Have I told you about Louis/Lestat syndrome?

It took a lot for me to get into Life on Mars, but once I did I gobbled it up. If it had been a book I would have called it a page-turner. I was dying to find out what was going to happen to Sam, and the individual episodes were, I thought, nails-bitingly tense due to the palpable vulnerability of the protagonist, which John Simm did so well. Best TV drama I’ve seen in ages for both writing and acting, despite an overly complicated and (in a way) depressing ending.

So I thought I’d check out the sequel, Ashes to Ashes, which seems to be popular with both critics and the public. As far as I can tell from the first half of the first episode (I couldn’t watch any more), it’s a giant pile of crap. I should have seen this coming from the interview with Matthew Graham, one of the creator-writers of the shows, where he talks about the final episode of Life on Mars and how Sam’s really repressed and he didn’t want to put Sam back in the modern world. The comments were bizarrely off-base for what I’d been watching: in the show Sam’s relentlessly heroic and always right (it would have been unbearable with a lesser or less charming actor), and Hunt is, in addition to being a brutal bigot, always wrong. Sure, you can see how Sam Tyler’s repressed, a prig even, but it’s nothing that’s ever explored on the show, nor is Hunt given any redeeming qualities (besides Glenister’s charm).

I call Louis/Lestat syndrome: it’s just like when Anne Rice rejected Louis, the narrator of Interview with the Vampire, in favour of Lestat in The Vampire Lestat (and the novels after that). She said that the whiny Louis, depressed and tormented by his conscience, represented herself at a time in her life that she never wanted to look back on (dealing with her daughter’s death, I believe). From then on she focused on the Nietzschean Lestat. Now the problem here - besides the fact that I loved poor tormented Louis, I wanted to hug him and comfort him - is that while an amoral vitalist can be a great character in small doses, when they’re given center stage they’re… just camp. It happened to Lestat in his first starring novel, and it got even worse after that; and it’s happened to Gene Hunt in Ashes to Ashes. Anne Rice sold a lot of books with Lestat, and Gene Hunt apparently has a following, but Interview with the Vampire is still the only Anne Rice novel that might qualify as a work of literature.

But that’s just the beginning of the problems with Ashes to Ashes. There’s also:

1. The early Seventies, at least when rendered noirishly as they were in Life on Mars, have acquired a certain seedy mystery. What the hell is atmospheric about the early Eighties? It just makes me cringe. Also, 1970s cop shows: fun. 1980s cop shows: hide me. It’s Too Soon.

2. Keeley Hawkes, the new John Simm, is no deeply anguished soul, thus canceling out the vulnerability factor that gave the original show such a lot of tension. I think sexual tension is supposed to replace it, but unfortunately Glenister had way more chemistry, sexual and otherwise, with Simm than he does with this chick. Hawkes is gorgeous but way annoying; she has clearly only been invented so that Graham can fulfill his own sexual fantasies of getting together with Hunt. I would so like to be kidding. And poor Glenister, who was very good at playing a violent bigot, is too old for this sex god thing, and deserves better. Speaking of deserving better, Hawkes wakes up in 1981 dressed as a hooker and has to walk around like that for about a quarter of the episode. I so loved these writers after Life on Mars, I was willing to excuse that, something about “well in your Id you’d be dressed like a prostitute, right?” Yeah. Load of crap.

3. No mystery about what Hawkes is doing there, which is what made the last one a page-turner. If there’s a mystery instead about “what this place really is,” I’m not sure that I want to know if it’s as metaphysical, metafictional, and mind-bending as the last episode of Life on Mars, which bordered on the goofy.

I have no doubt this gets better, but something drastic might have to happen to make me give it a chance. Maybe Keeley Hawkes could play the new incarnation of The Master. Got no problem with that!

--Tagged under: anne rice--

--Tagged under: louis vs. lestat--

--Tagged under: life on mars--

--Tagged under: ashes to ashes--

--Tagged under: television--

--Tagged under: interview with the vampire--

UK TV

In need of ways to waste my time as the semester closes in on me and as I wait for the big Xmas/New Years’ finale of this series of Doctor Who (incidentally, Waters of Mars was one of Russell T. Davies’ dramatic triumphs, and bodes well for the finale - although NOTE TO RTD: can you please figure out a deus ex machina that doesn’t involve sound frequencies????)  I’ve been quite enjoying the UK version of Life on Mars (2006-2007). I tried to watch it when it first came out and my UK friends were excited about it, but because I was expecting sci-fi, I got quickly bored. Now that John Simm has appeared on Who as The Master, causing me to develop a raging crush, I have a reason to give it a chance, and the results are entertaining.

The show has six or seven premises going on. It’s a fish-out-of-water story about a policeman (Simm) who gets in a car accident and ends up in 1973; there’s good reason to believe he’s in a coma, but I don’t suppose we’ll find out until the end (if then) whether this is all a sort of dream or whether he actually travelled back in time. So it has a sci-fi element in the eerie Twilight Zone sense rather than the fighting aliens and monsters sense, with the overarcing mystery of what he’s doing there and the old sci-fi/fantasy chestnut of trying to figure out how to get home; plus it’s a “recent period” show (like Mad Men); plus it’s an odd couple crimefighting team show, because he’s forced to team up with his old skool Clint Eastwood-worshiping boss. At first it looks like it’s going to indulge in Mad Men-style nostalgia for the un-p.c. world it pretends to condemn (beating up suspects and planting evidence), but halfway through the first season it seems to have settled into a formula where it seems like Simm is wrong but he turns out to be right. This is a bit Mulder-and-Scully-ish and veers towards the preachy, so I hope they can find some kind of balance between the old and new methods.

John Simm has a job before him trying to make his utterly morally impregnable cop interesting and credible, but he’s the actor for it. Pasty and slight, with delicate features, he oozes vulnerability, so it feels like something is at stake when he goes up against the bad guys; at the same time he’s got enough swagger that you don’t doubt he can pull it off. Also, he and his big partner (Philip Glenister) exude odd couple love for each other that makes both their conflict and teamwork fun to watch. Like Mad Men, the show has a great period design and a fantastic soundtrack (early 70s British music). Unlike Mad Men, it’s political not just by virtue of being politically in/correct. British TV has always beat American TV at realism, particularly (so I’ve heard) in their seventies shows. Seventies Manchester is no Madison Avenue guilty fantasy; everyone is working class (at best) and struggling and violence lurks everywhere. It’s important that Sam Tyler has gone back to the world of his childhood, which he’s risen above and would like to forget; the show treats time as class. I keep wondering if he’s there to deal with his Daddy issues through Glenister, but the show hasn’t given Glenister much to teach so far, and in any case that would have to be treated carefully.

We’ve also been watching The Sarah Jane Adventures, starring Elisabeth Sladen. Den of Geek was right: it’s a better Doctor Who spin-off than Torchwood (at least pre-Children of Earth). Sladen, a 70s companion (those 70s again), was the most popular of the original show’s companions, a perky girl-next-door investigative journalist. She showed up on the new series for a guest appearance and lo and behold, she was more beautiful in her mid-50s than she’d been in her mid-30s. Russell T. Davies, in his great gay wisdom, couldn’t resist a hot older woman, so he gave her a kid’s show, as Torchwood was aimed at adults (Who at the family). I’m fairly sure that it’s The Sarah Jane Adventures, not Torchwood, that Davies masturbates to, popping Sladen into nifty 60s/70s outfits (mid-length velvet/leather coats and tall boots) and getting her to channel Emma Peel, which she pulls off miraculously for a 60-year-old. The show has a gorgeous primary-colours visual design, more uniform than Who’s, and subtly deals with issues of aging and loneliness: Sarah Jane has ended up alone (other than the children who help her out), and she’s enjoyably brittle and prickly; the early episodes play with the idea of the single, independent, eccentric older woman as “witch.” It’s nice to see a show where a 60-year-old woman and young teens are shown as competent, capable, and sensible: two age groups generally considered “useless” in our culture being brought together.

I have to imagine that UK TV is generally so much better* than US TV because a) there’s no Hollywood, so movies aren’t the goal; b) there’s a living theatre that’s connected to the TV industry, actors going back and forth between them; c) shows are commissioned by the series, so there’s no demand for a show to run forever and the writers and actors can do a couple of series and then move on to another project. In every good US TV drama that’s popular enough to last, the dry rot of soap opera creeps in early - it happened to Buffy, it happened to the X-Files, it’s nearly demolished House. Or else like Mad Men or Weeds, the show, no matter how eccentric, is designed as a soap in the first place, because you can’t sustain a formula series forever. I like a good soap as much as the next TV viewer, but it tends to quickly turn into which character is going to sleep with which one next (I can’t believe this House-Cuddy thing has stretched out over more than two seasons!) at the expense of the quality of individual episodes, and you can almost feel the ennui pouring out of the characters/actors at the fact that they’re still stuck in the same place with the same people - and so are we.

* I’m well aware that British TV crap is just as bad as American TV crap, also that American TV has achieved some memorable innovations - The Simpsons, Buffy - that are the envy of the British TV industry. Didn’t I complain at length that Torchwood and many aspects of the RTD era of Who were shallow Buffy rip-offs? I think I did. But at its best British TV is a writer’s-and-performer’s medium in a way that American TV just isn’t. Other than HBO, American TV neither uses nor produces serious acting talents (unless, like Hugh Laurie, they’re British), although it frequently launches comedic talents… into mostly crappy Hollywood movie careers.

--Tagged under: tv--

--Tagged under: life on mars--

--Tagged under: john simms--

--Tagged under: the sarah jane adventures--

--Tagged under: elisabeth sladen--

--Tagged under: uk tv--

--Tagged under: mad men--

--Tagged under: buffy the vampire slayer--

--Tagged under: doctor who--

The Stages of Descent of Camille Paglia

1. Back in 1990, when Sexual Personae was published, she was a bona fide genius. I’ve blogged before about how that book rewrote my brain when I read it as a 17-year-old, often by shocking me out of a lot of airy liberal assumptions I’d imbibed through osmosis. But the theory of art and culture was great too, even though now, over 15 years of way too  much education later, I’ve learned enough to disagree not only with her assessment of writers (that started happening immediately, as I read more of the writers included in the book; generally speaking, I like everyone she likes but also like most of the writers she hates) but with many points in her sweepingly broad overview of Western culture. Nevertheless, for over 10 years there wasn’t a single day that went by without thinking of something I learned in SP (fact or idea), nor could I write an essay without citing her. That’s how much I learned from that book.

Even then, though, 90% of what Paglia had to say was vastly unpopular, from her criticisms of feminism to her attacks on literary theory. (I have also learned enough to know that the latter are fairly sound: literary theory isn’t totally useless, and there are in fact huge areas of conceptual overlap between Paglia and, e.g., Bataille and Kristeva, although the early Paglia is a far better writer and clearer thinker than Kristeva and far less of a bore than Bataille, and far, far less arrogant than either, which is really saying something about their arrogance. But the truth is that intellectuals who go in for theory are pretentious and full of an entirely false sense of their intellectual superiority, based on the idea that if they sound smart, it must be so; while meanwhile equally smart people are being a lot less douchebaggish about it and are probably a lot more genuinely fascinated by ideas. And by “equally smart people” I definitely mean Me.) (As for her attacks on feminism - like the whole “date rape hysteria” thing - they may have been insensitive but they were necessary at the time. It was the crazy versus the crazy.)

Because of the unpopularity of her ideas, and a hyperbolic (she called it “sound bite”) style of self-presentation that made them seem a lot less complex than they were, Paglia was already reviled and misrepresented.

2. The two collections of essays that came out soon after SP were already a vast falling-off. Paglia is not suited to short forms, where her broad sweeping views, compressed, just seem cartoonish, and you basically need to be familiar with SP to put them in a philosophical context where they make sense. Nevertheless, “No Law in the Arena,” in which she gave her theory of sexuality in a nutshell, made a big impact on me. She also influenced my ideals: of scholarship, of respect for religion (even as athiests).

3. Despite her not being suited to short forms, her original Salon.com column was wonderful, mainly because she stuck to analyzing pop culture, and she was still just barely plugged into it, even though she turned her back altogether on anything avant-gardish that happened after her college years. The more she wrote about contemporary issues, though, the more obvious her demented loathing for liberal women became, really a self-loathing, like her adoration of Sarah Palin is a masochistic sort of narcissism. I don’t think - I don’t want to think - that this invalidates her theory of the female principle in SP or her critiques of “feminist excesses.” But if, as in her latest column, she’s going to - accurately - call out a public intellectual like Richard Dawkins on the demented psychodrama behind his attacks on religion, then fair’s fair, Cammy. I’d like to hear how Paglia’s voice changes when she talks about feminism!!

4. And now here we are in 2009, with Paglia’s second run as a Salon.com columnist. Now well into her dotage, she has completely lost touch with anything interesting or innovative in pop culture (Lady Gaga? don’t make me gag - and in any case, Paglia’s dismissive, as she would be of any female performer who emulates Madonna in any way, as she was of - the once-talented, and actual Paglia fan - Courtney Love - even though Paglia’s had an obsessive hate-on for Madonna for a decade), preferring bland mainstream pap - not even that, she was into that with Madonna in the 80s, now she’s gone MOR - seems to have turned into the very raving conservative lunatic that her ideological opponents always said she was (in fact she was once a libertarian aesthete, but it’s a hard position to maintain for life, apparently). And she’s picked this moment to hold forth on politics, not from the standpoint of her SP theories (she was still using those in the original column, which is why it worked), but like “a blogger” - that’s evidently what she thinks she is, despite being paid, and she seems to think it means being entirely uninformed on her topics.

And she still gets the same hate, but I can’t get behind the haters either, because they hate her for the same stupid, uninformed reasons they ever did, even though now it’s legitimate.

What the hell happened to Paglia? Whether the original two-volume version of SP was too insanely ambitious a project for anyone or she psychologically needed to fail like all of those women she accused of keeping themselves down throughout history, rather than being kept down by men, or whether she got distracted by pop intellectual fame, the fact is she failed. Well, many a brilliant writer or intellectual ends up a raving conservative lunatic - but her hypocrisy, misrepresentation, and total irrationality, in someone who was once my intellectual hero, is what gets me.

Not to mention the embarrassment now when I bring up her name in the context of an idea from SP. It didn’t matter that she was widely hated when I felt intellectually validated in being a fan. Now, though… well, presumably she’ll be dead before I am, and then the good memories will resume.

--Tagged under: camille paglia--

Shakespeare with Tits: Oliver Parker's Othello

First impressions:

1. I must have as specific an idea of Iago as I do of Hamlet, because this is the second one who’s seemed shockingly wrong to me.

2. This production’s not embalmed, like the Olivier, but suffers from the opposite flaw, which characterizes modern Shakespeare films: it’s manically busy. From the first shots of a gondola at night and Desdemona running secretly to be married, veil over her face, we know we’ve been downgraded to a cheap melodrama, and it affects the interpretations: the minor characters (Roderigo, Desdemona’s father) are just cartoon villains. It makes me appreciate the well-rounded, sympathetic characterizations of even the simplest characters in the Olivier version - a benefit of traditional Shakespeare.

3. Fishburne is elegant, restrained, and great to look at, but he doesn’t have a whit of Olivier’s authority.

4. You’d think the “realism” of having them settle the skirmish over Othello’s marriage as a courtroom scene would be more dramatic than characters standing around delivering speeches, but in fact it slows things down - all those tedious cuts back and forth. The director, Oliver Parker, is doing a hack-job, cutting away from speeches for literal-minded, cliched flashbacks. Oh, he did the 2002 Importance of Being Earnest? Yeah, that was terrible. Somebody (the director, I imagine) forgot to tell Judi Dench that Lady Bracknell is a comic role.

4. Branagh’s having fun, he can speak the language a hundred miles a minute (thumbs up from me), and in this crowd you can see what a skilled, clever actor he is. Fishburne’s his only competition, and most of Fishburne’s speeches are getting cut so he and Desdemona can suck face some more or strip their clothes off while the camera lingers. (The camera’s at least as fascinated by Fishburne’s body as by Desdemona’s.)

5. Rough sex as the explanation for why Emilia puts up with her husband and steals the handkerchief for him is better than any academic explanation I’ve ever heard. Although these days, for all I know that is an academic theory, which the movie stole.

6. The actor playing Cassio isn’t exactly bad, but he’s absolutely forgettable and the part’s been heavily cut so that a) a sub-plot that might add an extra layer to the play if we sympathized with him is sacrificed and b) the whole build-up of how Iago manipulates him into accidentally compromising Desdemona is completely lost. But who cares about plot when all these tits are around?

Final impressions:

1. Branagh’s smart, charming, and knows how to give a performance (and now I recall that he was a good Benedict), but he’s no Iago. Iago is Shakespeare’s most cynical character, incessantly suspecting the worst of everyone, a thorough pragmatist, materialist, and egotist - and paranoid. The puckish, puffy-faced Branagh’s just not… earthy enough. He’s great in the first temptation scene, though, playing expertly on Othello’s jealousy. But after that the acting gets overpowered by busy, busy, busyness. They can’t possibly just be talking, we might lose interest, you know. They have to clean guns or walk along the ocean or become blood brothers on a roof - how’s it possible to either give or watch a performance like this? In normal, non-Shakespeare movies, people are allowed to just talk in a room sometimes.

2. Fishburne’s a good, solid actor, but he’s making me see (for the first time in my life) why people think Olivier’s a genius. For all the mannerism and scenery-chewing of Olivier’s performance, it was far more powerful than this - a portrait of a man going mad from jealousy. Not that Fishburne’s able to construct a portrait anyway; the growth of his jealousy is a construction of editing and fantasy sequences. Saves the actors the acting, I guess.

3. My God, this is SO SLOW. Stage scenes have got to happen blindingly fast, one after another - this bit, that bit, bit’s over, next bit. But in a movie there’s all this realistic… “space.” Like dead air.

4. By the time you get to the scene where Iago’s prompting Othello to kill Desdemona, there’s been so much busy editing that you’ve forgotten why Iago wanted this. In the play there’s a gathering momentum that leaves you no room for questioning either Iago or Othello as jealousy tips over into murder: there’s a straight progression from the hatching of Iago’s plan to its execution and results. In the movie something else has taken the place of the momentum - the sense that Iago is “evil,” as a static character trait. I would have thought that was there in Shakespeare play, but it’s not in the same way. In the play we identify with Iago because he believes he’s injured, and it’s a (strange) given of drama that we’ll identify with any character who believes they’re injured - slighted, shamed, rendered impotent - and takes revenge for it, just as long as we meet them first. In the play Iago’s not a static character who’s at the same level of evil throughout. He’s a man full of such a sense of injury that nothing will satisfy it short of destroying Othello. I think Parker realizes that he needs to throw in a motivation for Iago once things go over the edge… so he has Branagh cry after he seals a blood pact with Othello over Desdemona’s death and Othello finally declares him his lieutenant. Parker’s clearly aware of the academic queer interpretation of the play (is that why Iago takes his wife from behind?), but having Iago cry at this moment out of nowhere is just weird. 

5. Since the Cassio sub-plot has been shoved aside, Desdemona’s missing for the whole middle of the movie, and comes back just to be prepared for the sacrifice - so literally that Emilia’s actually giving her a bath during their girl-talk scene after Othello struck her in public. (We need a bit of creepy female homoeroticism to go with the creepy male homoeroticism, right?) Desdemona’s none too bright in Shakespeare’s play, but here she doesn’t even have the sense to be scared. She’s just the dewy nubile girl in the horror movie (shades of Psycho) for us to gaze upon erotically while we anticipate what she doesn’t know is coming. The ironic thing is that the Shakespeare’s so close to this - all you have to do is miss seven or eight layers and it’s a cheap sex-horror melodrama. But then, that’s the movie Parker wants.

Verdict: Oliver Parker is a genuine moron, an incompetent director who should never be let near classics of theatre. Unlike Baz Lurhmann, he doesn’t have the skill, intelligence, or inventiveness to make Shakespeare modern and “exciting” while being faithful to its spirit and offering new ways to think about it. Then again, Lurhmann was smart enough not to take on one of the great tragedies.

I have to high-five myself for calling Parker an idiot just based on the one scene we watched in class, even though Fishburne’s performance made me cry - because Parker cut away from the murder scene, which anyone with the most elementary knowledge of theatre would tell you was a moron move: it breaks the tension that’s the material a playwright works with.

Compared to this trash, the elegance of the structure of the Olivier version - both the staging and even Stuart Burge’s (who?) film direction - makes it look brilliant. Branagh’s performance is flashy and technically skilled at the same time, but he’s defeated by a director and format that won’t let him give his character a sound psychological basis, and so it’s not very resonant (besides his wrongness for the part). Seeing this right after the Olivier version makes me wonder if it’s possible at all to make films out of Shakespeare’s great tragedies as opposed to filming stage versions. The minor tragedies and the comedies do fine because they don’t depend on actors having to construct and sustain difficult characterizations.

After watching the Olivier and then this I find myself baffled at how movie actors can create a character at all. I know they can, but you definitely cannot perform a theatre role if conventional movie techniques are used with total disregard of the original medium. It’s not the same character.

--Tagged under: othello--

--Tagged under: shakespeare--

--Tagged under: theatre vs. film--

--Tagged under: oliver parker--

--Tagged under: kenneth branagh--

Olivier's Othello

I’ve launched my project of watching every famous filmed version of Shakespeare I can find on the internet or at the library with Olivier’s Othello (1965).

First impressions:

1. Frank Finlay’s naturalistic Iago is such a bore I’m falling asleep. At first I thought this might be a good thing, since Iago tends to steal the play when you’re reading it, quite against your will, even though it’s Othello and Desdemona we feel for. Unfortunately, Iago is the star of the play - he’s on so much and talks so much, while Othello is mostly absent for the first half, that if he’s no fun, the play sinks like a stone. There’s no sense of evil anticipation in Finlay’s portrayal, which kills the suspense and excitement dead, let alone any attempt to explore Iago’s psychology.

2. As usual, the small parts, the ones that make you fall asleep when you’re reading, are expertly rendered. Derek Jacobi’s Cassio (despite a little-girl wig and a tendency to play drunk like Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow) is played just as Shakespeare wrote him (a nice fellow with a weakness for drink and women who would never consider seducing his general’s wife) and lots of bouncy fun, and now I do want to see his Hamlet. Robert Lang is also excellent in the much smaller part of Roderigo, a slimey, naive little half-wit who’s mentally overpowered by Iago at every turn.

3. Why are the good Shakespeare plays so exciting to read and such a bore to watch in production? I realize this is a filming of the stage version, not a proper film version, but can we at least all pretend that we’ve just survived a tempest, to give some stakes to Othello and Desdemona’s reunion? Why is everyone acting embalmed?

4. Olivier’s Othello. According to accounts on Wiki, it’s high camp consisting of a made-up accent and special walk. Throw in a lot of minstrel-type grimaces, and you’ve got a pastiche of every kind of politically incorrect representation of blackness up to 1965. I went in with an open mind, but it’s a truly bizarre, tic-filled performance. No more bizarre than anything Marlon Brando went on to do after Streetcar, though - it seems to be what befalls great actors who’re given their way too much. On the other hand - what’s he supposed to do? It’s not like the Shakespeare was being historically accurate to blacks (and which blacks?) of his day, or of his source’s day. Othello’s such a pastiche of Otherness that he seems to be a conflation of African and Arab.

5. Once Othello and Iago start getting scenes together, things pick up - the characters do play off each other well. The first tempting scene is a thing of beauty - sudden stakes appearing with the great bit of business of Othello putting his arm around Iago, and then the other shoe dropping with the cry of “O beware of jealousy my lord!” Nicely done all around.

6. Othello’s costumes are great, and the weird-looking Olivier has never looked better (or - oddly enough - more masculine). It’s Olivier’s own exoticism and peacockery that he’s letting loose in this performance, after all.

Final impressions:

1. The Othello and Iago scenes are terrific. They’re written for maximum dramatic tension, even sensationalism and horror, and neither actor overpowers the other. Despite the slow start, once these scenes start, the production takes off.

2. The bedchamber scene between Desdemona and Emilia is brilliant. I can see that (like Olivier’s very physical performance) it would have worked even better onstage - real chills. The anticipation-of-murder scene is always a good place for the playwright to go to town, and Shakespeare makes the most of the opportunity. It’s too bad they cut Emilia’s feminist speech in defense of adulterous women, although the feminism of the play is still written all over it - as in the scene prior to this one where Othello strikes Desdemona in public, to the vocal horror of the visiting statesmen.

3. Othello is a well-made play, perhaps more than the other major tragedies. A woman being suspected of adultery because she’s generously advancing a man’s suit; the device of the lost handkerchief; the way that Iago peaks in his power and then slowly gets caught in his own trap - it’s all the stuff of Ibsen.

4. The murder itself wasn’t that powerful. We watched the same scene from the Branagh Othello in class and Laurence Fishburne was much more effective than Olivier, although the focus on Othello threw the scene to him, and Desdemona was very weakly portrayed. Maggie Smith does a good job of playing the docile interpretation of Desdemona, wracked with shock and anger and eroticized passivity, but the final debate on the bed is still too calm.

5. I started sobbing anyway when Emilia came on the scene, and didn’t stop for the rest of the play. Emilia’s such a great role that all you need is a competent actress. If you want to know why Shakespeare’s a great dramatist, it’s there in the way he uses her repetition of “My husband?” (two simple words) to bring about the recognition of the tragedy. As a lower-class woman Emilia gets to speak up for the grievances acted upon women in the play, and as the voice of righteousness, condemning her husband, she’s powerfully moving. It’s also the most ironic exposure scene I know of in drama, topping even Hedda Gabler’s entrapment by the slimey doctor. The woman-hating Iago is undone by his wife, who turns out to be the only person he can’t control - because of her loyalty to her own persecuted sex. Jacobean theatre is of two minds about women: on the one hand, it luxuriates in the erotic horror of their persecution and torture; on the other hand, it uses the opportunity to speak out against the real abuses suffered by women. The upper-class heroines in Shakespeare’s tragedies (Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia) tend to be far more docile than in, say, Ford’s or Webster’s (Shakespeare likes his female Christ figures), but he makes up for it by letting loose his lower-class women. He’ll return to this ploy in The Winter’s Tale, where Paulina is a cross between Emilia and the Fool in Lear.

6. What to make of Olivier’s flailing-and-shouting performance? I have a distinct feeling this is how it would have been done in Jacobean theatre, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only choice for a modern actor. Olivier loves to physically contort himself, too, which is probably why he’s still most remembered for Richard III. The discomfort with the performance comes from all the un-p.c. implications. For example, his monkey-like, “primitive” reaction right after he’s killed Desdemona, sticking his tongue out and manipulating her head. It’s a defensible bit of grotesque stylization, not unsuitable for Jacobean tragedy, but I don’t know if it will ever be acceptable again post-p.c. (How did he even get away with this in 1965?) For all his contortions and grimaces, it’s an often moving and certainly charismatic performance, and I like how the speed with which everything happens is emphasized - in the space of a day Othello’s transformed from a noble man and loving husband to a murderous madman. Fittingly for tragedy, everyone’s hysterical and there’s no time to think.

7. The play really is full of homoerotic touches (literally), and it’s nice to see that they’re all here even though the queer intepretation isn’t foregrounded.

8. I’ve thought this before, but more than any other Shakespeare protagonist, Othello is seen from the outside. That seems to be the only effect handling a protagonist of another race has on Shakespeare - he certainly loves and pities Othello and considers him a great man. But it’s one reason Iago shares the lead role with Othello, who can only be known to Shakespeare through dialogue.

--Tagged under: olivier--

--Tagged under: othello--

--Tagged under: shakespeare--

Hamlet on YouTube

After a lifetime spent resisting the idea of ever watching an actor perform Hamlet, the upcoming David Tennant DVD release has suddenly made me want to plunge into that world and compare and choose. I saw the Olivier Hamlet, which made me never want to watch another (all I remember is him clinging to Gertrude’s skirts the whole time; I guess this was in the era of Freud redux), but I had to watch the Almereyda Hamlet for a class and I thought Ethan Hawke was okay but no more. The only praised Hamlet of the DVD era I’m unlikely to check out any time soon is Kenneth “pudding-faced” Branagh’s. I’m sure he made a great Henry V. Olivier’s greatest film Shakespearean turn is probably Richard III - it’s an early play and a hammy role, and Olivier served it up so well that John Lydon apparently based his Johnny Rotten character on the performance. Even the most admired Shakespearean actors seem to do better, at least on film, in the one-note roles.

Jude Law is the latest high-profile actor to assume the Hamlet role, and I think he’d be passable. He was easily the best thing, the only alive thing, in Stephen Fry’s vanity project Wilde. (I have the greatest admiration for the young Fry of Fry and Laurie, but he shouldn’t have applied himself to Wilde, who was self-pitying enough without Fry’s help.) What I admired about Law’s Bosie Douglas was the actor’s total lack of vanity. To understand that you are supposed to be playing an insufferable prick requires actorly intelligence, and Law also brought to the part, and to his role in The Talented Mr. Ripley, a mercurial charm rarely seen onscreen these days.

The mercuriality is right for Hamlet, but the amoral opportunism he’s brought to his best screen roles would be better suited for Prince Hal - in fact he’d make a fantastic one… although he already pretty much did the part in Wilde. A fellow female Shakespeare fan agreed with me that other than Hamlet, Hal is the sexiest Shakespeare character, but although there’s a strange connection between the roles, Hal is Hamlet one-note. There’s a sense that both characters ultimately don’t really give a damn about anyone but themselves, and they both like play-acting, but Hal is a cold-blooded opportunist, while Hamlet’s contempt is intellectually and morally based. Hamlet’s charisma is intellectually based, too, and having a too-handsome Hamlet might throw the play, which is already enormously weighted in Hamlet’s favour, out of balance.

Derek Jacobi’s delivery of the “To be or not to be” speech, found on YouTube, is interesting: the production values and eyebrows give me the sniggers, and Jacobi’s jaw-droppingly effete, but he demarcates the changing thought processes in the soliloquy instead of just reading it off, and when he starts playing with the arm of the chair, he’s magnetic. Now if only he’d read it fifty times faster. Perhaps the idea at the time was to read Shakespeare incredibly slowly so the audience could follow. My own theory is that Shakespeare produced so many words with such ease that he couldn’t have cared less if the audience didn’t hear half of them, and Hamlet in particular should speak his lines with great speed and as if he’s just having the thoughts for the first time and making it up on the spot - as in fact the writer was doing. The fertility and spontaneity of Hamlet’s intelligence and inventiveness is key to the character.  

(This to be or not to be mashup is pretty great, by the way - I especially like the lego men.)

Jacobi’s Hamlet, from the early 80s, starts off the Hamlets on The Guardian’s list of best modern interpretations (post-50s) that I could find on YouTube. Here’s Michael Pennington, also early 80s. The gravedigger’s terrific (it’s hard to go wrong with the low comedy parts), too bad Pennington has such a grating voice (seems to be one of the standard modern Shakespeare accents, and it’s unbearable), and his interpretation is far too earnest for my tastes. I’m never a fan of acting-by-panting either. But things pick up during the graveyard fight, like I was saying in my Hamlet review, even though they don’t grapple in the grave. (The effect of hearing the lines coming out of the grave would be silly, to be sure, but if I’m not mistaken that’s the point.)

Here’s Richard Burton (not on the list), who will live forever in my heart for his performance in the film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, doing my favourite scene in literature (“Get thee to a nunnery”)… and it’s pure junk. All the angsty shouting (both of them)! And what a big head he has. His portrayal of Albee’s George was closer to Hamlet than this. Early Romantic Burton: do not want. (Or if he must needs play Shakespeare, Antony’s his role, alright, or else one of the villains.)

Same scene from Olivier’s film version. The way he tosses the book over his shoulder at the beginning of the clip nearly made me LOL, it’s so ripe for parody. Olivier’s going for the big obvious interpretation here (that Hamlet suspects the ploy partway through and only pretends to be cruel to Ophelia - not that it helps her!). It smooth out the problem of Hamlet’s undermotivated cruelty here, but unfortunately it doesn’t really work with the text, where Hamlet’s manic, jittery, and nasty from the moment he lays eyes on her. (Personally I read “Where’s thy father?” not as a sudden suspicion but as his tip-off to Polonius - if Polonius were smart enough to get it - that he’s on to him.)

My quick survey of YouTube Hamlets would seem to confirm that I have such a fixed notion of how it should be played that no Hamlet will make me happy (unless I played/directed it!). But doubtless every great Hamlet brings at least some of the right qualities to the part, that it would be interesting to search out. Not so sure about Olivier, though. Being the greatest actor of your generation doesn’t mean you have the right qualities for Hamlet. That’s why I’m still holding out hope for Tennant, especially because his Shakespearean background is in comedy rather than tragedy. After the centuries of hype, if there’s one thing you can say for and about Hamlet, he’s still making me laugh-out-loud throughout now that I’m past my dozenth reading.

--Tagged under: hamlet--

--Tagged under: shakespeare--

Morality, tragedy, religion, drama, and sci-fi

Milton, in writing Paradise Lost, intended to justify the ways of God to man - and famously failed according to most readers despite some pretty compelling, if confusing, arguments (“sufficient to stand but free to fall”). Thinking about The Orestia in the wake of Children of Earth, it occurs to me that Aeschyles’ tragic cycle was an attempt to justify a fact of legend that was morally incomprehensible: the sacrifice of an innocent in order to make possible a fantastically stupid war. The act that precipitates the tragedy of The Iliad, Achilles’ denial of his war trophy, a captured girl, echoes the cause of the legendary war in the first place: Helen being stolen from her husband (which is a breach of etiquette). Later on Shakespeare’s going to pick up this trick of absurdly insufficient causes for his most painful tragedies: Iago or Edmund being slighted (like Achilles, whose sulking is motivated by both sex and politics), Lear being differently slighted, in a manner that’s emotionally devestating… but also no more than a breach of decorum by Cordelia. And we can even see a similar motif in fairy tales: the witch who’s not allowed to come to the party and therefore comes back when the princess is grown to take her revenge. A daemonic power has not been honoured, throwing everything into an imbalance that must be “rectified” at horrible cost. (In drama this is depicted in its purest form in Euripides’ Bacchae.)

There’s no way that Clytemnestra wasn’t as sympathetic to Aeschyles (or anyone familiar with the legend) in her revenge as Satan was to Milton in his rebellion. But to admit to that sympathy would be to say that a woman might be justified in murdering her husband - as unacceptable to a patriarchal society as admitting sympathy for the devil in a Christian one (just a different kind of patriarchy). And so each dramatist goes about trying to morally justify the morally unjustifiable legend. That may in fact be what the motive for drama originally was: attempting to make the archaic, pre-moral religious texts of a culture morally intelligible to a rational, part-secular society. Which incidentally shows how closely tied drama and morality are.

The crux of tragedy itself (which is amoral), as distinguished from tragic drama (which is moral), is imagining the most excruciating situations that could be forced upon you: the horror of killing your child or the worse horror (because children are property, while parents are authority) of killing your parent. This is what would be gripping the Athenian audience, and if anything the gruesome opening section of the death of Agamemnon is unsettling (in a Hitchcock way) because the audience will identify with Clytemnestra even though she’s presented as thoroughly evil. In order to try to make the tragic crux justifiable, Aeschyles is forced into the argument that women can’t go around killing their husbands or all anarchy would break loose. That is, he’s forced to argue this way because unlike the killings of Iphigenia or Clytemnestra, the killing of Agamemnon doesn’t deeply trouble anyone. Killing your husband, who is not blood, in revenge for killing your child, your most immediate blood, is no more tragic than having to kill your uncle in revenge for killing your father. (Children of Earth hints at these ancient debates of blood, with a gender reversal, in the sub-plot of Gwen contemplating abortion but then telling her husband that she would never do that to him.) By arguing that Agamemnon’s death was of greater consequence than the others, Aeschyles implies that the most troubling deaths aren’t troubling after all. While this misogynous solution would have played better to an ancient Athenian audience than it would today, I’m going to give them the credit of recognizing on some level that it was still incredibly lame, even lamer than the philosophically rather inspiring “sufficient to stand but free to fall.” But that’s what happens when you try to justify the ways of God to man.

It’s amazing how well all of this translates into a modern sci-fi/fantasy context. The most gripping parts of Children of Earth for me were the long, talky sections of debate as the British government tries to figure out how to “spin” the insoluble dilemma of sacrificing 10% of its children to stave off the murder of the human race through alien viral warfare. Their decision to make it look like it’s the aliens’ fault, that is, that they were gullible victims who weren’t just coerced but duped into what they did, repeats the uneasy idea lurking in the shadows of Paradise Lost that by fobbing off the introduction of evil into the world on Satan, God’s just doing the same thing that Adam is castigated for doing. And that is exactly the old theological problem of evil: if God is all-powerful, then he should have kept evil out of the world; if evil’s not his fault, then he must be Satan’s chump. Entire heresies developed out of this dilemma. Not to mention a lot of atheism, because without the problem of evil, the idea of an all-powerful benevolent God would look so good I’m not sure even Darwin could have put a sizeable dent in it. Then again without the problem of evil (i.e., suffering) we wouldn’t need the idea of God.

--Tagged under: shakespeare--

--Tagged under: greek tragedy--

--Tagged under: tragedy--

--Tagged under: torchwood--

--Tagged under: aeschyles--

--Tagged under: religion--

--Tagged under: television--

--Tagged under: drama--

--Tagged under: milton--

--Tagged under: paradise lost--

Is it ever a good idea to go biblical with your stakes?

Iphigenia is the genesis of a lot of the plotlines of Greek tragedy. She’s the maiden daughter of Agamemnon who was sacrificed so that his men could get to the Trojan War. When he comes home from the (pretty useless) war, the shits really hits the fan, since his wife is - sympathetically enough - waiting to repay him in kind (with the boyfriend she acquired while he was away). Such is the plot of Aeschyles’ Orestia, the foundational work of Western drama. Clytemnestra’s son Orestes has to revenge himself upon his mother for his father’s death, but since it’s his mother he’s polluted and pursued by The Furies until an impromptu trial is held by the gods, where it’s decided that the old blood revenge code of which The Furies are advocates needs to be transcended by a legal system based on justice… in which killing your mother is a lesser crime than killing your husband. And so Western drama begins, with a gesture towards a mythological foundation of Western civilization.

Euripides, meanwhile, treated the story of Iphigenia, and in his version she finds out what’s in store for her and ultimately offers herself as a heroic sacrifice, which turns out to be only creepy in a different way than the legend, where she believes she’s going to be married. I thought about this difference at the end of Torchwood: Children of Earth, which I finished watching today. I kept wishing someone would clue in the children and let them step up to the plate, or in one case, let the child know what his death meant. But that really doesn’t do much more than slightly let the audience morally off the hook.

Russell T. Davies doesn’t stint on the overt references to Greek mythology (the monster who demands a sacrifice of innocents at regular intervals) or parallel Biblical themes (Passover, Abraham and Isaac). I’ve heard Series 3 (really a mini-series, being in five parts) accused of “emotionally manipulative writing” by both fans and detractors. This isn’t emotional manipulation though - it’s emotional rape. The moral and emotional stakes are as high as it’s possible to get, and in getting to the classical tragedy roots of sci-fi/fantasy, Davies is, once again, following in the footsteps of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Only now he’s not just copying (after Messiahfying Doctor Who, like “death is my gift” Buffy), he’s moving into other territory - foundational myths of Western culture. It’s been a truism in drama for ages that you never rape an audience by presenting a child’s death as a consequence in an action picture. Even Hitchcock, who went far, once refused the opportunity. Deaths in drama have to be earned, and no drama earns that. But drama was founded on death of that kind.

One of the main things I loved about Buffy was Whedon’s discovery of a context where the stakes of classical tragedy could be used and made perfect sense in an era when “serious drama” hasn’t been able to use the stakes even of European tragedy for a couple of centuries. Davies’ imitations show that this discovery can be used by other TV fantasy writers. After finding the two Torchwood series painfully derivative, uneven, and marred by the inescapable presense of John Barrowman, I thought the mini-series was excellent (if long scenes of brutal moral debate in which you’re forced to actively engage - plus stuff and people blowing up - is your idea of good drama, it’s for you), and if what I’ve heard about the show getting no fourth series is true, it’s a shame, because it finally came into its own - and rendered Captain Jack Harkness, whether portrayed by John Barrowman or not, the darkest - the most tragic - superhero ever conceived. Fans of the series were understandably bummed out, but not being one in particular (or of the X-Files, from which the idea of children-stealing alien-government liasons was apparently stolen?), I was enthralled.

It’s really too bad that they did that terribly-acted storyline about Jack’s brother coming back to kill him, because this time Jack’s done something that really deserves a theme of eternal familial vengeance - and this time, for all the too-little-too-late cramming in of character background, Davies not only got Whedon but Euripides right.

--Tagged under: torchwood--

--Tagged under: science fiction--

--Tagged under: buffy the vampire slayer--

--Tagged under: russell t. davies--

--Tagged under: joss whedon--

--Tagged under: greek tragedy--

--Tagged under: euripides--

--Tagged under: aeschyles--

--Tagged under: television--

Death of the auteur

Gore Vidal’s comments on his stint as a studio-era Hollywood screenwriter have prompted me to reconsider auteur theory, which has only ever been a convenience of film criticism. It strikes me that the only reason “authorship” of a film, that inherently collaborative enterprise, has been assigned to the director is that unlike a play, a screenplay does not have a further life. The filmic interpretation is the only interpretation, and so whereas in theatre our interest is in the play, not the director (even if we can’t tell writing and production apart unless we’re familiar with either the text or other productions), in film the situation reverses: because what we’ve got before us is the interpretation, authorship goes to the interpreter.

This has created an ironic situation where we (both journalistic and academic critics) treat film as a branch of literature but fail to credit the writer(s), or even the writing itself, which we treat as sub-literary even when we regard the film as a masterpiece, because “as we all know” expectations for filmic writing, especially Hollywood films, is low, and film isn’t a literary medium anyway. (Wait… so then why are we studying it like it is one?)

In any case, “director” by itself isn’t an artistic function - not a creative one, anyway. The auteurists knew this, and so they singled out directors who were also producers and who usually had a hand in the writing. As auteur theory was adopted and developed by academic and non-academic film criticism alike it was decided that producers with a literary bent like Selznick and Val Lewton could also be auteurs. But what this means is that a director-producer, a producer-writer, a director-writer, or a writer-producer-director can be an auteur.

Auterism was a founding fiction of the serious consideration of studio-era Hollywood film, since for film to be an art (not part of the entertainment business) you had to locate an artist (not a bunch of craftsmen), and in order to interpret a film you needed to attribute intention. Ironically (again) auteur theory was being developed at around the same time other French intellectuals were calling for the death of the author in literary studies. Most devestatingly for auteur theory, Vidal points out that the presence of preoccupations in a director’s oeuvre doesn’t prove that he’s an artist. A stage director with enough power to choose what he wanted to direct would also be drawn to certain plays rather than others, obviously.

Later still it was admitted that a screenwriter could be co-auteur with a director if they had sufficient independent clout. But this hasn’t led to a different kind of analysis. Thorton Wilder’s given a perfunctory nod for his Shadow of a Doubt screenplay, then we’re back to talking about “Hitchcock this” and “Hitchcock that” in reference to the story and characters. This seems to hold true even of criticism of European films, to which established authors (Giradoux, Cocteau, Prevost) often contributed full screenplays (and not, as in the American system, drafts). As for Hollywood screenwriters who had enough of a personal style to gain their own reputation, they were usually comic writers (Sturges, Wilder) and usually went on to direct.

If we were to start paying more attention to the writing of classic Hollywood films, it would call for some radical reassessment of the director’s role. Case in point: Douglas Sirk. Sirk did not produce his films, and from what I’ve read had little or no hand in the writing, yet he’s been accepted as an auteur. He came to Hollywood from a background as a director in the German theatre, and as such he seems to have understood that his role was interpretive. But that role doesn’t have to be passive (as it seems to have been for William Wyler). Handed soap opera trash to direct, Sirk subjected the screenplays to subversive interpretations that brought out their Euripidean madness and the proximity of melodrama to tragedy. Forget his ironic signature shots showing a character “trapped” in a circle of their own doing. It was by heightening the luridness of the scripts almost to the point of surrealism, with a further surrealistic contrast with Ross Hunter’s vulgar, kitschy production design, that Sirk achieved his goal.

Just because the interpretation transcended the material, though, doesn’t mean that all of the writing in those screenplays was bad. Imitation of Life has some campy howlers (surely deliberate), but it also has two or three scenes (all involving the tormented Sarah Jane character) that any writer would be proud of. And the bookend design of the film, with the opening and closing scenes as mirror reversals, is a stroke of genius - whoever thought of it, Sirk or the screenwriters.  

What do you mean “impossible”?

But I like All That Heaven Allows almost as much, and that film doesn’t particularly benefit from the Sirkean treatment. The screenplay is kitsch, the acting is kitsch, the set design is kitsch, and the direction is kitsch. But the part of the movie that survives the kitsch is the screenplay - feminist and scathing towards suburban WASP conformity, with a fabulous ironic twist. According to Wiki, Sirk found the screenplay “rather impossible” and restructured the story - so I guess I’ll have to read Sirk on Sirk before I say too much about what kind of hand Sirk had in his films’ writing and how much creative control he was given at the height of his career despite not being the producer. It’s also possible that Sirk was no judge of the screenplay’s merits, being a European intellectual with no taste for soap opera that he couldn’t twist into lurid madness.

This screen’s gonna become REAL important…

The screenplay for All That Heaven Allows belongs to the same tradition as the 40s Bette Davis women’s picture Now, Voyager, where a woman trapped in WASP conformity goes on a path to self-discovery aided in equal parts by steamy romance and American transcendentalism. Now, Voyager was based on the bestselling novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, and while I believe all that’s been said about Prouty’s near-illiteracy, with the bad prose stripped away the continuity of her themes with those of Jane Austen and Henry James is revealed; and it’s in women’s pictures like ATHA and Now, Voyager that such continuity must be found, since such themes have dropped out of “serious literature” post-Modernism.

In the study of the Hollywood classics, the writing - often kitschy, never demanding or Modernist - has often been overlooked as an embarrassment, instead of which we hide behind the “auteur” notion and the magical transformative powers of the medium and the director. So from Now, Voyager to Bringing Up Baby to Gilda (and hundreds of others), the glories of classic Hollywood screenplays when they weren’t trying to be anything more than entertainments hasn’t been nearly celebrated (or analyzed) enough. To focus more on the writing would also force critics to consider more particularly what the director is bringing to the table - but that would require a theory of interpretation (and more knowledge of the technical side of film than most critics have). That may be the theory we need right now - not auteur theory.

--Tagged under: film--

--Tagged under: auteurism--

--Tagged under: film vs. literature--

--Tagged under: douglas sirk--

Wherein I continue to be a killjoy

Exhibit A: Where the Wild Things Are, the movie. I haven’t seen it, though I intend to take my five-year-old nephew to it if I get around to it. I half-heartedly echoed the general consensus that it would be “so cool,” mainly because I recalled from elementary school that the adherents of that book are fearsomely cultish (in a way Pride and Prejudice fans apparently aren’t allowed to be without being accused of lacking a sense of humour). I wasn’t read the book at home and came to it as an older child, and my reaction was, “So?” (Something I probably shouldn’t admit for fear of being accused of lacking taste even as a child, or something.) The ads put The Fear in me, the shots oozing a particular kind of shaggy-monster-following sense of wonder (incidentally not in the book, which thankfully avoids senses of wonder) that I knew would make my skin crawl, just a bit. When I heard that Eggars and Jonze were responsible for the movie, The Fear grew. Just the title of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius made me queasy, not for the personal but for the generational self-congratulation. But then, I was the kid who hated Catcher in the Rye - I thought Holden was a whiny little bastard. As for Jonze, I was shocked and appalled by the critical reception of Being John Malkovitch. There’s nothing inherently applaudable about narrative experimentation. With or without it, the narrative was boring, mainly due to the characters’ unpleasantness, and, above all, it was poorly resolved (Kaufman did create an impossible task for himself). Clever schmever, I thought it was an insult to my intelligence, and so I did not watch Adaptation, which I had a feeling I’d dislike even more. I am that most dangerous of things, the anti-hipster hipster, sharing the tastes of my generation in principle but seldom in fact. In fact it has created an agonizing dilemma whereby the more I like someone’s hair, glasses, and scarf the more I am apt to disagree with them on all other matters of importance. Not even I can deny the appeal of McSweeney’s design, as well. If only superficial aesthetics were enough. ARGH!

Exhibit B: Stephanie Zacharek’s review of the movie on Salon.com. I used to find Zacharek’s contrarian reviews interesting if seldom an indication of a movie’s value, but as she’s become more cantankerous she’s also become lazier, her ideas blurrier. This review is nothing but a series of not-at-all-veiled snarling potshots at my generation (hipsters, Gen Xers, emos, whatever you want to call it, although that’s to blur together a couple of generations - which is fair enough, I do recognize, with a shudder, that us Smiths-listeners birthed emo while ourselves moving on to the MOR whining of Coldplay or its arty version, Arcade Fire), and while I am a conflicted hipster, Zacharek makes her points with a sledgehammer. My God - could it be that a kid’s movie betraying a spirit of not wanting to grow up is reflective of the E(l)mo Generation, which in turn shows there’s something Terribly Wrong With the World Today? Well, you tell me: was Peter Pan reflective of something terribly wrong with J.M. Barrie’s generation - or the several subsequent generations for whom it was a stage standard? If so, you know, the world recovered from it and went on to give us Zacharek’s apparently mature and mentally-balanced generation… NOT. (Actually, to judge from the photo that’s on the web, Zacharek looks about the same age as me. So why are you hatin’ on the emos, Steph? We, and not their parents, made them.)

Exhibit C:

From the letter pages on the article:

Stunning Film & Shockingly Bad Review

This review stinks. In a mean-spirited way, it beats down all the remarkable inspiration and effort on the part of Jonze and Eggers to create a film that spans the imaginative worlds of both children and adults. When I saw the film, I was overwhelmed with its honesty about the nature of childhood frustration, how children reach into the deepest part of themselves when they are marginalized through the inevitable course of life. It especially speaks to how children’s imaginations can save them and bring them back to their “safe place,” into the arms of their parents and those who love them.

As Jonze and Eggers show us, life is a continuum of emotions and events that take us back and forth between the richness of childhood vs. the sterile world of adulthood. It’s not just two compartments (childhood OR adulthood) where the door slams, and one never again has access into the volatile frustrations or creative imagination of a child. We always have the capacity for both, they say. Jonze and Eggers are not indulging in their own stultified growth; they show very convincingly that the alienation that children feel during these years is normal. Venting, as Max has takes several forms. His first response is to act out, and this causes pain to everyone. Then, as Max reaches deeper into himself and the world of his monsters, he finds his own strengths to express the honesty of his longing to belong at home. The film is an honest rendering of Sendak’s story that speaks the language of the heart. A pox on this reviewer.

This is actually slightly more thoughtful and better-written than Zacharek’s review, but it’s still devoting a whole lot of pretentious wind to a kid’s movie. Don’t get me wrong, I think the classics of children’s movies and (especially) literature deserve analysis. But this reader review sounds like it was written by a child psychologist (I hope it actually was, and not by a parent who’s read too many books on child psychology!), which is the whole queasy-making problem, because the movie, too, seems like it was written by one. Incidentally, Zacharek’s description of the beginning of the movie makes it sound a lot like the set-up of E.T. - which I appreciated as a kid for its realistic (and, as I recall, not at all mushy - and this was Spielberg!) depiction of a post-divorce house in chaos. 30 years later we’ve got to go so “dark” that the kid’s biting people, or we won’t be accurately depicting all of that childhood frustration. Guess what - it’s way more frustrating to be an adult than to be a child, and if my kid was such a moody little Arcade Fire-listening twerp that he acted out by biting me, he’d find out about MY wild side. As I vaguely recall, Sendak’s book was about a kid still being in touch with his wildness (remember the Lost Boys in their animal costumes?), not “developing monsters” in response to socially-created anxieties - which, incidentally, has been a kid’s movie framing device since at least The Wizard of Oz, so let’s not place too much praise or blame on Eggars and Jonze.

Or maybe he bites mom because of the Oedipal complex. Now that would be Awesome.

Primal Masculine Therapy for little Emo Boys? You decide…

--Tagged under: where the wild things are--

--Tagged under: stephanie zacharek--

--Tagged under: film--

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