I like that way of looking at them and not just because after a certain point—it may actually have been the third time someone did something awful to his foot and he just sort of nervously, politely demurred—I couldn't stop thinking of Martin as the Fool of this movie's pack. The division of the four characters, especially the two who careen off into their ideological polarities and the one who finally saves the other and understands, was one of the elements that felt directly indebted to The Legend of Hell House. (It is by me a feature rather than a bug. I owe that movie my own debts.)
One thing I really liked was how Martin and Alma never, ever slide into Zach and Olivia's frenetic explanation-izing: when asked, Don't you see, they always very honestly say No, and not in a dogmatic way, but because really Zach and Olivia aren't making sense, or no sense that extends beyond their own minds.
Yes! And the same each time one of them is appealed to explain to the other. Aside from any concept of solidarity, there's just nothing there to explain.
It's interesting that the older two fall into a culturally derived story of what they're dealing with, whereas Alma's able to approach her experiences completely freshly.
That's true, and it feels telling about the kind of people they are. I appreciated how the cross-linking of characters avoided any straw men about scientists vs. nature people. The contrast of Zach with Alma especially underscores how much he's just climbed up inside his own head instead of "returning to the green"—he's made the forest so much of a part of his mythos, he's incapable of taking it on its own terms. To be fair to all parties, one of my early reactions to Olivia was jeez, lady, no wonder you lost your grant. Martin in a wilderness environment is a danger to himself and others, but I would trust him not to create a micro-cult.
Here is a great lacuna: watch the humans embroider around its edges.
I agree it's much more about the act of interpretation than the nature of the other, although I wasn't disappointed by the moment of contact because it was so satisfyingly alien to me. At the risk of story-making, it seemed legible that it's not malevolent: the horror of the folklore looks like a reaction to the difficulty of its mode of communication rather than any intent to harm or disorient or frighten on its side: even without the gulf in perceptions and processes, spore-mediated kything, at least in the initial stages, looks rough. Alma doesn't have a transcendent experience trying to get out through the spore-wall, she has a terrifying one. The second time at the stone, she still has to survive the shock of contact long enough for it to resolve into anything more than a flood of alien information mixed up with her own mind. I suspect it's even possible to achieve communication and reject it because it doesn't match your pre-mapped story—I haven't been able to decide if I think something like that happened to Zach, although if Olivia is telling the truth (and she might not be), he had some kind of interaction which he proceeded to misinterpret terribly. But Alma experiences something weird and true and it looks directly correlated to her ability to accept the reality of the forest rather than the myth-making of it and it felt like respecting the alienness that I couldn't read the meeting of their minds, I could just observe it. I loved the doppelgänger-shot in the spore-wall because in hindsight it seems clear it wasn't some kind of hallucinatory dissociation, it was Alma seeing what the forest was seeing, which was herself. I couldn't tell if it was a story-making creature itself. It might not need to be. I was comfortable wondering rather than knowing for sure.
no subject
Cool!
The four characters are like tarot cards.
I like that way of looking at them and not just because after a certain point—it may actually have been the third time someone did something awful to his foot and he just sort of nervously, politely demurred—I couldn't stop thinking of Martin as the Fool of this movie's pack. The division of the four characters, especially the two who careen off into their ideological polarities and the one who finally saves the other and understands, was one of the elements that felt directly indebted to The Legend of Hell House. (It is by me a feature rather than a bug. I owe that movie my own debts.)
One thing I really liked was how Martin and Alma never, ever slide into Zach and Olivia's frenetic explanation-izing: when asked, Don't you see, they always very honestly say No, and not in a dogmatic way, but because really Zach and Olivia aren't making sense, or no sense that extends beyond their own minds.
Yes! And the same each time one of them is appealed to explain to the other. Aside from any concept of solidarity, there's just nothing there to explain.
It's interesting that the older two fall into a culturally derived story of what they're dealing with, whereas Alma's able to approach her experiences completely freshly.
That's true, and it feels telling about the kind of people they are. I appreciated how the cross-linking of characters avoided any straw men about scientists vs. nature people. The contrast of Zach with Alma especially underscores how much he's just climbed up inside his own head instead of "returning to the green"—he's made the forest so much of a part of his mythos, he's incapable of taking it on its own terms. To be fair to all parties, one of my early reactions to Olivia was jeez, lady, no wonder you lost your grant. Martin in a wilderness environment is a danger to himself and others, but I would trust him not to create a micro-cult.
Here is a great lacuna: watch the humans embroider around its edges.
I agree it's much more about the act of interpretation than the nature of the other, although I wasn't disappointed by the moment of contact because it was so satisfyingly alien to me. At the risk of story-making, it seemed legible that it's not malevolent: the horror of the folklore looks like a reaction to the difficulty of its mode of communication rather than any intent to harm or disorient or frighten on its side: even without the gulf in perceptions and processes, spore-mediated kything, at least in the initial stages, looks rough. Alma doesn't have a transcendent experience trying to get out through the spore-wall, she has a terrifying one. The second time at the stone, she still has to survive the shock of contact long enough for it to resolve into anything more than a flood of alien information mixed up with her own mind. I suspect it's even possible to achieve communication and reject it because it doesn't match your pre-mapped story—I haven't been able to decide if I think something like that happened to Zach, although if Olivia is telling the truth (and she might not be), he had some kind of interaction which he proceeded to misinterpret terribly. But Alma experiences something weird and true and it looks directly correlated to her ability to accept the reality of the forest rather than the myth-making of it and it felt like respecting the alienness that I couldn't read the meeting of their minds, I could just observe it. I loved the doppelgänger-shot in the spore-wall because in hindsight it seems clear it wasn't some kind of hallucinatory dissociation, it was Alma seeing what the forest was seeing, which was herself. I couldn't tell if it was a story-making creature itself. It might not need to be. I was comfortable wondering rather than knowing for sure.