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What if it was the chicken?
For the guising season, I showed ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch Dave McKean's MirrorMask (2005). It has one of the best otherworlds I have seen realized on a screen and I love it just as much for everything it does with this one.
The plot is a dream, but it's a dream so intimately interwoven with the waking world that it is not possible to separate them any more than the mirror can be pulled out from the mask. On the liminal edge of adolescence, Helena Campbell (Stephanie Leonidas) does not fantasize about demon lovers or countries over the rainbow; she lies on her bed in her caravan decorated with strings of fairy lights and her own scratchy, spiky art and whispers wistfully through a regal white sock puppet, "I am queen of everything in this part of town . . . and everyone who looks at me says, 'Oh, she is such a wonderful queen—and not ever embarrassing at all—and so normal and goes to a school—'" The small traveling circus in which she has grown up may enchant the punters with its fire-breathers and acrobats and mimes and its harlequinade of masks and boozy, jazzy music, but these days it just makes Helena feel self-conscious and set apart, martyred to her parents' dreams. "They can have my life!" she declares of all the rhetorical kids who want to run away and join the circus. "I want to run away and join real life!" Instead, real life catches up with her in a sudden and brutal rush: the same night that Helena angrily, recklessly taunts her mother with a wish for her death, Joanne Campbell (Gina McKee) collapses in the middle of the show. The band plays out in time with the ambulance lights. Ten days later, the circus has stalled in Brighton as Morris Campbell (Rob Brydon) refuses to leave his wife in hospital; the bills are mounting, the troupe is talking about splitting up, and all the parental reassurance in the world can't override Helena's irrational, irrefutable conviction that it's all her fault. "It's just life," her father tries to tell her. Sniffing back tears, her hands covered in charcoal from sketching a feverish collage of streets and sphinxes and suns and doors and fish and get-well cards, she corrects him as only a teenager can: "It's just stupid!" That night she wakes to a violin ghosting her down the raddled halls of her great-aunt's council flat and into the eerily familiar avenues of a city split like a coin between day and dark, its bright side mortally encroached upon by creeping tendrils of shadow ever since the girl who identified herself as the Princess of Shadows betrayed the Queen of Light. Denouncing it equally as "just a stupid dream" does not produce the same effect as calling out a pack of cards. Her mother's smile ripples the white queen's sleep and like a fairy tale, half-knowing it, discovering herself, Helena sets out to restore the balance between the City of Light and the Land of Shadows by retrieving the mysterious "charm" whose theft sent the worlds askew. In her corner, she has a really useful book, her own circus-honed wits, and the negotiable assistance of the juggler Valentine (Jason Barry). Against her, the darkness fields what it always does—selfishness, greed, malice, fear, despair, and oneself.
It should go without saying that a film designed by McKean is visually a knockout. Even before we reach the drawn world with its chimerical architecture and drifts of shimmer and static and above all its masks, it looks burnished and bleak and factual enough to bark your shins on. The reality of our world is so important to the grounding of the story, it can't just be the frame of the portal that Helena steps through. The life of the Campbell Family Circus is shot so richly, affectionately, and pragmatically that I longed at once for McKean to adapt Angela Carter; then we snap into the hangover of the tower block of Embassy Court, which at the pre-renovation time of filming resembled a decaying ocean liner whose waterfront view prominently featured the burned-out skeleton of the West Pier. It's not just real life, but real life at its most grody and discouraging. "Dreams only get you that far, darling. After that you need cash." Of course it bleeds over into the world drawn from Helena's art—the white and black queens, the shoals of airy fish, the very important man with the tower—almost less in obvious anxieties like the veins of shadow swarming the city like sickness within a woman's body than in the general air of erosion and neglect which gives it the uncertain look of a war zone or a ghost town. And yet it is beautiful, and not just in ways that appeal to urban explorers. Its handmade origins are always visible in the neural tangles of light that float like doodles above the skyline, the fragmentation of its three dimensions into sketches or collage, its textures that recall geodes or lichen or fragile aged silk as often as cracked brick, flaking plaster, or foxed glass. It is animate as well as animated, populated by broody books and tarry coughs of surveillance and aerial giants that riddle with the slowness of deep time in their poignant and tenuous orbit, a double star of stone. The Palace of Light could be a luminous fossil, the Palace of Shadows a Brutalist heart. The monkeybirds that inhabit the abandoned spaces of the cathedral can lose their noses with a dowel-like clatter and the librarian (Stephen Fry) who recounts the creation myth of his world—the girl who sat drawing in the void until it was filled from corner to corner, whereupon she turned it over and filled in the other side—is more or less a stack of books in a long coat with some metal on top. However elaborately or partially, no normal person in this world goes unmasked. As Valentine explains early on, just as puzzled and slightly disturbed by Helena's wide-boned, half-childish face as she is by his block of a purple-striped mask with its pinpoint eyes and anemone-bunches of hair, "How do you know if you're happy or sad without a mask? Or angry? Or ready for dessert?" It is a natural extension of the costumes of the circus whose details have been unraveled and restitched into this dark-and-light dream-quest; it is so successfully a part of him that the sight of his thin blond human face in a vision is almost as disorienting as the stutter-stop of the future he's flashed himself into. We might have to get used to it. As the title indicates, faces in this story are just as important as masks.
The use of faces in this film, in fact, is brilliant. Its double-casting falls much closer to a production of Peter Pan than The Wizard of Oz (1939): in keeping with the film's play of light, they are refractions, precipitates and composites of all of Helena's conflicted feelings about her relationships and her life. The Queen of Light sleeps in a chamber full of sun, angelically imperiled by a treacherous daughter-figure, but when Helena crosses into the even more scribbly, detuned and free-floating dreamlands that buffer the two halves of the city, her white-haired, silver-ornamented apparition takes on the practical voice of Joanne, offering cogent advice about the missing MirrorMask: "It's probably staring you right in the face." Carrion-crow in the smoky bronze ripple of her domain, the Queen of Shadows faced with a stranger instead of the child she has been hunting with reward posters and all-consuming nets of shadow indulgently exchanges one daughter-figure for another, assimilating a bitterly helpless Helena into the black-eyed image of her lost princess, a submissive doll of herself: "You'll do." So far, so recognizably fissioned from that last terrible fight with her mother; her funny, vulnerable father appears as a subtler fear, the kindly, ineffectual Prime Minister of the City of Light with his clownish face and his worried eyes who says most often, "I don't know." I love that her parents are real enough to cast these shadows and for the audience to be able to see around the edges of them in ways that Helena is still growing toward. "The very beautiful Joanne" takes the tickets, spins faster and faster on the Spanish web in her half-silvered mask, grounds Morris the juggler and ringmaster who "keeps this circus running on charm and peanuts" and whispers I love you to his wife between acts. Their daughter can unerringly find her mother's thin skin, catch her father out in his tell of badly disguised worry; we get to see him dealing with more logistics than the Prime Minister and understand that she's tougher and more humorous than either Queen, but they are fallible as well as loving and talented people and however it fractures through their dream-selves, in the waking world it makes them more real. Nicely, because she's the protagonist and the dreamer, Helena's own reflections are complicated, too. Every time she looks through a window in the drawn world, she sees the runaway Princess of Shadows—credited as "Anti-Helena"—acting out exactly as she herself might as a rebellious teen, dressing punkily and smoking, stealing from her aunt and bringing boys home, fighting with her father and tearing up her art. "You're horrible!" Helena screams through the glass of her own drawing, but the Princess is only behaving as shadow sides do. Besides, Helena offered her life to anyone who wanted it. Always remember the risks of performative speech. Her other double is Valentine. He's her mirror in that he's the kid who wants to join the circus, actually introduced trying to rehearse a juggling act before it's engulfed by darkness, but he's a shadow side, too, stiff-necked and bumptious, a shirker and a fantasist, a trickster who runs at the first sign of trouble and is always ready for dessert. He's such a good Arlecchino—dark-haired in her pale loose sleep clothes with a moon-mask hanging in her bedroom, there is something of the lunar Pierrot about Helena. For all his claims of being a very important man, he's far more childish than she is. I do not think it is accidental that the most important thing he has to do in the film is apologize, the very thing that Helena fears she'll never get the chance to: "I still haven't said sorry. Not really sorry, not so she believes me." I love the two of them juggling together because it's such a familial, personal affirmation and therefore a sign of their relationship, intimate without romance despite the allusion of his name. His part in her coming of age is more nuanced. Like everyone else who matters to her, in the end he's more than the sum of his reflections, flawed and true and substantial enough to exist in the waking world on his own recognizance without even a mask to tell him whether he's happy or sad. You can hope to see the ending coming, but it's still a delight. Barry's anguished delivery of "I don't want to be a waiter!" was one of the great existential cries.
I was famously frightened of masks as a child, so naturally I grew up to be fascinated by them and love this movie, which plays with the very tensions of self and other that haunted my childhood Halloweens. I always forget that so much of the action progresses in nearly self-contained episodes because it never feels like a trail of plot coupons so much as a chain of correspondence, operating in accordance with the sympathetic magic of dreams. I love that its effects range from complicated CGI to a ball that lights up when you catch it. The score by Iain Ballamy is wonderfully carnivalesque. The screenplay by Neil Gaiman actually just works for me. I still regret missing MirrorMask in theaters, but it has held up at home-size every time I've revisited it since 2008; this time around, I had not bargained for how much Helena would remind me of my godchild, even to making faces to discomfit people. I suppose I am watching from the other side of the relationship now. Remember what your mother told you. I don't know. This charm brought to you by my dreaming backers at Patreon.
spatch Dave McKean's MirrorMask (2005). It has one of the best otherworlds I have seen realized on a screen and I love it just as much for everything it does with this one.The plot is a dream, but it's a dream so intimately interwoven with the waking world that it is not possible to separate them any more than the mirror can be pulled out from the mask. On the liminal edge of adolescence, Helena Campbell (Stephanie Leonidas) does not fantasize about demon lovers or countries over the rainbow; she lies on her bed in her caravan decorated with strings of fairy lights and her own scratchy, spiky art and whispers wistfully through a regal white sock puppet, "I am queen of everything in this part of town . . . and everyone who looks at me says, 'Oh, she is such a wonderful queen—and not ever embarrassing at all—and so normal and goes to a school—'" The small traveling circus in which she has grown up may enchant the punters with its fire-breathers and acrobats and mimes and its harlequinade of masks and boozy, jazzy music, but these days it just makes Helena feel self-conscious and set apart, martyred to her parents' dreams. "They can have my life!" she declares of all the rhetorical kids who want to run away and join the circus. "I want to run away and join real life!" Instead, real life catches up with her in a sudden and brutal rush: the same night that Helena angrily, recklessly taunts her mother with a wish for her death, Joanne Campbell (Gina McKee) collapses in the middle of the show. The band plays out in time with the ambulance lights. Ten days later, the circus has stalled in Brighton as Morris Campbell (Rob Brydon) refuses to leave his wife in hospital; the bills are mounting, the troupe is talking about splitting up, and all the parental reassurance in the world can't override Helena's irrational, irrefutable conviction that it's all her fault. "It's just life," her father tries to tell her. Sniffing back tears, her hands covered in charcoal from sketching a feverish collage of streets and sphinxes and suns and doors and fish and get-well cards, she corrects him as only a teenager can: "It's just stupid!" That night she wakes to a violin ghosting her down the raddled halls of her great-aunt's council flat and into the eerily familiar avenues of a city split like a coin between day and dark, its bright side mortally encroached upon by creeping tendrils of shadow ever since the girl who identified herself as the Princess of Shadows betrayed the Queen of Light. Denouncing it equally as "just a stupid dream" does not produce the same effect as calling out a pack of cards. Her mother's smile ripples the white queen's sleep and like a fairy tale, half-knowing it, discovering herself, Helena sets out to restore the balance between the City of Light and the Land of Shadows by retrieving the mysterious "charm" whose theft sent the worlds askew. In her corner, she has a really useful book, her own circus-honed wits, and the negotiable assistance of the juggler Valentine (Jason Barry). Against her, the darkness fields what it always does—selfishness, greed, malice, fear, despair, and oneself.
It should go without saying that a film designed by McKean is visually a knockout. Even before we reach the drawn world with its chimerical architecture and drifts of shimmer and static and above all its masks, it looks burnished and bleak and factual enough to bark your shins on. The reality of our world is so important to the grounding of the story, it can't just be the frame of the portal that Helena steps through. The life of the Campbell Family Circus is shot so richly, affectionately, and pragmatically that I longed at once for McKean to adapt Angela Carter; then we snap into the hangover of the tower block of Embassy Court, which at the pre-renovation time of filming resembled a decaying ocean liner whose waterfront view prominently featured the burned-out skeleton of the West Pier. It's not just real life, but real life at its most grody and discouraging. "Dreams only get you that far, darling. After that you need cash." Of course it bleeds over into the world drawn from Helena's art—the white and black queens, the shoals of airy fish, the very important man with the tower—almost less in obvious anxieties like the veins of shadow swarming the city like sickness within a woman's body than in the general air of erosion and neglect which gives it the uncertain look of a war zone or a ghost town. And yet it is beautiful, and not just in ways that appeal to urban explorers. Its handmade origins are always visible in the neural tangles of light that float like doodles above the skyline, the fragmentation of its three dimensions into sketches or collage, its textures that recall geodes or lichen or fragile aged silk as often as cracked brick, flaking plaster, or foxed glass. It is animate as well as animated, populated by broody books and tarry coughs of surveillance and aerial giants that riddle with the slowness of deep time in their poignant and tenuous orbit, a double star of stone. The Palace of Light could be a luminous fossil, the Palace of Shadows a Brutalist heart. The monkeybirds that inhabit the abandoned spaces of the cathedral can lose their noses with a dowel-like clatter and the librarian (Stephen Fry) who recounts the creation myth of his world—the girl who sat drawing in the void until it was filled from corner to corner, whereupon she turned it over and filled in the other side—is more or less a stack of books in a long coat with some metal on top. However elaborately or partially, no normal person in this world goes unmasked. As Valentine explains early on, just as puzzled and slightly disturbed by Helena's wide-boned, half-childish face as she is by his block of a purple-striped mask with its pinpoint eyes and anemone-bunches of hair, "How do you know if you're happy or sad without a mask? Or angry? Or ready for dessert?" It is a natural extension of the costumes of the circus whose details have been unraveled and restitched into this dark-and-light dream-quest; it is so successfully a part of him that the sight of his thin blond human face in a vision is almost as disorienting as the stutter-stop of the future he's flashed himself into. We might have to get used to it. As the title indicates, faces in this story are just as important as masks.
The use of faces in this film, in fact, is brilliant. Its double-casting falls much closer to a production of Peter Pan than The Wizard of Oz (1939): in keeping with the film's play of light, they are refractions, precipitates and composites of all of Helena's conflicted feelings about her relationships and her life. The Queen of Light sleeps in a chamber full of sun, angelically imperiled by a treacherous daughter-figure, but when Helena crosses into the even more scribbly, detuned and free-floating dreamlands that buffer the two halves of the city, her white-haired, silver-ornamented apparition takes on the practical voice of Joanne, offering cogent advice about the missing MirrorMask: "It's probably staring you right in the face." Carrion-crow in the smoky bronze ripple of her domain, the Queen of Shadows faced with a stranger instead of the child she has been hunting with reward posters and all-consuming nets of shadow indulgently exchanges one daughter-figure for another, assimilating a bitterly helpless Helena into the black-eyed image of her lost princess, a submissive doll of herself: "You'll do." So far, so recognizably fissioned from that last terrible fight with her mother; her funny, vulnerable father appears as a subtler fear, the kindly, ineffectual Prime Minister of the City of Light with his clownish face and his worried eyes who says most often, "I don't know." I love that her parents are real enough to cast these shadows and for the audience to be able to see around the edges of them in ways that Helena is still growing toward. "The very beautiful Joanne" takes the tickets, spins faster and faster on the Spanish web in her half-silvered mask, grounds Morris the juggler and ringmaster who "keeps this circus running on charm and peanuts" and whispers I love you to his wife between acts. Their daughter can unerringly find her mother's thin skin, catch her father out in his tell of badly disguised worry; we get to see him dealing with more logistics than the Prime Minister and understand that she's tougher and more humorous than either Queen, but they are fallible as well as loving and talented people and however it fractures through their dream-selves, in the waking world it makes them more real. Nicely, because she's the protagonist and the dreamer, Helena's own reflections are complicated, too. Every time she looks through a window in the drawn world, she sees the runaway Princess of Shadows—credited as "Anti-Helena"—acting out exactly as she herself might as a rebellious teen, dressing punkily and smoking, stealing from her aunt and bringing boys home, fighting with her father and tearing up her art. "You're horrible!" Helena screams through the glass of her own drawing, but the Princess is only behaving as shadow sides do. Besides, Helena offered her life to anyone who wanted it. Always remember the risks of performative speech. Her other double is Valentine. He's her mirror in that he's the kid who wants to join the circus, actually introduced trying to rehearse a juggling act before it's engulfed by darkness, but he's a shadow side, too, stiff-necked and bumptious, a shirker and a fantasist, a trickster who runs at the first sign of trouble and is always ready for dessert. He's such a good Arlecchino—dark-haired in her pale loose sleep clothes with a moon-mask hanging in her bedroom, there is something of the lunar Pierrot about Helena. For all his claims of being a very important man, he's far more childish than she is. I do not think it is accidental that the most important thing he has to do in the film is apologize, the very thing that Helena fears she'll never get the chance to: "I still haven't said sorry. Not really sorry, not so she believes me." I love the two of them juggling together because it's such a familial, personal affirmation and therefore a sign of their relationship, intimate without romance despite the allusion of his name. His part in her coming of age is more nuanced. Like everyone else who matters to her, in the end he's more than the sum of his reflections, flawed and true and substantial enough to exist in the waking world on his own recognizance without even a mask to tell him whether he's happy or sad. You can hope to see the ending coming, but it's still a delight. Barry's anguished delivery of "I don't want to be a waiter!" was one of the great existential cries.
I was famously frightened of masks as a child, so naturally I grew up to be fascinated by them and love this movie, which plays with the very tensions of self and other that haunted my childhood Halloweens. I always forget that so much of the action progresses in nearly self-contained episodes because it never feels like a trail of plot coupons so much as a chain of correspondence, operating in accordance with the sympathetic magic of dreams. I love that its effects range from complicated CGI to a ball that lights up when you catch it. The score by Iain Ballamy is wonderfully carnivalesque. The screenplay by Neil Gaiman actually just works for me. I still regret missing MirrorMask in theaters, but it has held up at home-size every time I've revisited it since 2008; this time around, I had not bargained for how much Helena would remind me of my godchild, even to making faces to discomfit people. I suppose I am watching from the other side of the relationship now. Remember what your mother told you. I don't know. This charm brought to you by my dreaming backers at Patreon.
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I can't afford to bid on anything, no, but that is really cool.