tarr's long takes are masterful cinema (this is must viewing for anyone in film, cinematographers at the top of the list, if only to see the visuals unfold) - and the black and white proves, as usual, to be artistically evocative and downright beautiful. And it says a lot, because the beauty here is only in the eye, the visual, the shot.

I am not quite sure what Disc 3 holds. For now, I will say that Disc 2 brought the following films to mind: Werner Herzog's "Even Dwarfs Started Small" and the low-budget horror classic, "Carnival of Souls". If you know these films, you know something really crazy is going on here.

Bela Tarr's Satantango

2010-07-30T22:51:00.004-05:00

What do you after a grueling week of graduate school? Begin watching a seven hour film, of course. Ever since I saw this still from "Satantango" I have wanted to see it. It came out recently on Facets DVD. So far, I would have to compare it to the works of Carl Dreyer - long takes, slow pacing - powerful images. I plan on taking my time with this, so there will be more commentary to come.

The eight minute take on the opening shot - of a herd of cattle, on a muddy, rainy farm crowded with decaying buildings, is well worth getting Disc 1 of 3, at least. We'll see about the rest.

Perverting the Landscape in The Lovely Bones

2010-07-08T14:51:00.009-05:00

Peter Jackson's "The Lovely Bones" is a powerful film, though not an easy one to watch. I have not read the novel it is based on, so have no comparison in that regard. The focus for me was the revulsion I felt at seeing the murderer stalking and trapping children. I don't think the film went over the line in its depictions - it simply worked, because dread and disgust are the only emotions we should feel when we understand a grown man is trying to trap a fourteen year old girl.

What truly pushed it over the edge for me was the killer's perversion of the landscape and nature to assist him in his evil deeds. He digs a pit in a field that becomes a trap, and later weaves branches in an attempt to create another trap. The resonance of using the natural world for unnatural deeds really twisted me inside as I watched. As well, he lurks in cornfields and behind trees, as if he was part of the natural world, using it as his shield.

It perverts the landscape because there is nothing natural about him. Pure evil. I don't often have problems watching films, but this man, made me nauseous. When juxtaposed with the other characters, it was easy to remain nauseous.

In the end, the natural world makes sure it does not allow the killer to use it for cover. Though a random accident, I felt it was a just end.

I understood this film to get some poor reviews, but I'm not sure why. The acting - Saorise Ronan and Stanley Tucci - but also the rest of the cast, including Mark Wahlberg, a favorite of mine - was excellent, and the film was suspenseful. The revulsion I felt was necessary to the situation. Perhaps Ronan's "heaven" was controversial, or seemed strange, but it worked for me because her character deserved at least that much wonder and satisfaction.

Ondine - Something Wonderful, or Something Terrible

2010-07-06T08:25:00.001-05:00

Ondine is an Irish film drenched in magical realism. For magical realism to work - for me - the realism must be subtle and not overpower the magic.

Something Wonderful: the magic here is truly wonderful. Colin Farrell plays an Irish fisherman, a "landsman", who, in the very first scene pulls his net out of the water and finds there is a woman in it. Having no exposition beforehand works - it is a powerful scene that we know is not supposed to happen, so we can get thrown right into the action and still feel comfortable.

Something Terrible: Though I have always felt good about understanding a thick Irish brogue, combined with cinematic sound which I have lots of complaints about any way, it was pretty hard to understand much of the dialogue.

Something Wonderful: to the films credit, the performances and cinematography are so perfect, it was surprisingly easy to not care about missed dialogue. Will need to catch the DVD and watch it with subtitles.

Something Wonderful: the woman pulled out of the sea may or may not be a Selkie, a folk being who is a seal in the water. The performance by Alison Barry playing Farrell's young daughter drives the mystery of whether the woman is a Selkie or not. Barry wants to believe, and the interaction between all three of these main characters is truly wonderful.

*** SPOILER ALERT ***
Something Terrible: In the very end of the film, the realism overpowers the magic. In a film like this, you should be left wondering about what is real - is she a Selkie? Does it matter? But the wondrous possible Selkie should never turn out to be a Romanian drug mule. That kind of spoils things.
***END SPOILER***

Add it up and we have three Wonderful's to two Terrible's. The Wonderful's win and the movie is hauntingly beautiful. The accents can be looked over because the acting, plot and visuals are really stunning. Farrell really is amazing here, as are the rest of the cast. You might want to stop watching, though, once the Ondine appears to have gone away.

Sweetgrass - Immersion in the Landscape

2010-06-28T08:47:00.000-05:00

Sweetgrass is an expansive new documentary about the last sheep herding trek through public lands in Montana. It is expansive because the natural landscape the sheep and the cowboys move through is visually stunning. Through the mountains, hills, rivers and forests, the film tracks moving flocks of sheep and the men, horses and dogs that watch them as they graze.

To balance the impressive visuals, there is little in the way of explanation. The soundtrack consists mainly of the natural sounds of the sheep themselves. What little narrative there is comes from the dialogue of the cowboys, often low in the mix or garble when they use two way radios. Because of the lack of dialogue, the film brings you into the landscape and the result is your interior moves into overdrive - thoughts come in response, filling up the narrative with whatever you bring to the scenes unfolding. As such, this film is probably not for anyone looking for Hollywood "action".

The human focus is mostly on two cowboys - one old, whose easy-going manner includes sweetly talking to the sheep, his horse and the dogs. He sings in a ragged but surprisingly charming voice, utterly alone on the range for long periods of time. Poignantly, at the end we find out this is his last trek, and it is not clear that he has much else to do. The other cowboy is a much younger man, who seems alternately enthusiastic and depressed on the range. When he meets up with the older man, they speak in short sentences. When he is alone, he produces some of the most colorful and degenerate cussing you may have heard in awhile. You may get the impression the sheep respond better to the older man's singing.

The sheep and the landscape are really the attraction here. Though the sheep follow each other, it was interesting to see their varied reactions. Often, there would be a few off by themselves, blazing their own way through the land. It was fascinating to hear the multitude of sounds they make, and their timely reactions at moments of importance to the humans forcing them on, and filming them.

The most interesting scene takes place when the younger cowboy is cursing up a storm at his flock who has wandered down a steep hill. In between his curses, he wonders what he is doing there and also curses the landscape itself. As he does this, the camera pulls back, showing the viewer more and more of the incredibly beautiful Montana wilderness. My guess is that the Chicago audience watching this might think he was insane for wanting to get away from that place. Later, he adds that he wants to get away because he wants to continue to love the mountains, not hate them as he is starting to do. Almost everyone complains about the work they do. Perhaps what we need is more of a balance - regionally, we all need time in the wilderness, but as humans, we understand that we might need to get out of it also. It is a fine line we tread, with a lot hanging in the balance.

There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.

2010-06-08T14:01:00.000-05:00

Chicago Farmer: Through the Country Like a Feather

2010-06-02T08:04:00.006-05:00

Putting on the Film Producer hat right now and trying to get a documentary on Chicago Farmer off the ground. Chicago Farmer is a folk singer and storyteller from a small town in Illinois - Delavan, population 25 - who moved to Chicago - population 2.8 million + - for a few years. Now he's somewhere in between. But you listen to his songs and you soon realize that no matter you're from, or where you are now, a human being is a human being.

To get this project into production, we are looking to raise a little backing money. We're doing ok right now, but would like to raise some more. Please go the director's blog to donate directly through Paypal - you can get a copy of the film, screen thanks or producing credit, depending on your donation interest. Or you can contact me directly for more information.

Why folk music in 2010? Well, from Murray Lerner's oddly awesome documentary about the Newport Folk Festival, Festival!: "You see I, I have a feeling about the people here. I have a feeling that although they're united in their interest in folk music that they're not, that it's not a leveling process, that it just, it serves to allow them to become more themselves. Folk music is, is really, the personification of a human being extending his hand to another human being, without losing any of his dignity. If you feel this way about it, walk with us."

And we ask that you walk with us - donate if you can, at least listen to some beautiful songs if you can't.

The Inevitable Death by Whale in John Huston's MOBY DICK

2010-05-11T11:16:00.001-05:00

John Huston's "Moby Dick" deserves, I think, more attention. It really is not at all like Melville's novel, this is a good thing. It constricts the narrative, truly focusing on the madness of the whaling hunt, not simply Ahab's madness as he pursues the great White Whale. It is not a pleasant tale, but it is a powerful one.

Huston uses a dream-like camera at times, and directs the action that emphasizes the crazy atmosphere on a ship of whaling men far from home.The editing is also rather abrupt at times, but this only adds to the hazy feeling, as if the sea spray were constantly obscuring the reality. The sailors are not at home in the sea, which Melville's voluminous text loses by including so many whale details from so many men.

One of the most notable inclusions in the film are the scenes of the women as the boat prepares and sets sails. Almost entirely lacking in the novel, women do not get any large roles in the film. But if any more powerful images were needed of the madness of whaling, the faces of these women on film fit the bill perfectly. They know they are at a funeral, and they don't really look sad; they are angry, seething even, but can say nothing. In the real world of whaling, I'm sure women accepted their men leaving as the necessity of economics. But for us, and the art of film, whaling is not only brutal and unnecessary, but truly madness when done in wooden ships.

The second addition in the film that truly works is the use of music. From the haunting concertina at the beginning scene when Ishmael enters the whaling inn barroom to the haunting chanteys sung by the sailors as they progress toward their sure death, the music here completely works in tandem with the hazy shots and editing to unite the mood of dread that only grows as the film goes on.

TREME: Musician as Myth Hero?

2010-05-04T08:20:00.002-05:00

HBO has a great new series on called TREME. It takes place in New Orleans three months after Hurricane Katrina and uses the music of the area as the undercurrent to the lives of the people trying to deal with the disaster and following neglect. Timely in the sad way as another man-made disaster heads toward Louisiana shores, it is brilliant in so many ways. Though every possible problem and facet of New Orleans culture gets screen time, it is all put together that none of it seems out of place.

I bring it up here because of a review on the series 4th episode from NPR's music site. It's a good lengthy review, which brings up many of the issues about and in the show. Most of the piece is an interview with a DJ about the lengthy music playlist from the episode. I quote here (my italics):

PJ: ..." And this: "Jazz hasn't run hot or cold since bebop. It just is, man." You want a piece of any of that?

JJ: I'm comfortable saying that jazz simply IS, without the "just" qualifier. There's no red-hot intensity of an actual movement anymore. The music is now a loose confederation of individual heroic quests, and heroes are the figures of antiquity. Jazz, however, is still current, but that's a different measurement value than it was during the heyday of bebop. As long as there's a need for freedom of expression, jazz has a base of operation.

Interesting use of words, I thought. Seeing the musician as the hero, on the mythical hero quest, into the unconscious, to deliver saving knowledge that transforms humanity, and then each subsequent musician as the continuing hero who has to perform that quest for themselves (and for humanity again) kind of blows my mind. This makes every solo, every song mythical regeneration. What a nice thought.

A Serious Man

2010-02-27T15:25:00.001-06:00

"Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you." - Rashi

"A Serious Man" begins with the quote above; apparently Rashi is an ancient Jewish scholar. Though this film is "Jewish", it strikes me that its message, if there is one, is very Buddhist.

This is a film that I'm thinking most people don't really want to watch. You must think about this film and it does not necessarily make itself clear. There is a certain lack of closure perhaps that many will find too open. As I note these aspects of the film, I begin to understand the film even more. Dualities - think/watch, think/clear, closure/open - are the heart of Buddhism. It seems they may also be the heart of Judaism. I'm sure they are the heart of mythology. And they are the heart of life, no matter how, when and where it is lived. But both sides are always present, or at least possible.

"A Serious Man" begins with a shot of a winter snowstorm, falling beautifully down on an old Jewish shtetl. The film ends with a tornado bearing down on a mostly Jewish high school in 1967. The duality of inclement weather - both awesome; one brings wonder,the other brings fear. How we receive these events - these random events - is what matters to us, not necessarily the events themselves. Larry Gopnik does not really know how to receive the events taking place in his life. For the most part, they are not positive events. When things look up, there is always the possibility of a downturn.

But this is why I see Buddhism here - Larry is not aware of what is going on around him until it comes and bites him in the ass. Good or bad. If he had been more aware, his life would not have deteriorated as it has. For me, the original and most Buddhist idea about Buddhism is that you must be Aware of yourself and what surrounds you. It's frustrating to watch Larry because he never tries to deal with anything or take control of his life. He asks for advice, gets pushed around and lives in an understated cloud of fear. To be sure, some of that fear is justified.

How to understand this movie? What does the title mean, or try to convey? Without awareness, Larry is too serious. He has "tried to live a serious life", but he has ignored that life is not always serious. Even when we're aware of what surrounds us, a snowstorm falls, a tornado hits. We cannoy control most events. We can only control ourselves and how we receive those events. If we're aware, it's easier. Not easy though. And if we are unaware, watch out. We will get blind-sided.

The film begins with a prologue, a short tale, in that wintry shtetl, of a husband and wife confronting a possible dybbuk, a Jewish demon of possession. The husband does not believe the wise man in front of him is a dybbuk. The wife never falters in her belief that evil has come to visit. She must make it leave her home. Which is he? Old man, or dybbuk? The film makes no resolution. Each receives the event in a completely opposite way. The duality is formed. Until perhaps the next day, which we never see, the issue is solved. We don't always get to know the details, whether we are right or wrong in any big picture. Just for ourselves. I imagine the husband up all night, sweating, while his wife sleeps as soundly as she ever has.

How do we receive events? I believe it depends on how aware we are of what comes before them. Larry is woefully unaware of some things, perfectly aware of others, and completely unable to have any knowledge of others. Like anyone's life.

*** This film is one of ten nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Without adressing how silly - and economically calculated - it is to have so many films nominated, I will say this film is not a perfect film. If you don't want to think about a film, you really won't like it at all. Avatar, this ain't.***

Abraham Lincoln in Fiction and... Fiction

2010-02-26T08:24:00.002-06:00

An interesting duality last night as Netflix brought John Ford's "Young Mr. Lincoln" and Mike Mignola's "The Amazing Screw-On Head". Ford's movie is a highly fictional account of one of Lincoln's first cases and is a classic film. Henry Fonda is made to look like Lincoln in many ways and it is a tour-de-force for him. Screw-On Head is one of the craziest things I've seen in awhile. Mignola is the genius behind Hellboy - this apparently was a one-shot comic featuring a secret agent robot that worked under Abraham Lincoln. It is crazy and hilarious - Mignola states in the Making of feature that he won't be doing more stories about Screw-On Head - what else was there to do?

There are no two films that could be more different - except for the fact that Abraham Lincoln is in both. And the character - as you would expect - is remarkably similar in both. Perhaps the best-regarded President in American history, the quiet man who makes hard though utterly human decisions, may be the myth of Lincoln. Having Lincoln in the craziness that is "Screw-On Head" grounds the narrative and lends it a gravitas that can only help such a spinning tale. John Ford focuses on the same - Fonda's Lincoln is deliberate, magnetic on-screen as his slow, reasoned actions lead to quiet mobs and correct decisions.

There often seems to be a disconnect that leads to high and low culture, academia and popular, that too often simply shows one side's ignorance of the other. Watch these two in tandem and let it all mix up together.

Note Added 3/4/10: Abraham Lincoln - Vampire Slayer !?

Cinema in 2010

2010-01-11T10:15:00.000-06:00

A good friend of mine reads this blog and calls me a movie critic. This gets under my skin just a little and I try to defend myself, thinking - nay, Hoping - "I write about more than film" - but I know, as Tags prove without a doubt, that Beyond The Veil could easily be called Beyond the Concessions Counter. Would you like to get a large popcorn for just a quarter more? That kind of thing. Films are an easy entertainment option, with the definite upside of having so much potential to speak to us about ourselves and society. They are important. They are art. They are fun. They are also hyped, expensive, and often, a big letdown. I owe that friend a debt for the above graphics, from "The Great Train Robbery" of 1903 to today's current blockbuster, "Avatar", have we really come so far? Is this start pretentious enough?

I stumbled onto studying and making film, needing a diversion from the sale of office furnishings. How could film not be attractive when your daily concern is selling more stuff? And film can be Cinema, the great god of visual art and narrative. On that level, film truly is mythical. But, as is the case with everything, everyone has a different opinion about what that level, that narrative, that mythical plateau, is.

Luckily, making a film was fun - it really takes a lot of work, and usually a lot of people, but I believe everyone's academic career should involve making at least one fictional narrative film. The process and the concerns of the filmmaker are not as readily understood, even in our Hollywood-based culture, as I would have expected. Which meant that, as I became more interested in interpreting and analyzing film, I found film school to be even more valuable. In today's world, understanding the flood of images and discriminating among them is an immense and important tool for living. I never had this type of training in visual analysis, though I do think many high schools and even grammar schools now teach some film analysis. That's a good thing.

Film is a heady environment, with artists and failed artists discussing what works and what doesn't; the form of film is mythical in itself: a narrative, with imaginal happenings taking place every second, almost always trying to connect to an underlying something. Cinema is Cinema because of those underlying somethings. Cinema is Cinema because we can go back and re-watch, ponder and intuit every detail. The mise-en-scene is so important to how we connect to a film. One of my favorite films of the winter so far is "Sherlock Holmes". There are many reasons for this, not least of which is that I'm a Sherlock Holmes fanboy, but what's relevant is mise-en-scene: in that traditional style of the detective film, every little thing Holmes does during the film, every object he touches and even glances at, is important to his detection. Not surprising cinematography, but fun and thoughtful. That can surely be enough at times.

I knew making film was not going to be my new career, but I also realized the film school I was in was not going to gain me access to Graduate level film programs. I tried, but ultimately settled on Myth Studies, choosing elucidation of story and imagination as my chosen field. As I've noted already, there is work to be done on the mythical structire of cinema in addition to the analysis of the content. My graduate program seemed open to film, and I was assured that many filmmakers passed through the hallowed halls. I took the bait and jumped.

I finally had the first session of the required Film class, and I'm feeling somewhat perplexed right now. One problem is that after delving into myth - which turns, for me, on philosophy and imagination - I am wondering why Film gets so hallowed a place as to have a class devoted to it. Though film pervades every aspect of our lives, it seems to me there are other forms of media and story that should be equally emphasized. On the required reading list is Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics", an excellent beginner's text into reading comics as a frame-by-frame structural art. There is some overlap with Film (being of course a frame-by-frame medium that just goes really fast) but the teacher was a bit confused when I asked whether I could do a project based on Comics, rather than Film. I only asked because McCloud was on the reading list. For me, the structure of the form of Comics is more mythical because we get to breathe between panels; we add our thoughts and imagination to the work. Film forces an identification on us, if we're lucky, that we ride till we reach a suitable point; for me, hopefully that point is the end credits. There could be many more facets to this discussion, but the Film class this time around had missed potential. Simply identifying an identification works well in psychological analysis, but sort of "loses the plot" and subtlety of film discussion.

In today's world, there are discussions to be had on almost every level of society about - well - every level of society. Film (and film of the fantastic has a special role here - see past posts) is able, when it is Cinema, to evoke feelings and thoughts at a high level. So - how far have we come from "The Great Train Robbery" to "Avatar"?

One film that sharpened the focus on my cinematic discomfort was actually incredibly enjoyable: "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus" (see yesterday's post). Though I smiled and laughed throughout, I walked out thinking it had really missed the mark. Though I don't always care if a film hits any mark at all, one with such an interesting incursion into ideas should spend some time developing them. I kept thinking here was a typical film - so many people involved that the final product doesn't really have cohesion. How many films get made for how many millions of dollars that have key scenes that simply do not make sense? How does this happen? Well, it could be anyone's fault - if footage doesn't work, or there is bad editing, or if the producers and directors get fired and then new personnel change the script but try to use footage from the script as previously shot, etc. etc. etc. Or, by golly, as it seems to be the case with Terry Gilliam, perhaps the money runs out. There are so many reasons for problems in film. This is why teaching kids to be able to analyze visuals is so important.

And how could money run out on Gilliam? Why would anyone want to fund something other than Cinema? If Gilliam didn't have to worry about funds, it seems his films would be the most entertaining as well as the most thought-provoking. The money ususally only goes toward entertaining - if thought is provoked, that's a bonus. I don't know Gilliam's story, but this is my guess from the little I have heard.

But perhaps the majority does not want thought to be provoked. It seems they just want to react. I was appalled at having to see clips of "G.I. Jane" in my recent film class. A good friend described it well when she said she "loathed" that film. And what is "Avatar" but another cowboy/Indian movie, even if what we are reacting to these days is our allegiance with the "Indians". Is this enough for us? One interesting possibility in myth is forming a new third that includes both sides of a duality - getting beyond that friction by including it in something new and hopefully "better". In movies, it seems war is always the answer. Though an audience sometimes just wants to react, must we always want to react by winning, by beating something down? In "Avatar", the expected and happy result occurs at every plot point. Thus, number one movie, of what, ever?

I have seen five films at the theater this holiday period, probably three or four more than I usually do. "Fantatsic Mr. Fox", "The Road", "Avatar", "Imaginarium" and "Sherlock Holmes".

"Imaginarium" tried the hardest, but probably failed the most because of it. "Avatar" is Gonzo, and "Sherlock Holmes" opened well with fall-off crowds from the packed "Avatar" theaters. As I have said, I love Holmes, and this film surprisingly did not stray so far from what I have always loved about him, but this is pure Hollywood. Which, when done right, is a huge compliment. "Mr. Fox" is charming, animalicious and gave me my favorite new swear phrase - "This is a cluster cuss!". It was brilliant, but I think most adults would not be seen going anywhere near a film like this. Too bad.

My favorite? The most depressing film I've seen in awhile, "The Road". It's a journey (mythically we're talking Senex/Puer) in a post-apocalyptic world in which not much happens - but it is thought-provoking and humanly honest - mythical at every level. Even the end, which seemingly is a "happy" note, personally gave me the creeps. But no one is really talking about this one. Everyone just wants to win in the end.

But winning isn't everything.

The Road

2010-01-11T10:10:00.001-06:00

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

2010-01-10T20:09:00.010-06:00

I saw Terry Gilliam's new film last night and have been prodded to write a bit about it. It is a hard film to put words on, as it tries really hard. For the most part, it succeeds - purely as entertainment, I can only say I had a smile on my face almost throughout the film. It was big, colorful, imaginative - as with most films of the fantastic lately, the production design and spfx departments were working overtime to good effect. My favorite scene is depicted above, with Jude Law on some really tall stilts. Delicious camera work put me in a jolly mood and made me want to try out some stilts.

But as with many films these days, this could have been so much more that ultimately it was disappointing. I have not seen all of Gilliam's films, but I loved "Time Bandits" as a teen and have seen "Baron Munchausen". It seems these films all have similar problems. Ultimately, the script is circular, by which I mean circling around ideas without ever evoking a final meaning.

One problem may be my own - perhaps my hearing is getting poorer as I get older. But I think the sound is just poorly done. As "Imaginarium" is Heath Ledger's final film, it would have been nice if I could make out his lines. The only lines I consistently heard completely were the diminutive Percy's. Perhaps I also have a problem with the accents, but I recall hearing every line of dialogue in Altman's "Gosford Park" clearly - and there were some major overlapping British lines in that film. No - I just think a bit more money should have been spent on sound. This is a problem I encounter more and more these days. I want to suggest that perhaps this film would make more sense at home on the DVD player with subtitles turned squarely on.

So perhaps the film makes perfect sense if you get all the lines. Perhaps. But my real problem is the missed opportunity in which this film had to explore story and what it is and does.

The Imaginarium is a travelling show - through which audience members can enter their fantasy worlds in full reality. The women who dream of Faberge eggs and giant shoes - not usually a particular high point in any dreamed possibility of mine - really are a high point here. But every fantasy is shown to wonderful effect. The problem is thematic. Early on, we see Dr. Parnassus as one of a sect of monks who, through the telling of stories, keep the world alive. Though the Devil (Tom Waits, who is always wonderful) shows him that their story is not what keeps the world alive, Parnassus believes others are telling stories as well and still believes in story.

A bet with the Devil leads Parnassus to form his Imaginarium and see how many people he can influence and engage by allowing them to see their internal story in full-color.

Story keeps the world alive, but does story keep individuals alive? Since Parnassus is having rough times in today's world, Gilliam's answer seems to be "less and less". And it seems people's fantasy stories are getting more banal - though the shoes and Faberge eggs are cool, ultimately, they are shoes and Fanerge eggs. The final fantasy explored is one in which deception is used to tell a lie, not a story at all. It's fascinating, but somehwat unintelligible.

I was hoping for an exploration of story keeping the world alive, which, for me, is yet another perfectly workable definition of myth, but only got really pretty pictures. Really pretty. Oh yeah, and Johnny Depp almost-but-not-quite playing himself again. Fun, but oh what it could have been.

Landscape & Myth

2009-12-18T08:48:00.001-06:00

Musing, it comes to me that the stories we know - the stories we live by - otherwise known as myth - are radically different based on where we live. The urban city is utterly different than any small town or farm, and the differences only begin there.

Last Friday morning, I was witness to an incredibly large sandhill crane southward migration, directly over the heart of the city of Chicago. In fact, they flew directly over where I live. Large flocks, by the hundreds, flew over for at least an hour. I understand now that this was only the tail end; even larger numbers flew over the same route last Thursday.

It came to me that this was a story I did not know, one that was not known deep inside me. If we don't experience something like this, we don't actually feel it. Bird migration was something that happened, elsewhere, high up in the sky; amazing in many ways, but a mental construct for me, not a living, honking sight. These large flocks of noisy cranes really have to be seen to understand the power in the action.

The city engages us with a completely different type of story, one of construct, man-made materials, neighborhoods, commerce. We can't get away from these in other places, but levels and space and materials are all different. City stories are not really nature stories. "Getting away" to nature for a while is not the same as day-to-day living in a place where, say, the sandhill cranes usually migrate over.

(An aside - I just read a research study that it is hugely more likely for those involved in serious hiking and backpacking to support conservation efforts than for those involved in nature tours - seems length of experience must be the tipping factor). The power of the natural world has to be lived in to be fully felt, just as the power of the urban must be lived in to be understood. I know of people who have been afraid to drive into Chicago, even living only an hour away in a suburb.

Where we are is a powerful indicator of the stories, the myths, we feel or know. These stories are neither wrong nor right, on a personal level. As a child, the fabric of the myths surrounding you creates your world. They make up what you know and how you know it.

But we do grow up, and have the opportunity to learn new stories, to experience ways we are not familiar with. Experiencing the sandhill cranes flying over my house can change me by allowing me to understand a powerful force that I thought I knew, but just didn't know deep enough.

Knowing possibilities allows us to question other stories being lived. I think of wolf hunts in Alaska from helicopters, one of many examples, and I question how that could possibly be a useful story to live in. But unless I am there, seeing and feeling the particulars, I cannot know, for sure, whether it is a story that needs to be told. It is a different story than those I am familiar with. I guess that I might end that story a different way. But can I make that call?

In the world today, and certainly in the United States, there really are no myths that everyone lives by. If different landscapes provide different myths, and so many other factors affect our stories as well, how could one story effect every person the same way? A colleague of mine suggests televison as one possible common denominator, and it works, but I don't think it works one hundred percent. Perhaps the medium works in similar ways for varied people, but the exact story told has its own way of working on us.

The same colleague also suggests The Wasteland as a common denominator, which also works to some degree. The degradation of land and responsibility and ability to care are all factors of The Wasteland, and it is not so hard to find evidence of this myth in reality. But again, it is not one hundred percent - there are those still hopeful, still happy, still building and able to keep themselves from being bogged down in the garbage. So I find it difficult to think of a widespread myths for all of us. Religions try, but "religions try" proves that is not the answer.

Perhaps this is why Joseph Campbell called out for each of us to find the personal myths we live by. This caused an explosion of interest in individuals seeking to recognize the mythic stories with true resonance for them.This happened because it is hard to find any connective story lines with others living their storioes.

Although ultimately it is our own stories that matter, it is obvious we need to understand that everyone's story is part of the same mythology. I want to listen and understand your story, as long as you don't tell me your story is the only one there is.

Peter and the Wolf

2009-12-02T07:51:00.007-06:00

The 2008 Oscar for Best animated short went to Suzie Templeton for "Peter and the Wolf". Somehow this 32 minute gem slipped under my radar, but I found it by chance and am very glad I did.

It uses stop motion animation to tell a simple story of a lonely boy whose only friends are animals. These include a heartbreakingly ill-fated duck, an amazingly expressive crow and, eventually, the titled wolf. An Oscar well-deserved. It's on Netflix. Queue it up.

What I want to focus on is animation. Once again, the power of the imaginal is more expressive than reality. Jean Paul Sartre writes of the imagination, the story being told as more powerful than the actual events that occurred. Hearing a story, everyone can live the events in their own head, the power of revelations and experiences multiplying and exploding as if the events were taking place all over again. When a story is told, power is unleashed. That's a paraphrase of Sartre - he might be appalled! But this is how animation, and stop-motion animation in particular, works - we instantly know we are in a story and don't need to navigate the trappings of reality. We go with it, allowing it more freedom because of its form, and perhaps that allows us to feel on a different level. The events and the power behind them become more real. There is an intensity of feeling - perhaps the animated characters and places become archetypal, stand-ins for all the real characters and animals that might be in a story like that. When we fill that archetype with substance, that power is unleashed.

Often the events depicted through animation are somewhat impossible. Through the medium, though - and always through story telling - we feel them as if they were real. Disney's "A Christmas Carol" (see last post) did this with 3-D animation. But I must admit I rushed that post after lingering on it too long. I wanted to get to "Peter and the Wolf".

Stop-motion has always fascinated me, with Ray Harryhausen's multiple mergings of monsters and men and Willis O'Brien's King Kong still being the standard bearers for the form. I am confident we can add Tim Burton's work to the honor roll, "Nightmare Before Christmas" being a classic. But "Peter and the Wolf" really belongs in the same conversation.

The power of the film itself is evident enough, but also watch the documentary "Making of" feature. We understand why this film has such power when we see the sets for this film. They are huge, with amazing detail. There is a scene showing Peter in the city in which the buildings look so real, I really wondered how the effect was done. Well, the crew built rather large buildings. An archetypal city, it has more power than if the filmmakers had used "real" buildings.

On a personal note, seeing those sets pulled me back to thoughts from film school. If you have ever tried to make a real film, you realize that it is difficult. You need a group of people working in harmony. Right there is a problem often too big to overcome. You need a huge amount of money, in proportion, for even the smallest and most modest film. Then there is equipment - technology is bringing prices down and quality up, but the costs are still very large. What really surprised me though is the fact that there is also an extreme aversion by filmmakers to taking bold risks. You would think young filmmakers would try anything, but the rigors of school almost always force them to go real and to go straightforward. After forty years or so in business, my film school was just beginning a Production Design department.

While in school, I had tried to get a small film made based on a Japanese myth. It would have required one set that was elaborately created to show the Dry Bed of the River of Souls. It was to be live action, but the design was crucial. If anyone showed any interest in tackling that project, they suggested animation instead. So, when I see a project as big and bold and ultimately successful as this version of "Peter and the Wolf", I can only exult with joy. Really.

My film would have shot in one or two days. "Peter and the Wolf" took five years to make.

Christmas Ghosts

2009-12-02T05:58:00.003-06:00

I have always been intrigued by the English tradition of ghost stories on Christmas. I understand that the day is not complete without the family settling in for a few tales of the lingering dead. There are some good guesses I could make about why this would be so, and why this is one tradition we don't normally associate with Christmas here in the U.S.A. I could probably google up the history of this, but I've always enjoyed just knowing this and left it that.

The famous ghost story of the season is one we actually do treasure here, Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". He wrote it to be a traditional Christmas ghost story. While we know the ghostly part of the story, the emphasis is usually on the conversion of Scrooge's heart from coal to love.

Disney's new 3-D version brings the ghosts back, and they are welcome. I have touted the latest 3-D process here before, and must do it again. The depth in the screen makes these movies like nothing else. The word "amazing" really fits.

"the hideous dropping off of the veil"

2009-11-02T22:58:00.001-06:00

"I looked upon the scene before me - upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain - upon the bleak walls - upon the vacant eye-like windows - upon a few rank sedges - and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees - with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium - the bitter lapse into everyday life - the hideous dropping off of the veil." - E. A. Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher

When I started this blog, Beyond the Veil definitely referred to the veil being lifted from this side of reality, our concrete world of everyday life, in order to discover the rest of what matters. In re-reading the Poe story quoted above this weekend, it struck me how he described the lifting of the veil from the other side. "Utter depression" occurs when we are on the other side, revelling in presumed awe and wonder, and the veil drops to reveal that reality. Poe describes our everyday life here as bleak, vacant, rank and decayed. And of course, he crossed over the veil through the use of opium.

But this was a reminder of how it works both ways. There is a world of wonder alongside the common world. Mythical living, I think, works only when we can see both sides of that veil. If we are stuck in the wonder, it is easy to lose sight of what is around us. Yet - if we see no wonder in what surrounds us, surely we are just as stuck.

The veil is thin if we allow it to be.

Mythical Living Through - Shudder & Gasp! - Pop Culture

2009-10-27T09:15:00.004-05:00

In the hallowed psychological halls of academia at the Institute where I eke out graduate level study of Mythology, and all that might mean, whispers circle at the edges. Furtive glances precede, sussing out those who might be listening, making sure only friendly voices are near when a certain topic is mentioned. This is not Depth Psychology, nor C. G. Jung. It is not ritual of which I speak, nor of the Eastern road to enlightenment. Jesus? No. Not religion at all. Barely mythological, if certain are listened to. Of what do I speak, true believer?

Pop culture. There - the heavens have rattled, the mind has felt tremors from deep within - but the skies and our bodies still stand. In the ongoing battle of high brow vs. low brow, art vs. - well what do They say is the opposite of art? - crap? Popular culture, the offering of these United States to the World.

Our entertainment is saturated with myth and psychological depth, but often ignored with the academic snort, a wave of the hand, a derisive comment, but mostly, with an ignorance claiming worthlessness to the whole part and parcel of the stories we live in. By focusing on religion, fine art and analysis, the actual mythical living this abundantly rich and mythical pop culture bathes us in - and sometimes cleanses us with - can be utterly ignored by the academy I am part of unless it can be linked to, as above, religion, fine art and analytical models that enable.... something. I don't quite know.

What I do believe though, is: read or embodied (embodied here meaning lived, because a story told that one finds enabling is often useful to then enact, somehow proving useful to one's lived life) - myth surrounds us. James Hillman - for all his output on patient analysis by relating our pathologies to Greek myths in order to see through and understand them, allowing ourselves to move beyond those pathologies - has a major idea that seems to be mostly ignored for what it implies, for what it imagines. He stresses that mythically living is the aim.

We need to see the stories that surround us at all times, the possibilities that those stories offer us. If we are in need, the stories that have gone before us can offer insights and ways to help us. But what of those who are relatively free of pathology? Myth still surrounds us. The idea of mythically living still offers us a rich, and deep, embodied way of life, a way to see the world and our world in more satisfying and meaningful ways.

To remain stuck in pathology turns the screws on ourselves, ferreting out deep insidious problems where there may only be a lack of ability to see the wonder and the awe. Why settle for problems when you can be awed? This is not to say there are not deep and disturbing problems that some of us have real troubles with. But without that, why not aim for awe?

And religion in our society has proven mostly incapable of providing awe. It seems harder and harder to maintain a story - a mythical life - that is capable of explaining everything in one system. The more stories we have, the more stories that provide that wonder and awe as example, the easier it is to mythically live. Thus, the American idea of the melting pot can be seen as that cauldron of story that Tolkien wrote about. And then, Enter - pop culture.

Our master mythologists today are our storytellers. The ideas run thick and deep in film, literature, comics, music and every other style and genre of art. Some is crap. Some provides wonder and awe; wonder and awe that provide stories to enable us to be in that rarefied space known as mythical living. Simple as that. Can pop culture do that for us? Surely no, the academy shouts loudly.

But of course, it can. This post was originally going to be a fun musing on paranormal investigators, an archetype that I was drawn to even as a child. Scooby Doo and his people investigated mysteries. One favorite show for me as a child was "Kolchak the Night Stalker", a Chicago newspaper reporter who found a new monster every week to investigate. A bit unbelievable that he was able to do that led to an early demise for that show. And recently - Hellboy, Mike Mignola's masterful empire of comics, animation and film about what seems to me to be the ultimate in paranormal investigation. All pop culture. All fun. But utterly mythical - providing stories that allow us to view the world through mythical eyes and re-see what is actually there.

I'll give only one example. In "Hellboy II - The Golden Army", after two viewings, I was still somewhat unsure of exactly why Hellboy and friends quit the B.P.R.D. at the end of the movie. Sure, it seemed wrong that the elf prince had to die. He was on the side against humans, but his cause seemed somehow just. And the princesses death certainly underscored how unfair it was. But this is what they do - fight the occult evils of the world. Why quit over this one?

And it now occured to me how powerful an earlier scene had been - a scene invoking landscape and a way to see mythical living in our world. It did not evoke pathology, but conveyed an actual way to see life anew. In that scene, Hellboy deafeats and kills a nature elemental, a giant flowerlike plant spirit that raged over the concrete streets and in its demise left a green paradise, plants and flowers, another world of beauty that could only be seen through after the nature spirit died.

This dreamlike scene, in which the human looking Liz meanders through a spray of falling seed and watches greenery sprout and spread instantaneously, is pop culture at its best. It offers images and narratives not only for the filmed story, but also for us and our lives. Here is pop culture myth powerful enough to hold its own with classical myths, showing us a possibility, one possible way, to live our lives. Hellboy quits because he sees through his life to the larger universal. Mythical living.

"Hey, that red devil is from a comic book!" They rant and rave.

I say - Throw back the curtains and open the doors. Emerge into the world and breathe. Deeply.

2009-10-25T09:31:00.003-05:00

The soul is the same in all living creatures, although the body of each is different. ~ Hippocrates

Disturbingly, I heard a bird's last death cry yesterday - a sparrow, presumably clipped, while flying, by a passing car . I heard it scream, while circling in the air once - before quickly expiring in the street.

Three hours later, almost in the same spot as when I witnessed the bird, I spotted a furry little thing laying alongside my building. Because of all the autumn yellow leaves scattered around it, I couldn't tell if it was some sort of women's accessory, or a mouse. I carefully touched it with the tip of my shoe - and a little pink mouth opened. It's fur was black, spotted with silvery white hairs - it was a bat. I don't know bats from beans, but I thought it was probably dying.

I left it alone, further disturbed on my corner of little deaths.

Hope lives on though - the bat had managed to crawl up the wall a few hours later. Was it just hibernating? Cold?

It was gone this morning.

Musing on Landscape

2009-10-19T14:02:00.001-05:00

The striking aspect of the amazing "Where the Wild Things Are" film, for me, is the use of landscape, the seemingly inevitable focus on nature as the place we go to work things out, to level ourselves. So often art shows the ways in which that landscape mirrors our interior landscape.

There is no denying the power of the cinematograpy of this film, because there is no denying the power of the landscape that enfolds it at every turn.

In myth, we come up against history, religion, psychology. Greek myth is used as the base tool for depth psychology, relating our Western lives to urbane gods that influenced a rationalizing society. But other myths rise from elesewhere, including the lands they are part of. There are the Celtic myths, with their forests without which they would be impossible to imagine. There are Norse myths, from frozen lands where harsh actions, with and against the landscape, were necessary for survival. Then there is The Kalevala, the Finnish song cycle portraying the Finnish landscape of lake and snow, sled and ice, as it influences every nuanced turn of every tale.

In our concrete landscape, we are able to separate ourselves from the world. All peoples at all times dared to take what they needed from the landscape, striving to make life easier and more fulfilling. However, there used to be less people, less sweeping change, less destructive human activity. The planet is overrun with people now, and too many of us are too far away from any natural lands. Are we disciplined enough to pull back, to need less and to get closer to the rest of the planet? Can we halt the concrete and find the land we need to maintain our real humanity?

Max uses the land and the Wild Things to not only release wild frustrations, but also to rejuvenate, to slow his mind down to be able to think thoughts, rather than simply process and release reactions. No greater tools exist for us to consider and reconsider landscape than myth and fantasy.

I saw a production of Peter S. Beagle's "The Last Unicorn" this weekend. It was remarkable, and part of the credit goes to the amazing production design, the landscape of the play. In a small space, a simple wooden fence became the world of the entire drama, evoking every background and space needed. If you have read this book, you might agree that a live production would be difficult. But this show transported us to a world in which magic and possibility existed. Interesting that culture at its very best in our concrete cities often means escape to a created landscape in the darkness of a theater. Film, drama, music; whatever artistic venture we attend, we go to experience the creation of a new world, or a look back at an older world. It is often simpler, yet more nuanced than our own. we seek a world made up out of fantasy, a landscape we seek to inhabit when the landscape around us is not enough. Or is perhaps too much.

Simplicity is a key idea in our dramas and fictions. Even in film, that most real of arts, we really know everything is created, everything is simpler than in reality.

It seems time to reconsider how to make reality itself simpler.

The Mask of the Superhero: Ritual Portrayal in the Comics

2009-09-20T10:10:00.000-05:00

In America, outside of the official churches of major religions, there is little obvious ritual. We have few experiences that can be compared to physically enacted, inward directed and mentally changing phenomenon that many cultures around the globe still engage in. Even rituals of religion have lost much relevance, because, as Joseph Campbell writes, “Where the synagogues and churches go wrong is by telling what their symbols ‘mean’. The value of an effective rite is that it leaves everyone to his own thoughts, which dogma and definitions only confuse” (Myths 97). The value of American religious ritual has been degraded because the metaphors of their meaning have been depleted, replaced with absolute values few actually understand. If a ritual evokes nothing, it is difficult to label it a ritual. However, there is another place to look for rituals in America. Analyzing modern myth in our culture, Harold Schechter quotes Mircea Eliade, “’What has become of myths in the modern world?’-and his answer is in part that they are to be found in our amusements, that they ‘survive among our contemporaries in more or less degraded forms’” (3). Myth survives, and thrives, in many forms in popular culture. Schechter analyzes the comic book, maintaining that “Far from being ‘mindless escapism’ or ‘worthless junk,’ popular art is a projection of the collective unconscious-an expression of the deepest, myth-producing level of the human psyche” (9). When readers interact personally with a text as closely as reading a comic, utilizing the built-in structure of gaps between panels to interject their own thoughts into the narrative, it becomes apparent such works function in a manner similar to classic myths. However, can ritual be present there as well? At the very least, ritual may be portrayed in these popular myths, just as ritual has been portrayed in the classic mythological narratives of the world. In these portrayals, what can we learn of how ritual is seen in our society? By analyzing the origin narrative of a famous superhero, the Batman, and focusing on the masking ritual he found so necessary, it will become apparent popular culture portrays both historically ethnocentric, as well as more relevant and open-minded, beliefs about ritual masking events.

Before there was Cultural Relativism, the Western anthropologist was an insulated breed, upholding European-based society as civilization, while at the same time, denigrating the fascinating “primitives” around the world, and their beliefs, as a lesser level of society. Through the twentieth century, this slowly began to change, but theory based on years of academic writing can be painfully slow to such change. Ritual masking theory, as Henry Pernet makes extremely clear, was based on Western assumptions and held to some very narrow views. He repudiates the purely Western interpretation of ritual masking as always being about giving up, escaping or changing one’s own personality to enter a supernatural state (125) as the only possible interpretations of this cultural phenomenon. Pernet demonstrates it is incorrect to generalize that the wearer of the mask always “becomes the spirit represented by the mask” (162) because “the facts show that the wearer generally remains aware and responsible; he must often submit himself to a long apprenticeship, demonstrate great concentration” (162). He also repudiates the view that “masks are malevolent” (105), because the wearers are usually dedicated and willing participants in the masking rituals (105-106). In the wide range of cultural masking phenomenon, these older, Western ideas have now been opened to a much wider range of analysis. Pernet writes, “As for the relation between the wearer, his mask, the power, the event or the spirit represented, it is found…on a continuum ranging from the simple dramatization of a character or a mythic narrative to a possible ‘actual transformation’ of the wearer, including a number of cases where the ‘supernatural’ power or element is present, completely or in part, in the mask, its accessories or the costume” (134). Pernet deftly proves by examples that every masking ritual has its own details and they do not all conform to the same parameters. The story of the Batman is relevant because it contains so many of the meanings behind ritual masking that Pernet delineates in his survey of the phenomenon. In addition, many of the classic theories of ritual can be applied to aspects of this narrative. Because of the huge volume of material containing this character, most of the following observations will be applied simply to a short, two-page origin story from November 1939 (Kane and Finger).

Before the origin narrative is examined, the most obvious and pervasive aspect of masking in the Batman story is the very one that Pernet proves to be flawed, the early Western view of other cultures’ ritual masks. The main premise of the Batman, and a major factor in the character’s popularity through a seventy year history, is that by putting on the mask, Bruce Wayne becomes Batman, a different entity. The man, Wayne, gives up his persona of a wealthy playboy to become the hero, Batman, a night-prowling crime fighter. He escapes his limits as a man to become a superhero. In addition, he completely changes his personality, going from a blasé millionaire to a hard-nosed detective, fighting to end crime. The mask reshaping the man into a supernatural-like entity echoes the early anthropologist’s views on masking. If the man did not become the Batman so completely, it is questionable whether the character would have lasted for seventy years. In all the multiple comics series starring the Batman, only one, a single, stand-alone issue, names Bruce Wayne in the title (Overstreet, 324). The major reason for sitting down with a Batman comic is to be engrossed by the narrative of the superhero, not his normal, true identity. Very clearly, because of the mask, Bruce Wayne becomes someone completely different. The non-stop and seemingly endless versions of the basic Batman crime fighting narratives prove the power of our culture’s need to believe in the myth of such heroes.

However, there is deeper resonance between Batman, masking and ritual theory to be discovered when we closely examine the foundation of the character, his creation myth, or origin, as it usually called in the comics. In a two page narrative (Kane and Finger), the following tale is told: young Bruce Wayne, his father and his mother are walking home from a movie. A robber pulls a gun on them and demands his mother’s necklace (Page 1, Panel 1). The father defends her and moves toward the crook. The robber shoots him dead (P.1, P.2). The mother yells for police, causing the robber to shoot her dead as well (P.1, P.3). Young Bruce has witnessed the entire, brutal slaying and stares, crying, at his dead parents lying on the sidewalk (P.2, P’s. 1-2). Next seen, the boy is kneeling and praying at his bedside, and he swears, “by the spirits of my parents to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals” (P.2, P.3). We are then told he studies to become “a master scientist” (P.2, P.4) and he “trains his body to physical perfection until he is able to perform amazing athletic feats” (P.2, P.5). In the sequence that completes the origin narrative, Wayne tells us “I must have a disguise” (P.2, P6) and “Criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot. So my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts. I must be a creature of the night. Black, terrible..a.a..” (P.2, P.7). A bat flies into his room. He says, “A bat! That’s it! It’s an omen. I shall become a Bat!” (P.2, P.8) The Batman is then depicted in full mask and costume with cape, under the caption, “And thus is born this weird figure of the dark..This avenger of evil. ‘The Batman’” (P.2, P.9). This short sequence proves to be very rich in depicting various aspects of ritual masking and ritual theory. This theoretical grounding may partially account for the resonance readers feel with the character and his continued popularity in our culture.

Important attributes of ritual in reality are that they should be physically enacted by a body, inwardly directed to embody “thought or belief”, and consist of mentally changing action “designed to reflect an interpretation of existence and to effect an experience of that interpretation” (Grillo). Are these fundamental qualities depicted in the origin narrative of the Batman as described above? First and most direct, the mask of the Batman is physically and thoughtfully put on by Bruce Wayne to become the Batman. Unfortunately, this action is not specifically drawn. However, this is a good example of the comics structure, wherein putting on the mask is the missing action the reader interjects between Panels 8 and 9. In addition to the mask, Bruce Wayne has clothed himself in an entire costume, including the typical cape and tights of the superhero. Second in regard to physical enacting, the entire ritual of becoming Batman, and really any superhero, is a physical action. The genre itself is equivalent to physicality and action. The Batman as a character is renowned because he does not have superpowers, but simply has trained, physically, to gain the strength he will need for his self-imposed mission. This is shown in Page 2, Panel 5, where we see Bruce Wayne lifting weights. Physical fitness itself may be ritualized, and Batman is a prime example of physical embodiment. Though the Batman story is told in a narrative form, the melding of story with art that is comics often emphasizes performance over narrative, which is similar to the structure of rituals in reality.

The second attribute of ritual, to be inwardly directed to embody belief and thought, is certainly present in the masking ritual of the Batman. Every time Bruce Wayne puts on his Batman mask, he becomes the persona of Batman, which was specifically chosen “to strike terror into” the hearts of the criminals he is dedicating his life to bringing to justice. The Batman’s purpose is to put an end to such brutality as was witnessed by the young Bruce Wayne. The entire costume, including the mask, is chosen to embody the action of striking terror in to the hearts of criminals. As such, it is an outward manifestation of Bruce Wayne’s thoughts in regard to his new mission.

This overlaps with the third attribute of rituals, that of mentally changing the person undergoing the ritual. As shown in the third panel of Page 2, Bruce Wayne swears on the spirits of his murdered parents to war on all criminals. His view of the cosmos is implied to be one of justice versus injustice, a staple of the superhero genre, and easily imagined by the reader of this narrative after seeing the brutality of the crime depicted just before this panel. Wayne’s role in actually working against injustice can only become action by a transformation into a crime fighter. He cannot work for his mission as Bruce Wayne. When he undergoes the ritual masking and puts on his Batman costume, his mindset changes, and the persona of the Batman reflects the experience of having seen his parents gunned down, as well as the embodiment of his internal view of justice. Pernet suggests that, “masks often aim, on the one hand, at expressing a cosmos, a system of the world, and on the other hand, at recalling or dramatizing events, which are in general the founding events of the world, of humanity, of the clan, or of a particular institution” (161). In the case of Batman, his mask, and thus his new persona, expresses both his views on how the world should work, as well as recalling the founding, tragic event of the character.

Ritual theory, as Pernet’s work on ritual masking reflects, often contains many different ideas that can co-exist in one ritual. The general narrative as analyzed above already depicts many fundamental aspects of rituals underlying the Batman origin. The analysis can also be expanded by correlating the narrative with additional specific ritual theories. For Mircea Eliade, one of the goals of ritual is renewal, bringing a previous creation back into existence by performing a ritual activity. He explains, “the experience of sacred space and sacred time reveals a desire to reintegrate a primordial situation – that in which the gods and the mythical ancestors were present, that is, were engaged in creating the world, or in organizing it, or in revealing the foundations of civilization” (91-92). When Bruce Wayne puts on the Batman mask, he is reintegrating a “primordial situation” by remembering the heinous crime against his parents. In this sense, it is his real ancestors, not mythic, that are present in his psyche every time he undergoes the ritual masking. By putting on the mask, he also reveals “the foundations of civilization”, his own moral underpinning of justice which shapes his cosmos and was the reason he developed the Batman persona in the first place. The mask represents the event of the unjust murders, and the events which followed based on the lingering mental effect on the only survivor. It is not the bat image that is important in Wayne’s own psyche, but the memorial and re-enactment of his moral values that were so shaped by the brutal shooting of his parents in the street. In a sense, the act of putting on the mask is what Eliade termed a hierophany, an irruption of the sacred into space and time that allows the experience of the original moment to be remembered and enacted, though in this case, the sacred event is only reenacted in Bruce Wayne’s psyche.

Batman’s mask is not a Halloween mask. Becoming a superhero is not merely a way for Bruce Wayne to play. When he says “Dad’s estate left me wealthy” (Page 2, Panel 6), we can believe if his parents were still alive, Wayne would be enjoying that wealth, not choosing to risk his life by fighting crime. The murder of his parents began what is basically an initiation rite for Bruce Wayne. As delineated by Arnold Van Gennep, initiation is a rite of passage, a change from one state to another. As such, there are rites between each state. These rites “may be subdivided into rites of separation, transition rites, and rites of incorporation” (11). All three subdivisions are portrayed in the Batman origin narrative. Rites of separation take place when an initiate is separated from normal society, the rites marking them as someone whose status is going to change. The brutal murder of Wayne’s parents can be seen in this way, though this is admittedly an extremely literal rite of separation. The young boy is now in a liminal state, neither of society, as defined by the family unit that is now gone, nor is he yet the adult who chooses to become the Batman. In this liminal state, he undergoes transition rites, actions that change him and prepare his ability to re-enter society. These include his vow to make war “on all criminals”, his training as a “master scientist” and the training of “his body to physical perfection” (Page 2, Panels 3-5). These rites change him spiritually, mentally and physically. As a whole, they prepare Bruce Wayne for his eventual transition back into the world. The latter rites are those of incorporation, when the initiate with changed status re-enters the world. In this origin narrative, the incorporation rite takes place when Bruce Wayne decides to become the Batman. The moment he decides to become “a bat!”, as well as that missing scene when he actually pulls on the Batman mask, signify these rites of incorporation. The last panel in the narrative shows the Batman, in the world and ready to live up to his vow to fight crime. The caption above clearly marks this as a rite of incorporation in the form of a rebirth, as it reads, “And thus is born…this avenger of evil. ‘The Batman’” (P.2, P.9). The mask and costume have led to a rebirth, an incorporation of a new persona into the world. Bruce Wayne has finally reentered society in a new state.

If we consider Batman in general, not focusing simply on this origin narrative, it can be argued that he does not actually reenter society, but remains a liminal being. For a liminal initiate undergoing Van Gennep’s rites of passage, there are key points that define the experience they are going through. These include “spatial separation”, a conscious struggle regarding their changing state, the actual experience of the sacred and the promotion of their own understanding of the cosmos, in which the “ritual itself defines and determines what is sacred” (Grillo). If we consider Batman as a liminal being, we can perceive him as being perpetually stuck in the transition rite. He is a masked hero who prefers the darkness of night, which spatially separates him from other humans. In later versions of the Batman story, he is in constant struggle with himself and trying to figure out if Bruce Wayne is the real person or whether Batman has become more real. He experiences the sacred every time he relives his bedside vow by putting on his mask to become Batman. As this year marks the seventieth anniversary of his first appearance, he has been experiencing the sacred for quite a long time. Finally, if the ritual is what determines the sacred, the very fact Wayne continues to put on the mask, participating in the physical ritual that is the work of the Batman, implies the Batman has become more real than Bruce Wayne. For the reader of these comics, this is definitely the situation, as the myth of Batman continues to resonate deep within their imaginations and psyches. For Bruce Wayne, however, the day when he gives up the liminality of Batman by getting rid of the mask, will be the actual day when he undergoes the incorporation rite.

As we begin to question the duality of Batman and where his place in society actually lies, it becomes useful to consider Sigmund Freud’s views on ritual. To do this, it will be necessary to keep analyzing Batman through the wider lens of all his various narratives, not simply the original origin. In more recent Batman stories, starting with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight, the Batman myth is examined in a grittier and more realistic style. The liminality of the superhero is directly addressed, and the question arises as to whether the Batman is a hero or a villain. The specific issue is whether someone who dresses up in a bat costume and acts as a vigilante can actually be considered part of society, much less a hero. In these narratives, Batman definitely remains a liminal being, stuck in the transition rite. Freud, equating the obsessive actions of neurotics with ritual actions, calls out their threefold resemblances consisting of “the qualms of conscience brought on by their neglect, in their complete isolation from all other actions…and in the conscientiousness with which they are carried out in every detail” (213). However, Freud does distinguish between the two, calling obsessive actions unconscious while ritual actions are usually consciously performed, even if the actor does not know why he or she is doing the action. In the Batman narrative, Freud might focus on the vicious murder of his parents that Bruce Wayne witnessed. The complexes developed from this experience, Freud might argue, have turned Wayne into an obsessive neurotic. He ritually becomes the Batman, putting on the mask, to satisfy his neurotic needs as above: he might feel guilty if he did not, he has put his wealth and normal society aside and he has dedicated his life to avenging an act he witnessed as a boy. The Batman personality is a compensation for his inability to keep his parents alive. In today’s Batman stories, as well as many other superhero narratives, this type of psychological examination of the protagonists is rampant. Many of the superheroes now have at least some elements of an anti-hero.

The origin of the Batman, as demonstrated by the masking rite which actually creates the character, has elements of four of the six categories of ritual devised by Catherine Bell (Grillo). These include the rite of passage, the commemorative rite, the rite of affliction (both in Batman’s attempt to destroy criminal behavior as well as his own attempt to heal his internal wounds) and the political ritual, as his attempt to rid the world of crime clearly expresses his world view, and possibly his desire to set himself as a vigilante, a judge of society. Clearly, the Batman origin narrative, through a mixture of words and pictures, expresses the content of ritual. The Batman character, through seventy years of narrative, has developed into a mythical being for our society. Granted, the usual genre story in the superhero comic is less mythology than violent wish fulfillment. However, the origins of these characters often contain embedded mythological resonance which has been built upon year after year, between the battles and the cliffhangers. As referred to above, the actual origin narrative of the Batman has been retold countless times, changing the myth of the character for the new generation discovering the comics. In seventy years, there have now been five generations, worldwide, that have known the origins of the Batman.

The longevity of the character can be ascribed to two general ideas. First, the comics art form is one in which artists and a writer create a story that a singular reader experiences. This solitary act is extremely conducive to allowing readers to truly engage with the narrative, allowing mythical elements in the text to interact with their own thoughts. Just as in classical myths, this interaction often creates new ideas in a person’s psyche. As already pointed out, the superhero narratives have matured over the years. The comic art form has as well. The artist is very often the writer now, creating singular works in all genres, adult narratives that feature much more than superheroes. Second, the mythic elements in the superhero narratives, including the demonstrated elements of ritual action in the Batman character’s origin, resonate with the reader. Ritual action is deeply embedded in the human, as demonstrated by worldwide commonality. The reader recognizes, at some level, the human universals portrayed by Batman’s ritualistic behavior. Recognition and resonance lead to relevance. The relevance of rituals, the very reason they are performed, is because they work (Grillo). If they do not work, they do not get performed. The ritual mask allows Batman to succeed in avenging his parents’ death because it allows him to fight crime effectively. This is a fictional presentation of ritual, but even in the end, it still meets the requirements of why ritual is performed. Henry Pernet sums up the uses of the ritual mask in a way that could almost sum up ritual: “the mask could be an identity, emblem, and object of prestige, an affirmation of social status or hierarchy, that it could express and validate political, economic and social realities” (164). The Batman’s mask is all of these things.

Works Cited

Campbell, Joseph. Myths to Live By. New York: Penguin Compass, 1972.

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1959.

Freud, Sigmund. “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices”. Readings in Ritual Studies. Ed. Ronald L. Grimes. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996.

Grillo, Laura. “Class Lecture Notes – Ritual.” Pacifica Graduate Institute. Carpinteria, CA. 7 Jan. 2009.

Kane, Bob (a), and Finger, Bill (w).”The Batman and How He Came To Be” [abridged-Detective Comics #33, November, 1939]. Ed. Daniels, Les. Batman: The Complete History. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999: 34-35.

Overstreet, Robert M. The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, 30th Edition. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000.

Pernet, Henry. Ritual Masks: Deception and Revelations. Trans. Laura Grillo. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1992.

Schechter, Harold. The New Gods: Psyche and Symbol in Popular Art. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1980.

Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.

2009-09-20T10:03:00.001-05:00

All Rights DC Comics.

2009-09-20T09:59:00.000-05:00

All rights DC Comics.

"9" - A Question of How the Soul is Made

2009-09-18T11:02:00.005-05:00

"9" is an amazing visual feast, with innovative characters that will charm and move you.

SPOILERS AHEAD - go see the film if you haven't yet. It's much better than reading any blog.

An interesting plot point in this animated pleasure is one we have seen recently - the splitting of the soul into a number of different objects. We have the same situation in the Harry Potter films, called the Horcrux by J.K. Rowling.

The Horcrux is split into seven inanimate objects, used by Lord Voldemort to insure his survival. If even one still exists, it will have the power to re-embody You Know Who. Similarly, in "9", the scientist splits his soul into nine amazingly cool little dolls, each with a different personality. In Potter, each part is capable of reproducing the whole. In "9", though each doll is joyfully different, it seems to be the same case. When some of the brave dolls die, their souls are eventually able to leave this world, with the remaining heroes remaining alive. I was expecting some twist along the lines of each doll being unable to remain when separated, but they are not simply part of the whole. With each having different talents, I expected each to need the other.

But I believe I missed a clue, because 9 has it all really - he combines in some small way the talents of 1 through 8. And maybe by the end, each one has done the same to some degree.

Can the soul be split? If we venture along the lines of each piece being able to recreate the whole, it would seem we can never really permanently lose a piece of ourselves. Somewhere inside, that energy will still be somewhere, somehow available to be pulled up for use when needed.

But it sure feels like we do lose part of ourselves at critical times - people that take a piece of us with them when they leave; hopes and dreams that fail; even decisions we make, when they eliminate possibilities. No matter that we keep going forward - something seems gone.

But maybe soul is more malleable than it might seem at first consideration. Cinema and story is filled with the idea of the team, in which each talent is needed for the completion of the whole. It is probably best to read that narrative psychologically, with each piece making up part of each of us. We seem to have all talents inside of us, just needing the courage to allow them to come to surface.

M. Night Shyamalan

2009-09-10T18:11:00.000-05:00

He fascinates me. No matter what he makes - and much of it can seem nonsensical at times - he concentrates on holding it all together with all the tricks of the cinematic trade. He is a craftsman, which is a whole lot more than can be said for many filmmakers.

I am one of the few that will admit I didn't see the hook in "The Sixth Sense" coming until it was revealed in the film. When I go to see a film, on the first watch I try to NOT figure it out. I prefer to allow my self to be immersed in the screen - if the film doesn't warrant immersion, it will kick you out itself. And the cinematic craftsman, such as Night, always invites immersion. Second watches are when structure and details can get close examination.

"Unbreakable" - I still judge this as a magnificent film. The structure, in which mise-en-scene connects each scene to the next, is cinematic mimicry of the comic book, as if each scene were a panel, and each edit the gap between the panels. The style echoes the narrative about the comic book hero and his arch-villain. Perhaps his greatest film.

I have only seen "Signs", "The Village" and "Lady in the Water" once each, so I won't make grandiose comments on these like I just did for "Unbreakable". I recall liking "Signs"; being extremely disappointed in the ending of "The Village"; and liking "Lady in the Water" - I'm a big Paul Giamatti fan. I do think I should re-screen these three films. I have not seen his earlier works "Wide Awake" or "Praying With Anger".

So what's left? "The Happening" - of course. When it came out to theaters, I remember being surprised. I had heard nothing about it. This bodes ill for a film, with low publicity usually meaning the studios are trying to sneak a film by the critics, and the audiences, to get to a DVD release. It usually means advanced screenings have already doomed its chances. "The Village" and "Lady in the Water" were not as successful - economically and critically - as his earlier films. It seemed "The Happening", with no real advance word on what it was even about, was a real bomb.

Then my brother told me it was about and that it was ridiculous - plants were causing the Happening. Perhaps he even said he walked out of the film. I may have invented that, but if it was fiction, it was enough to prevent me from seeing it. As he said recently "sentient plants", to which the probable reaction is "Blecch!". I felt bad though - I liked Night's work and no matter how silly it sounded, I knew I should see it. A year or so later, I did.

It showed up on OnDemand as a free movie. I almost forgot about it. It was time to watch, though I went in expecting little. On first view, it was defintely odd. Some strange lines and odd deliveries, not to mention the whole plant angle - I enjoyed it though, feeling it may be too simple and direct, and that was that.

It stuck with me though. I like Mark Wahlberg. I like John Leguizamo. Zooey Deschanel - I didn't know, but she stuck with me also. They were not perfect in these roles, but oddly good. And something must have been right, because as I said, they stayed in my head. Then - strangely - and perhaps it is because of my yearly craving for Horror around Memorial Day and Labor Day (there's a blog for another time) - and knowing my wife would say "Yes" when I suggest we watch a Shyamalan movie she's never seen yet - I just watched it again.

And I am rather in awe that I liked it a whole lot more the second time around. The odd tone and premise somehow go down better when you know what to expect. And some of the details - the web of connection that makes for satisfaction at the cinema - stuck out more on second view.
A quick scene of a car backing up over plants became creepy. The view toward science in general, though sometimes overdone, really shone through on the second view with Wahlberg's character in the classroom. Night produced an environmental message movie with an almost Todd Solondz creepiness to it, which is also a sweet love story by the end.

Sort of a mish-mash, I guess. But I liked it. In spite of some weird dialogue - what sticks in my mind is when Wahlberg tells the crazy woman "I'm a teacher!" - as if that is going to make her not be crazy any more? Strange. But cool in some way also.

Next is M. Night Shyamalan's "The Last Airbender" - based on the pretty cool cartoon series that I wanted to watch but just never found the time. Sounds and looks weird and cool. Yes, another Night triumph.

The Image in Song

2009-08-07T20:35:00.005-05:00

The beauty of the songwriter is the image they are able to convey. When the image fits the idea, you can call it seeing through to the other story - the one that makes sense. Peering say, beyond the veil.

No songwriter has better images - characters - stories - than Bob Dylan. And I honor him here - even though I have cut his song down to the only lyrics sung in My Chemical Romance's current version from the Watchmen soundtrack. This song saw through my world this last week - light and dark, sublime, radiant, ridiculous and melancholic. I feel the need to honor these words by having them clearly spelled out. It's very worth it to read all of Dylan's song, but here is the other version, whose energy and attitude made me laugh, wonder and survive, even while being an example of the very theory we were discussing. The line that willnot leave my head is:

The riot squad is restless/They need somewhere to go - which makes me nervous, but then -

As Lady and I look out tonight/From Desolation Row - which makes me laugh. Heartily.

I can relate every image here to something - or someone - I encountered this week. Now that I have written this, my thoughts have returned. Like it was waiting me out, to honor this crazy sprawling Dylan channeled through some crazy/funny music. Finally I can move on.

Without further ado -

Desolation Row (by Bob Dylan, as abridged by My Chemical Romance)

They're selling postcards of the hanging

They're painting the passports brown

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors

The circus is in town

Here comes the blind commissioner

They've got him in a trance

One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker

The other is in his pants

And the riot squad they're restless

They need somewhere to go

As Lady and I look out tonight

From Desolation Row

Cinderella, she seems so easy

"It takes one to know one," she smiles

And puts her hands in her back pockets

Bette Davis style

And in comes Romeo, he's moaning

"You Belong to Me I Believe"

And someone says," You're in the wrong place, my friend

You better leave"

And the only sound that's left

After the ambulances go

Is Cinderella sweeping up

On Desolation Row

Now at midnight all the agents

And the superhuman crew

Come out and round up everyone

That knows more than they do

Then they bring them to the factory

Where the heart-attack machine

Is strapped across their shoulders

And then the kerosene

Is brought down from the castles

By insurance men who go

Check to see that nobody is escaping

To Desolation Row

Right now I can't read too good
Don't send me no more letters no

Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row

The Language of Mythology, the Fairy Tale and the Fantastic: “The Native Speech of Dream”

2009-07-27T10:34:00.011-05:00

One of the foundations of Joseph Campbell’s mythic writing is his recognition that our times lack a tenable, global mythology. The religious myths still in use among varied human cultures are unable to provide comprehensive or credible insights for our modern world. They were formed thousands of years ago, well before the knowledge explosion that followed the discovery of the New World. Campbell rhetorically asks of these religions, if “…anyone has a right to pretend to a knowledge of eternal laws and of a general moral order for the good of all mankind” (The Mythic Dimension 224-225). His answer, that no religion does have this right, is the basis of much of his later work. That knowledge is what mythology is, and it comes from within each individual. He writes, “For it is simply a fact – as I believe we have all now got to concede – that mythologies and their deities are productions and projections of the psyche. What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man’s imagination?” (Campbell, Myths to Live By 253). The enticement in his work, as well as the problem, is in discovering what a relevant mythology for our times might look like and where it will come from.

Campbell focuses on the artist. One such artist is the fantasy genre fiction writer. The literature of modern fantasy has driven me into a deeper fascination with mythology and a desire to explore the connection between the two. However, a formulation of the actual relationship between fantasy and myth has been elusive. There seems to be a general dismissal of modern fantasy, claiming the work as a whole is not laden with enough internal meaning to actually qualify as mythic. A similar prejudice has kept fantasy as a genre from being acknowledged as literature, in the artistic sense. Fantasy writers are often seen as “hacks”. So what is the relationship between mythology and fantasy narrative? Campbell’s work has provided a thread to hold onto for further exploration. In pursuit, perhaps the thread will become a rope. In his discussion of the fairy tale, or the “tale of wonder” (Campbell, Flight of the Wild Gander 24), the focus is on the language of mythology as a language of symbols. This symbolic language is drawn from the psyche, our internal reaches that Jung terms the unconscious. Campbell writes, “…myth is a picture language…this language is the native speech of dream…it has been studied, clarified and enriched by the poets, prophets, and visionaries of untold millenniums” (Flight 22). This symbol language arises from our unconscious and is made available to us in our dreams. Myth can be made when these symbols are used in the conscious creation of a story. Modern society seemingly has taken direct relevance out of ancient myths. However, we are still able to gain insight from those myths because what live on, utterly relevant to us today, are the archetypal symbols and the language used to weave those symbols into a tale. Culled from our collective unconscious, the symbols are the building blocks of myth and are still recognizable to our modern, conscious selves.

These symbols also are used in fantasy fiction, one mode of the modern tale of wonder. “Myths… break up to let their pregnant motifs scatter and settle into the materials of popular tale” (Campbell, Flight 22-23). To begin an extrapolation forward from Campbell, the dream symbols of our unconscious are also deeply embedded in the mythologies of past cultures. As well, this language of symbols is found in the folk tales that have spread internationally. The stories are changed and tweaked depending on who is doing the telling, but the symbols at the cores remain the same. This symbolic language of the unconscious is still in use today, being called up, reflected upon, worked with and written down by the writers of today’s fantasy literature.

Since this symbolic language does remain in use around the world, from the tales of old religions to the fictions of modern fantasy writers, there may already be a modern, global mythology, though perhaps in a formative stage. The motifs and symbols of the tale of wonder, taken out of the collective unconscious, are the basal layer of our ancient and modern myths. “The ‘monstrous, irrational and unnatural’ motifs of folk tale and myth are derived from the reservoirs of dream and vision. On the dream level such images represent the total state of the individual dreaming psyche. But clarified of personal distortions and propounded by poets, prophets, and visionaries, they become symbolic of the spiritual norm for Man the Microcosm” (Campbell, Flight 23). Because these images from the collective unconscious are not only contained within us all, but also consciously passed down through historic tales and myths, we are all powerfully familiar with the elements of this symbolic language. In today’s world, myth, along with fantasy and folk tale, may be dismissed as childish. However, speaking of children, Campbell writes, “For it is a curious characteristic of our unformed species that we live and model our lives through acts of make-believe” (Campbell, Myths 55). These symbols, the basis of children’s make-believe and a way in which they learn, are actually the same building blocks adults can use to forge collective notions of who we, as individuals of a global Diaspora, are. As Campbell writes, “And so we find that in those masterworks of the modern day which are of a visionary rather than of a descriptive order the forms long known from the nursery tale reappear, but now in adult maturity” (Campbell, Flight 25). The question may be what will be considered as “masterworks of the modern day”?

In further writing about the tale of wonder, Campbell says “Its world of magic is symptomatic of fevers deeply burning in the psyche” (Campbell, Flight 24). In our post-modern era, the writers of fantasy literature are often consciously aware of the connections between those fevers and the stories they are relating to readers. The writer forges new tales using that symbolic language, the native speech of dream. They take the symbols being sent forth from their own unconscious and apply their craft by forging connections between their personally derived images and the images from tales already told. One well-known author that can be used as an introductory example is J.R.R. Tolkien, whose works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are so well known. One of Tolkien’s aims in writing these works was to create a specific mythology for England because he felt there was none existent. However, in writing in the fantasy genre, it seems he was well aware of the native speech of dreams, even if he used different words to describe it. “An essential power of Faërie is thus the power of making immediately effective by the will the visions of ‘fantasy’. Not all are beautiful or even wholesome, not at any rate the fantasies of fallen Man” (Tolkien 109). In this quote from his influential essay “On Fairy Stories”, Tolkien is acknowledging the combination of the “visions”, what we are calling the symbols of dream speech, and the “will”, or the author’s own consciousness being used to craft the tale. Though his work may not exactly be a mythology for England in the historic sense, it does seem that he created a mythic work that resonates with a large population worldwide. As one Tolkien commentator analyzes, “Myths develop a link with the past, a continuity that helps people weather the present and look forward to the future. In an era of unprecedented change, the links to the past are stretched to the breaking point, and a people without roots are likely to become, analogously, a people without branches or flowers” (Grotta, 85). This popular resonance stems from the author’s use of the native speech of dream, which contains the symbols which make up the content of mythology. They connect us not only to historical myths, but also to the possibilities of future stories, myths and actual changes in our lives.

It seems a difficult task to imagine a mythology being invented in the modern world that will serve the needs of the disparate, global cultures. Religion has been one of the organizing myths of our modern societies. However, now that religion is so culturally defining and dividing, spiritual insight has become peripheral to its organizational power. The foundational core of any religion has always been a dreamer, looking directly inside him- or herself to the unconscious, and relating what they find there to others. However, the political organizations of religions allow their leaders to manipulate and focus the shape of their official teachings. The actions and words of various churches have moved far afield from the original insights that were the basis for religions. As Campbell says, “But wherever systematizing theologians have appeared and gained the day…Mythology is misread then as direct history or science, symbol becomes fact, metaphor dogma, and the quarrels of the sects arise, each mistaking its own symbolic signs for the ultimate reality” (Flight 53). The native speech of dream becomes used for something unintended, namely, a dogmatic set of organizational ideas whose major aim seems to be the defining of a united group. The individual symbols that are the basis of that speech, the actual ideas of those formational dreamers of the past, are misunderstood and often completely ignored.

At a time when myth is overshadowed by religion, the writers of fantasy fiction are one subset of artists interacting with the symbols of dream language. In a manner similar to those of dreamers past, on whose individual inspirations much of our historic myth follows from, they present stories in the native speech of dream. Symbolic language is used to help the reader understand something about themselves and their place in the universe. Tolkien wrote of these tales of wonder, “Not all are beautiful or even wholesome” (109), but as Campbell says of any new mythology, it must be “addressed, that is to say, not to the flattery of ‘peoples,’ but to the waking of individuals in the knowledge of themselves” (Myths 266). The solitary work writers undertake to produce fiction is a mesh. It combines a historic trail of myth and tale with personal symbolic language articulated from out of their own unconscious. This work is done alone, just as the work of any dreamer is done alone. As written work, their art is then experienced alone, when the symbolic language of the writer is read by a solitary reader. Symbols, the native speech of dreams, transfer from the writer to a reader, who then allows the symbols to interact with the internal forms of his or her own native speech of dreams. When this speech is used to “constellate a mesocosm – a mediating, middle cosmos, through which the microcosm of the individual is brought into relation to the macrocosm of the universe” (Campbell, Flight 123), there is the creation of a fertile ground on which mythology grows.

Works Cited

Campbell, Joseph. Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2002.

Campbell, Joseph. Myths to Live By. New York: Penguin Compass, 1972.

Campbell, Joseph. The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-1987. Antony Van Couvering. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007.

Grotta, Daniel. The Biography of J.R.R. Tolkien: Architect of Middle Earth. Running Press: Philadelphia, 1992.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy Stories.” A Tolkien Miscellany. New York: SFBC Science Fiction, 2002.

The Unicorn: Giving to Redeem the Waste Land

2009-07-27T10:32:00.002-05:00

European sacred tradition produces narratives of Arthurian courts blending Christian and pagan mythology. By superimposing new interpretations onto older symbols, Christians had enormous success converting Europe to their monotheistic system. By reconfiguring familiar remnants, Christianity became a prime example of what mythology is and does. When new ideas blend into symbols of older traditions, a new, rich third is created. In the beginning of the twenty first century, Arthurian myth is still with us. Though we can discover both Christian and pre-Christian meanings in its symbols, modern comprehension reveals our own gap: what do these symbols mean to us? Joseph Campbell wrote about our modern lack of recognizing metaphor in religious understanding. He said, “For it is simply a fact – as I believe we have all now got to concede – that mythologies and their deities are productions and projections of the psyche. What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man’s imagination?” (Myths 253). Literalism has altered symbols man produced as metaphors. The Unicorn is one symbol from man’s imagination often used within the Arthurian tradition. Though cited as a real beast by Cosmas Indicopleustes around the year 550 (Freeman 36), the unicorn’s changing metaphorical symbolism can be readily tracked. Using the exquisitely woven and preserved Unicorn Tapestries, pre-Christian, as well as religious, symbolic meanings of the unicorn can be illuminated. In the spirit of Campbell, however, as Christian literalism leaves us disenchanted in a modern Wasteland, are there unicorn metaphors that can make old myth relevant to us in appropriately new ways? The seminal fantasy author Peter S. Beagle used the unicorn as the symbolic center of his classic novel, The Last Unicorn. He also recently published a seven poem cycle, one poem based directly on each of the Unicorn Tapestries. Beagle’s work creates new metaphorical meaning for the mythical unicorn whose relevance waned in an onslaught of literalism.

The Tapestries, dating from the Middle Ages, depict a unicorn hunt in seven separate works. There is debate over exactly who crafted them, and for whom they were actually created. However, symbolic interpretations of the unicorn, the hunt in general, and the human and natural elements beautifully sewn into the works are generally established. In his detailed study of almost every element to be found on each tapestry, John Williamson sums up this interpretation as, “the classical gods gradually evolved from their original aspect to become metaphors of Christian ideas” (27). The Unicorn Tapestries contain symbols evoking pre-Christian vegetation myth. This predominant narrative is the seasonal variation of the agricultural year, with its myths of the Oak King and the Holly King (Williamson). The same symbols can also be interpreted as metaphors for the Christian figures of Jesus Christ and Mary. This narrative as depicted has various interpretations, but Williamson makes a detailed case for the tapestries depicting the birth and ultimate crucifixion of Christ, as well as a depiction of the Incarnation. Adolfo Cavallo suggests the symbolized narrative actually evokes Adam and Eve as their original sin becomes redeemed by the death of Christ (51). This interpretation might account for the woven “A & E” found sewn into the works. However, for this analysis, the focus on Christ being depicted as the unicorn is the most important detail.

The first of the Tapestries depicts “The Start of the Hunt”. Williamson describes the underlying pagan theme of this scene as “the symbolic awakening of the earth in early spring” (96), while also metaphorically depicting the birth of Christ. Seasonal rebirth was the foundation of human agricultural life. Rebirth is also the main message of Christ. There is debate today over whether the message refers to a literal rebirth after death, or if Christ was calling his followers to awaken to their inner lives in a new relationship. There can be no debate Christianity partly developed as a religious narrative superimposed on the seasonal myths that came before it. The first tapestry begins a narrative of the Oak King, who started his reign at the Winter Solstice, the same season of the birth of Christ on Christmas Day.

The second tapestry depicts “The Unicorn at the Fountain”. As Williamson details, the plants shown in this work depict “spring – the actual blossoming of vegetation” as well as underlying “images which suggest the return to earth of vegetation deities like Christ” (98). The new Oak King is taking control of his reign and the earth is abundant, just as Christ’s life symbolizes the abundance of good will humanity can achieve by acting on his words. The unicorn depicted purifies the poisoned water of a fountain, from which animals will now be able to drink safely. In addition, according to Williamson, there are symbols pointing to Easter and the month of March, to the “events that surround the Crucifixion” (120). Just as the Oak King must be killed yearly for vegetation to renew itself, so Christ is killed for his followers to be reborn after their death.

The third tapestry is “The Unicorn Crossing the Stream”. As springtime changes to summer, the year steadily approaches the Summer Solstice, after which days again begin to grow shorter. Williamson focuses on the crossing of the stream as a “homeopathic rite that ensures rain for the season” (140) of summer. There is anticipation in this tapestry, as the hunters drive the unicorn over water. However, Williamson is less clear about symbolic relevance to Christ here, saying simply this tapestry “identifies with the events centered upon resurrection” (122). Just as there is anticipation for the coming of necessary rains, I would offer a possibility of the crossing of the stream depicting a Fluvial Necrotype (Smith). The ordeal of the crucifixion is a figurative descent into the Underworld, which is followed in some Christian traditions by an actual three day visit by Christ to the Underworld of Hell. The unicorn, as Christ, crosses the stream, symbolizing his acceptance of fate and the descent that will go with it.

The fourth tapestry, “The Unicorn Defends Himself”, depicts vegetation associated with the arrival of Midsummer, “a time when the marriage of the Oak King with the representation of the earth mother traditionally took place” (Williamson 141). On the Summer Solstice, when the Oak King is at his peak, it is a short-lived peak. A decline toward winter begins the next day. Williamson suggests “the holly tree dominates the floral iconography for the first time” (145) as a clear indication of the continued seasonal depiction. The unicorn begins to take on the lunar aspect of the Holly King, whose strength grows even as the solar Oak King’s power wanes. In the Christian interpretation, Christ has now accepted his role by descending into an underworld. He knows he is the sacrifice that will save humanity, just as the Oak King accepts his own death as the necessity for agriculture’s rebirth. This scene also parallels the story of Jesus’ betrayal in the garden. Just as Jesus’ disciples featured in events leading to his death instead of trying to help him avoid it, no hunter is actually piercing the unicorn; they are just driving him on to his eventual fate. That fate is sealed in the next tapestry.

The fifth, “The Unicorn is Tamed by the Maiden”, remains with us in a fragmented state. Only two strips exist and at least two additional strips are missing. However, there is enough material still present to ensure this pivotal work provides relevant information. Williamson suggests the missing lady who tames the unicorn “is identified with love, death, and rebirth – aspects of both the apple tree and, ultimately, the Triple Goddess” (162). The vegetation in this work depicts mid-August, a time when the Holly King was powerless as the unicorn who has given in to the lady. Showing the complexity of these symbols, the lady with the unicorn is also suggested as a symbol of the Oak King uniting with the earth mother, when, “after a blissful union, he is led away and is killed” (Williamson 174). The Christian interpretation of the unicorn’s submission has various meanings. One is the final recognition by Christ of his “voluntary sacrifice and his acceptance of betrayal” (Williamson 162). However, this scene also suggests a symbolic reading of the Incarnation. Christ willfully enters into Mary in order to be born as man so he may eventually die to save humanity (Cavallo 47). The end result, of course, is the same.

The sixth tapestry, “The Unicorn is Killed and Brought to the Castle”, depicts the actual spearing of the unicorn and its body subsequently being brought to the royal couple who presumably ordered the hunt. Now that we actually have the death of the unicorn, the season depicted is winter. The Holly King has died, which foretells the coming rebirth of the Oak King. Williamson places this tapestry in the “season of the winter solstice, the end of the agricultural year, and the death of the lunar unicorn” (198). The Christian symbolism is of the actual Crucifixion, wherein Christ dies, shown by the actual spearing of the unicorn. Williamson suggests the royal court, in front of which the unicorn is paraded, depicts the descent of Christ into the underworld before he is resurrected (176). Williamson adds the intriguing interpretative possibility of the royal couple symbolizing Persephone and Hades, before which all the dead, apparently even Christ, must be brought (184 – 185).

The seventh and final tapestry depicts “The Unicorn in Captivity”, in which a reborn and prancing unicorn is contained within an enclosure, under a dripping pomegranate tree. The pomegranate symbolism adds credibility to the possibility the royal couple were Persephone and Hades, since pomegranate was the fruit binding Persephone to the Underworld. Williamson suggests this final work is not part of the hunt, “but rather the apotheosis of the hunt, in which the resurrected unicorn symbolizes the rebirth of Christian and pre-Christian vegetation gods” (199). Thus, the varied plants sewn into this seventh tapestry “promote fertility and encourage copulation” (226). The vegetation gods have been reborn in the yearly cycle after winter’s barren months, and Jesus Christ has risen out of the Underworld to a new life. Both events ensure humanity’s survival.

An additional interpretation of the seventh tapestry is suggested by Williamson, giving possible credence to Cavallo’s suggestion that Adam and Eve (A&E) are woven in throughout the hunt. The pomegranate tree symbolizes the feminine and the unicorn symbolizes the masculine. The enclosure that contains them both may be the New Garden of Eden. Humanity, reborn through Christ’s sacrifice, is now free to live without sin once again (Williamson 224-226). There is an underlying suggestion of the identification of the key to life, which transcends any descent to an underworld or being caught in any wasteland. “To provide fruitfulness within the holy precinct, the union of the sexes was essential” (226). Birth and rebirth are the keys to life, but they only occur through the presence of both the feminine and the masculine. Though Adam and Eve may have begun a vicious cycle, they also represent the only possible way to escape what they began.

What do these death and rebirth symbols of pre-Christian vegetation gods and Jesus Christ have to say to us today? As Campbell suggested, Christianity is generally understood on a literal basis today. Earlier mythology, telling stories of the agricultural gods, is generally accepted only as stories for entertainment. With both sets of narratives, there are those who will take time to unravel historical and psychological significance in the myths, but they are not the general public. Do the Unicorn Tapestries, any unicorn, or any myth retain relevance in the modern world?

Cavallo adds an interesting idea, germane to the question of the modern interpretation of such works. He suggests the first, fifth and seventh tapestries may not belong in the sequence of the other four (29 – 75), which we have seen Williamson string together in a unified narrative. Cavallo believes they were probably done by the same weavers, for the same clients, but not for a linear set. This question remains for art historians, as do those of the weaver’s identity and the tapestry’s original owners. However, this relatively recent idea comes after the researched and detailed narrative Williamson created to include all seven tapestries. If Cavallo is correct, then Williamson has already created a new narrative for the modern world. However, it is suffused with history, still based on symbols and myths alive when the works were created. Are there further new interpretations of these works?

Taking another cue from Joseph Campbell, we must look to artists for new paths. The first that must be briefly considered is T.S. Eliot and his poem “The Waste Land”. Eliot wrote and defined the Waste Land, a barren earth of failed relationships, in the year 1922. World War I began the devastation of modern sensibilities. Eliot used Arthurian source ideas to write of a world in need of renewal, whether from war or the personal brutalities we inflict on each other. His answer for escaping the Waste Land was “’Datta, dayadhvam, damyata’ (Give, sympathize, control)’” (53). If this is the way to renew the Waste Land, then taking, cynicism and chaos must be what creates the Waste Land. Arthurian myth postulates a return of the King to renew the world. Are there modern interpretations of the narrative of the Unicorn Tapestries, wherein we may find renewal for the Waste Land we are living in? Can mythic symbols which historically evoked the Oak King, the Holly King and Jesus Christ find their own rebirth for us today?

The second artist to consider is Peter S. Beagle, a seminal fantasy literature author whose career became serious with his novel, The Last Unicorn. A major coincidence recently took place when a brief classroom discussion regarding the Unicorn Tapestries was ignited the following morning by the discovery of a poem cycle by Beagle titled “The Unicorn Tapestries” (185-192). He chose to write from the point of view of a boy in tapestry six, depicted looking at his dog, unable to look at the dead unicorn slung over the horse’s back. The language of Beagle’s poetry speaks of the unicorn as a symbol of something within, yet beyond, the real world, which the boy senses by himself:

He was not white as ivory,
or snow, or milk, as men declare,
but white as moonlight on the sea –
oh, white as daisies! white as air! (186)

The boy’s father is the nobleman who has called for the unicorn hunt, and the respect he asks to be due the unicorn as a beast of natural wonder is shown in this verse:

He said, “We may not give him chase
till he is roused and starts to run.
Stand you a moment in his grace
and ask his pardon, every one.”

Then I was glad to be his son. (187)

The unicorn is defined by his “grace” by the father, but the son has already defined him by natural attributes of a wonderful existence, “white as air!” The father’s hunt continues anyway, but fails because there is only one way to capture a unicorn. The boy describes the maiden and the unicorn as he approaches toward her. She “smiled like a sleeping snake” (190), but the unicorn still goes to her, because he is a being who gives: “Perhaps he did know, / and did not care” (189). He then describes the actual killing of the unicorn after he has given himself up: “the wholeness broken by the grunting men, / the beauty spilling, / his eyes brilliant with hurt” (190). Here is the Waste Land defined: taking a life, a cynical outlook even as beauty spills and the chaos of a slaughtering scene. The boy can only look thankfully at his dog. Upon seeing the unicorn reborn, the boy describes his feelings:

All in the morning, feeling his breath
play in my hair as he stamped and blew,
just for a moment I knew what he knew,
shining and shining and shining –
that nothing could hold him, not even death;
that no collars, no chains, no fences, as strong as they seem,
can hold a dream. (192)

Here we have the unicorn as a symbol of a dream, perhaps a literal Jungian nighttime dream, but definitely a goal and hope of a person awake and purposeful. Jung’s individuation process encompasses both, a striving to shine and unwillingness to be stopped before achieving what a person needs. The chaos of restraints, death and the greed of others, instead of being allowed to give of your gifts freely, are aspects of today’s Waste Land. The unicorn gives all he can willingly, his life to the lady, in order to shine and inspire the boy in the light of rebirth.

Beagle has used the unicorn as a symbol of rebirth, just as the Unicorn Tapestries previously were interpreted depicting seasonal rebirth of the yearly cycle and rebirth of Jesus Christ in order to save the world. In modern global society, however, the individual rebirth of a child, awakening to the beauty of giving over taking, seems a more relevant interpretation. Daily agricultural labor is no longer seen by a majority of Americans, many of whom believe food comes from the supermarket. Vegetation gods hold little resonance for us. Jesus Christ has become a historical figure, proving most powerful for those who take his metaphorical words literally. The fact that we have lost much of our traditionally rich symbolism signifies not a will to lose it, but simply that we have lost touch with metaphor. Eliot used the Arthurian tradition to describe the modern world, perfectly describing the Waste Land, but coded his solution in the myths of an even older Hindu tradition. Beagle’s simplicity and relevance reworks the unicorn as a symbol. A beast of wonder, the unicorn evokes the environmental Waste Land we have created in our world, evidenced by rapidly diminishing numbers of wild animal species. There is an advancement of the mythical process here, as this becomes a symbol we relate to. We can then understand the unicorn gives freely. He doesn’t take. This was the original message of Jesus Christ, but it has become lost in the Waste Land of those who use him to take what they say is theirs. They have lost the understanding of the need to give – and give freely – in order to have rebirth.

Depth Psychology adds to this interpretation, but too often in the process of individuating, we take what is “ours”. Even when reclaiming what is within us, the common metaphor is to take from our unconscious what we need to be whole. If it is for what we perceive to be our own good, we often forget the unconscious is actually supposed to give us what we need. A careless or blind focus on our self may lead to appropriating cultural and religious solutions from other traditions. However, simply taking historical and psychological narratives of others will not completely enable us to escape our own modern Waste Land.

Joseph Campbell writes, “…myth is a picture language…this language is the native speech of dream…it has been studied, clarified and enriched by the poets, prophets, and visionaries of untold millenniums” (Flight 22). In fantasy literature, written by poets in this native speech of dream, old symbols are reworked to speak to the modern world. By understanding the wonder of the fantastic, we are able to recognize the shine within ourselves, so different from ordinary experience. Hopefully, we understand that when reclaiming our enchantment, we need to give the same to the world. Our own rebirth should be a rebirth of giving, a lesson the unicorn knows only too well.

Works Cited

Beagle, Peter S. We Never Talk About My Brother. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2009.

Campbell, Joseph. Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2002.

Campbell, Joseph. Myths to Live By. New York: Penguin Compass, 1972.

Cavallo, Adolfo Salvatore. The Unicorn Tapestries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998.

Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1962.

Freeman, Margaret B. The Unicorn Tapestries. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1976.

Smith, Dr. Evans-Lansing. “Class Lecture Notes – European Sacred Traditions.” Pacifica Graduate Institute. Carpinteria, CA. 18 May 2009.

Williamson, John. The Oak King, The Holly King, and the Unicorn. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.

Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince

2009-07-27T10:30:00.002-05:00

I have avoided writing about Harry Potter. So much is written already by so many others. I could not resist this latest installment though.

Cinematically, the whole series has been impressive. The frame is always used beautifully, and in "Half Blood Prince" is extremely effective. This is the art of cinema. When done well, a film is clean, beautiful and evocative. The film student will probably hufflepuff the whole idea, but I believe the images from the Potter movies to be some of the finest being shot in films today. As an example, the scenes with the bird cage and Draco Malfoy are simple, yet evocative. Draco is caged. An obvious metaphor, but the beauty of the shots really makes you think about the whole situation. He is torn amongst childhood, his being chosen by Voldemort and trying to live up to his family's sinister past. He is in the cage. But the cage can quickly become empty. And he knows it, since he is the one that removes the bird. How far can he go before he makes himself disappear? Just one example from a series that abounds in beautiful shots. The mise-en-scene is not taken for granted, unlike so many other films.

The attention given to rich detail is what modern big-budget fantasy excels at. There is an exhibition of Potter film props at Chicago's Museum of Science & Industry in which the detail on every item - from costume to intricate wand details - is plainly evident. If you're a Potter fan, I hope you get to see this show.

Thematically, "Half Blood Prince" hits a very interesting note and seamlessly binds generations.

A major focus is on the memory of the elderly Horace Slughorn. A good portion of the film focuses on Slughorn telling stories from his past. The frames in these films are awash in sepia tones, the photographic color of nostalgia and age. Slughorn struggles with his reputation. He believes how he is perceived is all that remains for himin his old age.

Draco struggles with growing older and making choices. Harry struggles with the same. Dumbledore struggles to assist both of them. And Harry must convince the older Slughorn to also make the right choice, but somehow not berate him for any past indiscretions. Slughorn must understand that his reputation is not in trouble, and only the yonger Potter can help him with this. Slughorn must admit what he has done, becoming more a hero than the fool he thought he was. Being true to others allows you to be true to yourself, no matter your age. It's a nice scene when Harry holds Slughorn's hand to assist him in giving up his memory. Too often the young and old are played off each other, instead of assisting each other with their own special skills. The Potter films could be analyzed just for what they say about respect between the ages. Even here, in which Potter and friends can be slightly snarky teenagers - joking about Dumbledore's old age - Potter and friends have always impressed me as being respectful to their elders who warrant respect because they give it. They are also shown respecting each other and themselves.

Another take on this theme is how age must be responsible for at least trying to help youth, giving guidance in decision making. Though Dumbledore being a father to Harry is obvious, there are many more young wizards and witches at Hogwarts. Dumbledore tries to save Malfoy. Snape, of course, actually does.

Knowing the seventh book makes Snape a wonder to behold in this film. There is no question for me that the literary Snape is one of the great adult characters of all time. The cinematic Snape is almost equal. Alan Rickman evokes so much with so little that it is easy to overlook his work. The interiority of the literary character is not easy to bring to film. When Snape reveals he is the Half Blood Prince - all is really revealed. But nothing is obvious. And aren't we all Half Blood in the end? The struggle of light and dark is played out constantly in us. Appearances can always be deceiving.

My last comments are on a minor part of the film, but a true surprise for me. I recently completed a paper on the mythological themes from the Unicorn Tapestries, the medieval tapestries hanging in the Cloisters in NYC. The tapestries were featured twice in "Half Blood Prince" and used the themes of the unicorn hunt to perfection. It was rather odd how they combined the tapestries, but no matter. The focus was on the seventh, in which the unicorn is captured in an enclosure, under a pomegranate tree.

We see this the first time as Draco stands in front of it. The second time has Harry and Ginny in front of the tapestry. There are various interpretations of the symbolism in the tapestries, both old agricultural myths of the Holly King and Oak King, as well as Christian re-interpretations.

What came to mind with Draco was the maiden who lures the unicorn to her, only to lull it into serenity and then be killed. At the same time, the unicorn goes willingly, giving itself up so that it can bring about rebirth. Draco ponders it for a shot - perhaps never understanding that Dumbledore's death is the sacrifice that is needed. However, he has a choice. As Dumbledore says in earlier film - between what is right, and what is easy. Because his guidance is poor, Draco can only proceed with the plot to lure in the old wizard.

When Ginny and Harry stand before the tapestry, the symbolism of the unity of man and woman comes forward. The unicorn stands enclosed under a pomegranate tree, symbolizing that rebirth and ultimate redemption by giving of itself. Ginny of course is aiding Harry in ridding himself of harmful magic, even while she is declaring her love for him in the most obvious way yet. It's a quick scene, but very beautiful.

As well, the passing of Dumbledore to come can be compared to the passing of the Holly King, as it is time for a new king to take over. Quick thoughts only, but it is great to see such works being used in this series.

I will post my unicorn paper to give a more detailed analysis.

Further Thoughts on Adaptation and Rebooting

2009-06-13T06:36:00.005-05:00

Why do we have an image here of the heinous film Van Helsing? Before I proceed, let me say it was one of the worst films I have ever seen.

So - may I also say, for me, it was one of the most disappointing films ever. I am a major Universal monster film geek, and was hoping that this film would capture the essence and update the whole cycle. The beginning of Van Helsing echoed that essence; what followed was simply dreadful. It did not follow the heart and soul of the originals. Why am I bringing this up?

Well for one, Star Trek, as my "review" below says, did a pretty good job of following the original. Except for, say, their handling of McCoy, that movie made an homage to the original by simply updating the sensibility of the whole narrative for the audience today. It worked.

What really fuelled my thoughts of Van Helsing though was watching Speed Racer, the movie, the other night. As a six and seven year old, I watched the Speed Racer cartoon every day after school. I don't like race cars and auto racing - unless it's done Speed style. When the film came out a year or so back, I obstinately decided there was no reason to see it. How could live action Speed possibly compete with my memories of cartoon Speed?

As with Star Trek, the Speed Racer film worked admirably. The essence of the entire film was distilled throught the cartoon. If it was part of the cartoon, it was somehow melded into the film. What was added, for the most part, allowed our "modern" sensibilities to digest the film and usually worked to add to the cartoon-fan's enjoyment. Maybe Spridle giving the finger to the villain was a touch too much, but overall, this was fun. Nothing more than that, but for the cartoon series fan, that was enough. It was cool.

So I am still holding out hope that the Universal monsters will make a return somehow. But when an old, scholarly vampire hunter becomes an acrobatic Hugh Jackman, you know you are on the wrong track. This was not a sensitive update for the fan. It was a slaughter of all we held dear. Universal made very calm, psychological monster films, set in a fantasy reality where monsters didn't want to rule the world. They just wanted a victim or two. Van Helsing was a kung-fu movie.

Star Trek: The ReBoot

2009-05-30T08:10:00.006-05:00

My pre-concern with the new Star Trek film was that it seemed as if it was messing with the original series. Thankfully, it messes with the original series.

History: When I first discovered Star Trek, it was the early seventies. In re-runs, the entire three years was being shown episode by episode. It's not as if I could get the DVD's from Netflix and watch Season 3. The fantastic fan had to wait for television programmers to show old movies and re-runs. Legends of celluloid were created simply by lack of viewing availability. There were only a few magazines devoted to science fiction, fantasy and horror movies, namely "Famous Monsters of Filmland". God bless, 4E Ackerman. When I discovered Star Trek, thankfully I also discovered comic conventions and fandom. Before Star Wars popped the entertainment bubble wide open for the fantastic fan, only Star Trek had audience enough to provide the fandom ephemera that is so standard today.

I watched Star Trek every weeknight for four months. My family hated me. And I loved it. But by the time the first movie came out, things had already begun to change. I found that first Star Trek film boring, by the standards of a fourteen year old who was firmly in the Star Wars camp by then. When The Next Generation came around, maybe eight years later, I watched it a little. I liked it. But it just was not the same as those early days. I know there were other shows and other movies, but it seemed like endless Hollywood recycle once again.

So - I was told I should see this new Star Trek. I was wary - I saw the trailer, with Kirk speeding in the old car particularly jarring for me. I was then told again to see it - and everyone else then told me to see it. Everyone that said this was someone whose opinion I trusted. So -

By re-booting the original show, they made a very fun film. I had not seen an episode in many years, but as a formative influence, it all stuck in my head. This film played on many of the lines and dynamics of the original and because of that I found it mighty fun. One of my favorite original episodes is "The Menagerie", a two part episode in which Captain Pike is disfigured and disabled, and Spock is on trial for helping him. In the new film, I thought they honored Pike well, even showing him in the wheelchair again, but this time, still able to talk. Pretty cool.

Mostly, everything was played for a laugh. Which is OK, I guess, as I laughed and enjoyed most everything. But then again, is it really funny to still be making fun of Chekov's accent? The voice recognition gag was funny though...

Mythically speaking, the cosmic birth of Kirk was well-done, though perhaps a bit dramatic. A fellow student wrote this spot-on review http://www.mythicthinking.org/2009/05/10/star-trek/, basically speaking to the Spock/Kirk dynamic of the film.

But here's the real problem I had - the original show to which ample homage is being paid was not a duality. Kirk and Spock had a go-between, a heart that was between Spock's mind and Kirk's penis. His name was McCoy - Bones - a huge part of the show that is generally neglected. Just as McCoy is neglected in the new film. When he first shows up on screen, drinking from a flask, I thought he was supposed to be Scotty. He is then played for laughs - cantankerous, giving out his famous "I'm a doctor, not a..." line, but never becoming the third piece to the puzzle that he was in the show. See "The City on the Edge of Forever" and "For the World is Hollow and I have Touched the Sky". Bones was real, and he was needed to mediate at all times. Here's to DeForest Kelley.

I am definitely grateful that William Shatner was not in it, though.

Your Mission: Define Mythology

2009-05-12T08:00:00.005-05:00

Really. The problem I am faced with in studying myth has been mentioned here before. Basically, myth has many different definitions. The average person on the street, when confronted by the word, usually has only a few ideas. "A myth is a lie" or "A myth is a story of how the world began" or "A myth is about the Greek gods" are at least better answers than the most common: a snicker. And I'm not talking Peanutalicious here.

Never do I hear: "A myth is a symbolic narrative used to understand human psychology (often employing the use of the dialectic to combine opposites to form a new idea)". That's my latest definition. My problem is that by using Depth Psychology to understand myth, I am entering a world in which understanding myth becomes a very personal journey.

That is not a problem for myself, necessarily, because the frontier of Depth Psychology makes sense to me more and more. Though I fought against some parts of it earlier, the concepts are not so new to my own internal thoughts. I didn't know all the terms and exact ideas of the most astute Dr. C.G. Jung, but feel like I had internalized a lot of his concepts already. However, those snickers re-echo in my mind, hammering home the question that usually follows: "How are you going to make money with a degree in Mythology?"

I always ignored that question, for oh so many reasons. But at the outset of this adventure I assumed I would land the way I always do, at least NEAR a soft bed of flowers. But this personal facet of learning how myth relates to the human psyche, and how it is necessary to bring your brain into a healthy state of co-existence with your unconscious - how can I express it to that every day man in the street? For the most part, they don't care too much. Remember, the first question was about money. The ones that do care are usually my friends, and I expect they care only because they, well, don't want to snicker. For all you west coasters reading this, remember, I'm from the city they used to call "hog-butcher for the world". Poor pigs! For my friends that actually are interested - all three of you I think - THANKS!

I'm not someone who has the patience to teach personal journey stuff (it's personal right?), but it is almost a requirement to be an individuated soul to get this approach to myth. The few friends I mentioned above, as I think about it, are pretty together. So they get it.

I guess I'm just wondering if the world at large has any interest in this stuff. Seems art and the unconscious are the first things to be ignored in the pursuit of more money. I could sure use a Snicker's.

To Blog or Not To Blog? And what to Blog about?

2009-04-10T17:37:00.008-05:00

My wife asked me to explain everything I know about blogs because, apparently, her company was going to start a blog. It made me question why and what for people blog, and I decided a company blog, in most cases, is utterly useless.

But it also made me question why I blog, which is one reason I haven't done so regularly lately. I always feel like there needs to be a hook - a reason for my existence in the blogosphere. And my original reason seems outdated, or at least unfocused, after beginning grad school. I am trying to focus, but have not been that lucky yet. So - while I continue to ponder my own why's - here's something completely unrelated. And, I think, awesome.

We watched "Iron Man" with Robert Downey Jr. today. Enjoyed it. May blog about it somehow. But not today. Today - it made me think of the worst animation for a superhero cartoon superhero show ever. The old Marvel Superhero Show - or whatever the name was. But they had awesome opening tunes.

I give you - the cocktail hour theme song for: IRON MAN.

The Mythic Dimension of "Frost/Nixon"

2009-02-23T07:26:00.006-06:00

The film "Frost/Nixon" is an interesting film to examine from the mythic dimension.

But first, myth is an incredibly charged word because it is used in so many different ways. The one thing I have learned in 5 months of Mythological Studies in grad school is there is very little consensus on what myth actually is. Suffice it to say, the common usage of "Myth is a lie or untruth", has so little validity in the reality of how myth is used that it is basically a nonsensical statement. That being said though, it is a common view held by a large amount of people. Let the mythic education begin.

For my purposes, myth is: thought that produces a narrative that includes opposites, paradoxically combining those opposites to produce a new understanding of how the two actually work together, and possibly create something completely new. This is a working definition that I am constantly re-thinking, but the dialectic that is created by myth is a very useful tool to analyze any narrative.

So - "Frost/Nixon". The mythic dimension became readily apparent in this film with the realization of the opposition of the two sides involved. The self-important, political heavyweight Richard Nixon, being interviewed by the gregarious, entertainment lightweight, David Frost. Physical and cultural opposites, their outlooks are from two different worlds. Nixon apparently only agreed to the interviews because Frost was seen as a pushover. The fallen president thought he had the platform on which to change his image enough to allow his re-entry into the political world. The powerhouse of Nixon's forceful personality is brilliantly portrayed by Frank Langella in an extraordinary performance in the film.

Michael Sheen as David Frost complements the Nixon force, however, by being just as forceful, just as determined, in a wonderfully understated role. The key in the film becomes a phone call that Nixon makes to Frost, in which the ex-president makes the challenge of the interview into a personal challenge. He claims, rightly for many reasons, that Frost is just like him. He also claims that Frost has no chance of besting him. Frost rises to the occasion because as determined as they both are, he knows there is a difference.

The mythic dimension, then, is in the meeting of the two worlds - the entertainment and the political, actors of two different stages, coming together at an incredibly important historical moment. The trust of America's people in its leaders was in meltdown. The political news was unable to even procure an interview with Nixon. If they were, it seems that Nixon would have been unable to admit he was wrong to such a force. His adamant personality suggests he would have held fast.

But when faced with his opposite, the change took place. His spirit was affected. With a newsman, the story, ultimately about admitting injustice and the emotions of a beaten down egotistical politician, could never have developed. Nixon's guard was down, he felt superior to his opposite, but the opposite is not superior or inferior - it is equal in opposing force. The conflicting emotions arose from having no choice but to coalesce in the middle of calm and fury. Truth, which is after all what confession is, arises when the paradoxical opposites are combined.

The guess is that Nixon's personal catharsis was good for him, mentally at least. But what did it do for America? Though the confession of wrong doing was needed by our country's people, it was a turning point of trust. By hearing the admission, there was no going back to trust. Politicians have always been corrupt, but the enormity of the President being involved scarred our ability to trust forever. It is a good thing to be wary, but also very tiring. The steady erosion of confidence that was publicly marked by Nixon's resignation has gone downhill since. Have we reached the turning point yet, in which we regain faith in what we suppose we have always stood for?

Jason Lutes "Berlin: City of Smoke"

2009-02-20T16:41:00.007-06:00

One of my favorite comic artists, storytellers I should say, is Jason Lutes. He tells a story in comic form that is extremely cinematic, but has an extra edge because it is not film. It's a comic. His line is exact and his detail impeccable. I have been meaning to write about Jason's work for a while now, but always find I don't want to dissect it. I just want to savor it.

One of his most amazing pages is that of a clarinet player, broken down into many small panels. By the layout and the spacing between the panels, I could hear the music. I love his work. Here is a link to an interview I did with Jason a long time ago. I once had a dream of opening a comic art gallery, store and animation cinema.... (I'm not quite sure THAT dream has died yet!)

"Berlin" is an incredibly dense and intricate tale of the city of Berlin between World War 1 and World War 2. It is political, romantic, funny, scathing and heartbreaking. The first two graphic novels have now been released. The third will probably take another three years or so. Following is a brief video of him that I put up here just because I had never known what he looked like when I stumbled on this.

Joseph Campbell Checks In...

2009-02-19T10:09:00.006-06:00

With my recent posts on what is required of each of us in today's world, and specifically in our country in crisis, I thought I would add a few quotes from Joseph Campbell. It seems to me his work is almost completely ignored by mainstream America. It's been awhile since he spoke so voluminously about myth and its importance, but I detect little to make me think any of his ideas have sunk in to general consciousness.

From Thou Art That, New World Library 2001:

"The exclusivism of there being only one way in which we can be saved, the idea that there is a single religious group that is in sole possession of the truth - that is the world as we know it that must pass away. What is the kingdom? It lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us." (p. 107)

"People feel panicky at the thought that we might all have something in common, that they are giving up some exclusive hold on the truth." (p. 110)

As I firmly believe in his ideas, it is disheartening to see that if anyone acknowledges his work at all, it is so often heaped on the pile of "New Age". More to come on this, for sure.

Myth In America

2009-02-18T21:15:00.002-06:00

One of the myths of America can be situated in a cultural dialectic. The idea anyone can succeed by working hard, and even grow up to be president, is one mythical American storyline. On the other side is the idea of America as a melting pot, sustained by a unity of diverse people, working together for a common good. These are opposing ideas because one speaks to the goals of individualism while the other speaks to the social collective.

How do we see these stories working in history? Capitalism is an ideology of the individual and has been instrumental in the growth of American interests and wealth. An argument can be made that all business decisions are initiated by someone who wants to succeed and become wealthy. The pride of America, on the other hand, is that we go to work every day. Our immense economic growth was made possible by a varied workforce successfully manning large projects that created the American superpower.

How do we see these stories working now? What is good for one individual is not necessarily good for that same collective of people. Our current economic downfall points out the problem with greed, when the individual’s ability to get wealthy is allowed to run amok with disastrous consequences for others. The collective then develops it own seams. It is hard to be concerned with your neighbor when yourself or your family have unexpected crises.

But the beauty of myth is that it is dialectic. Our stories, contradictory and paradoxical, contain the truths allowing both to work together. In recent weeks, we have seen the success of Barack Obama as he became an unlikely president. And in the midst of our economic meltdown, we need to heed our historic President’s call to action: to stick together, to work together and to create change where it is needed. If we as a people accept smaller gains for ourselves when our neighbors are also gaining, we become the truth of our American myths.

As the famous mythologist Joseph Campbell once wrote, “Unless the myth can be understood – or felt – to be true in some such way as this, they lose their force.” For a renewed success of American values, we must understand our myths to be true. We must recognize that both myths oppose each other unless we ensure they come together in each individual. America’s success as a country should be judged by its strength in individuals that care for each other and strive together. When one wins, we can all truly win, as long as we actually believe it.

Coraline in 3-D

2009-02-17T08:05:00.009-06:00

CORALINE is well worth seeing if only for the modern 3-D technology that makes it sparkle. There are other reasons though.

3-D throughout the years is the film industry's number one gimmick. They pull it out every decade or so, claiming things popping out of the screen will "Amaze you!" As a kid, I saw a western 3-D movie. It was called "Comin' At Ya" (get it?) and featured a really lousy film with effects such as bullets and arrows shooting out toward the audience. This could explain many things, perhaps, but it doesn't explain why 3-D remains a money-maker. This was a really bad film.

Whatever the new 3-D technology is, the joy for me is that it isn't limited to making things pop out of the screen. The new technology (accessed with a nice pair of black sunglasses, not a flimsy cardboard blue and red novelty) has depth. The screen went inwards, as well as out. It was a joy to look "into" the movie.

What came to my mind was the old Fleischer Studio's Popeye cartoon effects. Back in the day, Fleischer used actual sets on a turntable and animated Popeye and the other characters in front of the revolving backgrounds. There was depth to such classic longform cartoon features as POPEYE THE SAILOR MEETS SINBAD THE SAILOR. They were some of the most interesting cartoons and some of the most luscious.

The world of CORALINE is luscious squared. Depth, whether in production design, art or 3-D effects, simply gives us more world to get lost in. The neat thing is, with the whole movie in depth, the things that pop out of the screen are less in quantity but far more magnificent in quality. And Coraline's world, created by the prolific genius Neil Gaiman, is a whole lot of fun. This Other world, the more chaotic side of Caroline's internal childhood, is a very interesting and creepy place. The depth of the 3-D effects perfectly mirrors the depth psychology of the world behind the door that gives Coraline everything she thinks she wants, but knows is probably not the best thing for her. The buttons sewn on over people's eyes might be a big hint!

OK. So I loved the movie. But...

Gaiman originally wrote the book "Coraline" as a young adult story. I believe it was originally written to feature a girl as the hero. I have not read the book, but I'm pretty sure this is correct. Coraline was a character that would save the day because, yes, girls too can be heroes. Gaiman is like that. He writes female characters as well as he writes males, one of the interesting abilities of so many male writers of the fantastic. But as I said, I never read the book. However, I did read the recent graphic novel (i.e. giant comic book with quality binding) by Gaiman and drawn by the magnificent P. Craig Russell. There are some interesting points, considering the differences between movie and comic.

I have written of comics here before. The intimate connection between reader/viewer and the work makes it my favorite narrative art form. I get to go one-on-one with the material, let it go directly into my brain. I can linger or move fast. Whichever is right for the story as I am perceiving it. So, yep, I also like the "Coraline" graphic novel a whole lot. But there was a change between the comic (which I am guessing is closer to the book) and the movie which made me like the movie just a little bit less than I should have.

In the book, as intended by Gaiman, Coraline is the hero. It is her story to win or lose; it is the young girl who will either save the day or lose her family. All her. And we admire her for it. MOVIE SPOILER AHEAD:

In the movie, a new character was created - a young boy. He's a nice enough boy, but Coraline pretty much outwits him most of the time. And then - he adds key help at the end with the final defeat of the Other that comes to get Coraline. The boy sort of saves the day. I was saddened. Coraline showed ingenuity in the comic, that flowed directly from her female identity. She doesn't need a boy's help. That was the point of Gaiman's little story about a young girl named Coraline. The boy doesn't ruin the movie, but it dampens the point a bit. If you never read the story, I guess you would never know and would not be bothered. No wonder they don't promote comics at the movies!

Here are some links: P. Craig Russell is one of comics most refined and beautiful artists. I highly recommend his adaptation of Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung. It looks like it is available in two graphic novel volumes.

Neil Gaiman Fantasy writer extraordinaire. I think the Father in the Coraline movie may have been based on Neil himself.

Here is the Coraline movie website. And here's Wikipedia's article on the immortal Fleischer Studios. If you want to find out about "Comin' At Ya", well, you'll have to surf the web yourself. I'm hoping nothing comes up...

The John Doe Clubs

2009-02-07T07:08:00.009-06:00

In one of Frank Capra's cinematic masterpieces, "Meet John Doe", the citizens of the United States band together in local John Doe Clubs. Based on the "little guy", it mostly consisted of neighbors discovering and talking to each other.The clubs found after talking together they were all more likely to get along and actually help each other.

Ah, sweet, naive Frank Capra, thinking that people actually do get along when they know each other. Thinking people will lend a hand to somebody that needs that hand. "Capra-Corn" is what the critics deride his views as - sheer nonsense, nostalgia for times that never were. But the critics can be wrong. "Capra-Corn" isn't backward looking or romantic idealism. It was a call to action, a pointer to the future and a hopeful suggestion: help that guy over there because he may be able to help you or someone else later on.

And even if you don't need any help, ever, that guy may just amuse the heck out of you, do something silly, or artistic, or just plain fun, that will make your life richer, stronger and more optimistic. And in the words of Violet Bic, another Capra character from another classic, " What's wrong with that?"

The John Doe clubs go through a period of bitter disenchantment, but rally as the neighbors that had banded together realized they actually liked each other and were better off helping out than staying home alone. Call me an idealist (or a fool) but I think what this country needs right now are John Doe Clubs.

OK - I'll be honest - I'd rather call them something else, but it has to be corny. Obama's Economic Stimulus Parties just isn't very appealing. I'm bad with titles, so suggestions are welcome. But here's the thing: the bitter taste of contempt from the last uber-administration lingers in our country. After all the inauguration excitement, the talk of working together, a country renewed in spirit by the idea that someone will be leading us in the true spirit of America, that every single one of us matters, regardless - the politics of our country are stonewalling everything. In this I include both parties for different reasons - I'm not writing to call anyone out.

But President Obama is correct when he says America is in a jam and it will take everyone to help get it out of that jam. I have already had two family members lose their jobs and have friends in the same boat. And those that have jobs don't get too excited about going to them. The fear that grows into a knot in your stomach when you lose your job actually shows on your face. I've seen it. We all need to help everyone we know. And everyone we need to know.

Our neighbors, just as the John Doe Clubs realized, are just like us. Really. Maybe not in every way, and maybe they get you mad sometimes, but they are alive. Just like you. Isn't that enough?

So to the Democrats who think they can use the new administration to get theirs, just as Cheney and his cronies did the last eight years, I say "straighten up and fly right". You are owed nothing. You get paid to work for all the members of the non-existent John Doe Clubs. To the Republicans, whose antics seem to say they will block anything, enough. Time for new ideas. I see a Senator complaining the President isn't listening to him, screaming, literally, on TV. Well - call him. Seems to me he'll take your call.

And for all of us, take a hint from Capra. Simple pleasures -of family, friends, food and music - are really what matters. The CEO's we all complain about? Take a lesson. Don't envy their wealth. See it for what it is - excessive. Money cannot buy happiness. What it can buy is food, education and some fun. I believe in the new direction our new President believes in. But I also believe it comes from us. One act at a time. One day at a time. It's not easy. But it is the only way.

CHE - Parts 1 AND 2

2009-02-06T10:31:00.006-06:00

A few months back I saw "The Motorcycle Diaries", the film about Che Guevara's early twenties in which he took a motorbike trip around South America. He left from his homeland of Argentina with his best friend. Their aim was to have some fun basically, though as doctors, medical students really, they did have some serious intentions. They planned to visit a leper colony and talk to a distinguished physician there. It was an interesting enough movie that it led me to read the book, which is actually the diary of Guevara from the trip.

Yesterday, I finished watching "Che", Steven Soderbergh's two-part, almost five hour film about Guevara. I am glad I read "The Motorcycle Diaries"!

Part One is a film about Guevara hooking up with Fidel Castro to bring about the coup in Cuba. It seems Guevara was the tactician and inspiration, while Castro was the leader who took on the responsibility of the whole action. With a large number of rebels, they advance on government troops. The final part of the film is an almost street-by-street, and literally wall-by-wall, account of the taking of the final town before the rebels were able to take control of Cuba. With little plot other than miltary tactics, the film is bogged down in itself. While ephemerally interesting at first, my interest began to lag. By the time the final invasion was being shown, I realized the only thing I had learned, other than how to take Cuba by force, was that Che greeted every soldier individually, by name, as he looked them straight in the eye. That was an insight that passed quickly though. I must admit I was glad when it ended. I wondered if I would actually watch Part Two.

For the sake of artistry, and because I have some interest in the man I met in "Motorcycle Diaries", I watched the second half. And I will say that if you have any interest in Guevara, you have to watch both films. The second is set in Bolivia, where Guevara goes to continue the revolution. He leaves Cuba behind to a Castro that is living off the fat of that land and hardly embracing "the people". But Che, whether he saw that or not, plans to lead the Bolivian peasants against their government. Where Cuba was such a success, at least for Che and his intentions, Bolivia proves to be the exact opposite.

The amazing problem is that he has so few rebels with him. It is hard to understand what he actually expected to do with a group that seemed to top no more than thirty at any time. His ability to greet his troops personally and look them in the eye served him well here, though it did not go as well for those soldiers. Guevara is the leader here. There is no Fidel Castro to take any heat or make any decisions. Guevara, whose lifelong problem with asthma really rears up in Bolivia, has no business attempting what he attempts here.

These two halves - one of great success and one of abject failure - make Soderbergh's opus a film well worth watching. There is an overall biographical arc, an assessment really, that can only be attained by setting each half against the other. But I would suggest reading the "Diaries" also. The film gives us little background or characterization of the famous revolutionary icon. From the book, I knew that his goals were formed by seeing the native Indian populations of South America living in cultural splendor, but economic destitution. He had good motives.

But the film shows that when those same Native Americans are coerced to help rebels, they get nothing in return other than government troops harassing them. The very people he wanted to help wanted nothing to do with such violence and harassment. There must be better ways to change the world, but those ways may make results harder to achieve than violent revolt.

Che had good intentions, but it seems it was really a wasted life and wasted talent.

W.

2008-10-26T17:29:00.005-05:00

I saw Oliver Stone's "W." yesterday. I felt ashamed as I left the theater.

The ads for the film, with Talking Heads' "Once In a Lifetime" playing over them, had me geared up for a wickedly funny skewering of George W. Bush and his incredibly poor, and almost over, two terms in office. I wanted to laugh at him.

I saw the film.

I realized there was nothing to laugh at. His presidency has been inconceivably manipulative, dangerous and filled with failure after failure. There is nothing to laugh at. Even his incredible misuse of the English language is not funny. We deserve - we demand - better. At least, I hope we do at this point.

"W.", the film, portrayed W. as a brash young drunkard, looking for acceptance from his father, and finally finding success that allowed him to go his own way. I was surprised at how fair to Bush it was.

But there was hardly a laugh to be found. And though it offered reasons as to how he may have made such disastrous decisions, it never allowed circumstances to become excuses. And there are no excuses for such ignorant and selfish governance.

Good bye, W. I want to laugh without guilt again.

The Story Within a Story

2008-10-08T07:43:00.007-05:00

This may become a homework assignment for me, and possibly a bigger theme for my later work, but I thought I would get down some quick, initial thoughts here. In the Mahabharata, the classic Indian epic of Hindu mythology, there is a story, "Nala and Damayanti" in the middle of the main story. My guess is that in the longer versions of the epic, there may be more than one instance of this, but this particular tale illustrates a steady course of action for the main characters to follow.

The tale within a tale is a popular literary device, and one around which such series as the 1001 Arabian Nights are wholly based. We have seen that the same is true in cinema - the flashback being an obvious example.

I think we can consider mythology, and really, any story, in the same vein. We have our reality - which can be considered an ongoing tale - in which we imagine, tell and sometimes write stories. These stories are tales within our own tales. We use them to illustrate possible courses of action for ourselves to follow. Religious mythology, the tales of our extant religious systems, are perfect examples of stories meant to illustrate life. Often they relate the same advice of myths from past religious systems, such as the Norse myths, but few now follow the Norse as religion. There is little difference to the advice in the tales, though.

If we could get past belief and see myth as story, we might be a lot better off in our own living myths.

Miracle at St. Anna

2008-09-30T18:38:00.002-05:00

Spike Lee's "Miracle at St. Anna" is a sprawling epic, the kind of film I wish was being made more often these days.

On one hand it is pure Hollywoood - in the sense of classic Hollywood. A lot of characters, an intricate plot, room for war, drama, humor, magic realism, love, and whatever else you might want in a good film.

On the other hand, it is extremely artful. From the opening titles, I knew there was something special coming. Lee did not let me down. I would consider this one of the best films I have seen this year, and a film worth multiple screenings. There were some problems. I tend to look at reviews after I see a film to see what the "experts" have to say. In this case, there were a lot of different complaints. They included: editing, cinematography choices, music, acting ability, mise-en-scene and actual scene choices. I will admit I noticed scenes in which each of these was a problem. But it was always a small problem. The narrative and the story immediately told me to forget it - move along with us. This is what classic Hollywood does better than anything - make you trust the film and go with it. I did, and I am glad I did. My gut tells me that on a second view, these inconsistencies will have a better place in the vision of this film than they did on the intial watch.

Spike Lee has made a major film here. It is about race. War. Love. Loyalty. What really comes to mind takes me back to the first lee film I saw at the theater. "Do the Right Thing". Damn it. Just do the right thing. When you reflect on what the Miracle actually is, do the right thing may become your mantra.

What pains me is that "Miracle at St. Anna" was only number nine on the weekend movie charts. I don't usually care about this, but had to look after I saw "Eagle Eye" the next day. "Eagle Eye" was number one, by a wide margin. EE was a fun film - evoking Hal from 2001 in ways that I really enjoyed - but fun was all it was. Thrills, spills and chills. But no art. And no heart. I guess that is why so few films like "Miracle" get made.

After "Miracle at St. Anna" ended, the woman behind me quietly said, "That's right, Spike. That's right." I agree with her.

Musings

2008-09-25T12:15:00.011-05:00

What follows is simply a lot of my thoughts on a lot of issues, mostly being brought up from my new graduate mythology classes. If you have any thoughts on any of it, please let me know.

1) I am trying to work through whether stories - specifically the stories that would be classified in the fantasy genre - can be considered myths. There is such a wide variance on what myth is that for me the question bears examination.

For instance - in a Newberry Library class on Welsh Mythology last night, the instructor defined myth, in a nutshell, as a narrative, set in sacred time and sacred space, with divine (immortal or superhuman) actors, often associated with a particular ritual performance. Big nutshell, I guess. In my Graduate program at Pacifica, another component of myth would be the use of symbols from the unconscious to tell that narrative.

Now - I don't know the stories of Welsh Mythology, but the instructor made it clear that after so many years, they are rather literary by now. I can't wait to learn about the rituals they were part of originally. And my unconscious is getting a work out in my readings for Grad School, which also emphasize ritual as an important part of myth.

So, in moshing all these ideas together - Fantasy is a narrative. You could say set in sacred time and space. Often with divine actors - and if you consider anyone in touch with these divine actors, or with their unconscious, as divine also, I think that provides more evidence for Fantasy as myth. Additionally, Fantasy definitely uses symbols in telling the story. Are they the symbols of the unconscious? Not necessarily. And is there any sort of ritual content that follows from, or by, reading these stories? On first thought, probably not. There are fannish activities, and there may be studies relating fanac to ritual, but that's beyond my knowledge right now. In general, the type of ritual usually involved with myth is missing from these stories.

However, on second thought, my whole premise is that the content of Fantasy can often change reader's attitudes towards their real lives. The views written into the fantasy narratives of so many of todays genre authors are views of how the world could, and maybe, should, be. On a personal level, do these stories change lives? Maybe. I think they can. Is there any aspect of ritual in a reader who seriously relates to these texts and uses them to look at life in a new way?

2) On a different tack, if myths are stories using the symbols from our unconscious, is a thought-out story any less mythical? OK, perhaps it is not a myth simply because it uses symbols. It might only be an allegory. However, the definition of myth is rather fluid, both academically and in general usage. Doesn't the very act of thinking involve, on some level, those unconscious symbols? Thinking is formulating ideas by working with, or pulling out, the symbols from our unconscious. Consciously or not. Thinking is similar to dreaming, but with rational rules - not symbols any more, but thoughts. If the intent is to explore a different kind of landscape, or any aspect of ourselves, but still tell about real lives in some way, I think we are close to myth and the Fantasy story having the same function.

3) One of the aspects being left out is the religious component to mythology. I have already expressed my views that religion is myth and that the traditional use of religion makes me nervous. Specifically, our world has changed, yet most religions try to force us, and everyone else, into a box of similar belief. Conversion as a goal is dangerous. Will there ever be a time when the major religious texts lose their holy power and become, like the Welsh Myth texts, more literary? They already can be read that way, but the organized powers behind them don't like that much.

4) The Archetypes of the unconscious led to myth, religion and philosophy. Science followed. We can probably assume that unconscious archetypes are leading to new ideas in scientific fields, right?

5) On a personal level, what do we do with archetypes now? What is being created with these symbols? Is this only for artists to wrestle with? Does the average muggle just get neuroses because they ignore their internal archetypes?

6) The archetype of the hero is well known. Is there an anti-hero archetype? As the lead character in much (too much in my opinion) of modern story, it would seem there must be. Was this archetype always in existence, or is this something new we have created? As I undersatnd it, new archetypes are not really created. I think I have a problem believing that.

7) Modernity is an endless parade of visuals and symbols. We either reflect on their meaning or are conditioned to soak them in. My film class called Visual Analysis was great, because their premise was that in the onslaught of images being thrown at us, we have a responsibility to filter them and understand them. I took that class twice! Now, my myth classes are very concerned with the analysis of the images our unconscious is barraging us with. Similar processes; utterly different material.

8) We used to have our actions animated by our internal symbols and we lived them. When did this stop exactly? Can we trace when mythic and religious thought began to be drowned out by rationality? Not that I mean this is a completely good thing. Symbolic and religious thought can make life easier to live, though not necessarily squaring up against our rational thoughts. The problem rises in the global sphere when religions clash. They promote division. Where do we find the religious thought that makes life easier for everyone, that promotes unity?

If you read through all that, you must have some thoughts. Leave a comment. Thanks!

Are Animals the Children of Men? (A Look into Film Analysis)

2008-09-05T08:38:00.003-05:00

I have been working on a paper about the film "Children of Men". While watching the film, I realized I was seeing animals in many scenes. After watching it closer, for a dystopian science fiction film, I found it interesting that animals were featured in 97 scenes in a 109 minute film. Pets and working animals, with a few exotics, are the kinds of animals shown, represented, heard or spoken about almost constantly in the film. Though not really the main focus, they are the type of details in the mise-en-scene that provide the substance of a film.

I begin work on a paper when I want to explore the text of a film or story, to see what is contained in it and to then unpack that container: to see why someone has put these things into it. My initial interest in "Children of Men" was that it extrapolated some of our current social conditions, and attitudes, into the future. It was grim enough to spur my thoughts and seemed worthy of a detailed inquiry. All of these animals being superimposed into this story is the sort of textual detail that should be examined, not for answers, but for possibilities.

I started with the premise that the film is science fiction, though I found later that this was fatal premise. I began my research with the current issue of Science Fiction Studies. It explores animal studies in literary science fiction. I wanted to see if current SF literary themes were at all relevant to this film. But literary science fiction is often about contact between species - alien or extraterrestrial, but increasingly animals. As Sheryl Vint reviews, current literary interests are human-animal relations: communications, usage in our technological pursuits, including slaughter for use as food, land use and wild life issues, and the status of animals as feeling beings. The question persists of the status of animals in comparison to humans. Vint's summary is a thorough review of the issue's contents.

These ideas represented a wide-ranging discourse on the question of animals and their relation to the human animal. Science fiction is an arena that explores current practices with an eye as to how they may develop in the future. However, these topics fell flat for me when I looked at "Children of Men" through their lens. Other than three scenes that show burning or dead cattle, which could possibly be related to land use issues, none of these themes seemed comelling enough as an explanation for the use of animals in the film. Even the dead cattle scenes seem to be more about the aftermath of human war and medical condition of the land than about the actual animal shown.

The animals are all shown as pets, working in security or on farms - all directly in a relation with humans. Even a zebra and a camel are shown as pets being walked in a park. The only wild animal seen is a deer. It comes out of an abandoned school house. As one instance out of 97, it holds undertones of land use/habitat themes, but I didn't feel it could be used as the main argument. It was one scene only. Perhaps the reasoning for the widespread use of animals in the film is simply to show that wildlife is dependent on a balancing act against humans, a balancing act this film seems to say has tipped irrevocably toward the human side. Is that it?

I moved to sources on animal studies in film analysis. While literature on documentary and real-life nature film is readily available, the use of animals in narrative film is less well-represented. Jonathan Burt's Animals in Film from 2002 appears to be the seminal work. Burt points out that we have an emotional response to animals on film - is there something natural in our reaction to animals, or is the emotional response developed by film technique? Burt explains that the diversity and quantity of animal images in films, and elsewhere, makes it hard to pin down meanings for animal symbols.

He also points out that too often these days, our only knowledge of animals comes from film. There are few wild animals left for us to encounter in reality. Does film contribute to animal loss? Burt sums his book up somewhat by showing that "In film, the animal so often presides over disorder but also in some sense shapes it towards some form of reunion or resolution,..." (Burt, p. 78). In other words, animals are often used as the plot point the film revolves around.

But in "Children of Men", the film does not revolve around the animals shown. They are not focused on. They are marginal, seen quickly before the camera or edit moves us on. Are the animals being filmed to produce a response in us? Certainly the scene in which a kitten trys to climb the protagonist's leg and we get a high close up of it, seems to want to lead us to think the kitten is cute. But, is the importance that animals are dependent on humans? That pets are doing well, but not other animals? Or not us?

And I realized that what I was watching wasn't really science fiction at all. Yes, the social implications of our world in the future were extrapolated in interesting ways. However, the main plot of this film is that humans can no longer reproduce. There are baby kittens and animals shown in almost every scene that don't have the same problem. Possible? Yes. Probable? No. Animals are the first to go. Problems show up in them first. The canary in the coalmine test. So really we are watching a fantasy. As fantasy, it speaks more to what our world is like now than having an interest in the future. The trappings of SF are present, but the heart of the film is in the fantastic.

A big budget fantasy. In Wheeler Winston Dixon's Visions of the Apocalypse, he writes, “In contrast, the paint-by-numbers movies of the majors sell quickly and then burn out, becoming texts without a function. The more bloated the spectacle, the more divorced it is from the culture that created it and the less it has to offer us as scholars and historians.” (p. 117). And in this statement, in which he was suggesting that such films as the low-budget exploitation movies of Troma have more to tell us about our culture than almost any Hollywood product, I seemed to have found my answer. Many films are empty texts.

There is an overwhelming use of the animals, but seemingly no over-arching context for them. They have little function. The text of this film makes animals seem relevant because of the number of scenes they are used in, but in analysis seem devoid of a lot of meaning. If 97 instances of animals are there to tell us that pets and wildlife depend on us, it seems a bit of overkill.

In an essay about the use of the forest in the Fantastic and exactly how that is changing due to the loss of actual forested land, Ruth Padel asks, "So as the woods, fens, and heath which evolved the wildlife of our intense little island turn into fenced-off archipelagos between the suburb and the motorway, what's the state of play with native British wildlife in the new millenium?" She is writing about the British landscape of classic fantasy literature and how it can be seen today. "Children of Men" takes place in just that same landscape.

The deer in the abandoned school house is probably the scene that works the best for the animals in the film. It relates to the history of British fantasy in which wildlife was, as Padel points out, just outside your door. The scene achieves a sense of the fantastic, the one time this big-budget fantasy delivers any hesitation, any sense that what we are seeing is relevant to both us and the film.

We must truly examine what we are seeing. This film fooled me into thinking there was a puzzle at the heart of it, but when its text opened to me, I found a Hollywood fantasy, in which the action and explosions took on a greater meaning, but the issues I believed were there at first dissipated rapidly.

Note: Just as I finished my analysis and research, I read Jonathan Rosenbaum's excellent inquiry into Carl Dreyer's "Day of Wrath". This 1943 film that is filled with text, subtext and possibility of relevant inquiry 65 years later. Check it out.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Burt, Jonathan. Animals in Film. London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2002.
Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Visions of the Apocalypse. London: Wallflower Press, 2003.
Mitman, Gregg. Reel Nature. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Padel, Ruth. Into the Woods: On British Forests, Myth and Now. 2000.
Science Fiction Studies March (2008) 35.
Vint, Sherryl. “‘The Animals in That Country’: Science Fiction and Animal Studies” Science Fiction Studies March (2008) 35.

FILMOGRAPHY
Children of Men, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2006)

Why Mythology?

2008-09-03T23:28:00.007-05:00

I have been asked many times in the last few weeks why I am about to enter a Mythological Studies program. People ask me what I am going to do when it's completed. "How much does a mythologist get paid?" some chortle. My answers have been evasive. We don't like to be chortled at usually. For those that were sincere, it was hard to give a clear answer. My reasons are there, but have been bubbling up, still out of reach.

But clarity has struck me. My thoughts became a bit clearer as I have delved into my school readings, been away from the corporate world for a while and watched the political conventions over the last week and a half.

Mythology is the study of the stories humans tell to explain their world. They are stories filled with the archetypes and symbols of humans throughout the ages. Even when a story is outdated for how it tells us to lead our lives, those archetypes and symbols still pull us in. Our minds are able to play with them and use them, figuring out our own lives.

The archetypes and symbols are used in our films and stories. Our artists use this mythological world to express the inner life that we all have, even if we struggle to express it. Even if we repress it. Artists help us to figure out how to use it.

And I am interested in these things because I really believe that paying attention to our unconscious, the place where these archetypes lie, and our dreams, where they are expressed, and our sudden insights and thoughts, where they finally come out and become useful to us, are the only way we can be fully human. We have to use everything we have, and too often we ignore this part of ourselves. But too often these internal, personal issues are used as public tools.

Religion is mythology. As such, it is a personal interplay with your unconscious. Personal. The stories of all religions are reflections of someone's unconscious. They should be used as internal meditations of your own personal possibilities. You have a responsibility to listen to yourself and figure out what you are about. But as myth, no religion should ever be forced on anyone else. It is inhuman to do that. Your faith in something should be kept to yourself if you don't realize that everyone in the world has different ways of getting to know themselves.

The corporate culture is about money. Nothing else. The political culture is often about producing a show that will put you in power so you and your friends can get money. Sort of a corporation also.

I am about to study mythology because I want to explore how we can change this culture. I want the creative power we all hold in ourselves to be the strength of the people of the world, not guns and money. Our political leaders use religion to lure voters to them. Religion should never be used as a ruse. God - or gods - unless they are the God or gods in you - do not make decisions for you.

A Look at Life from "The Mahabharata"

2008-08-26T10:28:00.006-05:00

"Now take care," said Krishna. "Maya mixes his blessings. Let me lead the way."

The Pandavas followed Krishna up the stairs. "Is it dangerous?" asked Arjuna.

Krishna replied over his shoulder, "Not exactly, but..." With a crash Krishna walked straight into a closed door of clear crystal, and stood back rubbing a bruise on his head. "See? That's the sort of thing not to do..." Krishna was pushing at the door. Then he gave up and went to a smaller doorway next to it. "I'll get in, or else!" He stepped up, pushed, and fell right through.

Krishna lay on the beautiful floor. "Well, come in. There is no door here, just empty air." (Buck, p.88)

Buck, William. Mahabharata. Berkley: University of California Press, 1973.

The Drive-In Movie

2008-08-25T13:30:00.002-05:00

I went to a drive-in the other night. I used to see a decent number of films at the drive-in, often low budget horror and fantasy films. I wish something similar was on the bill this time around.

The Skyway Drive-In is in Fish Creek, Wisconsin in Door County. It is a throwback, one of the few drive-in's still in operation. It has radio sound, so it sounds better than the speaker you hang on your window. It has that option, but no one was hanging anything (till after the show). A lot of people sat outside and turned those speakers up. It seemed to work pretty well.

I'm not sure why, but sitting in your car watching movies is pretty cool. It's private, and sort of surreal. People walk by and the shadows they cast, as well as their floating dialogue, dampened by the insulation of the car, makes it a sort-of-scary fun summer activity. Scary because while you're in the car, it's hard to tell exactly what is going on outside. It's sort of like telling ghost stories. Corny, but fun. A little creepy. For some reason, summer holidays make me think of Stephen King novels. The drive-in did too.

The concessions at the Skyway were great. They offered a stellar candy selection. They showed old cartoon ads, such as aliens coming down to buy popcorn, and cartoons announcing how many minutes till showtime. Before the first film, they played old Fifties tunes. Again, corny, but fun. And a little creepy.

When I was younger, it was all fun. I would have to bring pajamas and a blanket - I could never make it through a double feature without falling asleep. And I have to admit, it took some effort this time around. Which may be due to the quality of the films I saw.

Films I remember seeing at the drive-in when I was younger? "Dr. Doolittle", "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory", "Capricorn One", "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger", "Food of the Gods" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Special Edition". OK - a few good films (Willy Wonka, CE3K:SE and Sinbad - if you don't appreciate Ray Harryhausen, move over to the next blog), one decent kid's film (DD), one bad, but fun horror movie (FotG) and one I really don't remember (Capricorn One - I think OJ Simpson was in it - and it's probably pretty bad, but I think I liked it when I was a kid). All in all, at least these were fun. All of them had their creepy moments as well. To go along with the fun, drive-in atmosphere.

The Skyway was showing "Mamma Mia" and "The Dark Knight".

Let's start with "The Dark Knight". It was the second film, so I was getting a bit sleepy. It was OK. I don't see a need for my humble, in-depth thoughts on the biggest film of all time, except to say: I like my heroes to be good, and I like to care, one way or another, about the characters in films. There weren't many to care about here. And it was dark, really dark - and though the drive-in, starlit night may have had something to do with that - it was also not much fun. Interesting and complex, but ultimately, I'm just not one for the dark reality comic book heroes.

But - it was way better than the first film I saw. "Mamma Mia". Oh mamma mia, why? I didn't think it could be so bad, but I watched this film with my jaw dropped down around my ankles. Why would anyone make this? It made Greek islands look dingy and dark. That's all that needs to be said - so there is no need to comment on why you would make a story based on songs that are unrelated, use actors with no singing talent in a musical, then edit their performances to point out their flaws rather than to tighten their few charms. I know it was a stage show first - apparently a hit? I don't know. This could be the worst film I've ever seen.

If the fun and creepy drive-in can't soften the blow, you know it's bad.

In Defense of The Clone Wars

2008-08-15T17:25:00.010-05:00

What the heck. It's Friday.

I had plans to see "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" today. Me and my brother-in-law, both old enough to have seen the original (Part IV, I guess) (when it first came out, multiple times, standing in long lines hoping to get a ticket for my seventh viewing - really), were going to spend some time together and thought it would be fun. This morning, I get my local paper, the old-fashioned printed Chicago Tribune, and what, to my horror, do I read? Michael Phillips' review. He beats this little cartoon like a rented mule.
http://chicago.metromix.com/movies/movie_review/movie-review-starwars/553252/content

Not wanting to believe - it's Friday, after all, and we're going to the matinee (what we used to call the cheap show) - I check out the other local, Mr. Ebert, on-line at the Chicago Sun Times.

OUCH. Looks like we picked a dud. Star Wars just isn't the same. What happened?

We had a plan though. And we stuck with it. We went to see "The Clone Wars" in spite of the stellar reviews. And you know what? We had fun. There's lots of Jawas in it, you know? Neither review mentioned the Jawas.

A lot of what they did mention, and I'm just giving my impression of what they said - dark animation, sort of clunky, long battle scenes, bad dialogue in short sentences - and whatever else they say, is probably not all that wrong. But it seems to me that the awe-inspiring original "Star Wars" was a bit clunky, had long and utterly unbelievable battle scenes and pretty bad dialogue. But it changed the fantasy movie forever - for better or for worse. And it was fun.

Just like "The Clone Wars" is fun. Star Wars is not just a film, it is a universe. The fun is in the details, however broadly drawn - or as the esteemed reviewers might say, badly drawn. I'll agree - the art is uneven, at best. I did think Obi-Wan looked a bit odd - and in certain close-ups I thought he was one of Gerry Anderson's old Supermarionation Thunderbird's puppets. But for every odd bit, there are some pretty spectacular ones too. The backgrounds were tremendous - vague, dark pastels that set a grim mood over the war scenes. One scene of Anakin and his new Paduan apprentice walking across the desert - with R2-D2 of course - in shadow, in front of the blazing Tatooine suns - really stood out also.

Yes - these are small pieces of a film. But because Star Wars is a universe, I can enjoy the smaller pieces. I enjoyed seeing multiple Greedo's (I'm sure his race has a name, but I don't know it). The Huttlet - and perhaps this is an old man talking - was awesome. Cute as a button.

There are other problems, though. The battle scenes are a bit long, and in consideration of the times we live in, pretty grim. The dialogue is spotty. The new Paduan gets away with a lot of sass. But then again, Anakin is a Jedi who is all about sass. The Episodes I thru III were not as widely hailed as the originals, and I think most of the problems were with the character of Anakin. My belief was that Darth Vader should have made his appearance by the end of Episode II. We also knew the story already. The charm and the power of "Star Wars", the original film, is that it was new and we were not quite sure where it was going. It spoke pretty deeply to a lot of people, probably because of its adherence to Joseph Campbell''s Hero's Journey. The prequel trilogy just did not have that power.

That leaves the major problem that ran through my mind as I watched "The Clone Wars". Why would Jabba the Hutt, basically a criminal on the edge of the universe, even if he is a very successful criminal, be so integral to so many stories in this universe?

Because he's a big blob of Hutt, that's why. Jabba is a great creation and it's good to see him again. He may have looked better than he does in "The Clone Wars", but as old friends, we don't comment on someone's deteriorating looks. We greet them and smile.

Tolkien's Concept of Recovery, Part 2

2008-08-04T11:52:00.005-05:00

"If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish, and become Morbid Delusion." (Tolkien, 127 - 128)

A quote from Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories" worth analyzing - if we are unable or unwilling to see truths in reality, the Fantastic will be warped, as we will be unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. Not only does it "not seem at all impossible", I would suggest that our world is currently plagued by those unable to honestly assess "facts and evidence".

We have believers of numerous religions, unwilling to accept anyone's faith but their own. This leads to such nonsense as a creation museum, where dinosaurs pull carts made by men (not shown here, but look at the video of the Commercial to get an idea). I would say this qualifies under people that "could not perceive truth (facts or evidence)". On a different level, we have many people with a lack of imagination. They are able, but unwilling, to examine the facts of society's problems and then extrapolate possible solutions. If you can't imagine, or empathize with, what other people experience (things you "did not want to know"), there is a lack of creativity in dealing with problems. If you can't imagine solutions to problems you face, then you become powerless. You accept the situation you are in. This leads to hopelessness.

Worse, on the larger, political level, you accept the status quo. You seek nothing, find no new solutions and accept the way things have always been done. This leads to the political stagnation we find ourselves in - deception and corruption in politics, financially over-the-top benefits for the wealthy while everyone else moves along blindly, apparently powerless. Bread and circuses indeed.

Fortunately, the inability to work with the truths and evidence of life does not affect everyone. So while some Fantasy IS Morbid Delusion (again, the dinosaur pulling the man's farm cart is really the perfect example), the role of fantasy in our lives, created by rational people, is to enable imagination. It is real creation from real people, using fantasy to explore possibilities.

And here is where Tolkien's Recovery is a useful term. He discusses the problem of humans when they come to believe that everything is a part of them. This is in the sense that the individual believes he or she is central to everything - someone who believes the world revolves around them. We might say egotist. As Tolkien writes, "Of course, fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is enough." (Tolkien, 129).

"Humility". The ability to see oneself as part of a whole and not necessarily the most important part. Creative fantasy aims to describe something new. This brings recovery - the seeing of old things in a new light - as we experience the world's simple things in a new way. Humility follows when we appreciate the intricacy of the connections between people, animals, plants, the planet, the stars, etc. The fantastic elements in these stories are there to bring wonder to us, but they also serve to enforce the wonder of the real elements that they echo and help describe.

It is almost as if Fantasy is an adjective for the real world.

Tolkien, J.R.R. "On Fairy Stories". A Tolkien Miscellany. New York, SFBC Science Fiction Printing: June 2002.

Imprisonment, Part 3

2008-08-02T07:07:00.002-05:00

Bergman's Faith trilogy examines the internal dynamics of faith and how it can imprison us if we use, or lose, it. Blackmon's "Slavery by Another Name" rips straight into our real world sensibilities by uncovering ugly imprisonment, and worse, in post-Civil War America.

What is the relevance to us today? Internally we want to be free and believe everyone should be. Ideologically we should feel that wrongful imprisonment is bad. But how bad is imprisonment otherwise? Who should be jailed? How should they be treated when they are jailed? These are bigger questions and each of us may have our own answer.

Let's look at two current texts that dovetail nicely in exploring imprisonment and finding similar answers. One is a dramatic film; the other is a science fiction novella. In the current film "The Visitor", imprisonment of illegal immigrants in America is the explicit driving force of the narrative. How the effects of that imprisonment work internally on a middle-aged European American forced to confront the situation is the real exploration of the film. Is he imprisoned also? By what? Does he escape that imprisonment? How? In "The Political Prisoner", written by Charles Coleman Finlay (and found in the August 2008 issue of F&SF), a high level political agent of a volatile government on a "religiously" oriented planetary colony finds himself on the wrong end of an uprising. He is soon imprisoned in a hard labor camp, where every prisoner strives to stay alive by whatever means are necessary. He eventually winds up enmeshed in forced labor along with a group of alien Adareans. What he learns about history, people and fairness makes this hard-hitting, well-written story one to read.

The protagonist of "The Visitor" is a college professor whose love of life was sucked out of him when his wife died. He improbably gets tied to the lives of two immigrants that he helps out with a place to stay. He gets help from them by being immersed in discovering his own music and meeting new, friendly people. These new people are all recent immigrants. When one of them gets detained for later deportation, his life changes. He begins to consider what America means, but also what imprisonment is. Is it proper to simply lock people up, denying them easy access to help and information? There may be a better way to handle people's lives than the impersonal and distinctly rude way that this film portrays the immigration system. Illegal immigration may be just that, illegal, but this film speaks to these real people's common humanity. They should at least be treated like people.

In the novella "The Political Prisoner", the situation is different. It is the well-connected government agent that, perhaps mistakenly, gets arrested. He is packed in with other prisoners and sent to a hard labor camp. It is difficult to be on his side completely, as he is a brutal agent involved in double-dealing and murderous plots. But even this hard man becomes sympathetic; the brutality of camp enforcement and the conditions of so many men pushed together in small spaces works on his, and our, sensibilities. Finlay shows us the problems inherent in such brutal treatment. When the agent ends up with an imprisoned group of aliens, who have been treated by the humans poorly at best, and exterminated whenever possible, the irony, of course, begins. Their sense of who they are, their strength, pride and unity, show the human prisoner not just the only sympathy he can find in prison, but also what it actually means to be alive. Those we demean and abase should be mirrors for us, as they are never fundamentally different from ourselves. This is often the function in science fiction when "humans" and "aliens" meet. It also should apply in our world, as we meet any other person from around the world.

"The Visitor" and "The Political Prisoner" both end up focusing on the humanity of their respective detainees. The lessons in both should be obvious when we look back at our history. Hopefully they also speak to us about our current society. And perhaps Bergman's films should have a last commentary - as artistic cinema, what lessons are we to take from his films? When each of his character's lose faith in others, they get imprisoned in their own mental jails. Inevitably, this leads to tragedy. The worldwide Golden Rule says to treat others as we want to be treated. When it comes to prison, detention and human rights, it seems we often forget this.

Imprisonment, Part 2

2008-08-01T07:47:00.000-05:00

Douglas Blackmon wrote a book called "Slavery By Another Name". It's a book everyone in America should read.

Slavery was abolished by the Civil War, right? When the Yankees beat the Confederates, slavery was abolished. Blacks were free and though they knew it would be a long road to equality between the races, they were free. Right? Well as it turns out, not everyone got on that road. The slave system was re-invented, given a new name and practiced, legally, up until World War II. Unable to have slaves, the businessmen and law enforcement of the South teamed up. African Americans were arrested for any thing that could be thought of - such as vagrancy, meaning they did not have a job (how many people could be arrested for that in 2008?) - and fined large sums which they could not pay back. Their sentence: labor to pay back those fines, and the prisons then sold them to the mine owners, steel mills, etc. So the law enforcement arrested people for no reason and sold them to the industrialists for cheap labor.

"Legal" servitude - Another Name for Slavery.

Apparently, the only real reason it was ended at WWII was because the American government was wary of Nazi Germany and the Axis Allies. You couldn't have the enemy using America's poor treatment of its own citizens as propaganda against us. We were supposed to be freeing the people of Europe, so I guess we better free our own imprisoned people first. I guess.

It took foreign criticism to finally end the legalized practice of slavery in the United States of America.

There were some poor whites who were caught up in this system, but the majority were the supposedly freed blacks. A link to the book can be found on my links list on the right. And here is a link to an op-ed piece about the book from Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Leonard Pitts: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-oped0728pittsjul29,0,5821420.story.
For typical Internet ignorance, read some of the comments after that piece. It shows that attitudes toward others have not changed much. Skin color makes some people very angry.

But they don't seem to understand the history of our nation. The exploitation of the past made us very wealthy and it explains our current situations. And it is still happening today. The racial ratio of prisoners is one piece of evidence.

But more important to today is if you look at who is being exploited now, it is people with power (and money) exploiting those without power (and money). Color doesn't matter as much any more. Just don't be poor and without social connections. But because of the history, if you are poor, without the right connections and happen to be black, you are probably dealing with even more limitations.

So if the wealth divide is growing larger, why do people want to continue racial disputes and arguments? We need to get over color and move on to fair. Not to mention justice.

Is film relevant on issues like this? How do Bergman's films about faith in God and in family relate to racial and economic slavery in the real world? Next I'll look at a film and a story with more direct relevance to the issue.

Faith and Imprisonment, Part 1

2008-07-29T08:34:00.001-05:00

In a few weeks, I will begin a Mythological Studies Masters program. My goal - besides immersion in myth and story - is to understand how myth is used in our society in film and literature. Even more important is to then explore how mythic underpinnings in our art and culture help explain our politics and history while foreshadowing our future. Myth is the stories of our lives, and our lives are the stories of the world. Big ideas to get a grip on and sometimes the wonder is in whether it even makes sense to try.

Timing is everything though, and sometimes parts of the whole crystallize out of nothing. Imprisonment has been a theme running through texts I have recently been reading and watching. I will explore that in my next post, but first I want to explore some films that have served as an underlayment to my thoughts as I was thrust into these Imprisonment texts.

I began watching the Ingmar Bergman Faith Trilogy recently, consisting of the following films: "Through A Glass Darkly", "Winter Light" and "The Silence". Though known as the Faith trilogy, each one revolved around the theme of imprisonment. Bergman explores the effects, and reasons for imprisonment, whether it is just or not, and the effect it has on people's faith (in many things). The images, themes and stories have been simmering in my unconscious for weeks as the films are truly complex works of cinematic art.

The most distinctive part of these films is the cinematography of Sven Nykvist, as the black and white (and gray) imagery shimmers in the light of the filmed worlds. Just like the shading of the filmed light, the theme of Faith is not always explicit. Implicitly, faith seems to be tied to trust and family in these films, but not always with pleasant results.

"Through a Glass Darkly" depicts a small family's struggle to come to terms with a woman's ongoing insanity. The father, husband and brother all seem to have lost faith that anything can be done to actually prevent the woman's illness.

"The Silence" explores the relationship between two sisters, the older one who is dying and the younger that wants to escape from under her dominance. The eldest has lost faith in the younger, who resents having to tend to her and acts out in a destructive manner. Complicating the situation is the small son of the younger daughter - he cannot comprehend what is happening with his mother and tries to comfort his aunt as best he can. As the eldest is dying, alone in a hotel room, the boy is the only one who even thinks about her.

Only "Winter Light" explicitly discusses faith as Faith. A priest's lack of faith in his god spreads to the people of his church, who begin to stay away from him. He is imprisoned by his role as pastor of a congregation and as his belief leaves him he becomes unable to help anyone else believe. When this leads to a father's suicide, we see faith, and perhaps loss of faith, causing undue stress in our lives.

As usual with great film, the thematic situations and magnificent imagery stayed with me even when I was concentrating on thinking about these films. For an example, the last amazing shot of the eldest sister in "The Silence" - the lighting of the scene almost making the shot look like a negative image. It is of her in agony, mouth open to scream but unable to, as she is about to die, alone and abandoned, her faith in her sister and in the way she was taught to live utterly dissipated. Powerful image to go with large ideas to ponder. And there are many more scenes of equal quality.

In the next few days, I will be examining other films and stories that look at imprisonment, as well as some disturbing American history. If you are familiar with the Bergman trilogy, keep these films in mind. He works with the spiritual and mental imprisonment in ways that linger - and also in ways that come to mind when faced with real imprisonment.

Also - I would welcome any comment about these films or other Bergman films. I have not seen many more and don't see general discussion of his work brought up usually. It would be interesting to hear what others had to say about him.

A First Look at Recovery

2008-07-06T15:45:00.005-05:00

J.R.R.Tolkien, in his justifiably famous essay "On Fairy Stories", uses the term Recovery. It is used to describe the effect of how Fairy stories - about other worlds and the fantastic - enable us to see our own "real" world in a clearer way. I like this term because it is absolutely what happens to me when I read fantasy literature - I start to think about things in a different way, envision the world anew.

But fantasy is not the only medium that does this. Science Fiction is, in a sense, a "recovery" of our view of the future. We see new possibilities. An even more interesting idea to me is that recovery can happen when we learn things - science, history, culture and politics opening up our eyes and minds to how the world works and to what may actually be possible.

An example: I tend to trace my recovery of the wonders of nature back to a snowstorm that hit one afternoon. I had a day off from work and was visiting my Mom that day - a cold sunny morning turned quickly to a storm. It left a few inches of snow in a very short time. However, in an hour or two, the sun was back out, but the ground was covered. I noticed that birds, immediately after the storm passed over, went flying back and forth in search of food. And I noticed, for the first time in a long time, the variety of different birds that were actually around. It had been a long time since I had looked so closely at what was around me, but that afternoon I spotted at least six different species - sparrows, starlings, crows, pigeons (rock doves for you birders!), mourning doves and a blue jay - looking for some food to get through the day. There may have been a gull sighted also.

My wonder at nature - the recovery of the reality of my life and what surrounded it - took place in that crazy storm. It led me to do a little birdwatching and to realize that there are a lot of different birds flying around, if only we take the time to notice them. I now see all kinds of birds just on my daily commute.

Recovery is probably a word we would associate more with medical rehabilitation today, but I really like it for use in the sense of our renewed vision. Seeing things in a new light is the only way we can get out of the ruts of our daily lives and perhaps make changes to what life actually is. We may even make changes that change the world. This is what looking beyond the veil means.

In future posts, I will be looking into recovery in more detail - going back and re-reading Tolkien's essay and then writing a few different ideas down here. The stories we tell - from fantasy to "real-life" stories of culture, history and science - all go to the heart of recovery, using story to change the way we perceive the world. If some stories are made up and others simply revealing facts we never knew, what's the difference? For our purposes, we are learning new things in either case. I like to look at History and Politics as a mirror image of Literature and Film.

Big Budget Fantasy

2008-06-02T09:45:00.008-05:00

I had a conversation recently that made me think in broad terms about the films I see. I had to admit I had not seen "No Country for Old Men" or "There Will Be Blood", well reviewed, realist films that are, by all accounts, genuine additions to the "good film club". I had every intention of seeing them on release, but I often have good intentions to see films currently on the big screen. This is the way movies should be seen. But I didn't go. They are available on DVD now. And I still haven't seen them.

On one hand, I love serious film - on a simple level, artfully made cinema can show us real life and the problems involved with it. I love Carl Dreyer; I've started exploring Bergman. Murnau. Lang. Capra. By that short list alone, you can tell I am very cautious with new films.

When you don't watch films every day - and with stories available in so many other forms, I don't - sometimes the film you find yourself watching is simply for entertainment. Can we expect more from a film that supposedly is only for entertainment purposes?

Which brings me to Hollywood's seemingly recent high-priced love affair with big budget, epic fantasy films. I love a fantasy movie. I am excited by the ways in which the unreal can be shown on screen. The fantastic, in the right creator's hands, illuminates the possibilities of our reality instead of just showing reality. By finding humanity in situations that are not real, the meaning of that humanity seems to be clearer, felt at a deeper level. Fantasy comments on what could be, if only we looked at our situations in a different light. This "different light" is what cinema - fantastic or realist - does so well as an art form.

But the "different" is what seems to be lacking in most Hollywood cinema. I saw "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian" and found it to be a pretty powerful cinematic experience. This was only because of the small moments in the film, moments not copied from other, similar films. What gets repeated? The wide angle, amazing landscape shot, for one. At the beginning of the film, when Caspian rides his horse valiantly out of the castle and through the woods, past mountains and trees and... you know this scene. It was a staple of Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Place, and landscape, are very important elements in any fantasy. But when we see the same shots over and over, they lose all their power and grandeur. And it really doesn't take long for that to happen.

The other major similarity in these films is the epic battle scene. I don't feel I even need to detail this.

In contrast to the battles, I believe fantasy works better on a smaller scale. At least it becomes more meaningful, better able to tell us about reality. After all, fantasy is an inward look for most of us, bringing forth what we have inside of us - our dreams, aspirations and fears. Filmmakers often ignore this scale, but there is a sequence in "Caspian" that is a true triumph. When Lucy falls asleep at the campfire, she awakens to find herself called by Aslan into the forest. The lighting is the clear lighting of a new day, the leaves float around her, forming into spirits as the trees move and direct Lucy toward the lion. The joy on Lucy's face throughout mimics our joy at the beautifully imagined and produced mise-en-scene.

Then Lucy truly awakens. It was a dream - the leaf faeries, the moving trees and the Lion - were all inside of her. She brought them up and met them because they were in her. But when she truly wakes, the light is different. It is day time, but it is a murkier light. The landscape is not so crisp and delightful any longer. And because of this, we instantly realize it was Lucy's dream we were in. But we have learned all about Lucy. We know what is inside of her. Since fantasy is imagination, isn't that what we really want to see?

Epic battles are a fantasy stereotype at this point, and "Caspian" plays along, offering a lot of those. But there is another small moment that makes it easier to sit through more warfare. When High King Peter battles the Telmarine King, one-on-one, they call a respite because they both need a breather. As they turn from each other, leaning sideways, hands on hips, limping slowly, they remind me of my own aging body, standing up after sitting too long and the pains of old age that come creeping up slowly. Realism steps into the bloody fray for one brief moment. It makes the fantasy all the more real. As well as makes us laugh at how foolish the violence really is.

Fantasy's small moments are the ones that offer insight into ourselves and our reality. Since there are very few "small" fantasy movies made, hopefully Hollywood will learn to scale back. Till then...

The Father in the Fantastic

2008-05-05T08:58:00.014-05:00

The Water Horse, a film plainly intended for a younger audience, like all good film and fantasy, offers thought for all ages. A simple story - a lonely boy discovers the egg of the Loch Ness Monster (a Water Horse) and by nursing it from a hatchling develops a strong friendship with the magical creature.

Interesting to me is that the story is layered with commentary about fatherhood and how it relates to the realities of family life, children and war. The film shows the fantastic, the magic of the world, as an antidote to a harsh reality. The Fantastic is an option we can choose. We can choose to take delight in the world and all its wonders, or we can choose to get bogged down by that harsh reality.

Angus, the lonely boy, had a father that led him to the natural world, explaining the awe of natural wonders to him when he was smaller. The father spent quality time with the boy and forged a strong relationship with him. His subsequent death in a ship sunk during World War II led Angus to a fantasy world. Literally, Angus refuses to acknowledge his father's death. But also figuratively, as their bond of an interest in nature leads the boy to discover the egg of the Water Horse, a faerie spirit of Scotland.

Angus' delight in the magical creature occurs around the events of the real world, as the armed forces move in to the estate Angus' mother is watching over. This brings in the first personality to vie for the role of Angus' father figure: a captain in the army, who is living in his own fantasy - he has been sent to guard the lochs of Scotland because there is a good probability no one will be coming to invade by that route. War is his life, but he really knows nothing of real war. Angus' mother is attracted to him because he is a man of position.

The second personality to vie for Angus' attention is Mowbray, an honorable ex-soldier, tired of the violence that has left him scarred, but aware that in service to a cause, sometimes it is necessary. He is a balanced figure, interested in the real world but aware that the Fantastic holds a better way of life at its core. It is stories that make life interesting and can show us a better way to carry on.

Because he refuses to accept his real Father's death, Angus rejects both of these men. The foolish captain tries to impress him with war. Mowbray probably reminds him too much of his real father at first. But when everyone is confronted with the reality of the Water Horse, honesty and true feelings are released. The mystery of things unkown, which are the very same things we want to know and often suspect, are the mysteries that prove to be cathartic when we are able to look at them correctly.

An interesting further look can be made with the Fantastic and the issues of Parents and Fatherhood. Harry Potter lives in a closet under his mean aunt's stairwell, his parents both killed. Lyra of The Golden Compass lives at a great institute under the care of the staff , her father pretending to be her uncle. The Pevensie's of Narnia fame have been shipped off to a country estate by their mother. We can even add Frodo to the list - Bilbo is his mentor, but is his uncle. Where are these British kid's parents?

It seems one of the more common themes in our big fantasy movies is the missing parent. But they all discover the awe of the fantastic only after being on their own. Is the Fantastic a good metaphor for the teaching of children, a substitute for guidance that cannot be found at home?

The Red Balloon - A Classic Short

2008-04-08T08:31:00.011-05:00

I guess "The Red Balloon" made a lasting impression on me when I first saw it, which was probably 30 to 36 years ago. I could not have told you what exactly happened, but the imagery floated in my memory. I just saw the film for the first time since then and my fleeting mental imagery was just like the rather large balloon, dipping in and out of my mind just like it did on film with the boy.

There is no great analysis of this film here - other than to say it is a masterful use of cinema to tell a fantastical tale of the dreams and possibilities of youth. There are lessons to be learned about others trying to block those possibilities, but overall, it is charming and has a fun and wish-fulfilling ending. At 38 minutes, it is the type of film that I would love to see more of an outlet for.

Film school is built on short films. Oscars are still given out for short films, documentaries and animated shorts. A lot of artistry on film can be found in shorter lengths than the typical feature, but the general public never sees much of this work. I suppose that Youtube is providing a venue and helping generations get used to shorter film experiences. A lot of what comes up there is not very artistic though.

There is a case for depth - a feature length film that is worth watching will provide a deep experience and that is what we crave in cinema. But after watching "The Red Balloon", it's just a "too bad" situation - it is too bad that we don't have more outlets for public viewing of 38 minute films. Director Albert Lamorisse proves that it can be as fulfilling as the best of the classic epics of cinema.

Enough With the Gangsters Already (or Moving On and Up with a Little Help from Others)

2008-03-19T20:21:00.006-05:00

Reading is my escape right now, and blog ideas are at a minimum. I am always pleasantly amazed at the intelligence of the ideas articulated by comics artists. Their stories as to how they started are often similar, but their insights are also similarly well-thought out and well-stated. So here are some quotes I found to be worth writing down - lucky for me I have a blog to write them in. One is from fiction writer Paolo Bacigalupi whose talents I have already praised here. The last three are taken from the latest issue of The Comics Journal. If you like discussion about art, and you like comics, TCJ is must reading.

"Right now all of our myths are focused on how to become rich and successful -- we tell stories about ourselves as explorers, as adventurers, as extractors. So I'm wondering about the creation of another set of myths and models, where we start to get excited about the possibility of being a sustainable species rather than a rapacious species." - Paolo Bacigalupi (From www.grist.org, "Stranger Than Fiction", Interview by Michelle Nijhuis 2/21/08)

"The problem with reality is that it is too chaotic. Too coincidental. Art is supposed to make some order in this chaos we call life.To give it some sense, some meaning. Life, reality, has no meaning, at least not one we can be sure of. I better say it like this: Life has no subtext. And a story without subtext is a soap opera." - Rutu Modan (From "An Interview with Rutu Modan, Conducted by Joe Sacco", from The Comics Journal No. 288, pg. 33)

"The films show these Mafiosi as calculating greedy killers, but at the same time portray them as a sensitive if somewhat dysfunctional family whose moral corruption is justified by family honor. Even in his last moments Don Corleone is shown in the sun-drenched garden playing with his adorable grandson. Heave a sigh and cue the fuckin' violins. Some might call this a well-rounded family saga of moral complexity. I call it a complete cop-out trying to cover your bases. Don Corleone was a motherfucker to condemn, not a Badass Motherfucker to lionize." - Paul Karasik (From "An Interview with Paul Karasik, Conducted by Michael Dean", from The Comics Journal No. 288, p.52)

"When you live in a culture that embraces terms like "evildoer," that calls cheese "protein" and bread "carbohydrates" then you know you've got problems. We assign dark consequences to everything, and it stems from a fear of our own mortality. It's a very debilitating undercurrent if you aren't consciously aware of it." - Cathy Malkasian (From "An Interview with Cathy Malkasian, Conducted by Kristy Valenti", from The Comics Journal No. 288, pg. 100)

The Path to Enlightenment

2008-03-11T09:00:00.001-05:00

My sage, a steadfast supporter of my academic quest, passed away recently. He was a pillar of wisdom, though never knew all the answers, and he understood that in not knowing answers, all we can do is keep asking questions. In the midst of my search for graduate school, he was one of very few people who accepted and supported my need to expand my world.

He was also my sounding board. He actually liked to read this blog! We discussed everything, and his major interest - how all religions have a fundamental teaching on how we should treat each other, but how they all become convoluted in people's hands - led to many spirited discussions. We wondered together how anyone can truly believe there is one, true way, when there are so many people, so many beliefs.

My grief at his passing is only lessened by the immense nature of the responsibility I feel to continue on my way. This week I should be hearing from at least twograduate schools to see if I have been accepted. If the answer is yes, I only wish I could have told him I was accepted. If the answer is no, I will follow his lead and continue to look for a new path.

It is amazing to me how at these moments there is always a confluence of ideas, circumstances and often, revelations. Whatever we want to call this, a synergy exists in this world. If we look for connections, we usually find them. This may all be our mind working to make those connections, but if it is useful for us, all the better.

I was introduced in a very direct way to Buddhism in the last few days - my sage had been a Buddhist. They say that there are 84,000 different ways to enlightenment, 84,000 being a code for Infinity. So for each person, there may be a way to enlightenment. Apparently they also say, if I am understanding this one bit of knowledge correctly, that the enlightenment is all around us - we only need to look at things the right way. And this is where the confluence makes sense. And our interpretations of the connections we see. If we take their meanings to be positive, we can grow. If we see only doom and gloom, our chance for enlightenment shrinks.

I return to the question my sage and I often discussed: How can there be one God, and only one way to God, when there are so many different ideas and beliefs around the world?

It seems to me that God was a reaction. When there were multiple gods of mythology, the pantheons - from Odin to Zeus to Isis to Ameraterasu - they each had a name. Who decided that the one, true god would have the name "God"? Or Allah, or whatever one name means "God" for each existing religion? It seems to me that the one true god would not take God for his name, as that is a generic term. A distant corner of my mind tells me there are probably passages in holy books talking about how the Supreme Being has no real name. But if you explore the construction of religion, I would expect a name other than God to be placed on that being. Or on that idea. Perhaps we forget that men make their gods, and their God.

And so - with new ideas constantly spinning forth, the path I traveled with my sage will never, ever end. I will just have to find new companions to travel it with me. Maybe just for awhile, I will walk that path alone and still converse with my sage.

The Spread of Ignorance

2008-02-20T08:56:00.001-06:00

Two articles were brought to my attention recently, and they give me good reason to refocus on the Beyond the Veil manifesto.

One is a book review of Susan Jacoby's "The Age of American Unreason" at Salon.com . It explores the anti-intellectual backlash taking place in America today, including how that has led to an increase in religious fundamentalism. The second is a story from the Chicago Tribune dealing with American Christian fundamentalist groups that are actively exporting Creationism and anti-evolution teachings to Europe. Through heavy spending, they are making inroads into changing the intellectual climate of that continent. An interesting point from this story: the Council of Europe was able to prevent a Muslim fundamentalist creationist text from being placed in some public schools, but they do not seem to be having the same success against the American economic backing that is pushing Christian fundamentalist texts.

I do not believe the ignorance that is taking hold in America is only a result of a retreat into religious dogma. Religion and myth are excellent personal retreats for anyone that can find meaning in soul searching and the contemplation that have marked the beauty of these realms for so many years. However, personal is the key word here. Whereas myth has retained a personal connection to those interested in it, religion has always had those who exploit beliefs for personal gains in power and wealth. When religion stops being personal and becomes forced ideology, zealously proclaimed as one true way for all the world's people to follow, we have a problem.

Why do so many people want everyone to only believe what they believe? The ignorance discussed in Jacoby's book is actually encouraged by those pushing fundamentalist ideology. We are not a free society, welcoming new ideas and innovations. We are a scared society, aware our way of life may be on a tipping scale downward. We have lived well off of others for a long time. But now that we may be seeing an ultimate end to our excessive wealth that is beyond the rest of the world's means, we retreat into ideology that we hope will preserve our lifestyle.

Instead of collectively facing our challenges, too many of us take the easy way of banding together against change. Our nation has a collective lack of interest in science and art, the truly great achievements of the human race. Our scientists, artists and teachers are ignored by a majority of people, and they lose out in competition with business, money and fame. We lack an interest in exploration, in science that pushes to discover the wonders of the universe, including how our own world functions. A truly religious person wants to know these things, to know the beauty of the intricacy of creation.

In the same vein, we lack an interest in the creations of artists, who seek to explain our place in that natural world. By ignoring science and art, we take refuge in a religion and use it to try to hold on to a way of life that we hope we can perpetuate forever. But when we ignore others and other ways of seeing and believing, we are doomed to failure.

As the Tribune article shows, with American wealth and economic policies spreading globally, the same lack of interest in scientific and artistic ideas may also spread. The world may grow in its concern only for material goods, the way of thinking that led to America's predominant economic place in the world. More is better has been the American motto and has quickly become the same for the world's rich and powerful.

Economics is a human construction. The natural world is not. It can only be explained by the process of hypothesis, experimentation, and conclusion. This leads to new hypotheses and starts the cycle all over. Science explains how the world works and opens new doors that fill us with wonder and assurance, if we can accept always having another question as being assured.

Religion should be personal. There is no one way for every person to feel about the world, so religion should not be forced on people. Why can't everyone's right to believe what they want be accepted by all? Myth and art, the stuff of our dreams and inner thoughts, is how we deal with the world and express our place in it. Doesn't religion belong in this category? So, if someone gets reassurance from belief that death leads to a better place, who are we to criticize that? However, if someone else believes that death is just that, death and removal from this world, leading them to believe the only thing that matters is how they live their life while they still have it, why does the religious person criticize that?

The individual right to different beliefs should be the most cherished right we hold. Religion has no place in the public sphere because every religion is valid. No one should want, or be able, to legalize religion. But lack of knowledge and the spread of ignorance are leading to more and more confrontations between religions. Is this the world we want to live in, wherein our own personal beliefs and hopes are put ahead of everyone elses beliefs and hopes? Do we really want a system of capitalism for our most dearly held inner beliefs?

Where the Ideas Come From

2008-02-12T08:00:00.000-06:00

Man disillusioned moves away - becomes a troll.

This is a sentence from a sheet of paper that is full of ideas that I have written down. It is an easily accessible file with ideas for stories, papers, films - anything I come up with at any time. My hope is I'll get around to expanding them, sometime, into complete works. They may be simple, like the above sentence, or they may be paragraphs, trying to capture a feeling that defines the idea as a whole.

It is not really important where these ideas come from, as I believe ideas flow rapidly. I keep paper and pen nearby to get them in writing when they are more interesting than the usual stream of associations passing through my brain. What is important, though, is what do we do with the ideas once we get them. And that is by far a trickier question.

I guess this is really about procrastination. We need to produce some sort of story, or other work, from those small ideas. It's easier to say than to do.

I just began a collection of Neil Gaiman's short stories called "M Is for Magic", and the second story within is called "Troll Bridge". Basically, it is about a man, disillusioned, that moves away and becomes a troll. I read his story in a public place, while I waited for my wife, and got some looks as I laughed when I finished reading it. Neil Gaiman took my idea! Well, no, of course not, but it was great to know that this amazing writer at some point had the same idea as I did.

However, he wrote a wonderfully haunting story based on it. I moved on after I wrote my one sentence down, never quite forgetting it because I thought it was a promising idea, but never getting around to expanding that idea either.

I guess the point is - "get to work". You can't produce art or reviews or papers or - anything - if you don't sit down and do it. There are a lot of ideas in my idea file, but very little finished work. Time is always an excuse, but never a good one.

The question for me is - do I write my story about the man who becomes a troll now? Or will Gaiman's story be so present to me that it will not be worth the attempt?

Adaptation and Persepolis

2008-02-11T18:06:00.001-06:00

Here is an interesting post (from the Chicago Comics website) about the new film version of "Persepolis". It deals with the question of whether the film is necessary because of how it adapts the comic.

I have not seen the film, nor read the comic, but this article makes me want to start with the comic. As I've said before, the intimate nature of the comics experience often leads to longer lasting effects for me than many films do.

For all the similarities between various storytelling methods - for my purposes here including film, literature, myth, religion and comics - they are also very different. I for one wish film would create more of its' own stories instead of adapting all the others.

On the other hand, I wish the others were not losing ground in the race for people's attention. Well, maybe religion isn't, but that is not always a good thing.

Once - A Quick Look at Life and Music

2008-02-04T08:23:00.001-06:00

I realized that music, which I've always loved, and musicals, which strangely enough I haven't, seem to have become an integral part of how I look at the world, and the worlds of the fantastic. I have seen more musicals in the last few years than I ever thought I could, but I've also been exploring recorded and live music more than I have in the last few years. Music takes us out of our everyday world and moves us somewhere else. Exactly where depends on the form and the style of music.

Previous posts here about the Waterboys were inspired by an amazing live concert that caught me up completely in the moment of the playing of the musicians. When the music is that powerful, that interesting, most anyone can tell you that in some way you are transported to somewhere in your mind, regardless of the venue you are actually at.

In film as well, music often serves to create a new place. It sends various signals to an audience. This includes sometimes suggesting to us that what is happening onscreen may just be an ideal, a fantastic twist on our reality. We do not have music around us in real life in the ways in which typical musicals present it to us.

This makes the recent film Once an interesting film to look at, because the music is presented in a style which does not take us away from reality. The main characters are musicians and the majority of the film is presented as moments when the two are singing or playing songs.

My quick insight on this film is about the first scene in which the two play together in the back of a Dublin music store. They begin playing, then singing, progressing so naturally into their song that I did feel the music taking me into a different reality. It was not fantasy, and not necessarily that far removed from my own world, but as a cinematic moment, it was different from day-to-day reality. It was a place where people connect in positive ways, which seems so rare for the real world.

The cinematography also had a huge part in contributing to this exploratory and joyful feeling. The shots were consistently close ups of both musicians. The camera caught them understanding each other as they played, and the joy they felt as they connected through music that they explored and expanded together.

A truly amazing and magical scene, which was more than I expected for a musical that is garnering praise for its documentary-like style. But exploration, joy and expansion are what the best music is all about, so maybe I should not have been surprised.

The Science Fiction of Paolo Bacigalupi

2008-02-03T19:00:00.000-06:00

Science Fiction is a genre that truly goes beyond the veil, speculating on what can happen based on the various threads of real life. It is also a very misunderstood genre. On film it seems to be a rarity, as what gets called science fiction is often more mythological and fantasy based. The obvious example is the Star Wars series - the technological trappings lend them the SF label, but the worlds created are pure fantasy. There are exceptions, but cinema as a whole does not seem to do justice to the genre.

And the genre, containing what should be thought exercises as to what the future may hold, works best for me in literature. Plot and character drive film, but science fiction is often about setting and ideas. The intrigue for me has always been the intellectual game being played, extrapolating possibilities of both the physical and social sciences. A film about such ideas may not often interest the ticket-buying public, but for the right reader, such stories can provide a lot to think about.

Through the dim light of memory, Arthur C. Clarke comes to mind as someone whose work always inspired me with new ideas. As with the best science fiction, Clarke's future always provided me with new ways of looking at the world today. It also opened my eyes to how politics, technology and social structure contribute to creating new developments. As I haven't read any of his work in a very long time, I can't comment on how I would feel about it today. But there is a new collection of short stories being released soon by an author whose work, as different as it is from Clarke's, puts me in the same mind set when I read it.

Paolo Bacigalupi is the author's name and his work bears close attention. I have read three of the stories included in the upcoming collection titled PUMP SIX. They rekindled memories of the best of the science fiction I have read even as they presented absolutely new visions based on some of the problems our world faces going forward.

I first discovered his work in The Magazine of Fantasy & SF, mentioned in a previous post here. Bacigalupi writes tales infused with extrapolation of the future based on possibilities taken from our current economic and environmental trends. As you may guess, it isn't always pretty. But like the best science fiction, the real genius of the genre, it makes you think about your current world. And it makes you think hard.

The tales can be somewhat grim. For me, the only recent film dealing with any similar territory for comparison might be CHILDREN OF MEN (I have not read that book, so I can't comment on it). The settings and conditions are often harsh, but the characters are well drawn. Their situations are always engaging and thought inducing. What more can be asked for?

There seems to be a perfect storm of publicity rising up around the author in light of his first collection, but in this case, I believe it to be fully justified. If you don't read science fiction, try this out.

To help convince you -
1) A recent AP News Story about a looming problem which is typical of those Bacigalupi explores. AP News Story on Western US Water Crisis
2) One of his stories, The Tamarisk Hunter
3) An excellent, three part interview with the author PBS Wired Science
4) A review of Pump Six by Gary Wolfe, one of the best reviewers of the genre today at Locus Magazine's website
and
5) Bacigalupi's official website, windupstories.com

Retention, or, The Art Form of the Comic

2008-01-18T10:40:00.001-06:00

When I was younger, everyone around me quoted lines from movies as their contribution to good humor. Everyone would laugh in shared recognition of famous, and hilarious, lines from the latest Hollywood comedic blockbusters. Except me. You see, I never could remember any of these lines. I seem to have a retention problem, most noticeable when it comes to humor. If you know me, you'll realize I have never actually told a joke. When I try, I barely can get it out, and don't have the timing needed for succesful punchlines. But thankfully, I also don't use movie lines to try and get you to laugh.

Lately though I have been using lines of dialogue from "It's A Wonderful Life". I've even gone so far as to suggest, just as Tom Hanks touts the virtues of "The Godfather" in "You've Got Mail", that to any question there is an answer from a line of dialogue in Capra's masterpiece. But really, why does anyone want to do this? Use scripted dialogue in real conversations? Laugh because we recognize a line from a movie? Just because it was funny the first time around...

I consider it a masterpiece - a seamless film that works perfectly in so many ways, and I realize the only reason I can do this with "It's A Wonderful Life" is that I have seen it so many times. Without VCR's and DVD's, I never had the funny lines ready as a kid because I never saw things over and over. Even now, the majority of the films I see, I see once. Quality should be treasured, but there is more dreck than quality out there. Amazing images and characters stick with us, forcing us to remember, or lingering just close enough that we can recall them at appropriate times.

Similarly, there are few books I read more than once. There is always a new story to get wrapped up in. Sadly, it seems I have less retention of books than I do of movies. But there is only the image we create in our heads to associate with literary stories. The truly powerful works that remain with us are probably more so than those of cinema because the pictures are all our own.

Which brings me to the point of this post - comics, sequential pictures, with or without dialogue. The images and stories from comics seem to stay with me stronger and longer than either film or literature. I believe it's because of the personal nature of the art form - we are alone as we experience it. A movie can be shared, but we can be passive as the images roll. The written words of literature create images in our head, but often these slip away.

With comics, we turn pages at our own rate. We linger as long or as little as we like. And though we don't create our own images, we fuse the drawn forms with our reading of the lines. If the work gives us a personal reason to respond to it, the likelihood rises of our being able to remember and recall those images and storylines. I plan on writing more about comics in the future.

La Perdida - The Lost One

2008-01-13T16:30:00.001-06:00

After seeing the first few pages of Jessica Abel's "La Perdida" at a comics art exhibition in Chicago a few years back, I have been looking forward to reading it. It took a few years, but I finally read issue #1. Luckily, I just received the collected book as a gift and was able to read the entire story. In one sitting. Yep, it's that good.

And it's relevant to the examination of how fantasy worlds and the real world mix that I try to explore here. "La Perdida" is the story of Carla, an American girl who grows up without any understanding of the culture of her Mexican father. As she gets older, she becomes interested and makes her way, by means of some subtle subterfuge, to Mexico. She attempts to learn what she has been missing.

I would call Carla's expectations and hopes for what Mexico can mean to her the fantasy world. She has little knowledge of Mexico and does not speak the language. The story plays off the differences between her relationships with American expatriates and those she creates with various natives. With little knowledge of what to expect, she is unable to see that her Mexican friends, whose attributes come to be her embodiment of what it means to be Mexican, may not be the nicest people to hang out with. She judges everyone else against them, but does not always see that their lack of respect toward others may also be directed at her. Eventually events take place which show her that she was seeing the world only from one direction, unable to get beyond what her own hopes were.

It is hard to fault her for wanting her reality to conform to her thoughts, but easy to realize that she needed to be more discerning to get what she really wanted out of her cultural exploration. Abel's genius is that she made me feel sad for Carla at missed opportunities. Looking back, when her co-worker Luisa moves in with her, Carla could have gotten a healthier view of her new world. Instead of opening to a new voice, she pulls Luisa toward her circle of friends.

Though this is not really a work of the Fantastic, I feel that when culture meets culture, we are at a place where reality begins to push the boundaries into something new. That being said, I have to mention the revelation of the last page of this work. Carla is from Chicago originally, as am I. Abel draws various Chicago locations and uses the city for certain plot details in the framing sequences. The last page of the work depicts a street in Chicago with Asians walking in front of Asian restaurants. This colored my entire experience of the story before it. The search is universal. Carla may have been exploring her Mexican roots, but everywhere, everyday, there are people whose roots are behind them. They try to make sense of the traditions and cultures that led to their present. As well there are people who have moved away from their backgrounds, trying to make sense of new cultures and traditions.

When respect is given to all cultures, and when substance and meaning, instead of popularity and fleeting sensation, become the basis for new cultural traditions, I think we'll all be better off. Unlike Carla in "La Perdida", we should get to know a few different people before we make any judgements.

The Golden Compass - The Book

2008-01-05T18:56:00.003-06:00

Cinema, as a set of all films, contains a rather large, and loud, subset that we call Hollywood films. When we look for examples of great cinematic art, Hollywood has produced many films of profound value. All too often, however, and seemingly more often than not, they fail to produce great art because of economic reasons, including a simple lack of taking risks, which often is the catalyst for great art. Sequels are a good example of the expensive nonsense that too often is the product of Hollywood cinema. Just as incomprehensible are missed opportunities.

Based on the book, the movie version of "The Golden Compass" missed too many opportunities to make an artistically visual, and poignant, cinematic statement. Changes made to the film, and scenes that were left out, created a typical Hollywood thrill ride, when the possibility existed to create a vision of the Fantastic that would make people think and remember.

If you plan to read the book and/or see the movie, be warned - this is a SPOILER ALERT.

Philip Pullman's novel, "The Golden Compass", reads simply and straightforwardly. Written for a young adult audience, credit is still given to the reader's intelligence. The simplicity of the language does not eliminate the visual detail that Pullman infuses in his world. He attempts to use that detail to explore the larger issue of the nature of the soul. The core of this exploration is the beauty of the relationship between Lyra and her daemon, Pan. I suspect the author's view may be that a person grows up when they choose who they want to be. Hopefully they are given every opportunity to allow themselves to choose freely and intelligently. "The Golden Compass" is the first of three books. I would expect the second and third books to fully expound on the author's beliefs. But the first is a satisfying whole, even though it ends in the middle of a tragedy, with earthshaking events taking place around Lyra.

The movie would have done well to attempt relating the author's story in the same visual detail and with the same emphasis on the relation between the girl and her daemon. Unfortunately, the film is strictly Hollywood. It takes no real chance at creating art or memorable ideas, but simply provides standard Hollywood thrills. As my previous post is testament to, it succeeded. It's a visual treat - but it could have been much more.

First, the film makes Iorek the polar bear the most important character after Lyra. The Hollywood choice is obvious - the bear is huge and exciting to see in animated form running through the icy landscape. The trailer is based on that image and creates the feeling of the Hollywood spectacle. If the book had been followed, Lyra's daemon Pan would have been the secondary focus. The story would be drawn down and inwards. The relation between a girl and her soul, as they learn about the world and attempt to come to grips with it, would be the focus of the storyline. By elevating Iorek to a higher status, the thrills become more important than the revelations that cinema can give us about the human condition. Escapism wins out over revelation at much too high a rate in Hollywood.

Second, the film twists the book's events out of order, including leaving off the pivotal and explanatory ending. If Iorek was to be made more important in the film, his battle with the renegade king makes more sense to be positioned in time as it is in the book, the last episode before the actual ending. It seems to me the cinematic bear vs. bear fight was moved to take place before the rescue of the children from Bolvangar simply to allow a sprawling battle to take place at the end of the film. This seems to be the requirement of a large budget, Hollywood fantasy film. "Can't end one of those fantasy films without a big battle at the end," I can hear the producers say as they procure the money needed to finance such a film.

The ending of the film was strange to me, but it is truly puzzling after reading the book. The film has no conclusion to explain all the questions that arose for me while watching it. The book elegantly answers enough questions at the end so that we understand what has gone before and completes a story, while still maintaining our interest in getting further answers if we choose to follow Pullman to the second book. The film does not address or explain major plot points - the Dust, what exactly Lyra's place is in the story and again, why the daemon/human relationship is so important. An opportunity to make a unique film was pushed aside to make a typical film that could be marketed to the "young adult fantasy film audience".

The last difference between the book and movie that I will address refers back to the visual detail of the book. The movie has the great visual effects that money can buy, but the choices of what to show seem amazingly safe. Here is why the art of cinema, which should be perfectly suited to the amazing worlds of the Fantastic, is lacking in many Hollywood productions. I would expect the production teams on films like this to be the best in the business. And I would expect their business to be the ability to push the envelope of what we see on-screen by making visual statements worthy of the imaginative scale of their source materials. And even though the scale, and budget are large, I would expect these artists to be the ones that could successfully pull off telling the smaller story of Lyra and Pan. Somehow, they are not allowed to attempt that lyrical exploration of the soul. The evidence is a character and a scene that is eliminated from the movie.

In the book, the witch Serafina Pekkala has a grey goose for her daemon. We do not see the goose in the film, which I believe to be a major mistake. By showing the actual witch herself, the focus is again taken off the daemon/human relationship. But Pullman describes the goose with such majesty, and anyone who has truly seen the various geese of our world will understand, how it is a shame we do not get this character on the screen.

That may sound silly or unimportant to a viewer, but the scene eliminated from the film is probably my favorite in the book and is Pullman's best work. Lyra and the grey goose free several ghost-like images of animal daemons from cages, where they have been locked up after being forcibly separated from their children. The eloquence, horror and hope of the scene are beautifully described by Pullman, ending with the grey goose coercing all the ghostly forms to take on the shape of small birds and follow him, escaping through the air to some place they can be tended to.

As I read that scene, I wondered how the eloquence of such visuals, as well as their relevance to the deeper themes of the story, could be eliminated from the film. If I were the production design and cinematography teams on that film, I'd sure like to take a crack at bringing that to life.

The day when Hollywood is consistently able to bring eloquent versions of the imaginative stories our authors dream up to the big screen seems to be a day that is very far off.

The Golden Compass - The Film

2007-12-29T07:48:00.002-06:00

Why exactly were Christians suggesting boycotting the film "The Golden Compass"? I recently saw the film and cannot see any reason for it. So I must assume it has something to do with the book it was based on, which I haven't read yet.

I did start it though, so I guess I'll know more when I'm done. I can say that in the first fifty pages the young heroine, Lyra, is depicted drinking liquor and smoking cigarettes, which is not surprsingly missing from the film. But if that is the type of thing leading to boycotts, almost every religious person I've ever known needs to be boycotted - but that's a subject for another time.

I can only look at the film I actually saw and offer a few thoughts. It was a spectacular looking film, for the most part. The animal daemons (or souls - hmm, maybe that's the issue) were extraordinary, brilliantly animated and a major piece of the movie's charm. As well, the directing, acting and production were at a high level. The young actress playing Lyra, the main character, was brilliant.

I can't discuss how the book was translated to screen yet, but I can say that in the screenwriting there were some problems.

When a book is made into a movie, which in Hollywood seems to be a large majority of the releases, there is an outcry over what is lost, missing, changed and, as the criticism usually implies, destroyed in the translation. One need only search out Tolkien scholars' discussions of Peter Jackson's trilogy of The Lord of the Rings. But I will say this - as movies, Jackson's work held up on their own and were seamless. Confusion was held to a minimum. Whether they adapted Tolkien's work correctly is irrelevant to this discussion - they were straightforward and spectacular Hollywood films, if you like that sort of thing. And they made sense.

Which is not to say that "The Golden Compass" does not make sense. It just seemed to miss opportunities to give us more information. It rolls along and we must accept what we are told and roll with it. But we sense a deeper backstory of which we know nothing. Perhaps when I finish the book, this feeling will go away.

But a book and a movie are completely different entities. You should never have to experience both to understand either. I hold to an old adage that the book is always better than the movie, but cinema is such a huge canvas that it is increasingly the only way people come to know the written works of the world. So they need to get it right.

A land of giant polar bears, a bunch of witches and a prophecy about Lyra that everyone seems to know, but that we are never told, are all elements that made me wonder what world we were actually on. World-building is a very important topic in fantasy criticism. The examination of how a world is constructed and whether all the elements fit together to unify the created world as a place we can accept is essential to belief in the story. In The Golden Compass, I never could figure out exactly how the world so spectacularly shown on-screen was held together. When the witch shows up for the first time, I actually had a "huh?" in my mind. Witches? And when the witch army is shown in silhouette on their brooms in the air, I first thought, "Ah, that's cool," but then, "Huh?" again. We did not know enough about this world for all these elements to add up.

I believe the book will do a better job, as in the first fifty pages Lyra has a run in with some ghosts due to some of her constant trouble making. A detail like this may have made the witches seem less out of place. The story still made enough sense that unaddressed questions did not take away from the visual splendor. Ultimately, as a Hollywood movie, it was an enjoyable ride. When your second most important character is a giant polar bear, and it works, you are definitely having some fun at the theater.