When Classic Becomes Camp

Last night I went to see Mysterious Island, one in a series of movies the local art-house theater is showing to honor the achievements of legendary stop-motion artist Ray Harryhausen, who died earlier this year. If you haven't seen it, it's an adaptation of the Jules Verne novel, with castaways encountering perils and (this being a Harryhausen film) giant monsters on a remote island. Though not one of the master's best films--the drama is slow and plodding, and some of the effects, particularly the glass paintings and traveling mattes on the island, are poorly executed--Mysterious Island is still an impressive piece of special-effects movie-making.

But you know, every time I go to see one of these older fantasy films, whether it be King Kong or The Valley of Gwangi, I have to sit through the lunkheads in the audience cracking up every time an effects sequence appears on screen. Last night, it was an older couple, probably in their sixties, sitting right behind me, yucking it up over Harryhausen's creations. It ticked me off.

I'm more sensitive to this than most, since Harryhausen was my boyhood hero, one of the main reasons (along with Star Wars) I grew up believing in the power of fantasy. But in a broader sense, the hilarity of last night's audience made me wonder: when did classic become camp?

There are campy movies out there, for sure. Many of them were made in the fifties and sixties, when Harryhausen was at the peak of his form. But his films weren't among them. They were designed as spectacle, perhaps, but not as camp. They were meant to be taken seriously: to inspire awe and wonder, not giggles.

Now, as a literary critic and film scholar, I know that what a creator intends for her or his artwork has nothing to do with how an audience receives it. If, in today's era of soulless but realistic computer effects, a film with stop-motion monsters appears silly, audiences will, perhaps naturally, perceive it as such.

But I can't help thinking you'd have to exist in a historical vacuum not to recognize artistry as artistry, regardless of its relationship to present standards. Cave paintings might look quaint today--but they were pretty damn impressive in their time. The acting in Citizen Kane is over-the-top by today's naturalistic standards--but that's still a pretty darn good film. Harryhausen, working alone and with budgets in the mere thousands, couldn't produce what immense teams of technicians equipped with multi-million dollar machines can produce today--but that doesn't make him a hack.

It's inevitable, perhaps, that a consumer culture such as ours--a culture that can't wait to get its hands on the next technological gizmo, simply because it's the next--will equate past with surpassed. It's perhaps inevitable that such a culture will perceive anything classic as campy.

But I'm going to stick with my convictions. Something that was good in its own time--something that was great in its own time, as all of Harryhausen's films were--can still be meaningful in ours. If we fail to acknowledge this, then we're the ones who have become silly and irrelevant.

The Problem with Paradise

The Eagles' song "The Last Resort" begins with these lines:

She came from Providence 

The one in Rhode Island

Where the old world shadows hang heavy in the air.

She packed her hopes and dreams like a refugee

Just as her father came across the sea.

It's a song about emigration, about westward movement, the colonization (and destruction) of the continent.  With each westward move, to the farthest coast and then to the islands beyond, the colonists believe they've found Paradise, the ultimate place of rest and beauty.

But there's a problem: no sooner do they arrive than they begin to turn Paradise into a wasteland.

I was thinking about this song when I watched After Earth, the Will and Jaden Smith vehicle.  Not a bad film, as summer sci-fi fare goes; if you want a full review, check out my other blog, YA Guy.

But what got me thinking about the Eagles song as I watched this film was the theme of emigration and colonization, in this case emigration away from earth and colonization of distant planets.

In After Earth, humans have destroyed our home planet's environment, and so they leave, seeking a new, more hospitable planet.  It's a theme we've seen in a number of recent fantasy/sci-fi films: Avatar, Wall-E, Battle for Terra.  I wrote about those films here.

And what I wrote is that I find such films disturbing, because--for all their ostensible environmental awareness--they suggest that even if we trash this planet, there'll always be another planet waiting for us.

Some people actually believe this.  Should earth become uninhabitable, they say, we'll simply pull up roots and terraform the moon or Mars.  That such a feat is far beyond our current technologies isn't the main problem with such thinking.

The main problem is that, unless we can overcome such thinking, no matter where we go we'll start doing the same thing all over again.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with Paradise: we don't really want to live in it.  We want to devour it and move on.

The Eagles song ends:

And you can see them there on Sunday morning

Stand up and sing about what it's like up there

They call it Paradise

I don't know why

You call someplace Paradise

Kiss it goodbye.

What's going to save us, if anything is, is not another place "after Earth."  There is no such place, or if there is, it won't be safe from us for long.

Paradise can't save us until we decide there's something worth saving.

Ray Harryhausen, The Master of Fantasy

Ray Harryhausen is dead.

He died Tuesday, at the age of 92.  I don't follow the obituaries, but my dad, roughly ten years Ray's junior, does.  He called to tell me of the master animator's death.

There has been much written about Ray, and so I have no intention of providing a biography of the man.  Nor is this post meant to be a eulogy.  It's simply a personal reflection from one of the countless thousands of fans whose lives Ray touched.

When I was a child, my favorite movie was King Kong (1933).  It still is, in fact.  That's one thing Ray and I shared.

Another was our love of fantasy.  At the age of ten, I received a book titled From the Land Beyond Beyond, a guide to the films of Ray and his mentor, King Kong animator Willis O'Brien.  I read it so many times the cover came off, and had to be reattached with Scotch tape (the old kind, the kind that yellowed and cracked after a few years).  It's still on my bookshelf--as, in DVD and Blu-Ray where available, are all of Ray's films.

They're all great.  My favorite is Jason and the Argonauts, but The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Twenty Million Miles to Earth are close seconds.  When I wrote my own book on fantasy film, Framing Monsters, I noted the absence of Ray's films in scholarly treatments of the genre and included a chapter of my own on the Sinbad trilogy.  The book received mostly positive reviews, but even the less positive ones singled out the Ray chapter as the book's high point.

When I was a kid, I dreamed of being a stop-motion animator.  Turns out the industry left that dream behind, and had I stuck with the craft of motion pictures, I'd likely have become a CGI artist, one of the thousands whose names roll past in big-budget movies like The Hobbit and Iron Man 3.

Ray was different.  Working solo, he created life.

There's really no way I can sum up my feelings about Ray.  He was--and is--one of my heroes, one of the people who absolutely made me who I am today.  He was--and is--the single greatest magician the cinema has ever known, or ever will.

I've been in the habit of dedicating my books to influential people in my life who are no longer with me.  My first academic book was dedicated to my grandparents, my second to a dear friend who died young, my third to a college mentor.  I've wondered whether to continue this practice when my debut novel appears next year, and if so, to whom the book should be dedicated.

But there's no longer any question about that.

It's Ray.

How 3-D Is Ruining Movies For Me

First, let's get one thing straight: there is no such thing as a 3-D movie.

3-D movies are two dimensional like all movies.  In the case of traditional movies, the flat screen uses certain context cues (scale, overlap, etc.) to trick our brains into perceiving apparent depth.  In the case of 3-D movies, an additional trick is used: two slightly off-kilter images, which our brains, assisted by special lenses, combine to perceive apparent depth.

I was perfectly happy to imagine movies as having depth.  I didn't need to wear funky glasses to aid the deception.  In fact, to me, that additional illusion destroys the illusion: the few elements that jump out of the screen only emphasize how flat everything else truly is.

To me, the 3-D movie craze is absolutely ruining my ability to watch the kind of movies I want to watch.

Case in point: Jurassic Park.  I saw it twenty years ago, and I was excited to see it again on the big screen.

But I can't.  Why?  Because it's in 3-D, and the very few 2-D screenings are in the middle of the day.  When I'm, you know, at work.

Most of the movies I enjoy watching--that is, fantasy and science fiction--are now being presented in 3-D.  Soon, they might only be released in that format.  At which point, I'll probably stop watching movies altogether.

And maybe that won't be such a bad thing.  Because the other, deeper way in which 3-D is ruining movies is by dictating their content.  With our fancy new 3-D technology, we take a perfectly nice story like The Hobbit and add endless chase scenes, dropping-off-cliff sequences, and other completely needless nonsense merely because it looks really cool in 3-D.

The technology, rather than the story or the theme or the character relationships, drives the film.

Now, to a certain extent, technology has always played a determining role in fantasy and sci-fi film.  A main goal of such films is to produce the illusion of the impossible, and technology has kept pace in striving to make that illusion convincing.  By introducing another illusory reality to fantasy and science fiction film, one could argue that 3-D is only extending that tradition.

But 3-D, I believe, is different.  To a far greater extent than any of the technologies that have preceded it--stop-motion animation, blue and green screens, CGI--3-D takes on a life of its own: it becomes the film's reason for existence, over and above its function of enhancing the realism of the film's patently unreal effects. If you want proof of that, the mere fact that these movies are advertised as 3-D should supply it: no one ever said, "I'm going to a CGI movie today," even if (as in the case of the original Jurassic Park) revolutionary advances in CGI modeling greatly added to the film's appeal.  3-D, in other words, is a kind of uber-technology, a technology that calls attention only to itself.

And ultimately, that's why it's ruining movies for me (and seems likely to ruin them for everyone in the long run).

We don't watch movies anymore.  We watch the technology.

Like so much in today's digital age, we've added a (virtual) dimension, while losing the thing itself.

Monsters under the Bedroom

I watched Jurassic Park III last night.  My son had never seen it, and though it's the worst of the three, we happen to have the entire trilogy on blu-ray, so what the heck.  It's short, fast, and relatively convincing dinosaur-wise, so it wasn't a bad way to spend a Friday evening.

It's also, however, evidence of Hollywood's fascination with reasserting male power and prerogative, particularly in the family circle.  I commented on this in an earlier post on Oz, the Great and Powerful; I comment on the same phenomenon at length in my analysis of the first Jurassic Park in my book Framing Monsters.  It's one of the recurrent themes in Hollywood fantasy film (and, for all I know, in other genres; I don't watch much else).  As such, it's worth discussing.

On the surface, Jurassic Park III is about two things only: dinosaur attacks and cool special effects.  (That's really one thing, I know.)  But look a little closer, and you'll see it's also about a broken family that has fallen apart because, as the movie sees it, husband and wife have been playing the wrong roles.  She's the aggressor, the sexual predator; he's the wimp, the milquetoast.  They've been divorced for a year when the film's action starts, and we have every reason to believe she's the primary motivator of the marriage's breakup: her son is para-sailing with her new boyfriend when the two catastrophically crash on the island of the dinosaurs, an event that sets the whole rest of the plot in motion.  She's reckless, thoughtless, careless: according to her own report, she totaled three family vehicles during the time she was married.  In other words, she's a homewrecker--or, in the fantasy terms of the film, she's a monster.  Thus, though it makes no story sense that the female velociraptors would identify her as the one who's stolen their eggs--we the viewers see that she had nothing to do with the theft--it makes perfect thematic sense: this woman who has failed as a mother and nurturer, who has pursued sexual activity outside the sanctioned bounds of the family, must be humbled by the film's true monsters and, relinquishing the eggs that don't belong to her, return to her proper role within the family unit.

But monstrous women, the film also insists, only exist where weak men allow them to.  Thus the husband must be represented as his wife's polar opposite: prissily careful, incapable, anything but the strong, heroic male figure of Hollywood legend.  He owns a bathroom fixture store, which connects him to the home in a subordinate, "female" role: in Hollywood, it's women who make the toilets sparkle.  He gets his clock cleaned by paleontologist Alan Grant--no impressive male specimen himself, though in the first Jurassic Park he does claim the father's scepter by helping two abandoned children find their way across dinosaur-infested territory.  (Interestingly, in the end Dr. Grant chooses the study of raptors over the charms of his female companion, so that by the time we see him in JP III, he's a childless bachelor, "the last of his breed.")  It's only when the husband begins acting in a more appropriately macho way--lighting fires, operating heavy machinery, saving his wife and child from dinosaurs--that he recovers his lost family: in a completely nonsensical scene, the woman who divorced him a year previously screams hysterically, "You can't leave me!" when she believes he's died defending her from a dino attack.  Perhaps the most interesting moment in the film occurs when the father smiles in grim satisfaction at his son's rejection of his mother's coddling: in the film's terms, the son too has become a MAN, someone who keeps a firm hand over women rather than submitting to them.

I've wondered for many years why Hollywood seems so obsessed with telling such stories, but perhaps the answer is simple.  Along with the corporate boardroom and the political arena, Hollywood remains one of our culture's bastions of traditional male authority: it's a place where almost all the important decisions are made by men, while women meekly obey.  Yet that kind of power never comes without anxiety that someone--Barbra Streisand, the feminists, NOW--might strip it away.  So the film industry neurotically imagines the opposition in the form of female monsters, only to restore male power in the end.

It makes for some interesting analytical moments.  But it also makes for a lot of films that really bite.

We're Not in Kansas Anymore

I saw Disney's prequel to The Wizard of Oz today.  My initial reaction was that it had some interesting effects--particularly the well-rendered china doll--and characterizations--particularly the winged monkey who aids the neophyte wizard--but that it didn't pack anywhere near the imaginative punch of the 1939 classic.  Like so much of today's big-budget fantasy fare, Oz, the Great and Powerful seemed more interested in spectacle than story: instead of deepening or extending the Oz mythology in interesting ways, what we got was a lot of green-screen action sequences (many of them looking like bad 1980s video games, and some of them clearly included only for their 3-D possibilities), an overly familiar tale of a scoundrel becoming a fatherly saint (think Real Steel and X-Men: First Class, just to name the two that popped first into my head), and a painfully familiar tale of evil women (wearing black and showing lots of cleavage) duking it out with their angelic counterparts for the love of a man.

In one respect, though, I found the film interesting: its self-referential nature.  When a film culminates with a showman projecting images of himself onto a screen to dominate the masses, one can't help thinking that the film is making only a barely disguised appeal to its own technological and cultural operations.  (The film does, in fact, refer to Edison's early experiments in moving pictures, so the self-referential nature of the effects cannot be chance.)  The 1939 film, as I've shown in my book Framing Monsters, was itself very much interested in the nature of film and film technology, so there's a nice continuity between the two movies there.

The difference, however, is that Oz '39 was quite skeptical about the power of film as a cultural force; set against the backdrop of 1930s Hollywood's attempts to monopolize the technology, bust unions, and force independent producers and exhibitors out of business, the original film was anything but enthusiastic about film's immense cultural power.  (It's the wizard's cinematic exploits, after all, that are revealed as humbugs.)  But Oz '13 represents the deceptive qualities of film as an agency of salvation: the wizard cows and defeats the two witches through the power of the cinema, and the citizens of Emerald City are liberated, not shanghaied, by this power.  I sensed no irony in the wizard's triumphant use of cinematic illusion to ascend the throne; judging by this film, it seems that little compunction remains in today's Hollywood about the industry's cultural dominance.

And really, why should any such compunction remain?  Film is so pervasive as to be all-but-invisible.  It's everywhere, and as such it's nowhere.

Which is about as good a definition of ideology as you're likely to find.

Jack the Lady Killer

I took my kids to see Jack the Giant Slayer yesterday.  I wasn't expecting much, and so the movie didn't disappoint.  Once you got past the predictably weightless CGI monsters, the flatulence humor, and the obligatory endless battle sequence, it even had some good moments (most of them provided by Ewan McGregor's cheekily suave captain of the guard).  My son gave it a 7 out of 10.  I'd have put it a notch or two lower.

There was one regard, however, in which I found the movie rather troubling: its (mis)representation of women.  As has become obligatory in children's fantasy films of these post-feminist backlash days (think Aladdin or Brave), the princess heroine, Isabel, was initially presented as a spunky, irrepressible spitfire: bridling at her father's overbearing care, sneaking out of the palace to attend theatrical displays that poked fun at royalty, and ultimately running away to avoid marrying the odious suitor of her father's choice.  But notably, it is this final act of resistance that gets her into trouble: stopping at Jack's humble cottage while on the lam, she's swept up into giant-ville by the beanstalk that explodes from the hero's basement.  From that moment on, she reverts to stereotypical damsel-in-distress, achieving absolutely zilch on her own and needing to be saved by Jack at least three times (once when she's about to be eaten by giants, once when the beanstalk she's riding crashes to earth, and once when the two-headed giant king pursues her into the mortal realm).  If we read the giants as unlicensed authority figures--and I think we have to read them this way, given the fact that their ambition to supplant the rightful king is thwarted by the magical crown that enables Jack to bend them to his will--then the message seems clear: little girls who defy their daddies' orders end up in the hands of evil men, unless they're lucky enough to have a boyish hero to save (and wed) them.

Jack the Giant Slayer struggles mightily to distance itself from its fairy-tale origins: the tongue-in-cheek humor, the framing device where Jack and Isabel read themselves into the story that eventually unfolds in real life, the off-the-cuff nods to the source material (with golden eggs and singing harps displayed visually but never incorporated into the storyline)--all of these devices suggest that the film wants to be not only a retelling but a deconstruction of "Jack and the Beanstalk."  But the portrayal of its female lead suggests how much of a stranglehold the fairy-tale logic of gender relations still has on our collective consciousness.

Bad Hobbits

My mom likes to tell the story of the time I was five years old and got so excited about Halloween I didn't sleep for a week beforehand.  Predictably, on Halloween night itself, I lasted about a block before falling asleep and needing to be carried home.

I guess I haven't learned much in the past forty-three years.

For some time, I've been looking forward to the film adaptation of The Hobbit.  With all the delays, contractual wrangles, directorial switches, and so forth, I've been kept in a state of nervous agitation for what seems like years.  And now that the movie's out and I've finally seen it, I have this to report:

It sucked.

Oh, there were a couple good parts: the riddle contest had a kind of menacing intensity, and the representation of Thorin Oakenshield, though not at all like the picture in my head of an elderly, stately dwarf, actually worked really well.  And Cate Blanchett was absolutely ravishing as Galadriel, so that was a plus.

Other than that, though, the film was lame, lame, lame.  Here's why:

1. Blockbuster Bloat.  Tolkien's novel may be the prequel to the much more sweeping epic of The Lord of the Rings, but The Hobbit itself is a small, domestic, homely tale (I use all these words with positive connotations, as did Tolkien).  Blowing this story up to not one but three three-hour movies, with endless epic battle scenes, CGI-heavy chase sequences, and 3D-friendly roller-coaster rides made no sense whatsoever (unless, of course, all you care about is making a buck).  I'd have thought Jackson, who was once a director who cared about quality, would have disdained making a movie that cares only about quantity.  But I guess once you become a blockbuster director, the things you care about change.

2. Dwarf Droppings.  In his essay "On Fairy-Stories," Tolkien famously defines fantasy as the act of creating a "Secondary World," with its own rules, logic, and internal consistency.  It's okay, he says, to have magical things, impossible things, in this Secondary World--so long as you don't change the rules in midstream.  I quote Tolkien:

What really happens [in fantasy] is that the story-maker proves a successful "sub-creator."  He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter.  Inside it, what he relates is "true": it accords with the laws of that world.  You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.  The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or art, has failed.  You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.

This is, alas, precisely what happens in Jackson's film.  I can accept goblins, hobbits, wizards, trolls, and all that stuff--but I can't accept human beings (or even dwarves) dropping five hundred feet on a rickety wooden platform, then being squashed by a two-ton monster, and walking away unscathed.  That's not one of the rules of Tolkien's Secondary World: dwarves are mortal, and (though hardy) breakable, so you can't do any damn thing you please with them for the sake of a really cool computer-generated shot.  But Jackson has shown himself willing to do just that in many of his recent big-budget movies, as in King Kong, where regular human beings roll around on the back of giant dinosaurs with nary a nick or scratch.  It's big, loud, dumb movie-making, and it destroys the credibility of the whole enterprise.

3. Gore, Gore, and More Gore.  The Hobbit was written for children.  The film version was made for the audience that every blockbuster film is made for these days: teenage boys (and their hapless dates). So you've got to have beheadings, impalings, amputations, incinerations, and everything else that, for some inexplicable reason, teenage boys consider really, really cool.  (My guess is they'd find it less cool if it were happening to them, but that's another story.)  Once again, in the interest of marketability, Jackson has decided to violate the spirit and substance of Tolkien's book.

4. Been There, Done That.  I loved The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy--but I don't need to see constant homages to it in The Hobbit.  Same score, same dramatic moments, same lines, same actors (including Elijah Wood and Ian Holm in particularly unfortunate and meaningless opening cameos where they try to play the parts they originally played when they were ten years younger).  Even the great Ian McKellen was rather tired and obvious as Gandalf: he's done it so well before, all he could do was repeat himself here.  In retrospect, it's a shame that Guillermo Del Toro backed out of the project and Jackson took over; a fresh interpretation might have worked better than a retread.  It might not, however, have made as much money, and I guess, in the end, that's what it's all about.

So in sum, I wish I'd learned my lesson from age five.  I'd have been a lot better off sleeping through this one.

Gotta Lotta Harry Potta

I've now seen the final installment of the Harry Potter series (twice, in fact, thanks to my daughter's obsession with it). What can one say? To praise the movies (or the books) is redundant, to critique them seems like sour grapes, especially when one is an aspiring fantasy novelist oneself. But for what it's worth, here's my assessment of "The Deathly Hallows, Part 2":

I liked it.

It was very dark--literally and figuratively; I had trouble seeing what was going on some of the time. The score was terrific, the acting was effortless, and there were a number of stirring scenes, notably the arming of Hogwarts. I also found myself moved by two scenes in particular: Snape's memories viewed by Harry in Dumbledore's Pensieve, and Harry's meeting with the shades of his loved ones in the Forbidden Forest. Though Voldemort's death was something of an anti-climax (less so, actually, than in the book, where he just kind of falls over dead), the film had a fittingly final feel. The promos read: "It All Ends," and though that may be a bit grandiose and hyperbolic, I didn't feel as if they'd left anything out or failed to tie up any important threads.

The only negative thing I'll say about the movie, or about the series as a whole--and this has nothing to do with J. K. Rowling or the film-makers--is that I just don't get all the reviewers and critics who write about the saga's profound religious and mythological resonances. I had the same objection to those who waxed eloquent (and incoherent) about the Star Wars films as modern-day myths. Yes, Harry visits King's Cross Station when he dies--and then he comes back to life, so you can definitely see the Christian imagery there. But the books (and the film adaptations thereof) don't strike me as carrying the gravity and significance necessary to proclaim them "mythological" or "religious." They're pretty simple fairy tales or action-adventure yarns: good confronts and defeats evil, all while riding on dragons and fighting ogres. If that's all there is to mythology or religion, so be it. I suspect, though, that there's lots more: like the complexity of faith, the puzzle of suffering, the relationship of humanity to the earth, the mystery of creation. Harry Potter (not to mention Star Wars) doesn't seem to have anything to do with those subjects, and so for me, it fails the test of myth.

But it fails that test only if we expect it to pass. If, by contrast, we expect it to be exactly what it is--a well-crafted story with appealing characters, a visionary dreamworld, and a compelling narrative--then it passes with flying colors.

Fairy Tale Future

As mentioned in a previous post, I'm currently working on a young adult fantasy novel. It's set in a post-apocalyptic Earth (or maybe not Earth), and that's all I'm going to say about its plot for now. I've got a chapter and a half drafted (but no title!). We'll see if something comes to me.

Anyway, working on this book has got me thinking about futuristic narratives and their relationship (or lack thereof) to reality.

Take Blade Runner, for instance. It's celebrated as one of the great science fiction films of all time--and I don't dispute that. Its visuals remain stunning (especially on a widescreen TV and Blu-Ray, both of which I recently purchased), its conception of a future Earth is arresting, and (once Ridley Scott got the control he needed to strip out the voice-over narration and other distracting elements from its theatrical release) its plot is deeply moving and disturbing.

But measured against the real, it's way off base.

Think about it. The film, which came out in 1982, is set in 2019, or eight years from now. Earth is for all intents and purposes uninhabitable. Non-human animals are extinct. And superhuman android slaves labor in off-world colonies. Huh?

Unless we have some major changes in the next eight years, Blade Runner's vision of 2019 is pretty much laughable.

Or let's consider the Terminator movies (which also look really cool on Blu-Ray). The narrative is set in 2029, after a super-smart computer called SkyNet has initiated global thermonuclear war to annihilate the human species. Cyborg assassins called Terminators travel back in time (that's right) to eliminate the humans who will, in the future, fight back against and ultimately triumph over the machines.

Double huh?

Time travel is impossible (Einstein proved that). The smartest computer we've got can barely beat a human being on "Jeopardy." And though nuclear war does remain a looming threat, what will happen in its aftermath, if it happens, is that humans will have to struggle against themselves, not a bunch of machines, for survival.

I'm not being dense here. Obviously, futuristic narratives aren't meant to offer "real" pictures of the future; they're meant to facilitate reflection on the present. And we do indeed have reason to be fearful about our present technologies, our present violent tendencies, our present destructive ways. The only point I'm making is that stories about the future, even those that gesture the most strenuously toward believability, are bound to be just that--stories. Fictions, in fact. Or, to use a somewhat more loaded term, fairy tales.

This is why, perhaps, I prefer futuristic narratives that make no pretense of accuracy. Narratives such as those of 12 Monkeys or Star Wars. The former an obvious social allegory, the latter based largely on The Wizard of Oz (which was itself, by the way, a futuristic narrative when it came out in 1939, as well as a social allegory).

So when you're reading my book (assuming it comes out some time in the future), don't be surprised if I get everything wrong. As the androids and cyborgs will gladly tell you, that's the nature of the game.

Thor-oughly Disgusted

For the record, I am royally sick and tired of movies about gods who don't get along with their daddies.

There was Clash of the Titans. And Percy Jackson. And (in a somewhat different register) Tron: Legacy.

And now there's Thor. I saw it today, and while it has some cool special effects (as well as some really chaotically filmed special effects, almost as if the filmmakers didn't want the audience to be able to see whether the effects were any good or not), in the end it boils down to that unbelievably tedious tale of a spoiled little boy who argues with his daddy, but who learns in the end that father knows best.

Director Kenneth Branagh, dabbling in the decidedly lowbrow, must think there are Shakespearean echoes to this silliness. It's Hamlet in Asgard!

Well, actually, no, it's more like Ferris Bueller's Day Off with frost giants.

I mean, come on. Can't anyone think of a more original thing to do with gods and monsters? Does every story have to be so boringly Freudian? Couldn't we have a story where dad and son actually got along, so we could explore something more interesting about them?

Fathers and sons do have conflicts, sure. I have plenty with my own dad. But I hardly believe these petty squabbles are of Olympian or Asgardian proportions. I'm not so delusional as to believe the heavens quake every time my dad and I piss each other off.

On the horizon, I see there's a movie coming out called Immortals, a Greek mythological mishmash with Theseus (but no minotaur that I can tell) fighting on the gods' behalf against a corrupt mortal king.

Let's just hope it doesn't turn out that Theseus bears a grudge against Papa Zeus. I'm not sure I can take any more.

Machine Man

Thanks to the Blockbuster queue (my seven-year-old son calls it the Blockbuster “cube”), I saw a fantasy film last night that brings together many of the issues I’ve been blogging about of late: technology, spirituality, fatherhood. It was, of all things, Iron Man 2, and like its predecessor, it wasn’t half bad (even if, in the end, it was a bit muddled). Still, I’ll take it over The Dark Knight any day.

Iron Man 2 opens with gazillionaire Tony Stark hosting a revived “Stark Expo,” which his deceased father originated a quarter-century earlier. A showcase for his dad’s (and his own) technological utopianism, their belief that technology can make the world not only a better place but a perfect place, the Expo seems to be vindicated by the exploits of Stark’s alter-ego, Iron Man, who in a very short span of time has used his high-tech iron suit to bring about an unprecedented era of world peace. But the film undercuts Stark’s confidence by showing what’s going on behind the scenes: Iran and North Korea are trying (though at the moment failing) to build their own Iron Man weapons, Stark’s competitor for military contracts is creating Iron Man drones, and a rogue Russian physicist, memorably played by Mickey Rourke, has succeeded in reproducing the reactor technology his father co-designed with Stark’s father, enabling him to wear and wield a high-voltage reactor weapon. Meanwhile, the reactor technology built into Stark’s own Iron Man suit, a technology that not only gives him super powers but keeps him alive, is also slowly killing him as its radioactive elements leech into his bloodstream. All is not well, it appears, in the world that technology has built.

But then, with the introduction of a home-movie lecture from Stark’s father, the film shifts, suggesting that technology is indeed not only a panacea but may well be divine. Looking directly at the camera (and at his son, who’s watching the home movie), the absent father, who in life was too busy with his experiments to pay attention to his young son, reveals to his grown heir the sub-atomic secrets he himself was unable to unlock due to technological limitations. Armed with his father’s knowledge and the technological advances of our own day, Tony manages with ridiculous ease to produce a particle accelerator that creates a new element, one capable of keeping his heart beating without destructive side effects. In other words, the Starks, father and son, become gods, creating new matter and new life. Faith in technology--and in fatherhood--seems safe once more.

And yet, in another turn, the Stark demons come home to roost when Iron Man must face an army of the drones his own technology has enabled his competitors and enemies to create. He triumphs, of course, with the help of his trusty African-American sidekick (a racial stereotype the film could well have done without), but only after the drones, as well as the good guys’ efforts to defeat them, have caused untold chaos. So we’re left with a very ambiguous message, wherein advanced technology both saves and destroys, brings both peace and war, serves both God and Satan (not to mention Mammon).

What I like about the Iron Man movies is this ambiguity, or ambivalence, or even (to be less charitable) this confused, have-one’s-cake-and-eat-it-too mentality. Unlike the Batman movies, which trot out simplistic propositions about life and refuse to challenge or undermine them, the Iron Man films question their own conventional wisdom, their own sacred truths, even their own vested interests. (Let’s not forget, after all, that the cinema itself is a highly advanced technology, and any film that traffics in technological utopianism and/or dystopianism implicitly fingers its own medium. The Iron Man movies make this connection explicit, as everything in Tony Stark’s world--his phone, his coffee table, the interior of his suit, even the air around him--is transformed into the equivalent of a handheld, wireless touch-screen.) So where the Batman films are screaming at the top of their lungs “Life is complicated!”, but doing nothing to visualize or, for that matter, complicate such complexity, the Iron Man films are showing us something of that complexity in the texture of the films themselves. In that respect, these films are heirs to a long and honorable fantasy-film tradition, going back to Metropolis and The Wizard of Oz and forward to Alien, Blade Runner, RoboCop, and others, in which technology becomes both medium and means for reflecting on matters of church and state, machine and man, faith and fantasy--including our culture’s faith in the fantasy of film itself.

This doesn’t make these films masterpieces. But it does make them worth watching--just as the issues they address are worth watching out for.

The Dreck Knight

The word on the street is that the next Batman movie is going to be filmed right here in my hometown of Pittsburgh.

My advice to the producers: don't bother.

After what seems years of hearing that The Dark Knight is a must-see movie, one of the classics of the fantasy/action genre, a gritty, atmospheric mood piece anchored by Heath Ledger's Oscar-winning performance as the Joker, I finally saw the thing on DVD.

My reaction: yawn.

I'll freely admit I've never been a fan of "the Batman" (as those who are serious about this drivel refer to him). I never read the comics; I watched the TV series but was too young and, I guess, too straight to catch the camp; I found the Tim Burton films (with Pittsburgh's own Michael Keaton) pleasantly silly but nothing more; and I find the Frank Miller Dark Knight hooey utterly pretentious and preposterous. So maybe I'm not the best person to ask about this particular film.

But come on! The whole Batman mythos is built around the idea that a guy who wears a costume and engages in vigilante justice is somehow making a profound statement about LIFE. In reality, though, the philosophy of the dark knight boils down to sophomoric propositions anyone over the age of ten could tell you. Like: GOOD PEOPLE SOMETIMES DO BAD THINGS! Wow. Deep. Or: LIFE IS UNPREDICTABLE AND RANDOM. Really? I didn't know that. Or my favorite: THERE IS GOOD AND EVIL IN ALL OF US!!!!! Now that one I'll have to think about for a while.

Putting one guy in a bat suit and another in clown make-up to "represent" these obvious, simplistic truths does not make them any more interesting. It merely illustrates how banal these truths truly are.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love lots of trashy fantasy films: Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds, Dragonheart, Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans. I just don't get all serious about them and think they hold the answers to life.

I also happen to think there are many fantasy films that are eminently worth discussion as works of art: Alien, Blade Runner, 12 Monkeys, and so on. Such films are both stylistically daring and thematically rich.

The Batman films, alas, are neither.

But maybe I'm being unkind. After all, in The Dark Knight, there's a character, Harvey Dent (aka Two-Face), who gets badly burned so that one half of his face is skeletal while the other is strikingly handsome. This represents the fact that THERE IS GOOD AND EVIL IN ALL OF US!!!!

Yep, there's one that'll keep me up nights.

Father Knows Beast

So I understand the Steelers lost in the Super Bowl. Sizeable Benjamin did not, as the blogger whom I mentioned in a previous post hoped, get his legs broken, but perhaps it would have been better for his team if he had; I hear he played very poorly. The city of Pittsburgh was briefly traumatized (I could tell from the absence of hoots and cheers outside my window Sunday night), but now everything appears to have returned to normalcy. Life goes on.

In my case, life was never interrupted; I spent the Super Bowl grading papers and watching Iron Man. Interesting film, though it's disturbing how its apparent critique of militarism turns into a critique of supplying arms to the bad guys (and thus, in the end, into a promotion of militarism on the part of the good guys). It was also intriguing for its use of a theme I've noticed in a number of fantasy films, where the father either is a monster or consorts with monsters. You see it in Iron Man when Tony Stark's surrogate father, Obidiah Stain, turns out to be the supplier of arms to the bad guys (and, later, dons the Iron Monger suit for a face-off with his estranged "son," Iron Man). You see it in The Spiderwick Chronicles, where the father, having deserted his family for some other woman, later returns to apologize--but it turns out he's actually the arch-villain, the shape-shifting ogre Mulgarath, in disguise. You see it in the Jurassic Park movies, where a bunch of childless, irresponsible men sic monstrous dinosaurs on innocent children. You even see it in Terminator 2, where the fatherless John Connor is both pursued and saved by Terminators posing as guardians. I'm sure I could multiply examples, but I think you get the point.

There's a very lengthy critical literature on the representation of the "monstrous-feminine," psychoanalytic critic Barbara Creed's term for the feminization of movie monsters. Supposedly, this has to do with men's universal fear of female genitalia, the vagina dentata, and all that. (Creed has a field day with the mouth-inside-a-mouth of the Alien monsters.) I'm sure there's something to this, but I prefer to read gendered monsters sociologically, to ask what cultural anxieties and desires underlie the representation of monsters as voracious moms or dastardly dads. For those interested in learning more, there's always my book Framing Monsters. Alternatively, you can pop any of the Star Wars movies into the DVD player and learn all you need to know for yourself.

Of course, we could also talk about the football quarterback as failed father-figure, but perhaps we'll save that for another time.

Faith in Fantasy

I saw the most recent Narnia film today with my daughter. (She's a big fan.) On the whole, I'd have to rate it a failure, certainly inferior to the first and best, and even a hair below the second. Though it had plenty of promising material--a high seas adventure in search of enchanted swords and missing lords, a boy who turns into a dragon, a pool that transforms all it touches to gold--for me, all of these elements fell flat. And the reason is simple: the film had no faith in its own fantasy.

That's the problem with allegory, and the Narnia films, though they've been softened somewhat from the overtly allegorical books, are nonetheless allegories. (At one point in the film Aslan tells Lucy, "I am known by a different name in your world, and you must come to know me there." Yawn.) Allegory, by its very nature, empties fantasy of its mystery and appeal and turns it into a mere facade or excuse for something else, something supposedly deeper and presumably more important. Allegory won't let fantasy simply be; it insists that fantasy has to mean, and what it means cancels out the very vessel that holds the meaning. So instead of a thrilling adventure, you get a dull lesson in temptation and sin. Instead of true imagination, you get a sermon. Instead of a talking lion, you get talking points about the Son of God.

I say all this, remember, having nothing against the Son of God. As Martin Luther King Jr. Day approaches, I think we would all do well to remember what the Son of God said, and try to live our lives, as King did, a bit more in his example.

But King was no allegory. Neither was Christ. They were living models of the spiritual life, and when they told us to follow them, they didn't need a talking lion to make their case.

So let's have both faith and fantasy, and keep the two separate. Let's allow life to be mysterious and unknowable for its own sake (that's fantasy) as well as mysterious and unknowable for some higher purpose (that's faith). Let's not demean faith by calling it a fantasy. But let's not demean fantasy either by insisting it has to be the handmaiden of faith.

Tron, Reloaded

I saw the remake of Tron a couple days ago with my son. He gave it a 9 out of 10 (but then, he never gives anything less than an 8 if it's got spaceships and laser beams). I gave it about a 2. It was just plain awful.

The story made even less sense than the original: guy is somehow translated into his computer, where he has to fight programs in human form with spinning-laser-disk-frisbee-things and lightspeed motorcycles. One of the programs, a clone of the creator, wants to take over the world (he was designed to create perfection, and he's pissed when his creator suggests that perfection is unattainable). Another program, a really hot chick, turns out to be an angel of some sort. And yet another program, named Zeus (huh?), camps it up in possibly the most bizarre scene in the film, wherein he dances in white tailcoat and cane while the creator's son, who's also been zapped into the computer, gets his ass kicked.

We saw it in 2-D, thank God, because I don't think I could have taken all the blinking lights and neon laser thingies if I'd seen it in 3-D or, worse, Imax. But even in 2-D, it was barely watchable.

It was also, for what it's worth, yet another of the recent fantasy films that tries to insert a religious element into the mix. But its religion was so muddled and confused, it made me long for the simple allegory of Narnia and its ilk. The creator of the programs is kinda like Jehovah, see, except he's into a whole Zen Buddhist thing (except when he's kicking people's--er, programs'--asses), and the program that opposes him is kinda like Satan, I guess, and the cute girl is an angel, maybe, and the whole place is a utopian society, possibly, unless it's not, in which case it's something else. All they needed was a wise Native American elder to pronounce statements like, "The earth is our mother," and then they'd pretty much have covered everything.

I'd love to see a fantasy film that deals with religion in an intelligent way: not by bashing it (like Legion or your typical vampire film), reifying it into allegory (like Narnia et al.), or throwing every damn thing into the hopper and hoping it'll make sense somehow (like Tron). If you've got any suggestions, please, send them my way.

In the meantime, I think I'll go do a Zen Buddhist thing and kick somebody's ass.

Putting the "Christ" Back in . . . The Movies

It's the end of the year, which means it's time for the big blockbuster serial kiddie fantasies that have become Hollywood's mainstay since the dawn of the Star Wars era. I saw the first part of the seventh part of Harry Potter with my son and daughter, and I'll probably go see the latest Narnia installment with them as well; I might even check out the Tron remake (sequel?) for kicks.

But I'll tell you, I'm starting to get a bit annoyed by the way in which the studios, influenced by the likes of Walden Media, are inserting subliminal Christian messages into all these kids' films.

With Harry Potter--not a bad film, by the way, though it could have used a couple fewer scenes of Harry and gang looking scruffy and confused out in the British countryside--there's the whole Savior/Satan thing, with Harry being "The Chosen One" and Voldemort being, well, a snake. With the Narnia films, there's the C. S. Lewis Christian allegory (which was the main reason J. R. R. Tolkien, as stauch a Christian as his friend Lewis but a far better fantasist, hated the books). A while back, there was Bridge to Terabithia, with its really unsettling discussion of whether one of the main characters was going to hell or not because she didn't attend church regular; earlier this year there was the final Toy Story installment, with its title characters very nearly being consumed in a junkyard incinerator that was as vivid an image of hell as can be. So we're getting a good number of veiled Christian stories in our children's films, and I for one find this troubling.

Mind you, I'm not knocking Christianity. Nor am I arguing that there shouldn't be films with Christian themes. Christianity is a powerful and pervasive cultural force, and movies need to deal with it. What I object to is the use of children's fantasy films as a "wedge" to introduce Christianity into secular culture, much as Intelligent Design has been used as a wedge to insert creationism into the science curriculum and the Institute for Historical Review has used historical revisionism to insert Holocaust denial into the scholarly community. I don't have a problem with The Passion of the Christ (though personally, I couldn't watch it till the end; its depiction of torture was just too gruesome). I do have a problem with The Passion of Harry Potter.

If Christians want to disseminate their message, they are free to do so. I even encourage them to do so--if their message is to love one's neighbor, to do good, to forgive others their trespasses, to judge people by the content of their character not the color of their skin. But Christianity doesn't, or shouldn't, need to proselytize on the sly, through seduction or misrepresentation; if it's really as good as it claims to be, it should present itself openly, with no disguises, and let its audience judge for themselves. That was Christ's method, after all: he told it as he saw it, with no concessions and no prettying-up of the sacrifices entailed, and he let people choose for themselves.

A sermon should be a sermon. It shouldn't be a toy, wrapped like a Christmas present to tempt the young and unwary.

Trick or Treat

Halloween, in case I haven't told you already, is my favorite holiday. There are lots of reasons for this, most of them obvious: the imaginative aspects, the fun of dress-up, the candy, the ghost stories. Then there's my own special reason: Halloween is the only holiday that's almost entirely politician-proof. When's the last time you heard some blowhard spouting off about how Halloween expresses the values that made this country great? "Our long-suffering pagan ancestors, in the days of yore...." It just ain't gonna happen.

I had a great Halloween this year, though it was tinged by a sad note: my old animation teacher, Tippi, died several weeks before. Tippi (or Priscilla, as I discovered from the obituary she was named) was one of the great influences of my young life, when, at the age of nine, I joined her class at the local arts center to learn the craft of stop-motion, cell, and other forms of animation. With regular-8 camera in hand, I produced lots of wobbly, jerky claymation shorts in hopes that one day I'd become the next great stop-motion animator, following my heroes Willis H. O'Brien (who animated my favorite movie of all time, the 1933 King Kong) and Ray Harryhausen (whose swan song, Clash of the Titans, was remade earlier this year). Of course, it didn't work out that way; stop-motion went the way of the dinosaurs when computer-generated effects hit their stride, and in any event, I'd moved on to other venues by that time. But I still think of Tippi as one of the most important people in my life, one of the first people who took entirely seriously my love of fantasy and my desire to live a life not altogether according to convention. Several years before she died, I had the pleasure of presenting her with a copy of my book on fantasy film, in which she receives acknowledgment. I acknowledge her again here as an extraordinary woman and an undying part of who I am today.

And speaking of early childhood influences, who should I run into while taking my kids out trick-or-treating (my son in homemade General Grievous costume, my daughter in homemade Ms. Pac-Man monster suit) but one of my childhood friends, Herman, with whom (among many other things) I used to construct Halloween haunted houses in my parents' basement? We'd lost touch for many years, then reconnected several years ago, lost touch again, and now (having traded emails) I expect we'll keep the friendship going once more. It was at Herman's house that I first saw some of the fantasy films I remember best today; on his birthday, his family would set up a rented projector in the livingroom and a bunch of us boys would watch such movies as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (another Harryhausen classic) and The Blob (which made just about all of us sick). I've carried on the haunted-house tradition with my own kids; at our annual Halloween party, my son, the younger of the two, squats inside a cardboard box and pulls all the fishing lines that make ghosts and werwolves and devils dance while my daughter reads a script full of spooky names and (age-appropriate) scary scenarios. So just like Tippi, Herman was one of the first people who helped nurture my love of the fantastic, and bumping into him on Halloween was both a perfect coincidence and quite a treat.

Another coincidence, this one more of a trick: I was unable to attend Tippi's memorial service because it conflicted with my Halloween party. But I guess you could say, in the truest sense, that she was there in spirit.

Troubled Dreams

As summer winds to a close and the school year looms, I treated myself to a film I'd heard only good things about: Inception. I'm happy to report that the reviewers didn't lie; it's a great film, one of the best sci-fi films I've seen in a while. Maybe not quite Blade Runner or Alien quality, but right up there.

Inception is the kind of science fiction I like best: the kind that wears its science (and its fiction) lightly, with whatever visionary elements it introduces operating in the service of an investigation into what it means to be human. The film takes place in a time that could be our own, with one small but significant exception: a technology (or technique) exists whereby individuals called "extractors" can enter other people's dreams to steal information. The story revolves around the efforts of one extractor, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, to perform a reverse (and, most people believe, impossible) operation: to implant an idea in a dreamer's mind, a process called "inception." I won't go into the details of why or how he does this; suffice it to say that in order to make the implanted idea stick, he and his assistants reason that they have to go deeper into the dreamer's mind than a single layer of dreaming, not only into a dream within a dream but into a dream within a dream within a dream. Needless to say, this leads to some very cool and creepy stuff where the edges of reality and fantasy blur and nothing is quite what it seems.

Inception is full of startling, Matrix-generation visuals, where dream burglars scamper about ceilings and walls and entire cityscapes unfurl from sand and surf. But at its heart, it's not about the mind-blowing images or mind-bending plot but about two of the most basic human emotions: guilt and grief. During an early experiment in the construction of dream-worlds, it turns out, DiCaprio's wife came to doubt the reality of reality, with devastating results--and DiCaprio's character is hounded by the belief that it was he who led her down this path. Thus when he (and we) enter the dream-world, we're entering the world of trauma: a place of frozen time and deadly distortion, a place where early, awful events have produced demons from which the dreamer can neither escape nor awake. To its considerable credit, the film mostly suggests these horrors rather than divulging them; I kept waiting for the monster to pop out of the closet, but it never does. And in that sense, one is left at movie's end with an uneasy feeling akin to the characters': there's no simple resolution, no quick catharsis, just a sinking realization that the real work has yet to be done.

Maybe I saw Inception at just the right time, given my recent thoughts about reality versus fantasy, the actual against the virtual. Maybe I was drawn to it because it resembled some of my own recently published fiction, such as Your Name Here. Or maybe, in the larger sense, I saw it at the right time of life: smack in the middle, when I'm thinking about how my past has shaped my present (and how it will continue to cast its shadow on my future). Whatever the case, I know this film--like a dream--will stick with me for a long time.

The Last Bare Ender

My son, who treats anything and everything longer than it is wide as a lightsaber, has been begging me to take him to the movie The Last Airbender, so today I finally relented. It didn't look too good from the previews (the title alone is preposterous enough), and the critics skewered it. So I was figuring on just grinning and bearing it, hoping it wasn't too painful.

Oddly enough, it wasn't painful at all. Yes, the acting was amateurish; yes, the plot was slow and incoherent in spots; yes, the concept as a whole is kinda dumb. (And the directing wasn't that smooth either; you had to love the decision at one point in the film to frame the back of the Fire King's head in immense close-up and crisp focus while the rest of the shot, approximately 85% of the screen, was a distant, smudgy blur.) But the special effects were arresting, the various kingdoms convincingly realized and differentiated, and some of the action sequences--including the climactic battle of fire versus water--quite impressive. For a summertime kiddie fantasy film, it did what it was supposed to do: kept the kids entertained and the adults at least mollified.

(My only real complaint was the phony scene in which the princess of the Water Kingdom, a peripheral character with whom we have no reason to identify, sacrifices herself to restore the moon spirit her people need to defeat the Fire Nation. It was mechanical, unconvincing, emotionally flat, and utterly pointless, the kind of paint-by-numbers tear-jerking that annoys far more than it affects.)

I did notice, however, that this film is yet another in the tradition of "humans against the gods" fantasy films I identified in earlier posts, following in the train of Clash of the Titans and The Lightning Thief. In the scene just before the princess's sacrifice, when the Fire Nation general kills the fish within which the moon spirit resides (don't ask), he snarls, "We are the gods now!" It came out of nowhere; there was no indication earlier that the Fire Nation was anything but imperialistic, certainly no mention that they imagined themselves superior to the gods. But there it was. I've generally maintained that the more illogical and pointless a device like this is, the more it tells us about widespread cultural convictions and anxieties; when a film with zero obvious investment in the issue jumps on the Gods R Us bandwagon, we can safely say it's entered the cultural bloodstream.

We'll have to wait for the sequel to see if this goes anywhere (yes, the film ends on a cliffhanger, with its titular character having mastered only two of the realm's four elemental powers and the King of the Fire Nation dispatching his evil daughter to finish the novice airbender off). But whatever the future holds for this particular series, I think it's evident that something elemental is indeed going on in such films--something environmental as well, I believe. Though fewer and fewer Americans accept the reality of climate change, though the federal government has done absolutely nothing to address that issue, though we continue to live and consume as if there's nothing to be worried about, I suspect that we are deeply worried, so worried that our fears are slipping out even--or especially--in the most innocuous, fantasized, and easily ignored cultural places.

I read a couple days ago that scientists are predicting the human race will go extinct within the next century due to overpopulation, pollution, and resource depletion. We are the gods now. And we're bending the elements past the breaking point.