February 21, 2011
Japanese genre horror (1)
This is only a representative sampling of movies I've actually seen, and all the shorter because the horror genre is for me more the exception than the rule, to be avoided unless I have a good reason not to.
To start with, the genre seems dominated by extremes of "bad." At one end, by splatter flicks, these days stripped even of eye-pleasing gratuitous sex and nudity (e.g., Freeze Me). At the other, by coldly mathematical morality tales. And in the middle, elaborate practical jokes: "You though X. Ha! It's really Y!" M. Night Shyamalan's entire oeuvre.
Most modern horror isn't scary or frightening. It's some banal combination of the depressingly nihilistic and the startling, like a balloon popped behind your ear. Not the same thing at all. I don't like roller coasters either.
The scariest thing I saw as a kid, maybe ever, was--no kidding--Disney's Miltonesque Black Hole, and Anthony Perkins getting rototilled to death by a killer robot, totally sans blood and gore, not even a nosebleed.
But a few films do the same-old, same-old with sufficient wit and bravado--that don't confuse iconoclasm and heresy with the juvenile giving of offense--and actually manage to create something new. Or did that new thing first to start with.
Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1953) deserves to be on Time magazine's all-time 100 best list. It's a morality tale based on well-known ghost stories, told in the context of Japan's medieval warring states period, albeit with obvious contemporary allusions, considering it was made immediately following the end of the American Occupation.
Aragami (2002) is a recent addition to the same story line, in which a wandering peasant or soldier takes shelter in an old temple that turns out to be home to a surly demon. Aragami does nothing new and sports a groan-inducing Shyamalan-style ending. The world doesn't need any more ninety minute Twilight Zone episodes.
Makai Tensho ("Samurai Resurrection") is a perennial classic, remade now at least three times. The story comes from the 1637-1637 Shimabara Rebellion, in the wake of which almost 40,000 Christians were killed and Christianity was outlawed (upon pain of death) for the next two centuries. But, hey, bygones!
Christianity nowadays (the trappings thereof) is cool. In the early 17th century, it was very bad for your health. The leader of the Shimabara Rebellion, the "Christian Samurai" Shiro Amakusa, rises from the dead to wreak vengeance and it's up to Yagyu Jubei (another historic character and samurai flick favorite) to save the Shogunate.
The 2003 version has the best production values and is the least gratuitous, though it lacks the cheesy, exploitation flick exuberance of the 1981 version (often titled "Samurai Reincarnation"), starring Sonny Chiba as Jubei, a quasi-historical role he played often.
"J-horror" was big in the U.S. for a while, but I got bored with it about as soon as it began, movies about ghosts with big hangups and a misdirected sense of revenge. The "vengeful ghost" is big in Buddhism. Like Ghost or The Sixth Sense, except these dead people need tons more therapy.
The following "big three" are generally acknowledge to have launched the "J-Horror wave": The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water. Of those three, I've only see the English version of the first. Like I said, not my cup of tea. Two hours of mood for a few minutes of "Gotcha!" I'll wait for the ten-minute Simpsons parody.
I can only put up with so much moody angst before I want to know what happened next. When stuff does happen in J-horror, it's usually according to a strict moral algebra where everybody who does X and Y predictably gets Z, except in the maddening passive voice. Give me a protagonist who will just punch the creepy ghost's lights out.
Which is why I greatly prefer shamelessly pandering action/horror flicks like Constantine and End of Days.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa (not related to Akira) made the postmodern psychological thriller his thing (for a while, with Koji Yakusho in the lead role). I just can't get excited over his stories of Nietzschean excess, about weird things happening to people I don't care about. But they're a far sight better than the recent spat of inexplicably popular "will-to-power" amorality tales.
We're not talking about vigilantes ridding the world of far worse guys, but the kind of sociopathic twerps Jimmy Stewart upbraids in Rope, that we're supposed to root for because they're so, so clever and filled with so, so much Freudian angst.
The execrable Death Note franchise perhaps represents the nadir of this particular sub-genre. It really is just Rope turned upside down and given a spiffy polish. Rope was made in 1948. Talk about recycling old material and pretending it's hip and new.
Code Geass is a hundred times smarter, and the Hamlet-ish conflict Lelouch starts out with is a hundred times more interesting. But by the end of the first season it's clear you're stuck rooting for Hitler or Stalin, and I'd rather they both dropped dead.
Seriously, parents and preachers and politicians, you should wish your kids were watching porn and not soul-killing crap like this. On the other hand, it once again demonstrates that there is zero correlation between what tickles the teenage mind and what actually motivates a teenager to get off his butt and do anything.
I've long concluded that there is a depressingly large population of (especially "indie") filmmakers who believe that there's absolutely nothing worse in this world than growing up middle class. Back in high school, they concluded that life sucks and never grew up. Teenagers do love being told how put-upon and long-suffering they are.
Anyway, I did like Koji Yakusho in Shinji Aoyama's Eureka, a psychological thriller/serial-killer crime drama with a strangely hopeful conclusion. A little authentic hope goes a long way. Otherwise, horror is like hitting your thumb with a hammer for the pleasure of stopping. Better not to hit your thumb in the first place.
Shikoku and Inugami are based on novels by Masako Bando, the "Stephen King" of Japan (his Maine is her Shikoku). The former is low-budget and ends like an Indiana Jones sequel. The latter is a crazy mix of Oedipus Rex, Shinto mysticism and a Hatfield/McCoy feud. It's a gorgeously-shot film, with heaps of gorgeously-shot sex and nudity.
Inugami is a good example of an "art film" where the director mistakenly thought that setting a mood was the same as delivering a message. All I remember about it now are the lush establishing shots, the stuff about traditional paper making (the most interesting parts), and attractive women without any clothes on.
Well, sometimes that's enough!
To start with, the genre seems dominated by extremes of "bad." At one end, by splatter flicks, these days stripped even of eye-pleasing gratuitous sex and nudity (e.g., Freeze Me). At the other, by coldly mathematical morality tales. And in the middle, elaborate practical jokes: "You though X. Ha! It's really Y!" M. Night Shyamalan's entire oeuvre.
Most modern horror isn't scary or frightening. It's some banal combination of the depressingly nihilistic and the startling, like a balloon popped behind your ear. Not the same thing at all. I don't like roller coasters either.
The scariest thing I saw as a kid, maybe ever, was--no kidding--Disney's Miltonesque Black Hole, and Anthony Perkins getting rototilled to death by a killer robot, totally sans blood and gore, not even a nosebleed.
But a few films do the same-old, same-old with sufficient wit and bravado--that don't confuse iconoclasm and heresy with the juvenile giving of offense--and actually manage to create something new. Or did that new thing first to start with.
Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1953) deserves to be on Time magazine's all-time 100 best list. It's a morality tale based on well-known ghost stories, told in the context of Japan's medieval warring states period, albeit with obvious contemporary allusions, considering it was made immediately following the end of the American Occupation.
Aragami (2002) is a recent addition to the same story line, in which a wandering peasant or soldier takes shelter in an old temple that turns out to be home to a surly demon. Aragami does nothing new and sports a groan-inducing Shyamalan-style ending. The world doesn't need any more ninety minute Twilight Zone episodes.
Makai Tensho ("Samurai Resurrection") is a perennial classic, remade now at least three times. The story comes from the 1637-1637 Shimabara Rebellion, in the wake of which almost 40,000 Christians were killed and Christianity was outlawed (upon pain of death) for the next two centuries. But, hey, bygones!
Christianity nowadays (the trappings thereof) is cool. In the early 17th century, it was very bad for your health. The leader of the Shimabara Rebellion, the "Christian Samurai" Shiro Amakusa, rises from the dead to wreak vengeance and it's up to Yagyu Jubei (another historic character and samurai flick favorite) to save the Shogunate.
The 2003 version has the best production values and is the least gratuitous, though it lacks the cheesy, exploitation flick exuberance of the 1981 version (often titled "Samurai Reincarnation"), starring Sonny Chiba as Jubei, a quasi-historical role he played often.
"J-horror" was big in the U.S. for a while, but I got bored with it about as soon as it began, movies about ghosts with big hangups and a misdirected sense of revenge. The "vengeful ghost" is big in Buddhism. Like Ghost or The Sixth Sense, except these dead people need tons more therapy.
The following "big three" are generally acknowledge to have launched the "J-Horror wave": The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water. Of those three, I've only see the English version of the first. Like I said, not my cup of tea. Two hours of mood for a few minutes of "Gotcha!" I'll wait for the ten-minute Simpsons parody.
I can only put up with so much moody angst before I want to know what happened next. When stuff does happen in J-horror, it's usually according to a strict moral algebra where everybody who does X and Y predictably gets Z, except in the maddening passive voice. Give me a protagonist who will just punch the creepy ghost's lights out.
Which is why I greatly prefer shamelessly pandering action/horror flicks like Constantine and End of Days.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa (not related to Akira) made the postmodern psychological thriller his thing (for a while, with Koji Yakusho in the lead role). I just can't get excited over his stories of Nietzschean excess, about weird things happening to people I don't care about. But they're a far sight better than the recent spat of inexplicably popular "will-to-power" amorality tales.
We're not talking about vigilantes ridding the world of far worse guys, but the kind of sociopathic twerps Jimmy Stewart upbraids in Rope, that we're supposed to root for because they're so, so clever and filled with so, so much Freudian angst.
The execrable Death Note franchise perhaps represents the nadir of this particular sub-genre. It really is just Rope turned upside down and given a spiffy polish. Rope was made in 1948. Talk about recycling old material and pretending it's hip and new.
Code Geass is a hundred times smarter, and the Hamlet-ish conflict Lelouch starts out with is a hundred times more interesting. But by the end of the first season it's clear you're stuck rooting for Hitler or Stalin, and I'd rather they both dropped dead.
Seriously, parents and preachers and politicians, you should wish your kids were watching porn and not soul-killing crap like this. On the other hand, it once again demonstrates that there is zero correlation between what tickles the teenage mind and what actually motivates a teenager to get off his butt and do anything.
I've long concluded that there is a depressingly large population of (especially "indie") filmmakers who believe that there's absolutely nothing worse in this world than growing up middle class. Back in high school, they concluded that life sucks and never grew up. Teenagers do love being told how put-upon and long-suffering they are.
Anyway, I did like Koji Yakusho in Shinji Aoyama's Eureka, a psychological thriller/serial-killer crime drama with a strangely hopeful conclusion. A little authentic hope goes a long way. Otherwise, horror is like hitting your thumb with a hammer for the pleasure of stopping. Better not to hit your thumb in the first place.
Shikoku and Inugami are based on novels by Masako Bando, the "Stephen King" of Japan (his Maine is her Shikoku). The former is low-budget and ends like an Indiana Jones sequel. The latter is a crazy mix of Oedipus Rex, Shinto mysticism and a Hatfield/McCoy feud. It's a gorgeously-shot film, with heaps of gorgeously-shot sex and nudity.
Inugami is a good example of an "art film" where the director mistakenly thought that setting a mood was the same as delivering a message. All I remember about it now are the lush establishing shots, the stuff about traditional paper making (the most interesting parts), and attractive women without any clothes on.
Well, sometimes that's enough!
Related posts
Anime genre horror (2)
Christianity is cool
Ghostbusting in Japan
Labels: buddhism, japan, japanese movie reviews, moral outrage, movie reviews, pop culture, religion, robots, shinto
January 25, 2010
Oh yeah, we're baaad
Recently in the New York Times, David Brooks described Avatar as an illustration of the "White Messiah fable," a popular narrative formula in which
Somewhat in Cameron's defense, the Messiah and his "white man's burden" is a fairly universal trope. And not confined to white men. Its seeds germinate at the heart of any reactionary or revolutionary cause, especially those that can attract true believers with no actual skin in the game.
Its appeal is undeniable. In contrast to the monomyth hero formula that has a lowly beta catching a lucky break and making the most of it through sheer hard work (Rocky), being a Messiah vaults you to the top of the pecking order solely because of your inherent moral superiority. Because of who you are.
It helps if you're Kevin Costner or Tom Cruise.
This is the corrupting feudal apple in the primordeal Eden. Despite our equalitarian pretentions, we really do believe that some animals are more equal than others. Moral superiority requires no effort to possess. You need only announce its presence within you and hew to the proper political platform.
As I point out in my review of The Last Samurai--also cited by Brooks--this version of the "White Messiah" fable actually gets the audience to root against democracy and for an oppressive aristocracy. Saigo Takamori's rebellion was the early articulation of an imperialistic vision that led inexorably to WWII.
We ignore the obvious because identifying with the Tom Cruise character allows us to virtually zoom straight to alpha status without having to go through the grueling Darwinian guantlet demanded of the natives. (If they had the good luck of being born to the right parents, that is. Who cleans the latrines on Pandora?)
As Slate's David Edelstein observes, "Movies can manipulate you to root for just about anyone, anytime." So the deeper question is not just why it is so easy to root out our lurking aristocratic inclinations, but at the same time make us actually root against our own culture and the ones who brung us.
A big reason can be found in M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable (his last good film): without monsters, there's no need for monster killers. The two are complementary. The one rationalizes the other's existence, the good becoming only as good as the evil is evil. As Shakespeare's (not yet) King Richard puts it:
What makes Peter Parker the hero is not just his strength but his morality--"with great strength comes great responsibility." This is not a bad thing. In the information age, moral superiority is as telling an alpha marker as physical superiority. But again, without moral supervillains, moral superheroes are out of a job.
Except there just isn't enough easy-peasy supervillainry to go around. Unless the Luther family lives in town. It becomes necessary, then, to proselytize. To sully our names far and wide. Conveniently, the ideological causes that consign the west to the heart of darkness also vault us to the top of the food chain.
These "humble" convictions that posit the United States as the controlling variable in ruining everything--from the climate of the planet to war and peace everywhere on the earth to the survival of every species of life--make us all supervillains. Demi-gods. Masters of the universe. B-B-B-bad to the bone.
Not only that, but theatrical conspiracy theories from Three Days of the Condor to The X-Files to Enemy of the State are, despite themselves, celebrations of unbelievably efficient centralized government apparati found nowhere in nature (except in the Orientalist fantasies of Tom Friedman).
Americans are not alone in this. Apocalyptic Japanese SF fantasies such as Vexille, Akira and Evangelion are really about the Japanese destroying themselves because they're just so darned clever. Michael Crichton's Rising Sun is a similarly backhanded paean to superior Japanese wizardry.
We're great, which makes opposing ourselves even greater. There is no deeper fount of justification and self-righteousness than self-abnegation. The sinner sees the light and preaches reform. And just like in that old time religion, the man on the silver screen suffers for us, takes upon our sins, and redeems us.
That's what Messiahs are for. I mean, it's a whole lot easier than doing it ourselves. All that is required is to watch, agree, and applaud. Because living like those Rousseauan "noble savages" really lived would bore us out of our freaking skulls (if we managed to survive the first hard frost, that is).
a manly young adventurer who goes into the wilderness in search of thrills and profit. But, once there, he meets the native people and finds that they are noble and spiritual and pure. And so he emerges as their Messiah, leading them on a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilization.
Somewhat in Cameron's defense, the Messiah and his "white man's burden" is a fairly universal trope. And not confined to white men. Its seeds germinate at the heart of any reactionary or revolutionary cause, especially those that can attract true believers with no actual skin in the game.
Its appeal is undeniable. In contrast to the monomyth hero formula that has a lowly beta catching a lucky break and making the most of it through sheer hard work (Rocky), being a Messiah vaults you to the top of the pecking order solely because of your inherent moral superiority. Because of who you are.
It helps if you're Kevin Costner or Tom Cruise.
This is the corrupting feudal apple in the primordeal Eden. Despite our equalitarian pretentions, we really do believe that some animals are more equal than others. Moral superiority requires no effort to possess. You need only announce its presence within you and hew to the proper political platform.
As I point out in my review of The Last Samurai--also cited by Brooks--this version of the "White Messiah" fable actually gets the audience to root against democracy and for an oppressive aristocracy. Saigo Takamori's rebellion was the early articulation of an imperialistic vision that led inexorably to WWII.
We ignore the obvious because identifying with the Tom Cruise character allows us to virtually zoom straight to alpha status without having to go through the grueling Darwinian guantlet demanded of the natives. (If they had the good luck of being born to the right parents, that is. Who cleans the latrines on Pandora?)
As Slate's David Edelstein observes, "Movies can manipulate you to root for just about anyone, anytime." So the deeper question is not just why it is so easy to root out our lurking aristocratic inclinations, but at the same time make us actually root against our own culture and the ones who brung us.
A big reason can be found in M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable (his last good film): without monsters, there's no need for monster killers. The two are complementary. The one rationalizes the other's existence, the good becoming only as good as the evil is evil. As Shakespeare's (not yet) King Richard puts it:
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to see my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain[.]
What makes Peter Parker the hero is not just his strength but his morality--"with great strength comes great responsibility." This is not a bad thing. In the information age, moral superiority is as telling an alpha marker as physical superiority. But again, without moral supervillains, moral superheroes are out of a job.
Except there just isn't enough easy-peasy supervillainry to go around. Unless the Luther family lives in town. It becomes necessary, then, to proselytize. To sully our names far and wide. Conveniently, the ideological causes that consign the west to the heart of darkness also vault us to the top of the food chain.
These "humble" convictions that posit the United States as the controlling variable in ruining everything--from the climate of the planet to war and peace everywhere on the earth to the survival of every species of life--make us all supervillains. Demi-gods. Masters of the universe. B-B-B-bad to the bone.
Not only that, but theatrical conspiracy theories from Three Days of the Condor to The X-Files to Enemy of the State are, despite themselves, celebrations of unbelievably efficient centralized government apparati found nowhere in nature (except in the Orientalist fantasies of Tom Friedman).
Americans are not alone in this. Apocalyptic Japanese SF fantasies such as Vexille, Akira and Evangelion are really about the Japanese destroying themselves because they're just so darned clever. Michael Crichton's Rising Sun is a similarly backhanded paean to superior Japanese wizardry.
We're great, which makes opposing ourselves even greater. There is no deeper fount of justification and self-righteousness than self-abnegation. The sinner sees the light and preaches reform. And just like in that old time religion, the man on the silver screen suffers for us, takes upon our sins, and redeems us.
That's what Messiahs are for. I mean, it's a whole lot easier than doing it ourselves. All that is required is to watch, agree, and applaud. Because living like those Rousseauan "noble savages" really lived would bore us out of our freaking skulls (if we managed to survive the first hard frost, that is).
Related posts
The Big Bad
Apocalypse not now
The Second Coming went
The world ends (and I feel fine)
Labels: apocalyptic fiction, deep thoughts, miltonesque, moral outrage, movies, superhero
February 24, 2009
Don't look at that!
If you've ever--you know, accidentally--happened to watch some anime porn (even of the R-rated variety: I recommend I Dream of Mimi), you might find this illustration of the moral and legal perils involved and the editorial fictions invented by importers to ameliorate them amusing.
To better understand what a "figurine" is, go here and click around (at your own NSFW peril).
Of course, there's the irony that characters somebody drew having "sex" are considered more "dangerous" to our moral health than actual human beings pretending to be underage and having sex (American Pie). You can even garner yourself an Oscar for doing so!
Regardless of what the Supreme Court said, anime importers follow the "stagecoach rule" in this regard. "First Amendment" rights are even hazier in Canada, which is also DVD region 1. And just to be safe, outfits like Greencine won't send "porn" to Utah and a couple of other states.
I once came across a hentai tape at a Hollywood Video here in Utah County (it wasn't half bad). The same store also had a copy of In the Realm of the Senses (meh), so it was probably part of the startup stock, and the owners had no idea it was there.
Until the irate parent stormed in, I suppose. Is that why Netflix doesn't ship I Dream of Mimi anymore? They do ship In the Realm of the Senses, which is about a billion times more explicit. Go figure.
Here's the Wikipedia entry for Kodomo no Jikan (haven't seen it, don't want to). The teacher/student romance typically involves a female high school student, and it is ubiquitous enough to constitute a standard girl's comics genre (and is often quite explicit).
The flipside is the "harem" genre featuring a prepubescent boy surrounded by developmentally precocious teenage (and often older) girls, such as the enormously popular Negima! and the just plain creepy Please Teacher, Happy Lesson and Mouse.
To sum up Negima! Imagine that Harry Potter as a nerdy ten-year-old and Hermione as a spunky, resourceful sixteen-year-old, and she and her coed classmates at Hogwarts have a habit of "accidentally" getting undressed around him. Oh, and they share a dorm room.
Actually, if Rowling's Hermione had been more like this Hermione, I might have stayed interested in the books. Stupid "fan service" aside, Negima! takes some interesting plot turns and is far less annoying than Ken Akamatsu's big harem hit, Love Hina.
But as I argue at length here, I've concluded that the Freudian subtext is really all about family formation (and the lack thereof).
To better understand what a "figurine" is, go here and click around (at your own NSFW peril).
Of course, there's the irony that characters somebody drew having "sex" are considered more "dangerous" to our moral health than actual human beings pretending to be underage and having sex (American Pie). You can even garner yourself an Oscar for doing so!
Regardless of what the Supreme Court said, anime importers follow the "stagecoach rule" in this regard. "First Amendment" rights are even hazier in Canada, which is also DVD region 1. And just to be safe, outfits like Greencine won't send "porn" to Utah and a couple of other states.
I once came across a hentai tape at a Hollywood Video here in Utah County (it wasn't half bad). The same store also had a copy of In the Realm of the Senses (meh), so it was probably part of the startup stock, and the owners had no idea it was there.
Until the irate parent stormed in, I suppose. Is that why Netflix doesn't ship I Dream of Mimi anymore? They do ship In the Realm of the Senses, which is about a billion times more explicit. Go figure.
Here's the Wikipedia entry for Kodomo no Jikan (haven't seen it, don't want to). The teacher/student romance typically involves a female high school student, and it is ubiquitous enough to constitute a standard girl's comics genre (and is often quite explicit).
The flipside is the "harem" genre featuring a prepubescent boy surrounded by developmentally precocious teenage (and often older) girls, such as the enormously popular Negima! and the just plain creepy Please Teacher, Happy Lesson and Mouse.
To sum up Negima! Imagine that Harry Potter as a nerdy ten-year-old and Hermione as a spunky, resourceful sixteen-year-old, and she and her coed classmates at Hogwarts have a habit of "accidentally" getting undressed around him. Oh, and they share a dorm room.
Actually, if Rowling's Hermione had been more like this Hermione, I might have stayed interested in the books. Stupid "fan service" aside, Negima! takes some interesting plot turns and is far less annoying than Ken Akamatsu's big harem hit, Love Hina.
But as I argue at length here, I've concluded that the Freudian subtext is really all about family formation (and the lack thereof).
Labels: anime, deep thoughts, moral outrage, netflix, politics, sex, utah
January 19, 2009
I'm number one in something!
Over the weekend at Amazon, volume one of Ai no Kusabi bobbed back to #1 in Books > Comics & Graphic Novels > Yaoi > Novels. And briefly this morning, it ranked as high as #55,138 in Books. I've never broken the top 100,000 for my own novels.
Granted, if there was a category for Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Horror > Mormon Vampires Novels > Featuring Actual Mormons, I'd be number one in that too! (like those self-esteem courses that are supposed to make kids feel so special about being their unique little selves).
But having apparently offended the tender sensibilities of several readers with the "graphic sex" in The Path of Dreams and Angel Falling Softly (man, those are some really tender sensibilities), I have to say I'm amused (in a totally good way) by reader comments for Ai no Kusabi like:
In the eye of the beholder indeed! So if Angel Falling Softly tests your limits, run away! (I can assure Ai no Kusabi readers that there are way more explicit passages in subsequent volumes.)
Get past those "obstacles" and some narrative repetition (the story was serialized, published as a single volume, expanded into a light novel series, and now a second anime series), and Rieko Yoshihara has insightful things to say about Caligulan moral decay and the rotten fruits of political idealism.
Granted, the supercomputer-running-everything motif (e.g., Appleseed) is a bit dated, but then again, it's mostly there as backstory and not an active part of the narrative.
As the series progresses, I'd swear Yoshihara is poking Swiftian fun at child-poor but dog-crazy Japan (to quote The Independent: "One in five families has a dog in Japan and they are treated not like pets, but like part of the family") and the "Lolita" subculture (the most morally disturbing parts).
Perhaps I'm reading too much into it. I am wont to do that (but only because it's so much fun).
Granted, if there was a category for Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Horror > Mormon Vampires Novels > Featuring Actual Mormons, I'd be number one in that too! (like those self-esteem courses that are supposed to make kids feel so special about being their unique little selves).
But having apparently offended the tender sensibilities of several readers with the "graphic sex" in The Path of Dreams and Angel Falling Softly (man, those are some really tender sensibilities), I have to say I'm amused (in a totally good way) by reader comments for Ai no Kusabi like:
Those who are looking for graphic scenes are going to be fairly disappointed. Aside from a heated, however vague, piece in the first chapter, there is virtually nothing of note in this book.
In the eye of the beholder indeed! So if Angel Falling Softly tests your limits, run away! (I can assure Ai no Kusabi readers that there are way more explicit passages in subsequent volumes.)
Get past those "obstacles" and some narrative repetition (the story was serialized, published as a single volume, expanded into a light novel series, and now a second anime series), and Rieko Yoshihara has insightful things to say about Caligulan moral decay and the rotten fruits of political idealism.
Granted, the supercomputer-running-everything motif (e.g., Appleseed) is a bit dated, but then again, it's mostly there as backstory and not an active part of the narrative.
As the series progresses, I'd swear Yoshihara is poking Swiftian fun at child-poor but dog-crazy Japan (to quote The Independent: "One in five families has a dog in Japan and they are treated not like pets, but like part of the family") and the "Lolita" subculture (the most morally disturbing parts).
Perhaps I'm reading too much into it. I am wont to do that (but only because it's so much fun).
Labels: books, lds, light novel, moral outrage, sex, translations
August 27, 2008
Frozen Feminism
I like to imagine that one day during the filming of Freeze Me, the producers approached writer/director Takashi Ishii, clapped him on the shoulder and said, "We all know the plan was to make a slick, updated "Pinky Violence" sexploitation flick, but, damn, this doesn't look half bad! I know, let's turn it into an art house film!"So what could have been a kick-ass, soft-core revenge movie instead ends up an unsatisfying pile of faux "independent film" pretentiousness. And still manages to be just as misogynistic.
The story goes as follows: after getting raped by a trio of knuckle-dragging thugs, Chihiro (Harumi Inoue) has moved to Tokyo and made a new life for herself. Then thug number one shows up and, blackmailing her with a video made by his cohorts of their previous "encounter," announces he's ready to pick up where they left off last time.
A bunch of degrading sex later, Chihiro has had it up to here and caves his head in. Well, it was about time. The problem is, she has no convenient way to dispose of the body in downtown Tokyo. So she buys an industrial-sized freezer (delivery included) to store the corpse in while she figures it out.
Then thug number two shows up wondering what happened to thug number one and decides to avail himself of the same opportunities. Chihiro spends less time putting him on ice as well. And then thug number three—well, you get the picture.
But all this freezing is sucking up the power in Chihiro's rabbit hutch of an apartment, and it being the middle of the summer, the only way to keep from throwing a circuit breaker every five minutes is to turn off the air conditioner. Then the only way for her to cool off, natch, is to take lots of long showers.
Now, to be honest, I could have spent the entire 100 minutes just watching Harumi Inoue take showers. In any case, at this point in the film, we have the makings of a clever black comedy, with plenty of eye candy thrown in.
I was even willing to forgive Chihiro her maddening passivity during the first third of the movie. It's the standard Death Wish revenge fantasy formula: pacifist gets shocked into action and delivers violent justice to evil-doers ("a conservative is a liberal who got mugged"). Except that once the revenge is delivered, the plot grinds to a screeching halt.
Here is the rest of the movie (seriously):
Chihiro's loser boyfriend discovers what's in the freezers, and after some "It's not you, it's me" sex, he gets it too. Then she jumps off the balcony. I guess. It's kinda vague. Because it's an "art" film, don't you see. Oh, and it's raining. And it's at night. The end. Wow, moved and impressed, aren't you?
I don't know if the producers truly had the Pinky Violence films in mind as an antecedent, but Freeze Me is certainly less a homage than a betrayal. And sadly indicative of regressive and repressive strains in "modern" attitudes about women and sex. (By the way, the best Pinky Violence parody/homage is the hilarious Kamikaze Girls.)
During the early 1970s in Japan, with television eating away at profit margins, just like a Reese's peanut butter cup commercial, the "pink" (soft-core porn) genre collided with the yakuza action genre and produced a series of low-budget exploitation flicks featuring biker chicks slicing, dicing, and taking their clothes off.
A few of them, such as Delinquent Girl Boss with Reiko Oshida, don't actually suck. With her husky Lauren Bacall voice, Oshida totally sells the role as a bad girl in control of her environment and her own fate, willing to use both her fists and her sexuality to achieve her aims.
I consider Oshida's Rika the archetype for such modern anime heroines as Motoko Kusanagi (Ghost in the Shell) and Kumiko Yamaguchi (Gokusen). But watch Delinquent Girl Boss and then Freeze Me and you can't help but wonder: What happened?
One way I measure the relative quality of a bad movie is how long it takes me to doctor up a better script. It took me about five minutes to think of a better last half to Freeze Me.
Let's say a cop starts poking around—a female cop—wondering why the thugs haven't been reporting to their probation officer. The heat is on, and Chihiro has to figure a way to get rid of the bodies. And no way is she going to cram them down the garbage disposal. She's got to come up with something ingenious, and the cop is beginning to sense what's going on.
Ah, a physical and a moral dilemma. Now we've got pure film noir material. A comparison that springs to mind is Bound by Andy and Larry Wachowski. Freeze Me could have hummed and purred as well. Instead it alternately shivers and sweats and clunks and gives up without a fight.
I blame Thelma & Louise, which should more appropriately be titled: "The Original Dumb & Dumber." This supposed paean to film feminism follows the exploits of two unbelievably stupid grown women who have spent their entire lives as victims of impulse and circumstance and aren't about to let a little (almost justifiable) homicide stop them.
The good-guy cop (Harvey Keitel) finds them such a pathetic pair that he starts emoting like a father in pursuit of his two dimwitted daughters. Their exploits inspire pity at best, contempt at worst. Not once is logic ever allowed to compete with emotion, let alone overcome it. So why not just drive off a cliff?
It's hard not to read a very obvious metaphor into the final scene: the caring man stands by helplessly while the newly "liberated" women cast themselves into oblivion. And a woman actually wrote it.
It doesn't help that so many "artists" are so willing to read "profundity" into self-immolation, if dressed up with enough psychobabble or multiculturalism. It takes years of indoctrination to find something noble in dying for nothing, as Clint Eastwood did in the morally obtuse Letters from Iwo Jima.
Eastwood should have heeded his own advice: "A man's got to know his limits." Then again, Dirty Harry Callahan was much more sensible about things like that. Hells bells, even Rambo has a smarter motto. It's "Live for nothing, die for something!" not the other way around.
To be sure, there are plenty of movies about guys going out in a blaze of pointless glory—Barry Newman in Vanishing Point, James Cagney in White Heat, Michael Douglas in Falling Down, Newman and Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—but the directors stress that either they really deserved it or there was absolutely no other alternative.
Even then, think about it for five minutes and it's still pretty damn dumb.
And yet for far slighter provocations, women are expected to jump off cliffs, tall buildings (Vertigo) and balconies, and throw themselves under trains. I'm sorry, but I just don't see how depicting women as so unimaginative and psychologically vulnerable is supposed to counter the stereotype of women as the "weaker sex."
I ask along with Erica Friedman, "What the hell is entertaining about reading and watching women being complete idiots and being abused by men?"
Which is why there's something more invidious than the lazy, pretentious plotting going on in Freeze Me. And again, I think this is so deeply ingrained—even in modern, leftist Hollywood—that it goes without comment. That is, it is verboten for women to use sex to level the playing field with physically more powerful men.
Trespassers must be punished! Or as Emily Bazelon puts it, "Whenever a woman sins, or contemplates sin, blam!—she's immediately run over by a truck."
Jean-Claude Brisseau's Secret Things serves as the textbook alternative to Freeze Me. His Machiavellian women are similarly punished, but in proportion to the rules they deliberately—and with self-interest foremost in mind—break. Playing with fire will get you burned, in other words. And it's the man lying in the pool of blood at the end.
Ishii's Chihiro, on the other hand, seems mostly guilty of not playing the proper victim. "Life sucks and then you die" may strike the adolescent mind as profound during the teen goth years, but adults know that having to live with your choices is a heavier burden.
The last scene in Secret Things morally redeems all of its excesses, because it straightforwardly depicts two women who have learned something from their bad decisions, and who know where those scars came from. The last scenes in Freeze Me and Thelma & Louise only confirm that the unexamined life is not worth living.
And so, their lives unexamined, they stop living.
Brisseau's treatment of the subject does get so explicit at times (Ishii is restrained by comparison) that you get bored (bored with sex and nudity—now there's a crime!), or much worse, you start giggling. (The "orgy" scene: just don't do it!) Nothing kills the dramatic mood and the sexual tension faster.
But it is the vulnerability of Ishii's and Brisseau's men in the face of such female wiles that clarifies why some governments and cultures enforce misogynistic laws to prevent stuff like this from happening. The don't-objectify-me left joins hands with the don't-tempt-me right to demonize female sexual desire as the root of all societal evil.
Rika in Delinquent Girl Boss broke free of these constraints way back in 1971. It often seems we haven't moved much beyond that high water mark since. As I observe here, it's as if feminists have been busily manning the Maginot Line while the old school chauvinists have been sneaking through Belgium the whole time.
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Labels: criticism, deep thoughts, ghost in the shell, japanese movie reviews, moral outrage, movie reviews, sex, yakuza
July 26, 2008
Yet more AFS "uproar"
Moriah Jovan examines the TBM (true believing Mormon) blogs so I don't have to. I need to subscribe to the "your soul's being damned" mailing list so I can get clued into this stuff earlier. I feel in the mood for some Meat Loaf.
UPDATE: C.H. Hanson scouts out some more TBM blog comments. Picture me holding my head in my hands like John Dvorak. I just don't get it!
Luckily for Orson Scott Card, nobody but a few science fiction and fantasy geeks have read Hart's Hope or Maps in a Mirror. I've read that he's caught flack for making the women in his (Shadow Mountain, nee Deseret Book) "Women of Genesis" series human.
So I shouldn't be surprised, except that somebody who would be offended by books like that should turn away at the sight of the front cover of Angel Falling Softly (now being referred to as "AFS" in some quarters) alone.
But what springs foremost to mind is the same flabbergasted reaction I had when I first came to Utah from the "mission field" and encountered at BYU the thin scriptural and doctrinal comprehension of kids who had attended time-release seminary for the past three or four years.
I could imagine Evangelicals taking me to task for stressing Rachel's maniacally works-centered concept of grace (it's their number one beef, after all), but Mormons?
The weirdest accusation is that this was some sort of nefarious plan to undermine the morals of the Youth of Zion. Okay, that was the plan, but it didn't fit into the fifty-dollar advertising budget (I kid, I kid, though not about the budget).
In any event, Zarahemla Books has a website. The catalog listing at Zarahemla points to my website, which in turn points to my blog. Note the tricky URLs I use. Google my name and both come up at the top of the list.
Yes, it'd be nice to fancy myself a mysterious, shadowy Dashiell Hammett type, slinking through the back alleys of the Big City. Alas, on the Internet, I am a literary open book.
And because this issue has been raised in counterpoint, I would also like to point out that nowhere in Zarahemla's listing or anywhere on my website is Angel Falling Softly described as "LDS fiction."
UPDATE: C.H. Hanson scouts out some more TBM blog comments. Picture me holding my head in my hands like John Dvorak. I just don't get it!Luckily for Orson Scott Card, nobody but a few science fiction and fantasy geeks have read Hart's Hope or Maps in a Mirror. I've read that he's caught flack for making the women in his (Shadow Mountain, nee Deseret Book) "Women of Genesis" series human.
So I shouldn't be surprised, except that somebody who would be offended by books like that should turn away at the sight of the front cover of Angel Falling Softly (now being referred to as "AFS" in some quarters) alone.
But what springs foremost to mind is the same flabbergasted reaction I had when I first came to Utah from the "mission field" and encountered at BYU the thin scriptural and doctrinal comprehension of kids who had attended time-release seminary for the past three or four years.
I could imagine Evangelicals taking me to task for stressing Rachel's maniacally works-centered concept of grace (it's their number one beef, after all), but Mormons?
The weirdest accusation is that this was some sort of nefarious plan to undermine the morals of the Youth of Zion. Okay, that was the plan, but it didn't fit into the fifty-dollar advertising budget (I kid, I kid, though not about the budget).
In any event, Zarahemla Books has a website. The catalog listing at Zarahemla points to my website, which in turn points to my blog. Note the tricky URLs I use. Google my name and both come up at the top of the list.
Yes, it'd be nice to fancy myself a mysterious, shadowy Dashiell Hammett type, slinking through the back alleys of the Big City. Alas, on the Internet, I am a literary open book.
And because this issue has been raised in counterpoint, I would also like to point out that nowhere in Zarahemla's listing or anywhere on my website is Angel Falling Softly described as "LDS fiction."
Labels: angel falling softly, angel reviews, BYU, lds, moral outrage
July 24, 2008
Angel Falling Softly "uproar"
My novel, Angel Falling Softly, has purportedly caused an "uproar." (Start here and work backwards.) Well, to be proportionally accurate, a tiny tempest in the teapot of Mormon letters. Get out your microscopes. A Chad Hardy scale of controversy would be more useful in terms of publicity.
I wasn't even aware until I caught a mention on another blog. I mean, about five people outside my immediate family read the paperback version of The Path of Dreams.
And it's not like Parables and Zarahemla are straddling the LDS literary world like modern colossi. I wish it were so. Which is why I harbor the sneaking suspicion that my supposedly offensive book has escaped a truly close reading by those offended (if it's been read at all).
Though while composing this response, another element of orthodox "Mormon fiction" occurred to me: that the narrator must always be an objectively reliable source of the "truth." My narrators are always reliable about what they believe to be the truth. I see where this could prove problematic for some.
In that light, I would like to point out a few of the "orthodox" narrative elements that I do not consider "subtle," but seemed to have escaped the attention of some. Perhaps I should have underlined them.
Now, to be sure, King Lear shouldn't have been such a chump. It'd be nice if he could have patched things up with his daughters. And nice if Hamlet could have gotten some counseling to get over his "issues" and married Ophelia. But me thinks the plays wouldn't have turned out the same.
UPDATE: The controversy continues here.
I wasn't even aware until I caught a mention on another blog. I mean, about five people outside my immediate family read the paperback version of The Path of Dreams.
And it's not like Parables and Zarahemla are straddling the LDS literary world like modern colossi. I wish it were so. Which is why I harbor the sneaking suspicion that my supposedly offensive book has escaped a truly close reading by those offended (if it's been read at all).
Though while composing this response, another element of orthodox "Mormon fiction" occurred to me: that the narrator must always be an objectively reliable source of the "truth." My narrators are always reliable about what they believe to be the truth. I see where this could prove problematic for some.
In that light, I would like to point out a few of the "orthodox" narrative elements that I do not consider "subtle," but seemed to have escaped the attention of some. Perhaps I should have underlined them.
1) There are two explicit references to Saul and the Witch of Endor. Rachel makes one herself, so she is aware of the thin ice she is treading on. Like Saul, Rachel is one big rationalizing machine. So is Milada.
2) Milada believes herself damned because she committed horrific crimes in her past, not because she is a vampire (her guilt argues for the existence of her soul). I use vampirism to illustrate the problem of a sinner "tak[ing] also of the tree of life, and eat[ing] and liv[ing] forever."
Note the references to "good vampires" in The Silver Kiss and Angel.
3) I didn't want to Milada to degrade into what Erica Friedman calls the "Evil Psycho Lesbian" character, but this is a facet of her personality she wars with (hence her conflicted reaction to Laura). She manages it by drawing lines for herself that she will not cross.
Frankly, she's come a long way in four centuries. And along the way, she has made some terrible yet noble sacrifices on behalf of her sisters. She is not unworthy of grace.
4) Kamilla stands as a stark contrast to her sister. Kamilla lives by a firm moral code. She is a genuinely good person. She despairs at Milada's obsession with their sire. In this case, a vampire's soul is the product of nurture (and personal discipline), not nature.
5) Jennifer's condition in the end is no less manageable than, say, type I diabetes. Her soul is not in jeopardy. Again, see Kamilla's example. Note who ends up as her guardian. (Hint: not the two people who rejected the possibilities of God's grace.)
6) My mom liked it.
Now, to be sure, King Lear shouldn't have been such a chump. It'd be nice if he could have patched things up with his daughters. And nice if Hamlet could have gotten some counseling to get over his "issues" and married Ophelia. But me thinks the plays wouldn't have turned out the same.
UPDATE: The controversy continues here.
Labels: angel falling softly, angel reviews, lds, moral outrage
November 13, 2007
The Philip Pullman "heresy"
A "rumor" circulating around Christian websites and email lists breathlessly reveals that The Golden Compass, the upcoming fantasy epic based on the trilogy by Philip Pullman, celebrates the demise of God. All right-thinking people should be shocked! Shocked! Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war! But this kind of ignorance-fueled hysteria reminds me of nothing so much as the "witch" scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy has been in print for a decade and has sold over 15 millions books. One does have to wonder about the long delay in the outrage. Well, it does help to stoke the fires of self-righteousness once you get around to dressing your foe "up like this."
In fact, the god who meets his demise is more an over-the-hill Darth Vader than the personification of the being on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. And the scene in question doesn't occur until the third installment in the series, which at this point isn't scheduled for theatrical release until 2011 (unless they pack all three books into two movies, in which case it won't hit theaters until 2009). The Chicken Littles should take two Valiums and get a grip.
But the rumor is out and about, aided and abetted by the fact that Philip Pullman enjoys speaking his mind and has stated publicly, among other things, that he doesn't care for C.S. Lewis. So Lewis fans have taken mighty offense. Actually, in terms of literary criticism, I don't think Pullman is that far off the mark. I also have the feeling that the eccentric Lewis was in person--like Einstein--a less agreeable person than his hagiographies make him out to be.
Pullman obviously loves playing the curmudgeon too, and I have some sympathy for the sentiment. But I'll say this for the Borgia popes: they never let loutishness get in the way of artistic genius.
Pullman also comes across as something of an atheist (I say "something," because His Dark Materials is certainly not atheistic). This guilt-by-association is a trap Christians often fall into. Darwinism gets embraced by loudmouthed atheists, so evolution must be the devil's work. But Marxists reject Darwin too. Push come to shove, I'll stand with the Darwinists, thank you very much. They're less likely to ship me off to a gulag.
But these ad hominems are beside the point. Having grown up in the Mormon tradition, I'll direct the bulk of my ranting and raving against my own kind.
Namely, that this fevered reaction is typical of the kind of hand-wringing that Mormons get into by: 1) believing that the enemy of their enemy is their friend; 2) not really having the slightest idea what they actually believe, and so deciding in this intellectual vacuum to go along with whatever tripe the more vocal evangelicals are fulminating about; 3) seeking safety in numbers.
[My sister suggests that the problem may arise from what she calls "right-brained literalism." That is, rejecting the weight of empirical fact while taking the subjective and emotive--such as that aroused by art--as literal expressions of reality. So one's personal reactions to a rumor are taken as more meaningful than the substance of the rumor itself. Unfortunately, this makes rational argument so much dust in the wind.]
Too many Mormons, for example, aren't aware that Lewis (in Perelandra) explains the Fall in terms quite different than the Sunday school view. Pullman's depiction is closer to the Mormon version. Do we need reminding of why mainline Christians--especially evangelicals--consider Mormonism heretical and non-Christian? You may be both throwing stones at the same target now, but it won't be long until they're back to throwing stones at you instead.
What do Mormons imagine the First Vision was about anyway? If not killing off the Nicene god? And in no uncertain terms.
Not only does His Dark Materials align more closely with Mormon doctrine than Lewis's Narnia, but it does so on a more complex level. If Narnia is algebra, His Dark Materials is differential calculus. Hence the oversimplification, leading to gullibility. In contrast, this review of Pullman's trilogy in First Things elucidates the weaknesses in Pullman's narrative with an even hand, and comes to the same conclusions that I do:
As I've noted above, the supposed heresy that kicked off this whole kerfuffle doesn't even take place in The Golden Compass. So if you're jonesing to be offended, you're going to have to wait. However, the conclusion of the anime series Scrapped Princess is quite similar to His Dark Materials. Essentially, the overthrow of the old church and old god ("Mauser"), made possible by a blood atonement, which leads to an "fall" from Eden (that has turned into a police state), and from captivity to free will.
Obviously, without watching the entire series (available from Netflix), you won't understand all the specifics of plot going on here (Pacifica's brother--the dragon--is fighting the enforcers of the old order). But Mormons in particular should recognize the symbolic nature of Pacifica's death, the conversation between Pacifica and "god," and her description of the "war in heaven."
I personally consider His Dark Materials one of the most ingenious Y/A fantasies ever written. Besides, whatever else he does, Pullman deserves respect for his succinct and insightful defense of Y/A literature in general.
UPDATE: More Philip Pullman commentary here, here, here and here.
BEDEMIR: How do you know she is a witch?
VILLAGER: She looks like one.
BEDEMIR: Bring her forward.
WITCH: I'm not a witch. I'm not a witch.
BEDEMIR: But you're dressed as one.
WITCH: They dressed me up like this.
Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy has been in print for a decade and has sold over 15 millions books. One does have to wonder about the long delay in the outrage. Well, it does help to stoke the fires of self-righteousness once you get around to dressing your foe "up like this."
In fact, the god who meets his demise is more an over-the-hill Darth Vader than the personification of the being on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. And the scene in question doesn't occur until the third installment in the series, which at this point isn't scheduled for theatrical release until 2011 (unless they pack all three books into two movies, in which case it won't hit theaters until 2009). The Chicken Littles should take two Valiums and get a grip.
But the rumor is out and about, aided and abetted by the fact that Philip Pullman enjoys speaking his mind and has stated publicly, among other things, that he doesn't care for C.S. Lewis. So Lewis fans have taken mighty offense. Actually, in terms of literary criticism, I don't think Pullman is that far off the mark. I also have the feeling that the eccentric Lewis was in person--like Einstein--a less agreeable person than his hagiographies make him out to be.
Pullman obviously loves playing the curmudgeon too, and I have some sympathy for the sentiment. But I'll say this for the Borgia popes: they never let loutishness get in the way of artistic genius.
Pullman also comes across as something of an atheist (I say "something," because His Dark Materials is certainly not atheistic). This guilt-by-association is a trap Christians often fall into. Darwinism gets embraced by loudmouthed atheists, so evolution must be the devil's work. But Marxists reject Darwin too. Push come to shove, I'll stand with the Darwinists, thank you very much. They're less likely to ship me off to a gulag.
But these ad hominems are beside the point. Having grown up in the Mormon tradition, I'll direct the bulk of my ranting and raving against my own kind.
Namely, that this fevered reaction is typical of the kind of hand-wringing that Mormons get into by: 1) believing that the enemy of their enemy is their friend; 2) not really having the slightest idea what they actually believe, and so deciding in this intellectual vacuum to go along with whatever tripe the more vocal evangelicals are fulminating about; 3) seeking safety in numbers.
[My sister suggests that the problem may arise from what she calls "right-brained literalism." That is, rejecting the weight of empirical fact while taking the subjective and emotive--such as that aroused by art--as literal expressions of reality. So one's personal reactions to a rumor are taken as more meaningful than the substance of the rumor itself. Unfortunately, this makes rational argument so much dust in the wind.]
Too many Mormons, for example, aren't aware that Lewis (in Perelandra) explains the Fall in terms quite different than the Sunday school view. Pullman's depiction is closer to the Mormon version. Do we need reminding of why mainline Christians--especially evangelicals--consider Mormonism heretical and non-Christian? You may be both throwing stones at the same target now, but it won't be long until they're back to throwing stones at you instead.
What do Mormons imagine the First Vision was about anyway? If not killing off the Nicene god? And in no uncertain terms.
Not only does His Dark Materials align more closely with Mormon doctrine than Lewis's Narnia, but it does so on a more complex level. If Narnia is algebra, His Dark Materials is differential calculus. Hence the oversimplification, leading to gullibility. In contrast, this review of Pullman's trilogy in First Things elucidates the weaknesses in Pullman's narrative with an even hand, and comes to the same conclusions that I do:
I can fairly characterize His Dark Materials in this fashion: imagine if at the beginning of the world Satan’s rebellion had been successful, that he had reigned for two thousand years, and that a messiah was necessary to conquer lust and the spirit of domination with innocence, humility, and generous love at great personal cost. Such a story is not subversive of Christianity, it is almost Christian, even if only implicitly and imperfectly. But implicit and imperfect Christianity is often our lot in life, and Pullman has unintentionally created a marvelous depiction of many of the human ideals Christians hold dear.
As I've noted above, the supposed heresy that kicked off this whole kerfuffle doesn't even take place in The Golden Compass. So if you're jonesing to be offended, you're going to have to wait. However, the conclusion of the anime series Scrapped Princess is quite similar to His Dark Materials. Essentially, the overthrow of the old church and old god ("Mauser"), made possible by a blood atonement, which leads to an "fall" from Eden (that has turned into a police state), and from captivity to free will.
PACIFICA: Are you God?
MAUSER: I am a traitor, the caretaker of this sealed world.
PACIFICA: I--
MAUSER: You were born to destroy me.
Obviously, without watching the entire series (available from Netflix), you won't understand all the specifics of plot going on here (Pacifica's brother--the dragon--is fighting the enforcers of the old order). But Mormons in particular should recognize the symbolic nature of Pacifica's death, the conversation between Pacifica and "god," and her description of the "war in heaven."
I personally consider His Dark Materials one of the most ingenious Y/A fantasies ever written. Besides, whatever else he does, Pullman deserves respect for his succinct and insightful defense of Y/A literature in general.
UPDATE: More Philip Pullman commentary here, here, here and here.
Labels: lds, moral outrage, pullman, religion