(no subject)

[trinityvixen]

On ivy03's recommendation, I Netflix'd The Return to Oz last night. It's a surpassingly weird movie. The next closest thing I can think to relate it to (and that I kept thinking of the entire time I was watching it) was the video game American McGee's Alice. Apparently, the story is taken from the books, as I had darkling1 there to confirm that the elements are all Baum's, but the nightmare aspect of the ruined Oz really harkened back to the state of Wonderland post-insanity. The difference is, of course, that Dorothy isn't crazy (or is trying very hard not to be thought of as such), but there's a surprising similarity of tone to both worlds.

It's innocence. Even with the evil princesses, kings, and biker gangs (loved that costume design), Oz is still a place of surpassing innocence. I remarked that I would be less than sanguine about showing this to a child, but on the whole it still reads very much as a children's tale. There is no sex. None whatsoever, not even as gender is concerned. The closest that sex, sexuality, or gender come into it is in Jack Pumpkinhead wanting to call Dorothy "Mom," and even then, it's less about her being a mother--with all the ties to sex that that comes with--and more about her being his parent and protector and leader (if she'd been a boy, he'd have happily deferred to her as "Dad").

It's funny that I should think the same applies to Alice, but I do. Alice, even grown up, is still a girl. She is crazy, she murders evil Wonderland inhabitants, and she occasionally freaks out and becomes two different kinds of literal monster, but though it looks frightening, it plays out no different than her getting bigger or smaller with the EAT ME/DRINK ME foodstuffs. Alice looks on a world she knows and sees no order to it; things are familiar, but it is all too broken to really understand. There's a meta-y ending to Alice, but otherwise? Any child could play in that realm. In fact, with violence being shoved into kids lives ahead of sexuality (it's amazing that anything beats sexuality into kids' lives these days, but violence manages), kids of today might be more comfortable with the Wonderland of Alice than the more nonsensical and less violent one of the original story.

We watched a film in my Westerns class called Black Robe, about a French Jesuit missionary on his first outing to preach to the heathen Indians. The most ingenious thing about the film was the remarkable innocence of the native peoples of the Americas. And it's not simplicity or ignorant savage stereotyping. It's the Edenic lack of guilt over bodily functions and needs. A man and his partner openly copulate in the tent that they all share when everyone else has gone to sleep. There is no shame. Only the missionary is embarrassed about having to use the toilet over the side on a long canoe trip; his embarrassment is funny to the natives taking him north.

That movie, being about adults, could bring in that element of sex and managed to still be innocent. With children's tales, sex factors less, and they are, sort of by default, innocent. However, not all are. Stories about children or with chldren in them are often very sexualized to the point where something like this becomes a surprise find. Definitely interesting.

Comments

[arcane-the-sage.livejournal.com]

Black Robe really was a good film (watched it many times long ago). The only thing that I can say would have been nice (ie. not something I would want to change, but something that would still add a touch to the movie) is if in the end the missionary actually learned something. The trapper learned something, and was made the better for it. But that darn Black Robe just couldn't quit even when he saw the damage he was causing.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

See, and Alice in Wonderland was always too bizarre for me. Yet I loved Return to Oz. I was talking with my mother about it, and she thinks that a lot of the reason it didn't bother me or my brother watching it as children is how sanguine Dorothy is. There are a lot of sequences that could be terrifying, like when they fall out of the sky, but what does Dorothy do? She says, "It can't be helped."

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

The way my professor explained it, Black Robe did learn something, though I took the same impression of it you did. He had a point, even if it was weak. His point was, towards the end, when Black Robe separates from the trapper, he does so because it was in accordance with the dream the elder tribesman had. The dream showed Black Robe going alone to the outpost, so he would go alone, even though the trapper offered to see him through. Black Robe learned enough about his counterpart among the indigenous people to respect the man's vision after his death.

When he does not lie to the people at the outpost about baptism curing their sickness, he's showing a greater respect for them than his predecessor. So he's at least learned a LITTLE if not nearly enough.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I loved that reaction to her falling to her doom.

It's an interesting thought about Dorothy versus Alice's reactions to the magical realms they are in. Surely, neither faces fewer perils to encourage them to be blithe about their situations, yet Alice does always seem more anxious about it. The reaction of the heroine influences our own appreciation of the story so much, I can't believe I didn't consider that.

There's also the fact that Dorothy's approach is much more adult than Alice's. Dorothy in The Return to Oz was aware that something was wrong with her escaping to a fantasy world, even if that world was real, and she made the choice to go and come back and stay in the world from whence she originally came. Whereas Alice only barracked for getting back home because she couldn't make sense of Wonderland and got frustrated trying to. She didn't run home because she loved it especially (she'd been trying to escape in the first place), but only because she was more familiar with it. There's more enchantment and yet maturity in Dorothy's approach than Alice's.