Where the Wild Things Are

I’m not gonna lie to you.  My entire motivation for doing this one at this time is because the book is short.  I was gonna do a longer book, Beezus and Ramona, but I realized after reading the entire thing and then watching the movie, Ramona and Beezus, that the movie was not based on the book I read, but on other books in the series.  Well, maybe I’ll do those another time.  Where the Wild Things Are is still a book I had on my list of to-do’s though, so I’m not cheating.  …Much.

Where the Wild Things Are was written by Maurice Sendak and published by Harper Trophy (now HarperCollins) in 1963.  The story is very short and sweet with very beautifully illustrated pictures that in addition to telling half the story (it’s a picture book, ya know) won the Caldecott Medal in 1964.  That’s like a Pulitzer, but for picture book art.  Because the story is so simple, I really can’t do too much of a synopsis of it without telling the whole story.  So sorry for spoiling the 37 page book (16 of which are just pictures).

Max is in a funny mood the night he wears his wolf suit.  Maybe there’s a full moon or something.  He causes all kinds of trouble, chases the dog around with a fork like he’s gonna eat the poor thing, and when his mom points out that he’s being a nuisance he says he’ll eat her up.  So she sends him to his room without supper.   

Now, the book is ambiguous as to how a forest grows in his room.  Is Max imagining the whole thing?  Did he fall asleep and dream it?  Is it some sort of strange full moon magic?  I guess that’s left up to the reader.  But soon Max makes his way through the forest, across an ocean, and to the island where the Wild Things are (get it?).  The Wild Things try to scare him, but he wins a staring contest or something and they make him their king.  So they have loads of fun hopping and climbing and generally being wild, until Max sends them to bed without any dinner.  But he feels lonely, so retires from being a ruler and goes back across the ocean and the forest and back to his room where dinner is waiting for him, still hot.

And that’s it.  Not a whole heck of a lot to the story; even with the pictures there’s not much more that can be turned into a movie.  But, I suppose if it can be adapted to an opera, then might as well give a movie a chance.  Yeah, there’s an opera.  In the 80’s Maurice Sendak actually worked with composer Oliver Knussen to write an opera based on his book.  According to the synopsis on Wikipedia, it followed the book pretty faithfully, focusing on the wild rumpus that is the first order/coronation ceremony of King Max, and I reckon that opened itself up to plenty of singing and dancing and stuff that operas are all about.

Anyway, the movie was directed by Spike Jonze in 2009.  Wait.  Spike Jonze?  The same Spike Jonze that directed Being John Malcovich and Adaptation?  Uh huh.  A kids’ book fits right into that repertoire doesn’t it?  It had the some of the same tasks ahead of it that Grinch did: it needed to develop back stories and deeper character development and more story arcs to make a movie that was more than 20 minutes long and worth seeing.

The movie opens with Max being generally a monster.  He growls at everyone and does the chasing the dog with a fork thing.  He has a big sister in the movie, although there is no mention of or against siblings in the book, so I suppose artistic license?  Anyway, it doesn’t matter since she is never seen, mentioned, or alluded to after the first two scenes.  The main family member focus is on Max’s relationship with his mom (played by Maxine from Being John Malcovich), who for the most part is very kind and sympathetic toward Max.  

At some point about ten or so minutes in, I start to think that movie Max may be emotionally disturbed.  When his sister tells him to go play with his friends, he goes and orders a fence around, and kicks it when it “talks back” to him.  After her friends smash his igloo and she exits stage left for the rest of the movie, he throws a tantrum in her bedroom, breaking her stuff and screaming.  Why is this kid acting like this?  A mere trouble maker or overactive imagination isn’t this insane.  We never really get an explanation.  Oh, his sister doesn’t listen to him and his mom is dating someone.  That’s it?  So, is that why he bites his mom?  Oh, he threatens to eat her up first, like he did in the book, but then he takes a big ol’ bite out of her shoulder before running away into the woods.  This kid is not stable.

The sun's gonna blow! Take cover!

Perhaps it’s his teacher’s fault.  I say this because the one day we see him in school, we see his teacher giving a lecture about the sun (is a mass of incandescent gas… sorry.)  They and we are treated to a five minute detailed explanation about how someday the sun will die and all the life on Earth will die with it.  Sure, it’s probably true, but seriously, a whole lecture to fourth graders about it?  Doncha think they’re a little young for doomsday prophesies?  Just a side note, I have a beef with the classroom set up.  Hey, movie directors of today, I got an FYI for you.  Elementary school classrooms are not set up in rows with the teacher lecturing at the front any more.  Maybe high school might be, but it’s not a functional learning environment for grade school.  Ok, off my soapbox.

So Max runs into the woods, which leads to the ocean, where he climbs on a boat and sails to the island of the Wild Things.  Same as the book, except that he ran away from home rather than be sent to his room with no supper.  There is more confusion as to whether the woods and ocean and island and Wild Things are real, magic, or imagined, although we can be reasonably assured he didn’t dream it.  Sure, as adults we can rationalize that it’s all in Max’s head, but I can see it being at least a little confusing to a kid.  On the island he subdues the Wild Things not by a magic trick that he would imagine himself to be able to perform, but by lying to them about being a king and having powers that could blow up their heads.  In fact, a lot of the things King Max says in this movie are overly violent, adding to my whole emotionally disturbed theory. 

The Wild Things are each given a name and a personality that expresses a certain psyche of Max’s mind.  The striped one named Carol is his anger id, KW sort of reflects his innocent nice kid who is frustrated and a bit ashamed of his anger, the goat looking one Alex is his feeling of being invisible, and so on.  They elect Max as their king because he’s been king of the Vikings before, proving that even in a kid’s imagination experience is everything when trying to get a job.  I didn’t really have too much to say about Max’s time as King of the Wild Things since in the book that part is told almost exclusively through the pictures.  Who am I to say this stuff didn’t happen?

There are a lot of “I’ll eat you up” connections, although I don’t think it’s too overdone.  Just that it’s a lot more literal.  First, Max bites his mom, then the Wild Things greet him with a conversation about if they should eat him, then Carol threatens to eat him when he finds out Max lied about being a Viking king.  The symbolic eating is replaced by literal eating, and it made the movie scary for many kids who went to see it in the theaters and spurring critics to advise against taking young children to see the movie.

I guess I kind of agree.  It is a scary movie, and if a young child sees it in the mindset that it’s like the book, that kid will be scared to death by the Carol’s anger toward KW and eventually Max.  As a movie in general, it’s not bad, but there are so many ambiguous or arbitrary scenes that I don’t know if it could be called a good movie either.  The cinematography’s pretty good, though, so that parallels to the book being visually awesome.

The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another, his mother called him "WILD THING!" and Max said "I'LL EAT YOU UP!" so he was sent to bed without eating anything.

History vs Horror

So, while I was reading/listening to Beloved, the following thought occurred to me: what really is the difference between a historic-esque war epic and a slasher?

I suppose this thought requires a little explanation.  In the book there are a few, shall we say, graphic descriptions of violence.  Some of the torturous punishments the Sethe flashes back to, and the actual torture that Paul D flashes back to, got kind of bloody at times.  While nowhere near the type of gore that is present in horror stories, it did remind me of the war movies produced for today’s bloodlusty audiences.  I’m not talking about the tactical war stories like Full Metal Jacket, but more like the

"I like blood, but damn."

armies-at-opposite-ends-of-a-field-screaming-war-cries­-and-waving-their-swords-in-the-air-as-they-charge-each-other kind of epics.  The sheer amount of gore in historical fiction battle epics like 300 could put Jason Voorhees to shame.  The same can be true for literature: much as I love The Hunger Games, there is a significant deal of bloody battles once the Games start, lovingly descripted for our impressionable young minds.  I know people who refuse to watch Halloween but don’t mind Braveheart.  So why do we regard those battle epics as more prestigious and serious movie fare (albeit maybe only a little) than slasher flicks?

Both genres have people killing other people in creative, gory, and often physically impossible ways.  The motivation for the killing may be revenge, those fighting or killing having a superiority or god complex, trying to prevent the other side from gaining too much power or knowledge, or just trying to make a point.  Killers often use tactical strategies, increasingly creative killing methods, and often convoluted schemes in which there are so many holes that they only work because the plot says so.  The weapons, although each genre has its standard type, still vary from movie to movie.  And in neither is victory assured for the protagonists, although the audience is supposed to hope for it.  The big surprise twist ending?  Everyone dies!

A movie based on a book...

The most obvious difference is the amount of people killing, the amount of people being killed, and the attention certain characters get be it in screen time or page, um, ink.  In war epics, the aforementioned armies battle other armies, and only a small group among them, sometimes only on one side and sometimes on both, have any real character development or attention given to them.  We as an audience only know who belongs to a relative little bit of the blood that splatters the face of the assailant, and when we do the death is usually poignant and tragic.  The protagonists are the ones usually doing most of the killing, although death is a shared responsibility of the heroes and their enemies.  In slashers, most of the characters killed have at least a little time with us and we usually can identify at least one characteristic of each character killed – although often it is only one characteristic.  One mysterious and usually psychotic individual, or in a few cases a group of people, do almost all of the killing.  We know little of the killer in this instance and therefore the one characteristic we know of our victim makes us identify with him/her more.  Alternatively, sometimes we know the killer we just don’t know that he’s the killer. 

Ok, so the different characters involved are all well and good, but what about the less visible differences, the sort of things that make us think?  Slashers, with their use of mystery, are much more psychological (or try to be) than war epics, which are more philosophical (or try to be).  The main emotion being sought by a slasher writer is fear – obviously.  Maybe a feeling of pity for the victims and lately the killer – more on that later – is an emotional goal as well.  For war epics, the emotions are more complex.  Usually some sort of pride or patriotism is the main emotion, and generally you feel sympathy for the characters that get killed – in the event that they have been given development time – instead of just kind of grossed out.

Dude, an Agatha Christie GAME!

The way the in-story characters react to the killing going on around them is stronger generally in slashers, where the characters (usually) react to each person who dies and possibly has a connection to each of them.  This spurs the main protagonist(s) into fighting back against the mysterious insane killers.  Characters in an ancient epic accept the gore as a fact of war and only react to their own special friend getting killed, ignoring the fact that their enemies also theoretically have special friends of their own who will seek revenge.  Sometimes they are even proud of how many orcs or whatever they’ve killed and boast about their kill count to their elf friend.  In war epics, though, killing comes in little spurts, with all the drama between battle scenes, of which there might only be two or three or just at the climax.  Murder is more of a focus of slasher stories, being a constant element to the story, usually.

While slasher stories seem to be a relatively new genre of storytelling, arguably emerging with the introduction of slasher films, bloody battles are not only not new, but as old as storytelling itself.  That’s right, there were gory, death filled battle scenes in ancient times.  Think of the Iliad or Mahabharata.  Three thousand years ago people were singing graphically violent stories to each other, and writing them down almost as soon as writing was invented.  This is possibly why the battle epic usually takes place in pre-modern warfare settings, although arguably World War II and Vietnam stories may be just as graphic even if on a more focused scale.  But therein lies an even closer resemblance to slashers than war epics – a small group kills another small group in sometimes bloody ways to help prove a (political) point.

Well, they both have blood and death, but the message and feeling are what make a war epic exciting and a slasher flick (or book) suspenseful.  If they're done right, which often isn't the case (therefore all of my "usually"s).  If all you want is decapitations and bloodspray, well then either of these will work.

...

Hey!  Awesome!  A post where I have no additional notes!  Hura... oh.  Uh, oops.  Well, since I'm here I may as well thank my boyfriend for helping me with the research and offering this hilarious title, although I ultimately went with something a bit less evident.  "Running at each other screaming OR running away screaming."

Yeah, I did a Venn diagram.  I did not include everything on it in the post, but I tried at least to get most.  There's also an idea for my & my bf's own slasher flick if you care to see...

Beloved

,I don’t know if you’ve picked up on this, but I’m just about as white as they come.  I can’t even get a proper tan, preferring instead to lobsterize when exposed to the sunlight.  I grew up in a neighborhood of almost all white families, and I remember only three Black kids in my entire school until we moved to Florida.  It was also the 80’s, so my exposure to books including and/or about other cultures, even other American cultures, was limited.  Seriously, take a look at any school book until about 1995 and just count how many kids in the pictures are not white.

Since February is Black History month, I thought I would celebrate and broaden my horizons by swapping out what I had planned for a Black author.  I had a few already on my list, but in the interest of learning more stuff, I decided to try a book I had not heard before.  I have to give props to my librarian.  I give her three criteria – Black author, made into a movie, at this branch – and she comes back with a list of, like, 20 books.  I suppose it’s not that hard to find, really, with internet, but some of the stuff she came back with is kind of obscure.  This book, however, isn’t.  I say that because, while I had not heard of it before, every person familiar with Black literature has.

Toni Morrison won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Fiction for Beloved.  It is a powerful story, even for me who has no racial connection to the events that drive the main character, Sethe.  Morrison was inspired to write the story by the true story of Margaret Garner; because Garner’s story spoils Beloved so nicely, you are free to click here at your own risk.  The novel was published in 1987 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., a publishing house under Random House.

There are essentially three stories in this book.  The main story is kind of a psychological drama ghost story of Sethe dealing with her past and Sethe’s daughter Denver discovering her sense of self, with romance mixed in.  Told in flashbacks mixed into the story when it comes to the mind of one of the characters are the respective histories of Sethe and her fellow Paul D, former slaves that had run away from a farm called Sweet Home.  No, it wasn’t in Alabama, and what kind of person would I be if I didn’t make that joke?  It was in Kentucky, and owned by a couple by the name of Garner, surly a tribute to the inspiration for the story.

Sethe has some skeletons in her closet.  A lot of skeletons, actually.  And they haunt her house – literally, the ghost of her two year old daughter from eighteen years ago says hi every now and then by wrecking havoc on the furniture, the cooking, and the dog.  The haunting has driven away her two sons and, because Sethe doesn’t want to lose her, has sheltered her last remaining child.  Sethe’s driving force is her love for her children, who most unusually are all sired by the same man – her husband Halle who was also a slave at Sweet Home but who never showed up at their meeting place the night they ran.

Denver has become reclusive and lonely since she’s afraid to leave the yard and no one comes to their haunted little spot of town.  She kind of hides out in the woods in a little tent the plants have grown into, and takes a certain pleasure in the tantrums of her ghost sister because it’s at least company.  Here is a detail that confused me quite a bit: I had trouble getting a beat on how old Denver was supposed to be.  She was ten, then she was six, then she was eighteen all within the first ten pages…  and since she has essentially been spending nearly all of her time in only the company of her mother, she acts a bit like a twelve year old.  I spent about a quarter of the book thinking that was how old she was.  She’s eighteen, which eventually becomes clear.

Paul D is not without past traumas, as well.  He pops out of nowhere on page six and tells Sethe how he’s been roaming for the past seven years.  What happened to him in the years between leaving Sweet Home and the Emancipation Proclamation (seven years prior to his showing up on the front lawn) is his storyline.

Yeah, she won a Nobel, too.

The title of the book has many, many layers of meaning, not the least of which is a character by that name who Sethe takes in after finding her sleeping on the stump in the front yard.  Beloved is at first ill, but seems to get more and more manipulative and selfish as she gets better and as she is accepted into the family.   Depending on how you interpret what she says (more on that when I talk about the movie), you can get the sense that she is either innocent as a child or sinister with dark secrets of her own.

It was difficult for me to get into the story in the beginning.  The occasional verb tense changes and the frequent point of view changes and usually unannounced flashbacks were a little confusing at first, and I had to reread or relisten to passages a few times until I got used to the style about halfway through the book.  However, unlike some other books that I’ve read, the flashbacks were always relevant and added to the understanding of the characters, their background, and the “best thing” in each of them.  And once I got used to the style, it was easy enough to follow what was happening during which time period.

Slavery is a main theme of the story, obviously.  Both of the flashback stories detail Sethe's and Paul D’s life in slavery and their respective journeys of escape.  Death, violence, fear, hope, love, despair, desperation, they all come into play as the stories unfold.   I did not intend to do two stories that involved slavery back-to-back.  As I said, this one was on the suggestion of my librarian, whom I had asked suggestions of on a bit of a whim because it’s February.  But, since we did just do Huck Finn, and talked about slavery and running away from it then, let’s do a little comparison.  Jim was running away because he was afraid of being sold and taken away from his home and assumingly his family.  His trek to freedom is fraught with fear, but little else.  He’s in the company of a clever white boy who can and will hide him, lie for him, and provide company on his journey.  Sethe’s plight started with her sending her children ahead of her, being beaten, setting off alone, nearly dying, having a baby along the way, and losing one of her children who then haunts her and drives almost all of the other ones away.  Skeletons.  Well, Beloved is definitely an adult book, and Huck Finn is a children’s novel.

The 1998 movie adaptation, directed by Jonathan Demme and released by Harpo Productions, starred Oprah Winfrey (big surprise) and Danny Glover.  Apparently, Oprah had tried for over ten years to get the movie made, since she bought the rights to do so even before the book got its Pulitzer.  I received a tip that the movie wasn’t that good from my best friend, but I like to form my own opinions.

And I can’t say that I wholeheartedly agree.  The movie is remarkably faithful to the book, and the actors give some stellar performances.  But I don’t completely disagree, either, because the movie is remarkably faithful to the book and tends to drag on.  It’s three hours long.  Three.  Flipping.  Hours.  Stellar performances or not, there’s no need for three hours for this story.

So... is this a love story?

As far as story retelling goes, there’s not too much deviation from the book.  Although I could have used more acting and less yapping.  The movie was a lot more of the current storyline – that of Paul D and Sethe’s relationship, and the arrival of Beloved.  While I had trouble getting used to the flashbacks in the book, I felt that the movie needed more.  There was a lot of just sitting around and talking.  Maybe we’d get a fifteen second flashback at the end of it.  Come on, you’re going to go through all that trouble to get a location, actors, and costumes for the amazingly well-dressed slaves and not use them to the fullest? Show, don’t tell!  Telling is boring, and actions speak louder than words, you know.

I know I harped on Oprah for playing the lead role in a movie that she produced and her studio filmed, but she does play Sethe perfectly.  She was hard when Sethe was supposed to be, girlish where she needed to be, losing it where she needed to be, and never overdone or underdone.  She obviously has a lot of love for this story and for Sethe.

 

That's better!

The other performance that I thought was well done was Beloved, although it’s not how I interpreted her.  The way Thandie Newton plays Beloved (oddly, that’s what Thandie’s name means) is as a constant child.  She seemed to genuinely feel the remorse, shame, and love – never developing proper speech and often somewhat innocent even when she’s being manipulative, almost as if she was mentally challenged.  My perception of the Beloved in the book, fueled by Toni Morrison’s reading of her, was very conniving, sharp, and sinister.  She knew exactly what she was doing at all times, and the expressions of sorrow and helplessness that she showed were not genuine, only done to control Sethe.  The underdeveloped speech and accompanying childlike demeanor in the movie may have been a decision that had little to do with a genuine interpretation of the character and more to do with Thandie’s British accent, certainly not something that was commonplace amongst post Civil War ex-slaves.

Movie Denver had two modes: happy and jealous.  I’m not sure if that was a directorial decision or if Kimberly Elise was having trouble emoting.  I’m not too familiar with her talent, though, so maybe I could take a look at some of her other work before making assertions about her.  I will say she wasn’t bad, just that there wasn’t much substance to Denver, no hint of the dilemma she faced.  Just one day she was doing one thing and the next she was doing the opposite, with the occasional jealous glare in Paul D's or Beloved’s direction, or the playful laughter as she ran around with Beloved in the woods.

I don’t know what really to make of this movie.  It shows respect for the story and characters (for the most part) even if the interpretation of them is slightly different.  It’s not bad, and if you don’t have time to read or listen to the book a couple or more times, you can get the story out of the movie.  The full emotion and psyche is lost, though, on the refusal to show us why we really should care, what is so heavy or shocking, about these characters.  In order to fully understand the story, you need the book.  Be prepared to read and reread.

124 was spiteful.  Full of a baby’s venom.

Yeah, about listening…  I hope you guys don’t think less of me for using the audiobook for, well, almost all of it.  Audiobooks are awesome, especially if you need your hands and eyes (but not your ears) for, say, work, and because of my professional and academic schedule this month, I didn’t have much time to curl up and read.  Related note: sorry this is so late.

Edit 4-17-11: I just noticed, while doing research for a future post, that Beloved is on the ALA's most frequently banned books lists for 1990-1999 (#45) and 2000-2009 (#26). I swear I looked when I wrote this post, so I don't know why I missed it.  Ah well, here's the mention, and the addition of it to my banned books link.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

This is the first book that I decided to read because of the news surrounding it.  (The Da Vinci Code doesn’t count; I had already decided to read that one and it so happened that I saw a news report.)  If you haven’t heard, NewSouth Books has released a version of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with some, shall we say, edited language.  The use of racial terms that many Americans of all races find offensive, or at least are uncomfortable hearing, has been removed or changed in order to present the novel’s story and themes in a more updated fashion.  I am referring to the repeated used of the N-word being replaced by the word “slave”, as well as a term “Injun” (i.e. “honest Injun”) which is not used so much nowadays being removed or changed (I don’t know what to - I didn’t read the new version).  The N-word especially has been the target reason for the banning of this book all over the country, ranking #5 in the 90’s and #14 in the 00’s on the ALA banned books list.

I have mixed feelings about this.  My most fundamental belief is that censorship is a violation of free speech, and if some people are upset at the language used in the 19^th century, then that’s their problem and they don't have to read the book.  When historical fiction is concerned, use of the language that was used in the time period of the story gives credibility and believability to the story, and removing it is almost like denying the term ever existed or was used in that fashion, especially if it did exist in the book originally.  But because some people are so upset by the N-words peppering the book – not so much with the derogatory meaning that we have come to use it today, but meaning a Black person in the manner that it was used in 1854 (free or slave)* – they have denied their children the chance to read it and get the very valuable lessons out of it.

I think it’s kind of a moot argument anyway since, seeing as that I don’t think the book is really appropriate for elementary school students due to its narration in“incorrect” grammar and use of many dialects.  And anyway, many of the children being “protected” from this book are listening to rap and hip-hop that make gratuitous use of the N-word for the modern purpose of it – to be derogatory or “shocking” and akin to courser language (which the songs often also use).  If you have never read the book, I recommend reading it or listening to its audio book in the original language as it was intended, but if you are too squeamish to encounter the N-word and not faint, then I suppose the edited version is better than nothing.  I just fear what other edits are in our future in the name of “modernizing” classics.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, considered one of the Great American Novels, was first published by a London publisher in England, Chatto & Windus (now part of Random House).  It was written, of course, by Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, and published in 1884 in London and a few months later in the US.  The book opens with a disclaimer, but I will ignore it to find and talk about the moral, motive, and perhaps a little of the plot knowing full well that I may be prosecuted, banished, and shot (respectively) by the author.  It is a sequel of sorts to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; the first line of Huck Finn’s book is a plug for Tom Sawyer’s even.  It continues the story of Huck, who escapes from his abusive father by using some clever skullduggery to fake his own death, and Jim, a neighborhood Black slave trying to escape because he is about to be sold and taken away from his family.  And he is accused of a murder he didn’t commit – Huck’s to be exact.

Throughout the book, Huck goes through a number of moral dilemmas, conflicting what he is told he should do and what he feels is right or what gets him and Jim through situations alive or without being caught.  He questions everything that he is told is right, and his biggest moral conflict is whether he should turn in Jim for being a runaway slave.  He calls himself wicked for trying to help Jim to freedom, and ignorant because he doesn’t have the overactive imagination of his pal Tom Sawyer.  The few chapters where Tom Sawyer is involved with the story demonstrates that, even though Tom was “brought up right” and schooled all of his life, Huck is generally smarter, or at least more clever, than Tom, who tends to overcomplicate things because that’s how it’s done in the books he reads.

Jim is portrayed as an unlearned, superstitious man who, now that he sees his chance for freedom, wants to skip off to the free states, then raise money to purchase his wife and children’s freedom.  He is skeptical of all the school knowledge that Huck tells him about, like that Frenchmen speak French.  While he and Huck are floating on the river pretty much where no one can see them, the two are near inseparable.  Whenever they risk Jim being seen and therefore caught and sold back into slavery, Huck leaves Jim hiding, usually with a story to tell to deter people from approaching him, Huck occasionally going over his dilemma of right/wrong in his mind.  When the Duke and the King, a couple of con men they meet about halfway through the story, commandeer the raft and essentially make Huck work for them, Jim is left behind to just sort of wait off page for days with a sign “sick Arab” to keep people from stealing him.

Jim’s portrayal may seem to those who have not paid too close attention to be that Black folks aren’t that smart.  Jim, having been a slave all of his life, has not been educated because it was illegal to educate slaves.  There is, however, a description of a free Black man from Ohio who is smart – a professor, actually – who can speak all kinds of languages and can even vote when he’s back home.  The only reason I could see for putting that description in there, albeit from Huck’s pap complaining about him, is to show that Jim’s portrayal was not in general the way the author saw Black people, but that this professor is what was possible if it would be allowed.  Of course, I’m not Mark Twain and can’t actually speak for him, but that’s what I got out of it.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here, and run the risk of being prosecuted and/or banished (since I’m already gonna be shot) and say that the book tackles many social issues of the time.  Racial and slavery issues surely, futility of a family feud that no one remembers the cause of and the families continue just ‘cause, fright of illness to the point of abandoning a near orphan boy whose family is sick (although Huck uses this to his advantage), insubstantiality of blind faith (i.e. you should do something about your problems rather than just pray for good things to happen), gullibility of people at the time (how many times did Huck pretend to be a Mississippi boy or an English valet or a girl?), but mostly, how kind but hypocritical people can be, satirizing – what was it that Wikipedia called it - Southern antebellum society.  Nope, I don’t know what that means, either.

There have been many movie adaptations of this book, mostly made-for-TV movies.  The most recent is the Disney version from 1993, directed by Stephen Sommers.  This is the one I will be looking at, partly because I think Elijah Wood is adorable in it (like in a little kid way – he’s only 12 in it – and not yet in the hobbitlicious way he is in The Lord of the Rings).

Disney has a knack for unnecessary alterations in their movie adaptations.  Some may be necessary for time or budget constraints, for example, Tom Sawyer is nowhere to be found in this movie, leaving some of the things that happen to Tom up to happening to Huck.  But often the addition or changes are frivolous.  Jim in the book is hinted at practicing a non-Christian religion such as Vodun for instance, but in the movie, even though he has the mystical ox bezoar, he gives more Christian-centric explanations, i.e. a black spirit and a white spirit turns into a spirit with horns and a spirit with wings respectively.  Jim goes wherever Huck goes and ending up getting caught and then just kind of walking off the new plantation that enslaved him.  So now he’s a double runaway slave.  When the Duke and the King show up toward the end, they dress him up like a

A geographical enigma.

“Swahili warrior” for the sole purpose of comic effect, since they never do anything with him and in fact end up leaving him by the raft.  Was that really needed?  No.  No it was not.  The movie does have its legitimately humorous moments, and I do get a few chuckles out while watching it.  And I do kind of find it funny that when the King (played by Jason Robards) and the Duke (played by Hagr Robbie Coltrane) and Huck go into town pretending to be from England, that not only is the kid from Iowa better at a Cockney accent than a Missouri one, but that the only one who actually is English plays a guy who pretends to be a deaf-mute (and thus doesn't need to speak with his pretending to be put-on accent).

See?  Little kid cute.

The movie’s message is not quite the same as the books.  It’s simplified to “slavery is bad” and shoves that message in our face no less than four times.  Huck is a bit more selfish, blaming Jim for thinking only of himself at times, although still a rough rapscallion of a boy raised in a hut in the woods.  Jim’s portrayal is the most drastically different.  He’s smarter and not so accepting of the “white folks knows best” attitude, although a half-hearted attempt at showing he is uneducated is made.  He starts right off the bat talking about how he was planning to run to the free states almost as soon as he meets up with Huck in the beginning, as if that was part of the reason he ran away in the first place.  And Jim says Huck is his best and only friend as a guilt trip in the movie, not in the sincere way he does in the book.  As far as the language used… Well, I must say when I first saw the movie a few years ago (during my Elijah Wood themed movie rental week…  What?  He’s always been one of my favorite actors) I was surprised by the amount of cussing present in a Disney movie.  “Honest Injun” does make a couple of appearances, but the N-word is swapped for “slave” – I guess Disney can stretch their image only so far.

The way the movie tells the story is incomplete.  There is no antebellum society to mock (I think) and no dilemma for Huck to overcome, he’s just a “wicked” boy from the beginning (interpret with the slang meaning if you wish.  I think he’s pretty wicked in that respect myself. J)  It’s heavy handed with the message, but still has some of the lightheartedness interspersed.  And there’s no Tom Sawyer to overcomplicate things.  Internal conflict is difficult to put on screen, I suppose, but we could have a subtler message or at least not be told what the message is so many times.  All-in-all, a better movie could have been made with this story.

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.

(See!  It’s a plug for Tom’s book in the very first line!)

*Although I admit the sentiment behind the use of the N-word may have been not particularly humane, I only know that because of other books I’ve read.  Many people, especially in the south, thought of Black people as less than human in order to justify their use as slaves, as Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry explains.  There is no other word in Huck Finn that denotes a Black person, and if you have read the book, or even just read this post, you’d know that Huck doesn’t think that way, even though he’s told by most of the adults that he ought to.

Also, I have nothing against rap or hip-hop, or how anyone chooses to express themselves.  I merely observe that the artists who use the N-word in their expression also use certain four letter words, and those who choose not to use those four letter words do not use the N-word.  And that middle and high school (and some elementary school) kids whose parents ban Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn listen to these artist.

Cliché Play: Fletcher's Syndrome

I’m writing today to tell you about a very serious disease that affects hundreds of main characters.   Fictional sleuths everywhere succumb to it's influence.  For where there is mystery series, there is Fletcher’s Syndrome.

Fletcher’s Syndrome is a dangerous and potentially fatal disorder that affects main characters who are detectives or otherwise investigators of crime.  Symptoms of Fletcher’s Syndrome include, but are not limited to, someone being murdered while at a friend's dinner party, someone being murdered while on that weekend getaway that has been in planning for months, someone being murdered while at a class reunion or extracurricular club reunion, a long-estranged (or at least hasn’t been seen an a few years) relative being murdered and the affected being the main suspect, a celebrity who the affected either idolizes or is seeing live being murdered or suspected of murder, and pretty much any leisure or professional situation the affected may find him- or herself in resulting in or involving murder.  Often, the sidekick, partner, family, or friends of those with Fletcher’s Syndrome show symptoms as well.    Those affected by Fletcher’s Syndrome are more often than not plagued by an incompetent police force and/or forensics team and an overzealous arresting officer or prosecuting attorney that is willing to base his or her entire case on circumstantial evidence.  Faced with these obstacles, the detective or investigator will usually try to solve the case him- or herself, and is often the only one who can. 

The only known remedy for those with Fletcher’s Syndrome is to clear the name of the accused party by coercing the guilty party into a confession.  This task does not necessarily need to be overly complicated due to the tendency of guilty parties involved in crimes in the general vicinity of those affected with Fletcher’s Syndrome to leave a plethora of evidence in their wake, overlooked by the aforementioned inept police and/or forensics force.  Guilty parties that are confronted by those with Fletcher’s Syndrome will nearly always admit to their crime once told the sequence of events conjectured by the clue gathering of affected.

There is no known cure for Fletcher’s Syndrome.  Those who have this dread disease cannot go about their daily lives without someone being murdered wherever they go.  Even if they take on cases that do not involve murder, the case will eventually involve murder or attempted murder or a death that is suspected murder but is actually accidental or natural.

Fletcher’s Syndrome is sometimes, but not always, contagious.  The disease will usually only spread to another character if said character becomes a partner of the original, takes over cases of the original, or has a spin off series.

Well-known sleuths with Fletcher's Syndrome include:

Author Jessica Fletcher.  Has a knack for turning her disorder into profit by turning her experiences into best-selling novels.  For this, Fletcher’s Syndrome was named for her.

Defense Attorney Phoenix Wright.  No less than half his cases were a result of Fletcher’s Syndrome, often with him, his sidekick Maya Fay, or his friend Larry Butz as the suspect.  He eventually passed the disease to both his successor Apollo Justice and his rival prosecutor Miles Edgeworth.

Shinichi “Jimmy” Kudo, aka Conan Edogawa.  Displays the worst case of Fletcher’s Syndrome on file.   Is really a seventeen year old sleuth whose Fletcher's Syndrome resulted in his age reversal to the body of a six year old boy.

"Psychic" and rather handsome detective Shawn Spencer.  Shows early signs of Fletcher's Syndrome in his first two seasons.  Progression of the disease can be observed in later seasons.

If you know someone with Fletcher’s Syndrome, add their name to the comments.  The more voices we have, the more we may someday find a cure.

[Yes, I am working on a full book/movie post.  It’s been a hectic week. All the reading and watching is done, I just have to do the writing.  I should have the new one up by Thursday.]

Just a note: All the series I referenced are series that I like and geek out about.  They are generally good, but I am kind of getting sick of seeing the main detective have murder follow him/her wherever he/she goes.  In the line of duty, sure if the client comes to him/her with a murder case or something with high potential of becoming one.  But out on a social call to a friend's house, in the middle of a roller coaster ride, or at a spelling bee?  It's a bit much, doncha think?

The Da Vinci Code

I’ve wanted to read and watch this book and movie for a few years now – pretty much ever since the movie came out – but didn’t really have time to or desire to deal with the conspiracy theorists associated with these.  With the combo of Winter Break and the blog, I now have time and an excuse.  This is also my first review where I have neither read the book nor seen the movie prior to the review, and seeing what I have planned it may be a while before it happens again.  This review, therefore, will contain some of my initial thoughts about the storyline(s), and I acknowledge that my opinion of either or both may change over time.  That said, lets delve into the mystery of The Da Vinci Code.

Read my eyes...

The book was written by Dan Brown and published by Doubleday in the US in 2003.  The book caused many controversies about historical inaccuracies and sacrilegious themes.  While it wasn’t the first book to declare most of these themes, it brought them to international mainstream attention, getting a whole new group of perfectly rational people seeing correlations that don’t really exist and into the idea that there’s always a bigger plan.  It’s worth noting that a few days before I started reading (December 12^th I think) I saw a news report that “experts”say that there were hidden messages found in the eyes of the Mona Lisa.  Uh, wut?  The “messages” varied from a couple of letters to a string of numbers, each “expert” seeing something different.  Apparently, Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa with a microscope, since that’s the only way some of these symbols can be seen.  And of course, it’s totally not possible that human imagination fills in blanks based on schemata of letters and/or numbers and the “experts” see something that’s not actually there.  I’m all for reading and getting lost in the world of the book, but when you mesh it with reality, there may be cause for concern.  And parents are worried that kids can’t tell between fantasy and reality.  Just saying.

But, since I’m not here to talk about those controversies or inaccuracies, and there are already plenty of excellent articles on some of the varied and repeated baloney found in the book, I’ll get back to the merits and shortfalls of the book as a literary work.  I have to admit, it took me a while to read this – nearly a month.  That’s not because it’s difficult or particularly long; in fact it’s only about 450 pages (and yet somehow 105 chapters?!)  It’s just that when I read a book that insults my intelligence as much as The Da Vinci Code does, I need to take periodic breaks.  There is more that I dislike about this book than just the fodder for the crazies.  But, since I like touching on the good points as well as the bad, I’ll do that first.

The story does a pretty good job of pulling you into the action off the bat and, for the most part, keeping that state of action pretty consistently in the story proper.  He uses what he assures us on page one are accurate descriptions of the artwork described (even if some details about the artwork or the artist are sensationalized, exaggerated, and often made up… oh sorry, right…) and details about real organizations (even if those details are sensationalized, exaggerated, and… well, you know…) It gives a real world feel to the fantasy of the world – and it is indeed a whole different world – that Mr. Brown has built.  It certainly takes advantage of that “what if?” factor that turns your everyday life into a bestselling novel.  The story itself is not too bad, either, as long as you understand that it’s not real.  There are many characters and story arcs, and Brown somehow keeps track of them all.  There seem to be at least four different stories told from one or two different perspectives each that are told in chunks going on simultaneously that all intertwine and merge eventually, and that’s a presentation that’s hard to pull off.

Unfortunately, I don’t think he pulled it off too well.  Every couple of pages, a cliffhanger occurs and either the point of view changes or we go to another story arc separated from what we were just reading, or we get pulled into a flashback.  I repeatedly just wanted to just hurry on to the next paragraph of the Robert-Sophie arc than find out what the evil albino’s next literal step is in the trail we already know is false (this is something we find out on the second page of the story, and he’s on that cold trail for 127 more pages – and yes, that’s the actual page count).  The chapter sections follow the same pattern – as I said, 450 pages into 105 chapters equals… lemesee… drop the 0, subtract 210, carry the 4… 4.3 pages per chapter, roughly.  Each chapter is usually accompanied by yet another change in POV.  The abrupt changes left me not with the sense of suspense I think he was going for, but a feeling of exasperation that I now have to suffer through another two-page irrelevant flashback that can be explained a page later when whoever the POV character tells the person he/she is with.  Oh, reverent Goddess of the Short-Attention-Span, I offer up to thee this sacrifice of suspense.

But even with all the flashbacks and POV changes, character development is nearly non-existent.  I know next to nothing about these characters as people.  I know a couple of things that happened in their childhood, last year, last month, last week, but I still don’t know who these people are.  All the bad guys are Dr. Claw, all the pawns are Faust, and Robert and Sophie might as well be male/female versions of each other – code breaking geeks who are rather slow at breaking codes.

The clues to solving the mysteries are what insult me the most.  They are either too easy or too personal to the character for the reader to figure out.  The “professional” code breakers are often too dumb to do their jobs.  Robert Langdon is a Harvard professor of symbology (no such degree, BTW) and Sophie Neveu is an agent of the French FBI’s cryptology department.  Yes, France has an entire cryptology department, and they have never seen English anagrams.  I solved a number of the “mysteries” before the main characters did.  Case in point: neither our intrepid professor nor his Grail scholar friend Leigh Teabing can decipher an “ancient Semitic language that none of them has ever seen” that I, with absolutely no cryptology training (newspaper cryptograms confuse me) and no Sophie’s Grandpappy to give me the clues as I grew up, was able to recognize within seconds and was able to read within about 6 minutes by staring at it and transcribing it to Notepad; that is, without a particular devise that some other readers may have grabbed to in order to “translate” it.  Every student, scholar, or French cryptologist who hears a theory accepts it readily and without debate or challenge, no matter how conjecturable it is.  Everything these people previously know is immediately forfeit to one person’s subjective interpretations.  All your logic are belong to us.

My last beef with TDVC that I will address here (the mythology geek in me is screaming to be let out, but there are other pages for that*) is the amount of literary clichés in here, especially amongst the antagonists.  Clearly, albinos are evil and totally not regular people with a melanin anomaly.  They always play a bad guy, often psychotic, taking pleasure in either the pain of others or his own pain.  Our intro to the baddies, and also the book, is a masochistic albino with a mission from God to kill the all the members of a brotherhood in order to extract an ancient artifact/secret that their sole purpose is to protect.  Yawn. (pages 1-3, not counting the page of “FACTS”, BTW)  Christianity is the only religion still practiced, but the Church is evil, funded by evil “new” Pope (unnamed).  Cops will do anything to track down and arrest someone that they are 100% sure is guilty of murder even though they don’t have any solid evidence.  Our professor knows everything about the symbols, purpose, rituals, and secret knowledge of a supposedly secret society, including all of the mystery of the true Holy Grail.  Been there, done that, let’s move on.

So, is the movie any better?  Well, yeah.  I expected the book to translate well to a movie, to be honest.  The organization and pacing of the book was such that it seems Dan Brown had a movie in mind when he wrote it.

We get more of a sense of character in our main guys.  Well, with Ron Howard directing and Tom Hanks playing Robert Langdon, how can we not.  Robert is not so much of a Gary Stu as he is in the book, shares the mystery solving with Sophie (Audrey Tautou), and leaves most of the Grail education to our Grail scholar, Sir Ian McKellen.  This makes the characters much more unique.  Langdon is even skeptical of Teabing’s theories until later in the movie, and admits to Sophie that he doesn’t know everything.  And, they figure out the clues much more easily.  Like their professions say they ought.

Although, the movie script does still seem accept the book’s view of Christianity being the only religion still practiced – the audience members at Pr. Langdon’s speech, even those from other countries, all give very Christian centric answers to his questions – it’s barely mentioned after that scene.

The movie also seeks to correct many of the inaccuracies that are presented in the book.  Some of the historical errors from the book are changed to the correct information or simply omitted.  The artistic inaccuracies and embellished details are swapped for some more plausible observations.  While it still attests some of the same clues that the book does, it presents them in a much more logical way.  I’m not saying it’s perfect, and there are still some parts that may make you facepalm, but the overall feel of the story, for me anyway, is that it regards the audience as able to think.  The book tried to force you to think it was real.  The movie accepts itself as a fantasy.

While I can’t say whether or not Dan Brown believes the coincidences he presents in his book are actually linked, it does seem obvious that he does not think his plotline is real, or that the conspiracies he uses in his story are fact.  In the beginning he gives us three facts.  He does not say these are factually related.  His fiction is what links them.  The book was ok as far as language used and plot development goes, but the names of the characters are better researched than the myths, art, and history the story revolves around.  It would have been difficult not to make it into a better movie that it was a book.

I think I’ll leave you with this piece of awesomeness.

Lego Last Supper by The Rev. Brendan Powell Smith

  

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery.

*P.S. As it turns out, there doesn’t seem to be many pages for that.  I found all kinds of Christian theology disputes, and good on them, but there are inaccuracies among the pagan religious ideas, too.  If you find some – that is, articles on inaccuracies and misconceptions pertaining to ancient and pagan mythological symbols and belief presented as “fact” in TDVC – let me know.  Otherwise I may have to take matters into my own hands…

Twihard with a Vengeance

I mentioned in my intro post that I did not want to review Twilight.  The reason I gave was that it was reviewed by everyone and their brother.  While that’s true, that’s not the entire reason.  I got to thinking about it, contemplating what it was about the Twilight saga apart from the popularity of its critique that I wanted to avoid, why I wanted to hide my personal feelings about the series from the world, and I came to one conclusion.

Twihards.

Even before I read the books, I was mortally afraid of these fanatics.  My introduction to the Twilight series was from a couple of Twihards at school, one my teacher and one a fellow student in a different class.  Both would not shut up about it, ranting about the more “romantic” aspects of Edward.  Shortly afterward, I heard numerous rumors about Twihards actually attacking people who did not think Twilight were the best books ever.  Even simple comments about plot holes or someone just not being into the charming good looks of Robert Pattinson gets fangirls up in arms, at least outright insulting people for disagreeing with something they like.  I don’t know if any of the physical attacks are true, but the verbal attacks most certainly are.

People can get overly defensive about their interests, and with the large communities that internet access creates for these interests comes an overwhelming backlash of and against “haters”.  This is certainly not exclusive to Twilight.  Hard core fans of anything (*coughBiebercough*) experience this phenomenon.  The thing is, even if the abuse is only verbal, or even just comments on the Interwebz, it is still abuse.  There is no reason to hate someone because they like or don’t like the same things as you.  Calling someone gay or jealous because he/she doesn’t find your favorite celebrity talented or attractive, saying they are stupid and don’t know absurdity when they see it because they like a certain book or movie or TV series that you think has a stupid premise or bad writing is not only immature and insensitive, it’s arrogant.  Bullying someone for liking or disliking something of popular culture simply because you don’t agree with that person is not an acceptable excuse or behavior.  Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, and certainly beating someone up about it isn't going to change his or her mind.