Here Be Dragons

Ever since I was a small child, dragons have had an indelible hold on me. I went through a protracted phase were I was a dragon myself, covered in scales, able to fly, able to breathe fire and incinerate anyone who tried to make me do whatever I didn't want to do. And why wouldn't five-year-old-me want to become a dragon? Of all the inhabitants of the fantasy bestiary, the dragon has  a uniquely entrenched position in the human imagination. Every mythological tradition in the world has some variant of the dragon within it. The perspective on the dragon varies from culture to to culture, but the dragon has continually endured, whether as a fearsome monster or a benevolent omen of good fortune. Indeed, as twentieth century fiction has evidenced, these two poles curiously begin to melt into one another.

Bluebeard's Descendents

Tom Hiddleston, blue if not bearded

 Gothic melodrama is immediately recognizable, whether one knows the genre appellation or not: a dark secluded castle, a lone young woman—significantly virginal—, a brooding mysterious man, dangerous lurid secrets, a sinister housekeeper. The release of Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak this fall served as another sampling of this longtime narrative staple. While del Toro’s film is heavily indebted to nineteenth century expressions of the Gothic,  the story's basic ingredients are owed to an even earlier source: the fairy tale “Bluebeard”. Prepare yourself for a potpourri of sharpened swords, forbidden chambers, corpses hanging from hooks,and other visions of marital bliss. 

Vive Le Bomb! (edition 1)

It is a reality of film-making that can be painful to swallow: there are films that sink at the box-office that have genuine merit—or if they fail, fail in an interesting way— and films that make an obscene amount of money that aren’t well done or even memorable. Social appetites, and twists of capricious Fate play a role; but there is a certain amount of condescension from middlebrow critics that plays into this dynamic as well. As Susan Doll wonderfully puts it in a MovieMorlocks post dedicated to movie turkeys, “I rarely agree with movie reviewers, and truth be told, I have stopped reading a lot of reviews, especially from online sources. While reviewers like to call themselves 'critics,' true film criticism does not revolve around personal taste.I loathe reviewers who jump on a flawed film that may still be worthwhile viewing and dub it 'the worst film ever made,' which sometimes affects the box office for that title.” The curious thing that I’ve found in my own experience is that the more scholarly a critic becomes, the less myopically elitist they tend to be. In the spirit of egalitarian enjoyment, I decided to give the spotlight to  a handful of films that did not succeed commercially or critically, but which I still feel have merit.

Islands in the Sky, Questions on the Earth: Engine Summer and Castle in the Sky

Note: The following post discusses central aspects of the plots of both the novel and the film under discussion, so for those who want a SPOILER warning, this is it. I would also add that, when you get right down to it, no story with real  merit can ever truly be spoiled, whether you know the details of the plot or not.

The flying city of Laputa made its literary debut in 1726 as an episode in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. In line with the vitriolic satire of the book, the inhabitants of the flying island are idiots, conducting pointless experiments in a quest for scientific discovery. They are literal and figurative airheads. Other artists have taken an interest in Swift’s creation and put it to use in their own works. I was recently struck by the motif of the flying island in two distinct fantasy works: John Crowley’s 1979 novel Engine Summer and Hayao Miyazaki’s 1986 animated film Castle in the Sky (Tenku no Shiro Laputa). While the flying island’s function in both stories is quite different, both Crowley and Miyazaki provide a commentary on the nature of time, humanity’s place in the natural world, and the ambiguous blessings of technology. 

Illustration from original edition of "Gulliver's Travels"

Only in Black and White

Black and white is the original template for the movies; a perusal of any “Greatest Films of All Time” list will reveal a bulk of black and white entries. One of the (many) unfortunate aspects of contemporary media culture is that black and white visual expression has fallen by the wayside, leaving great swaths of Millennial viewers ignorant of it. Contemporary black and white cinematography is most likely to be seen, when it is, in independent or foreign cinema, almost never in major Hollywood releases or on television. Black and white has come to be seen as an obstacle for viewers to overcome instead of something to embrace; consider Ted Turner’s misguided “colorizing” of classic films to make them accessible. Such a strategy is tantamount to producing a Shakespeare play from one of those “No Fear” editions—easier comprehension doesn’t result so much as grotesque cheapening.  

Yay...

 

...or nay?