In the recently released Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter often repeated the riddle from the original book: How is a raven like a writing desk? It's supposed to be a crazy question, a sign of how wonderfully mad that Wonderland (or Underland, I guess,) is. But there are answers to this question, both easy and hard ones. That's sort of the problem with the movie, really. It's not nearly mad enough.
I am a Burton fan in general, having watched pretty much all his movies, even most of the produced-only stuff. And I enjoyed nearly all of them. I even will defend the much-maligned Willy Wonka. I won't defend Planet of the Apes, though, because it's the least Burton movie that Burton ever made. So it surprised me that Alice in Wonderland, a movie that should be perfect for style, is the Burton movie that suffered the most from a lack of inspiration. Part of the problem, I think is that both it and Planet of the Apes are more purely fantasy or sci-fi, while nearly every other Burton at least starts in the real world and drifts into magical realism from there.
It got me to think about the reason for speculative fiction in the first place. We group science-fiction and fantasy into one genre fairly often, but they exist for different reasons. Science fiction, at its best, starts with reality and goes from there. It's about how things change. Sure, it often is used for little more than an adventure flick with lasers, robots, and spaceships, but at least I can understand the fantasy. A world like ours only better with a much more dramatic reason to exist? Who wouldn't like that?
Fantasy, though, starts with completely different reasons. Can it just be escapism? It might seem so at first, but why? In real life, if we went to a magic fantasy world, we wouldn't last a day before missing working toilets and refrigerators. So the only real benefit to such a world is the meaning. And that's how fantasy differs from sci-fi. There is little need to tie a fantasy world into reality, but in exchange, fantasy has to be about the why. There must be a meaning, a thematic reason for this alternate reality to even exist.
The original Alice in Wonderland usually is associated with the politics and society as its time. It's a fantasy adventure and a satire. Unfortunately, society has moved on and nobody knows what exactly its satirizing now. But the character is too iconic to do away with. In particular, Alice is one of the most well-known female protagonists in modern history. So remaking Alice means having to come up with new meaning.
Hero, Tim Burton ultimately failed. Without his normal tweaking to the real world, he does little but the standard hero versus villain LotR fantasy variant. It's like the Narnia movie. As religious as this country is, it doesn't really share the same spiritual sensibilities as C.S. Lewis, so we ended up with lines of fantasy monsters running into each other.
And Wonderland of all places shouldn't be like this. Why is there even a need for a good queen versus evil queen battle? Why did it have to end with Alice slaying a dragon? Why the need for all the prophecy and chosen one stuff?
Now, I'm not saying I didn't enjoy the movie at all. It has the arresting visual you'd expect in a 3D movie that costs this much to make, especially a guy who helped make Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands. Johhny Depp was mostly coasting, but he was entertaining enough, and Helena Bonham Carter was fine as the Red Queen. But it needed to answer why it existed. Most modern interpretations of Wonderland imply that it takes place in Alice's head, and that the challenges of that world prepares her to be a confident, assured young woman in the real world. But even though this movie goes the exact same way at the end, it goes out of its way to insist that the opposite is true. Alice insists throughout the movie that she's inside her own dream, only for it to be dis-proven in the end. So where is the meaning? Is it the Red Queen as reference to the exaggerated, proper world Alice came from? So what's the White Queen for? Who does the nice but slightly crazy pacifist alchemist represent in Alice's head? I know that you have a limited time to make a movie, but something like Wonderland in particular needs to avoid a classic three-act adventure structure.
By the way, the easy answer to the original question is: both have feathers. Well, fine, they did when the book was written, shut up. The hard one, though, is that both are related to death. Ravens live on death and consume it, and writing desks are made of it (wood, paper, the above-mentioned feathers when appropriate,) and it produces death. Any written idea is an idea solidified, an idea dead to the creator. And yet if done right, the idea could cause the little death that is change to others. But it doesn't seek to do that, then after it dies, it stays head.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Thursday, March 4, 2010
My Ideas: Or Maybe Reviews: The More Pretentious Side of Stealing Cars
I feel that I didn't give Grand Theft Auto IV the treatment it deserved. Sure, it had problems. Sure, the series itself hasn't changed that much since 3. And sure, nearly everything that could be said about the series has been said for the last two damn years or so. That...that's sort of a convincing argument, really.
Nonetheless, there is something I recently noticed that I haven't seen so much on our friend the Internet. If it isn't in a sub-thread on tvtropes, it's not a common theory, so here we go.
I'll start by focusing on a character that annoyed the crap out of me when I first played the game. Oh, spoilers coming up by the way. But again, it's been two years, so you had your chance.
The character is Florian, a friend of main character Niko's from the old country, a former member of his military unit, and for much of the game, possibly the traitor that got the rest of Niko's friends killed. But when Niko finally meets him, not only is he innocent, but he managed to completely turn his life around. He's living a peaceful life as an aerobics instructor, and he now goes by the name Bernie. Oh, and he's also gay. Really, flamboyantly gay.
Now, it's nice that a Grand Theft Auto game actually has a positive gay character. And after Niko learned Florian/Bernie was innocent, he befriended him again and helped him on several problems. But I was annoyed that he was such a stereotype. For a former soldier, he is incredibly useless in a fight, forcing Niko to do everything.
But as I thought about it, I realized that there is more to it than that. The game's main theme is about the horrors of war and violence and how people react to it. It's pretty established that those suffering from this past never emerged unscathed. That's true for Niko, of course, who's surprisingly honest about how shell-shocked he is. Most of the other characters are just as affected, but he puts up a persona to hide it. That's my theory at least for Roman's irrational optimism and the gambling addiction it manifests. Of course America is wonderful! Of course the future will be great! They have to be. Because home and the past were too horrible to contemplate, literally. Without that wonderful future to focus on, he'd actually have to think about and react to the past.
Hence Florian. Of course he'd be gay regardless of his history. And going from a conservative society to a liberal city in America with a healthy gay subculture, he'll probably embrace it. But that's not the only reason for his transformation. Florian saw all the terrible, traumatizing things that Niko did. But Bernie didn't. By becoming this new person, a person so completely different from his old life, he can have a happy life. You can see a bit of the old Florian at times, especially when Niko mentions Darko, the man who actually betrayed them. But that's the last thing he wants to be. If he goes back into his old life, his soldier's life, he has to deal with that memory again. For the same reason, it isn't vanity that makes him angry whenever Niko calls him Florian instead Bernie. It's because he ISN'T Florian anymore and he will never want to go back.
On a similar note, I think Dimitri, usually the main villain in the game, was not always the scheming disloyal rat he is revealed to be about a third of the way through the game. In fact, he wasn't even like that until immediately before he betrays the main character. He had his own traumatic past, including prison and life as a crime lord, but his breaking point came when he had to kill his own best friend to preserve his life.
Dimitri couldn't handle doing this or even stand to look at it, especially not while dealing with the man who physically did the deed and suddenly being forced to run an entire organized crime family when he previously could take a dispassionate look at his crimes and balance the books. So he created a new persona of his own: Dimitri the rascal, the rat, the betrayer. There is evidence throughout the game. He frequently blames Niko for his friend's death, never accepting his own responsibility for it. After all, as far as he was concerned, he didn't do it; the Rascal did. And the Rascal doesn't care. Or look at how his tendency to betray ceases to be even rational late into the game, especially in the "Deal" ending path. Even his voice changes after the incident. One might even argue that his constant attacks on Niko personally and those he cares about are an attempt to get Niko to kill him, the ultimate way to hide from the responsibility of his actions. This theory makes Dimitri a much more sympathetic character, or at least one with more depth, and one that is thus fitting for the darker version of Grand Theft Auto that this game strove for.
Nonetheless, there is something I recently noticed that I haven't seen so much on our friend the Internet. If it isn't in a sub-thread on tvtropes, it's not a common theory, so here we go.
I'll start by focusing on a character that annoyed the crap out of me when I first played the game. Oh, spoilers coming up by the way. But again, it's been two years, so you had your chance.
The character is Florian, a friend of main character Niko's from the old country, a former member of his military unit, and for much of the game, possibly the traitor that got the rest of Niko's friends killed. But when Niko finally meets him, not only is he innocent, but he managed to completely turn his life around. He's living a peaceful life as an aerobics instructor, and he now goes by the name Bernie. Oh, and he's also gay. Really, flamboyantly gay.
Now, it's nice that a Grand Theft Auto game actually has a positive gay character. And after Niko learned Florian/Bernie was innocent, he befriended him again and helped him on several problems. But I was annoyed that he was such a stereotype. For a former soldier, he is incredibly useless in a fight, forcing Niko to do everything.
But as I thought about it, I realized that there is more to it than that. The game's main theme is about the horrors of war and violence and how people react to it. It's pretty established that those suffering from this past never emerged unscathed. That's true for Niko, of course, who's surprisingly honest about how shell-shocked he is. Most of the other characters are just as affected, but he puts up a persona to hide it. That's my theory at least for Roman's irrational optimism and the gambling addiction it manifests. Of course America is wonderful! Of course the future will be great! They have to be. Because home and the past were too horrible to contemplate, literally. Without that wonderful future to focus on, he'd actually have to think about and react to the past.
Hence Florian. Of course he'd be gay regardless of his history. And going from a conservative society to a liberal city in America with a healthy gay subculture, he'll probably embrace it. But that's not the only reason for his transformation. Florian saw all the terrible, traumatizing things that Niko did. But Bernie didn't. By becoming this new person, a person so completely different from his old life, he can have a happy life. You can see a bit of the old Florian at times, especially when Niko mentions Darko, the man who actually betrayed them. But that's the last thing he wants to be. If he goes back into his old life, his soldier's life, he has to deal with that memory again. For the same reason, it isn't vanity that makes him angry whenever Niko calls him Florian instead Bernie. It's because he ISN'T Florian anymore and he will never want to go back.
On a similar note, I think Dimitri, usually the main villain in the game, was not always the scheming disloyal rat he is revealed to be about a third of the way through the game. In fact, he wasn't even like that until immediately before he betrays the main character. He had his own traumatic past, including prison and life as a crime lord, but his breaking point came when he had to kill his own best friend to preserve his life.
Dimitri couldn't handle doing this or even stand to look at it, especially not while dealing with the man who physically did the deed and suddenly being forced to run an entire organized crime family when he previously could take a dispassionate look at his crimes and balance the books. So he created a new persona of his own: Dimitri the rascal, the rat, the betrayer. There is evidence throughout the game. He frequently blames Niko for his friend's death, never accepting his own responsibility for it. After all, as far as he was concerned, he didn't do it; the Rascal did. And the Rascal doesn't care. Or look at how his tendency to betray ceases to be even rational late into the game, especially in the "Deal" ending path. Even his voice changes after the incident. One might even argue that his constant attacks on Niko personally and those he cares about are an attempt to get Niko to kill him, the ultimate way to hide from the responsibility of his actions. This theory makes Dimitri a much more sympathetic character, or at least one with more depth, and one that is thus fitting for the darker version of Grand Theft Auto that this game strove for.
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