The problem I have with LOTR is the same one I have with the Star Wars sequels, Harry Potter, The Dark Knight, even Narnia: I don't care about the bad guy. His goals and motives are incomprehensible, or he goes about achieving them in the dumbest way possible, or conversely, he's omnipotent—except when he isn't for purposes of plot.

Not caring about the bad guy, it's hard to care about the conflict challenging the good guys. What would Sauron do if he got the ring? Bad things! Um, what bad things? No idea, but it'd probably be more interesting than this movie!

The first Stars Wars is instructive in this regard. Darth Vader is a cog in a machine. His ostensible superiors disrespect him to his face. We get that he's defending a fading way of life in an efficiently managed Empire where the galactic trains all run on time. (It's not clear what the rebels bring to the table as a viable political platform.)

Then Lucas got all preachy and Manichean and perversely tried to "humanize" Vader, revealing that he had no idea what motivates anybody to do anything, except that we again see a disturbingly common pattern in all these movies: bad people are really ugly.


And incredibly dim and ineffective. Rowling (more ugly) has conveniently summed up everything she doesn't understand about villainy in her own arch-villain:

That which Voldemort does not value he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children's tales, of love, loyalty and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped.

Voldemort was steeped in that culture. He couldn't not understand it. Nobody that clueless could gather around him the best and the brightest, and then almost pull off a successful coup d'état. The great villains of history have always had a finger planted firmly on the pulse of the popular will and the governing zeitgeist.

There's a basic confusion here about the means by which people rise to power, and the ways in which they exercise it once it has corrupted them absolutely.

If anything, Voldemort is a carbon copy of Joss Whedon's first Big Bad, the "Master" from season one of Buffy. Whedon's villains improved considerably after that, reaching the epitome of cool, calculating evil in the person of Sunnydale Mayor Richard Wilkins (Harry Groener).

And the coolest, most calculating thing about Mayor Wilkins? He got elected. Compared to him, Voldemort is a cardboard cutout.

Which is not to say there aren't good uses for cardboard villains. Where would James Bond be without them? But they have short half-lives. Take the (ugly) villains of Independence Day. They serve the purpose well for two hours. Any longer and their unfathomable stupidity would become intolerable.

Similarly, the one redeeming characteristic of "Evil Angel" was that he was a two-hundred proof nihilist. But two-hundred proof nihilism gets boring fast, which is what prompts Spike's famous monologue:

We like to talk big, vampires do. "I'm going to destroy the world." It's just tough guy talk. Strut round with your friends over a pint of blood. The truth is I like this world. You've got dog racing. Manchester United. And you've got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs. It's all right here.

Both Buffy and Angel eventually succumbed to too many Big Bads destroying the world too many times. Though to give credit where it's due, Whedon did come up with another real bad beauty, the law firm of Wolfram & Hart. Okay, "evil lawyer" is playing to stereotypes, but good art doesn't dispense with stereotypes; it fully fleshes them out.

Destroying the world is easy and dull. Corrupting it using the kind of enlightened people who contribute to PBS and wouldn't be caught dead (or living dead) at McDonald's or Walmart and earnestly believe they're doing the right thing for the greater good (and for your own good) is a much more rewarding challenge.

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Labels: deep thoughts, harry potter, magic, movies, pop culture, religion, star wars, television

Yes, I've beaten this dead horse before, but Harry Potter strikes me as the teacher's pet, BMOC, sports jock, and trust fund baby all rolled into one. All the reasons I was glad to get out of high school and never look back. Frankly, Malfoy is only there to make Harry look less insufferable by comparison.

Not to mention that I never detected anything admirable about his principles, except that whatever is good for Harry Potter is good for Hogwarts (the Nietzschean "Superman," kiddy version). By the time the business with the house elves rolled around (cue Randy Newman's "Sail Away"), I tossed in the towel.

If Voldemort was what it took to shred that corrupt society to ribbons, so be it. You know, breaking a few eggs to make the omelette. And I just can't enjoy a fantasy series that's turning me into an unrepentant Marxist.

Granted, the nice thing about stories that take place "once upon a time" in historical romances and period dramas or in a "galaxy far, far away" is that we can filter from our minds the actual state of affairs on the ground.

Hence we worry about Darcy and Elizabeth and not about how the landed gentry got so landed, or the permanent underclass that served them, or the perverse incentives of primogeniture. Watching 300, we happily ignore the fact that the Spartans could enjoy be manly and Spartan 24/7 because of the (invisible in the audience) slaves.

But inject a contemporary observer into the mix and that suspension of disbelief becomes problematic. No sane democratic soul can believe for a second that the world of Gone with the Wind didn't deserve to get crushed under the heel of the Union Army.

I say this all as a long preamble to this declaration: Tweeny Witches is the un-Harry Potter, getting right everything it gets wrong. I don't doubt that Harry Potter figured into writer/creator Keita Amemiya's thinking, but in this case he took a good idea poorly executed and made it great.

As the title suggests, the heroine is a sixth grader who literally falls (though not down a rabbit hole) into a parallel, magical world. After accidentally wreaking a good deal of havoc that gets her and her new friends into big trouble with the authorities, she deduces that this world is the source of the Magic Book her father once gave her.

After which she goes about wreaking a good deal more havoc. On purpose. You see, Alice has principles. Not very sophisticated principles--she's only eleven--but ones worth sticking to, and ones that actually mean something. And ones that cost her dearly.

The most important rule in science fiction and fantasy is the Second Law of Magic Thermodynamics: there's no free lunch. You don't get to be a great witch or wizard (or Quidditch player) just because you won the genetic lottery and your parents were loaded (as Warren Buffett would put it).

And power comes from something, not out of nothing. Mumbo-jumbo, hot air, and waving wands are not enough to make the world go around. The fossil fuel running the magical engines in this case is mined from faeries and sprites. Cornering the faerie and sprite market is how the people in charge remain in charge.

The faeries and sprites are an odd and ugly bunch, but Alice finds the tradeoff disagreeable from the start. A natural resource being ugly doesn't make it any more harvestable than the pretty ones.

To be sure, the most gouge-your-eyes-out-with-a-spoon annoying Hollywood trope ever is the one about the cute kid who decides that squids are adorable and squid-eaters are EVIL and so by the end of the movie the entire calamari business goes bankrupt so the little twerp can feel all self-righteous about herself.

Yeah, right.

Alice's idealism more realistically traps her between one rock and a hard place after another. No, she can't have her cake and eat it too. Clinging to a guileless outlook on life doesn't automatically mean life will conveniently distill itself into an oil and water mix of good versus evil.

Yes, there are cardboard bad guys, but they're mostly there to chew on the scenery and tie faeries to the metaphorical railroad tracks. And they're also there to remind us that there are "bad" guys, and then there are even worse guys—but whose goals, under close examination, could be as worthy as yours.

Both sides are pursuing utopian, zero-sum solutions to a real problem that is only exacerbated by their implacable sense of rightness.

Alice's true antagonist is Head Witch Ateria, a close analogue to Pullman's Mrs. Coulter, with ulterior motives piled high. And while Ateria is willing to let the ends justify the means, she's not a blithering, jack-booted idiot (which, be honest, Voldemort is). She knows that you keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.

As C.L. Hanson puts it, "If there's anything more boring than the hero who's perfect, it would be the villain who delights in evil just because he's pure evil."

Though Ateria could kill you with kindness or crush you with an iron fist, she's not evil. She may even possess the capability of being truly good, which is a whole lot more interesting. This is just as true for the opposing warlocks. When the two sides finally meet, the real enemy, they discover, is in themselves.

A terrible—and yet understandable—betrayal will make this truism literal (a comparison to Edmund in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe comes to mind).

Putting the story's moral complexities to the side, every second of every episode of Tweeny Witches is a visual joy to behold. The artwork and design strike the eye as a quirky combination of Hayao Miyazaki, Charles Addams and Maurice Sendak. A world truly to lose yourself in.

The title sequences and the short "bumper" episodes seemed to have been drawn straight from the mind of Edward Gorey. And listening to the closing theme song ("Dooby Doo Wah") will put a smile on your face for the rest of the day.

It's fun, imaginative, often honestly scary, and a little warped. Alice is the perfect amalgamation of Bart Simpson's brattiness and Lisa Simpson's smarts and Lyra Belacqua's fearlessness—a kindred spirit with such iconic female protagonists as Anne (of Green Gables) and Harriet (the Spy).

Like Claudia (From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler), she learns that there's no point to running away from home unless, as T.S. Eliot put it (and which Alice takes as her motto), "The end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time."

Labels: anime reviews, fantasy, harry potter, magic, personal favs

At the library the other day I noticed a dozen newly-released paperback editions of Diana Wynne Jones's Chrestomanci and Dalemark series, clearly an attempt to leverage the Harry Potter phenomenon. Well, if that's what it takes, then that's what it takes. Gift horses in the mouth, and that kind of thing.

The first book in the Chrestomanci series, Charmed Life, was published about the time I became too sophisticated for young adult literature, a problem that has since been remedied by age. But age also has the benefit of allowing one to experience authors I'm pretty sure I read Back Then as if for the first time. (See: Red Dwarf, when the AI unit has Lister erase its memory so it can re-read all the Agatha Christie novels.)

My reaction: amazement. Several times I found myself stopping to flip back to the title page to check the original copyright date. Yep, 1977. Because I kept thinking, she borrowed this from Rowling, right? And that? And this bit here? That one, there? But, no, excepting the possibility of time travel, the other way around, more likely.

I'm not talking about plagiarism. Other than the common elements of the "family romance," there is little resemblance in plot or character (although Chrestomanci himself is routinely referred to as "he whose name should not be spoken," by those who are terrified by its mere mention).

I would make the following comparison: an entire arm of the publishing industry (legal and samizdat) is devoted to the third-party exploration of copyrighted universes, expansions upon existing characters and settings that are, frankly, often better than the original. Dave Wolverton's Star Wars novels, for example. In Japan, there's the whole doujinshi movement.

Nothing even that specific, in this case; rather, a "sense of the world" which makes Jones's and Rowling's universes seem so similar. Call it convergent evolution: establish the same environmental variables, the same shaping narrative, and you end up with remarkably similar creatures at the end of the biological tree.

But this is somewhat besides the point I'm getting to (to quote Monty Python: "Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who"). The question is, why Rowling and not the far more talented Jones? Now, to be sure, Diana Wynne Jones is hardly a commercial or artistic failure as an artist, just not warping-the-fabric-of-space successful the way Rowling is.

Let's explore some possible reasons:

1. Not too close for comfort

Rowling snugs the Muggle universe and Magical universe side by side. In Chrestomanci, Jones is thinking more along the lines of L'Engle: parallel universes. Moving from "our" universe to the Chrestomanci universe is difficult, and entails serious repercussions.

Morever, in the Chrestomanci universe, as in Rowling's, advances in modern technology have been hamstrung by the pursuit of magic. But unlike Mr. Weasley's fascination with all things Muggle (one of my favorite characters), that world is too far away in Chrestomanci to have immediate relevance. You can't take your Sony Walkman with you.

I am no fan of the theory that children must identify with characters that are somehow copies of themselves, socially/racially/economically. Half the fun of a story is getting as far away from yourself as possible (besides, all those Star Trek aliens behave exactly as you would expect a normal human being to, unlike the normal human beings).

But there is something to be said for easing the ability to project oneself onto a protagonist. By making transit between the normal and the magical as simple as literally taking the train, Rowling makes it that much more accessible to her readers, who can imagine making the journey themselves, without having to make the existential leap of abandoning everything they know.

Consider, as well, Hogwarts. As foreign as the British boarding school may be, its social structures and politics are recognizable to any secondary school student. Chrestomanci also has a school of magic, in a castle, but it only has four pupils. Harry Potter for the home-schooled, perhaps.

2. If it's not baroque, don't fix it

Simply in terms of style, you can say this about Harry Potter's universe: there's a whole lot more of it. The entire Chrestomanci series would fit inside Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Rowling perhaps demands comparison to Dickens, who (and I'm paragraphing somebody else) wrote long because nobody back then had television.

Rowling didn't simply prove that kids will read a LOT given good reason to, but she also disproved the canard that they will only read simple, short, solipsistic stories about themselves, and furthermore that only nerds will wade through baroque, 1200 page genre fantasy epics, such as Robin Hobb's Liveship triology (BTW, recommended!).

Rowling's American editors actually did edit her manuscripts, removing the more "British" examples of the language, but I doubt that was ever necessary. It's all about the narrative, about "what happens next."

3. Market timing

I've heard Madeleine L'Engle speak directly to this matter. When the manuscript of Wrinkle in Time was first circulated by her agent, it was turned down with hardly a second look. It languished so long in publishing purgatory that L'Engle feared it would never see the light of day. But that delay, she believes now, in large part accounted for its success. By the time it was published (1963), an audience had evolved that was ready to embrace it.

Jones, an Oxfordian who attended lectures by Lewis and Tolkien at Oxford (suppressing envy, suppressing envy), started publishing in the 1970s. Charmed Life came out the same year as Star Wars, and for the next decade Space Opera (much of it very bad indeed) ruled the day and soaked up all those wandering attention spans instead.

Harry Potter, in contrast, arrived on the scene when the trend in young adult publishing had been for a decade towards "utterly unmemorable, dreary, pointed tales in which girls and boys learn their lessons--actual and moral--in the most punishing way possible," what Moira Redmond terms "Dreadlit." The neuroticism of Dreadlit, she notes, "may be the millionth reason why children like Harry Potter so much."

Incidentally, the amazing Ghibli Studios has done a very good job with Jones's Howl's Moving Castle, with Miyazaki coming out of retirement to direct for likely the very last time. Although not as well received as his previous feature efforts, I find that Miyazaki's visual depiction of Sophie's every-changing appearance makes her one of his most subtly and insightfully-rendered of all his female protagonists.

Labels: book reviews, harry potter, magic

If nothing else, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is one of the more faithful book adaptations I can remember, without resorting to the tedious literalism that plagued the first couple of Harry Potter films. As a cinematic experience, it lacks the grand, David Lean sweep of The Lord of the Rings, casts of thousands and all that. As underwhelmed as I was by The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson could get the heart pumping. Andrew Adamson, to compare, manages to provoke a raised eyebrow now and then.

Nevertheless, I found The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe a better-told story, even if I did ultimately relate to it more or less as an illustrated version of the book. Its narrative completeness springs from Lewis's more sophisticated grasp of the differences between good and bad and evil, which Tolkien doesn't much bother with and about which George Lucas (to pick one other relevant example) hasn't a clue.

Lewis understood the importance of personifying evil, and the difference between an evildoer and a basically good person who does bad things. It's hard to think of any movie recently that has depicted the latter as well as Skandar Keynes does with the character of Edmund. The former, by comparison, is easier, except that like the tree falling in the forest, good and evil remain metaphysical abstractions unless manifested though human behavior not clouded by insanity.

Perhaps Lewis's greatest insight in this respect was his observation, particularly articulated in The Screwtape Letters, that far from being coarse, sloppy, and ugly, evil is neat, tidy, and ruthlessly efficient, manifesting itself most profoundly as an smoothly-running organizational power.

On this account, The Lord of the Rings fails from the beginning. The "big bad" is so impersonal as to hardly be organic, not to mention badly dressed and incompetent. For all of the supposed majestic power of the Ring, except in occasional melodramatic inserts, we never see it tempt its keepers that way Turkish Delight tempts Edmund. And it is never clear what the bad guys exactly intend to accomplish besides entropy. Which philosophically is as informative as watching iron rust.

Lucas got it right in the first Star Wars movie. What makes Darth Vader such a compelling figure is that we can sense the passion behind his actions, and can see the gears turning behind the polished armor of the finely-tuned organization that he serves. But having no idea how good turns to evil, the only way Lucas could show this progression in later installments was to turn the young Vader into a feckless jerk. Fecklessness doesn't build empires, or lead thousands into battle.

As Peter tells Susan, "You're not trying to be realistic, you're trying to be smart." Lucas was trying to be smart, and he simply isn't that smart about human nature. And so what he ended up wasn't realistic, either.

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Tilda Swinton as the White Witch takes us back to that early Darth Vader. She's really is smarter and stronger and better organized than everybody else. Truly smart antagonists are created by truly smart people, and Lewis was that smart. (Lucas just got lucky.) Though unlike Screwtape and That Hideous Strength, this isn't (unfortunately) the main point of the story. Yet for what is a fairly thin black-hat role, Swinton carries the part off extremely well. The narrative sags as soon as she's gone.

But it is Georgie Henley as Lucy Pevensie that makes the movie hum along. What an amazing young actress. Peter and Susan are pretty dull in comparison (and Susan gets quickly booted from the next volumes, anyway). I'll be looking forward to future installments just to watch Henley grow into the role.

The one thing that significantly detracts from the movie both cinematically and allegorically is its literal bloodlessness. Mel Gibson may have gone way overboard (though the briefest examination of his oeuvre—from The Road Warrior to Lethal Weapon—makes his obsession with the suffering protagonist hardly unexpected), but he's right that blood is key to the story. It's also inimical to a PG rating, and without blood, the penultimate scene in Narnia struck me as sterile and a bit glib.

What I did find quite surprising was the movie's overall visual impact. By so literally and convincingly couching Lewis's fable in the shapes and forms of Greco-Roman mythology, the movie illustrates the magnitude of Paul's syncretic effort ("Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you"). And its profound theological difficulties as well. Aslan's explanation of the core doctrine of Christianity still remains the best one going: it's heap big magic. Hence the appeal of fantasy.

I think it was a real discomfiture with this underlying reality that motivated early ham-handed—though comprehensible—efforts like the Gospel of Judas, and also fueled Joseph Smith's flirtation with Pelagianism throughout his life. It's a problematic paradox most often dealt with by being ignored. As the Catholic Encyclopedia bluntly points out, "Most, if not all, of these theories [of the atonement] have perils of their own, if they are isolated and exaggerated."

Safeguarding against a "merely juridical view of the subject," the Encyclopedia hastens to point out, is the Church's rich, ceremonial liturgy, ensuring that worshipers will not "forget the present and living reality of a sacrifice constantly kept before their eyes." In other words, the play's the thing. Or as Confucius said, "It is by the Odes that a man's mind is aroused, by the rules of ritual that his character is established, and by music that he is perfected." Good rules for movie making, too.

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Labels: harry potter, magic, movie reviews, religion

Defiance of authority, especially parental authority, coupled with the desire to be perceived smarter or better than one's elders (and peers), is a deeply ingrained theme in Y/A genre fiction, despite the fact that it is mostly nonsense. While I enjoyed Ender's Game, for example, the premise is absurd. For all their "fast twitch" skills, even the smartest pubescent boys make great cannon fodder and lousy strategists.

This was illustrated in a documentary I saw a while back about a real Air Force "Top Gun" school. One of the students was a brash twenty-something who obviously saw himself in the Tom Cruise role; another was a veteran B-1 bomber pilot, married with kids. Flying a B-1 is approximate to flying a 767, except the cargo is a bit different. But the "old guy" cleaned the young guy's clock in every single category. In the real world, age and experience make all the difference in the world.

I don't see this type of "Wise child" narrative as corrosive to the public order. I don't see it as especially conducive to good fiction either. You can thank it for all those Home Alone movies.

But I believe there another, darker reason for the popularity of Harry Potter. Rowling created a perfect storm of fiction's most tried and true genre plot devices, including the Wise child narrative (above), the Orphan (poor little rich boy) narrative, the Superhero narrative, and the Sports hero narrative. But the one that forms the structural foundation of Harry Potter's world, the engine driving the whole enterprise, is the Revenge fantasy.

The Revenge fantasy is an artistic tightrope, easily (and often) crass, exploitive and sexlessly pornographic (Death Wish). But at times ironic (Dirty Harry), poignant (My Bodyguard) and even profound (Unforgiven) in its sentiments. The Revenge fantasy is at the heart of most action flicks (Lethal Weapon), with the tipping point usually coming when a parent, child, or friend is kidnapped, assaulted, brutally murdered (Mad Max).

However, the Achilles heel of the Revenge fantasy is exactly the manner in which it must move the audience to condone, sympathize, and root for the "justice" the protagonist eventually meets out (extra-legal or not). Consider Mel Gibson's crucifixion scene in Lethal Weapon, in which he is spread eagle on a rack while being tortured by some thug. The brutality of this scene set us up for the next where he breaks the thug's neck.

We all know the bad guy had it coming. Except that wallowing in all this evil deadens the audience as well. This becomes apparent in the inevitable sequels. How to provoke the protagonist (and the audience) even further? The simplest way is by making his opponents even more depraved, the hero becomes more saintly in comparison, and his action justifiable. In Die Hard, a handful of civilians are murdered; in Die Hard II, hundreds are slaughtered. It gets numbing.

One way to mitigate this is to make sure that nothing really changes so that you can simply play the same emotional refrain over and over. Rowling has done both.

In Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, Eastwood's "man with no name" wanders from town to town. In this case, the Superhero narrative is meshed with the Revenge fantasy, as it is not enough to root out evil and bring it to justice--that would turn it into a police procedural--we must first be motivated to wish for what may be called the "payback" moment that comes at the climax, with one man taking on legions (Mel Gibson made a movie called just that).

Another good example is Shintaro Katsu's long-running samurai series, Zatoichi. Zatoichi is an itinerant gambler and masseuse, who also happens to be (natch) the world's best swordsman. In his bumbling, Columbo-esque manner, he wanders into town, stumbles onto some great injustice which he feels driven to right, leading up to a great cathartic sword fight in the last ten minutes of the film, during which he dispatches every bad guy in town.

At that point, were he to hang up his sword and settle down, that would be that. Were he were to come up with a more subtle way of righting wrongs, that would be that. But there's always another town where the politicians are exploiting the peasants and the yakuza are exploiting the politicians and somebody needs to clean house.

Still, once you've seen two or three Zatoichi films, you've pretty much seen all two-dozen plus. Again, the problem is that you've got to keep adding more sex, more violence, more outrages, more fights, more plot twists and turns to keep the story wheels turning. When Takeshi Kitano stepped into the role in 2003, he threw in a song and dance routine at the end. No kidding, a samurai movie with a chorus line.

Well, that indeed was different. Rowling's creative stroke in this regard is how she uses Quidditch to keep the fires stoked in between bad guy confrontations. This utterly illogical game exists to let Harry Potter be the star player, the quarterback on offense all the time, without the bother of him actually having to work and play well with others. Or even practice. Of his talent at the game, Rowling writes, "He realized he'd found something he could do without being taught."

Lucky him. But that's every kid's fantasy, isn't it? Hitting the long ball that wins the game, every game. And without all those workouts.

The Sports hero narrative is often a form of the Revenge fantasy, with athletic victory serving as a less-lethal kind of comeuppance. The sports arena allows the protagonist to beat his opponent physically and psychologically without invoking the morally troubling question of vigilantism. As in Rocky III, the hero is first humiliated by his opponent (the cartoonish Mr. T), and then, as the result of much righteous effort, pays his opponent back in the climax, literally eye for swollen eye and tooth for chipped tooth.

Harry Potter has all of the above working for him. He's an orphan, a sports jock, a superhero, and born to greatness. And rich. Not only are bad guys bumping off parents, friends, and then coming after him both as a child and a teenager, they don't even play fair! And that's just not cricket. Feel the outrage. Embrace the dark side of your human nature. Get them back for me. Go ahead, lop off somebody's head with your light saber (oh, sorry, wrong Revenge fantasy).

This, then, is why every new book is advertised as "darker" than the last, with some unexpected new violence or victim. It's also why nobody changes. Harry Potter doesn't mature, and neither does Malfoy, or the Dursleys, or Voldemort. They can't change objectives, change strategies, learn from past misadventures, reevaluate their places in the world, else risk Harry's revenge pilot light going out. They are locked into the caste system of the Revenge fantasy, doomed to relive the same parts over and over into eternity.

Or at least until the series ends.

Labels: book reviews, deep thoughts, harry potter, yakuza