A Few Thoughts on Alice Through the Looking Glass

I saw this film with a friend the other night, and while I certainly wouldn’t call it a good movie, it’s also a somewhat frustrating one, because it contains a handful of strong points – elements that, if pursued more deftly, might have resulted in a much better film.  That’s what I want to look at today, things that I feel went both right and wrong.  (Note:  I’m sticking strictly with the movie here.  The current allegations against Johnny Depp are another matter.)  A few spoilers.

General complaints first.  It feels disjointed to me that the movie’s look is one of wonder and whimsy while the overall storyline is bogged down by family drama.  Season 1 of Once Upon a Timesold the Mad Hatter as a tragic (yet dark) figure, but try as Alice Through the Looking Glass might, it really can’t pull off the same.  All the sad eyes feel forced, the familial fallings-out feel too tritely-written, and the prevailing tone of the whole thing just feels out of place.  (Also, speaking of Once Upon a Time, the Queen of Hearts’s childhood origin story makes Regina’s villainous motivation seem almost rational.)  To couple the father-son, sister-sister angst with the technical visuals and bonkers silliness of Wonderland doesn’t work for me.

As with the first film, the less you know about the book, the more sense the story makes, but I don’t begrudge it that.  After all, it was sold from the beginning as a revisionist version of Alice’s adventures.  Besides, I’m not so attached to the book that I mind all the changes, and it’s not like the book would give too much of a cohesive story arc for a film to work with, anyway.  While some of the newly-imagined plot, like Hatter angst, doesn’t interest me, others, like Hero!Alice, are pretty neat.  On the latter front, Alice’s transformation into a BAMF is written a little too obviously at time, but I like the general idea of it, and some of it comes off really well.  The opening scene, wherein Alice (now traveling the world in a ship left to her by her late father) escapes a band of pirates due to her knowledge of the sea, creative thinking, and sheer nerve, makes me very happy, and that combination of smarts and bravery serves her well when she gets back to Wonderland.

It’s interesting to me that every scene set in our world is basically, “Boo, Victorian misogyny!  Go feminism!”  It’s not surprising that Alice would receive pushback from her way of life there, and that it would be hard for her to combat something she can’t solve like a riddle or fight with a sword; I was definitely a little impressed when, mid-film, a Victorian doctor declares her to suffering from “female hysteria.”  That said, this storyline is also written too on-the-nose at times, and I don’t think the threads between Alice’s struggle for independence in England and her heroic journey in Wonderland are drawn quite clearly enough.  Again, I feel a real disconnect between the different parts of the film.  There are good pieces that don’t seem to blend organically into the whole.

My last check in the plus column is some of the stuff surrounding the personification of Time.  All the time jokes (a la “Why is it you wait for no man?”) feel very Lewis Carroll, and while it doesn’t quite make sense for Time to have a clock in his chest, since the use of timepieces to mark its passage is a box that we humans stuff time into, I do love the rooms filled with hanging pocket watches in his castle, each one representing a different person making their gradual way toward ticking their last – a cool idea, and a really gorgeous image.  I also enjoy the general theme of the time-travel plot, the ultimate idea of learning from the past rather than changing it.

Original: For Travis (2012)

I wrote this a few years ago as a gift for my older brother.  Geek on!

*          *          *

For Travis

This is for all the wardrobe explorers,

The brown-coat-clad defiers,

And the single-bound tall-building leapers,

For the what-the-frak swearers,

The ruby-slipper heel-clickers,

And the Millennium-Falcon-model assemblers;

Listen, you Shire leavers,

Fourteen-foot-scarf knitters,

And don’t-tell-me-it’s-futile resisters,

You sing-along bloggers,

Robotics-law abiders,

And great-responsibility great-power bearers;

To the red-pill takers,

The don’t-panic hitchhikers,

And the midnight-showing lightning-scar wearers,

To the vampire slayers,

The god-of-thunder hammer-lifters,

And the impossible-things-before-breakfast believers;

This is my message to you: 

Pay the skeptics no mind.

Life is as big, and wild,

And magic, and star-blazing

As you let it be.

Coraline (2009, PG)

Coraline the movie veers off from Coraline the book in a few places – the American-ness kind of weirds me out, there are a few criminal line omissions, and while I enjoy Wybie, his presence lessens some of Coraline’s accomplishments.  Overall, though, this is a pretty faithful, beautifully well-rendered adaptation of the Neil Gaiman book, done in gorgeous stop-motion by Henry Selick of The Nightmare Before Christmas fame (or rather, would-be fame, were it not for the fact that most people don’t realize that Tim Burton didn’t actually direct that movie.)

As in the book, Coraline Jones finds an escape to the doldrums of life in her new home via a mysterious door between her apartment and the next, leading into a fantastical world populated by her button-eyed Other Mother and Other Father.  Soon, however, the fun and instant gratification of that world take a sinister turn, and it’s up to Coraline to save her parents from the Other Mother’s clutches and get back home.

First things first:  the stop-motion is amazing here.  Full-on stunning.  I love the washed-out colors and apparent drabness of the regular world compared to the eye-popping vibrance of the Other World.  So many visuals are realized just perfectly.  I especially love Coraline and Wybie in the fog, the garden in the Other World, the passageway between the worlds, and the stunted, barely-sketched-out detail as Coraline ventures too far in the Other World.  Just fantastically well-done all around.  And the scary parts?  Majorly creepy – mission accomplished!

I kind of miss Coraline’s signature unflappability from the book, but I like how the movie makes her a bit brattier.  She goes back and forth between worlds more often before the penny starts to drop re:  the evilness, and you really get a sense of how she’s being seduced by the Other World.  Her relationship with a new character, her neighbor Wybie, reflects that as well.  Even as Coraline is bored and itching for some excitement, she turns up her nose at this obviously-eager potential friend, and it’s clear from her early interactions with the somewhat edited Wybie in the Other World that she mostly thinks of herself, not others.  In this way, the message of Coraline learning to be happy with the family/world she has rather than the one she wants comes through more solidly.

Like I said, though, I miss some of the book dialogue.  The name conversation between the cat and Coraline is sadly gone, as is Coraline’s wonderful little speech about getting whatever you want.  Plus, there’s the fun, random quirky lines that are lost, too, like “Everyone knows that a soul is the same size as a beach ball,” and, my favorite, “I’m on my own.  I think I’ve probably become a single child family.”  Who passes up stuff like that?

Dakota Fanning voices Coraline with spunk and aplomb.  Teri Hatcher is Coraline’s mother (both versions,) and she’s excellent – she has the alluring/sinister thing down pat.  The film also features the voices of Ian McShane (Silas from Kings,) French & Saunders, and Keith David (recently, Elroy on Community) as the cat.

Warnings

Scary images, a bit of suggestive humor, and kid-movie violence.

Why Horcruxes? (Harry Potter)

In a meta way, the introduction of horcruxes in the Harry Potter series is a means of explaining why Voldemort is the cockroach of evil wizards, the one who never seems to die completely.  Certainly, having horcruxes, with their own rules, artifacts, and infamy within the wizarding community, is a lot more articulate than “Because Magic,” and the task of finding/destroying them gives Harry and co. a real handy quest to go on in the final book.  But almost ever since we first heard about them, I’ve wondered what it is with Voldemort and horcruxes (spoilers.)

It can’t be denied – horcruxes are extremely powerful and useful, in a horrible way.  Through making a horcrux, a witch or wizard creates a safeguard against death.  This potent bit of dark magic allows them to tear off a piece of their soul and hide it somewhere, so that, if their body is destroyed, a part of them lives on and is able to come back.  However, this assurance comes at a high, terrible price:  the spell requires the caster to murder someone.  It’s in fact the very act of murder that causes the soul to tear in the first place, because the soul can’t go through something so reprehensible and remain intact.  This is why the wizarding world isn’t full of wizards who continually spring back up like weebles; the spell is such an atrocity that it seems many in the community won’t even speak of it.

But hey, what’s a little murder to Voldemort?  In The Half-Blood Prince, we learn that, as far back as his sixth year at Hogwarts, future genocidal dark lord Tom Riddle is found researching horcruxes, and already, his ambitions are set high – in a “purely academic” discussion with Professor Slughorn, he asks if there’s a limit to how many times the soul could be split, speculating that six would the ideal, most magically-strong number of horcruxes to create.  Slughorn tries to deny what’s happening in this conversation, but he’s horrified that Riddle would consider even a hypotheticalmagic situation that required him to kill six people.

That’s the thing, though.  Obviously, it’s obscene, just one of many red flags that Riddle is a dangerous psychopath, but why horcruxes specifically?  Even if Riddle doesn’t have particular qualms about killing, what makes a 16-year-old want a sevenfold magical insurance policy (six horcruxes, plus the part of his soul that remains in his body) against death?  I suppose we can posit that, already, he’s making his future plans to rise to absolute power and knows he’ll meet resistance.  Any aggressive power struggle is going to involve physical risk, and since his new world order involves wiping out Muggle-borns, he’ll be seen as an ethnic-cleansing monster.  Viewed this way, it’ll only be a matter of time before an army rises up to fight him or someone tries to assassinate him.  Is his obsession with horcruxes just sadistic forward-thinking?

That’s part of it, I’m sure – he knows he’ll be a target – but I think it goes deeper than that.  I think Voldemort is terrified of dying in any context, and I think he feels magic should allow him power over death.  As a child, when he first meets Dumbledore and learns about his mixed magical heritages, he immediately guesses that his absent father must have been a wizard and his deceased mother a Muggle.  “My mother can’t have been magic, or she wouldn’t have died,” he reasons.  Most people fear death, understandably, but Voldemort’s seems to go beyond that.  His first response to learning that he’s a wizard is to assume that it will automatically prevent him from dying, and when he realizes this isn’t true, he starts seeking a specific way to use magic to do just that, by any means necessary. 

Coraline (2002)

I’ve seen a few of Neil Gaiman’s TV efforts now – Neverwhere and his Whoepisodes – and I’ve listened to the radio adaptation of Neverwhere, but this is the first book of his that I’ve read.  As with his TV work, I like Coraline’s slightly off-kilter, somewhat dark, very British fantasy.

Coraline Jones has just moved with her parents into a large old house divided into flats.  She spends her early days exploring, getting to know the eccentric neighbors, and wondering about the door in her living room, the one with the bricked-up passageway that once led to the empty flat next to hers.  One day, though, home alone, Coraline opens the door to find the wall gone.  At the end of the passageway is a twisted through-the-looking-glass world containing Coraline’s Other House and populated by her button-eyed Other Parents.  Gradually realizing that her Other Mother has malevolent intentions, Coraline sets out to defeat the villainess.

This is a really neat book.  It’s definitely pitched for kids but still greatly accessible for adults.  I like Gaiman’s calm, observational prose in the face of all the crazy, scary things that happen to Coraline.  Our heroine is similarly unflappable, though not uncaring.  There are huge stakes in this story and Coraline knows it, but she approaches her challenges with a cool, rational head and bravery that’s more decisive than innate.

I think this quiet, collected attitude, on the part of both author and protagonist, makes the creepiness of the Other World even creepier.  Coraline goes through the door to find a world that’s just a little bit “off,” but the sense of skin-crawling foreboding builds slowly, teasingly, until you can hardly imagine how she’s able to keep her head.  The Other Mother is particularly horrific, no surprise. 

Overall, it’s a fine entry to the “And We Read This to Kids?!?” collection, with lots of menace and scary images.  Those British, I tell you – after all, kids love Doctor Who in Britain, and even before they get to the “exciting” stuff in Harry Potter, he’s being raised by unscrupulous relatives who make him live in a closet.  Then again, I suppose I shouldn’t talk.  The U.S. gave us Lemony Snicket, who killed the Baudelaire children’s parents and destroyed their home in a fire in the first chapter of the first Series of Unfortunate Events book before shipping them off to living with an abusive criminal so covetous of their inheritance that he schemes to marry a 14-year-old.

One of my favorite parts of the book, however, is a secondary character:  the cat who can similarly pass between worlds and sort of ambivalently helps Coraline in her fight against the Other Mother.  (Just “the cat,” by the way.  As it explains to Coraline – in the Other World, it can talk – “Now, you people have names.  That’s because you don’t know who you are.  We know who we are, so we don’t need names.”)  In a way, it’s sort of a more even-keeled version of the Marquis de Carabas from Neverwhere:  clever, enigmatic, more than a little imperious, and usually nowhere in sight when Coraline wants it around, but still generally on her side.

Warnings

Some major scariness for kids and disturbing elements.

Some Rumpelstiltskin/Belle Thoughts (Once Upon a Time)

This isn’t a Relationship Spotlight post, because it’s not one I love – not even in a fascinating, dysfunctional way like Tony and Sid on Skins.  Still, I’ve been thinking about these two since Once Upon a Time’s fall finale and wanted to write about them.  Belle/Rumpel spoilers ahead.

When I saw Belle’s season 1 intro, I was intrigued that the show’s version of her story placed Rumpel as the Beast.  He doesn’t look like the Disney Beast, of course – less animal, more imp – but more importantly, he acts different.  Where the movie’s Beast is mostly selfish and quick-tempered, Rumpel really is a monster when he meets Belle.  He’s killed people, psychologically tortured others, preyed on and manipulated countless desperate souls, and is feared by most of the realm.  In caring for Rumpel, Belle has to do far more than look past his monstrous looks; she has to see the glimmer of a good man he might have been once and could possibly be again.

This is a darker story, more about saving Rumpel’s soul than restoring his non-cursed humanity, but it becomes frustrating because Rumpel so rarely indicates that he wants saving.  Ultimately, he’s only ever on his own side, and on the occasions he aids the heroes, it’s either because their goals align with his or he’s “playing good” to placate Belle.  The genuinely heroic and/or altruistic things he does over the course of the series are negligible, so it makes Belle – who’s supposed to be really smart – seem like a dupe.  It’s painful to see her lecture rightfully-suspicious Storybrooke folk about Rumpel’s “good heart” when he’s being anything from amorally shifty to blatantly villainous behind her back.  Not only does it severely weaken her character, but it has an abuser/abused ring to it when she forgives him no matter how times she discovers (to her utter shock) that he’s been lying to her and doing horrible things on the sly.

The whole things is further complicated by the fact that Rumpel doesn’t want his curse to be broken by True Love’s Kiss.  The recurring theme of Belle and Rumpel’s story is that he wants her, maybe even needs her, and loves her after a fashion, but loves his power more.  In season 1, he explicitly rejects Belle’s offer of True Love for fear of breaking his curse and losing his Dark One powers.  Ever since, though their pattern is for him to beg her to stay when she catches him out and for her to take him back, it’s clear that he’ll always choose his power over her.  In addition to being one sick puppy (albeit a massively compelling, entertaining one,) he’s a total magic addict, ruled by his need to be the most powerful, and she can’t compete with that.

Despite the creepy, unhealthy slant to the relationship, especially this season (he maintains an insidious lie and uses magic on her to keep her in the dark, and she tries to control him against his will by wielding the Dark One’s dagger – please tell me no one sees Twu Wuv in that!), I like that Rumpel’s villainy and twisted power issues don’t negate his feelings for Belle.  She’s one of his few vulnerabilities, and to the extent that he’s ever conflicted about his actions, it’s due to her view of him.  For her sake, I don’t want them together, but for his, I felt for him during their big falling-out in the fall finale.  While he deserves every bit of it and I’m so glad Belle’s (finally!) wise to his deceit, I get why he’s so wrecked when she casts him out.  It gets back to complicated and dark, and that’s what I get behind when it comes to these two.  Being a villain doesn’t mean he doesn’t love her, and loving her doesn’t make him less of a villain – there’s a self-awareness to that portrayal that the pairing needs.  Don’t give me twisted and call it romantic, but make it equal parts intense, dark, messed-up, and bittersweet, and I’m there.