Ringing all the underwater, underwater, underwater bells

[sovay]

I am trying to figure out whether I can actually make an argument that Ron Howard's Splash (1984) is a queer film—even if the accidental kind, like Orwell with sexcrime—without being doomed to failure or just fail. It was a shower thought, which means very late at night. But I watched the film for the first time in several years with Viking Zen and her daughter for this week's Movie Night and this time it struck me that it's a story in which someone is outed. The ways in which Allen freaks at the revelation of Madison's nature (which she has been trying to tell him and he has been somewhat derailing with his certainty that it's a non-issue: "What, you're already married? You're dying, you were once a man? Whatever it is, I don't care!") are more Neil Jordan than Mélusine. Their first encounter afterward, he flinches violently from her when she tries to touch him. He walks back into work the next day and everyone stops with the fruits and vegetables to stare at him, prompting John Candy's inimitable holler: "What are you looking at? You never saw a guy who slept with a fish before? Get back to work!" Eventually he will realize he loves her, full stop, but first he has the kind of attraction crisis that desires the audience to slap him upside the head: "Nobody said love's perfect."—"Oh, Freddie, I don't expect it to be perfect, but for God's sake it's usually human!" I do not know how far the original material can be considered in this question, since Splash extensively rewrites "The Little Mermaid": instead of the mermaid futilely sacrificing herself for the hope of love on alien land, it's the human man who gives up his world to follow her into the shape-changing sea. Maybe I should be looking more generally at passing narratives. Or sleeping. The latter is probably a good idea regardless of the intellectual success of this paragraph.

I was also in the shower when I realized that Peter Cushing would have been my ideal Andrew Ketterley, even better than Ernest Thesiger—whose Dr. Pretorius displays the necessary air of superiority, but Cushing possessed the equally necessary ability to fold instantly and pathetically, as shown more than once in Cash on Demand (1961) and used to devastating effect in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954). I think it's an extension of the quality teenybuffalo remarked on when discussing his Van Helsing, a clearly marked hero who never looks as though being on the side of light is easy or without fear; he seems to have had a knack for suggesting uncertainty, vulnerability. (It certainly accounts for his reading of The End of the Affair's Henry Miles, who by all rights should have been boring as a box of bricks. Instead he's one of the most sympathetic characters in the film.) He would have had no difficulty with the more threatening aspects of Uncle Andrew, the magic that is sufficiently indistinguishable from mad science and the complete, clinical disregard for anything he views as a lesser being—which means girls as well as guinea pigs—and I can hear that crystal radio voice of his exactly in the self-deceiving self-dramatization of "Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny." Ditto the casual references to exploding test subjects. But the character needs to be scared out of his wits by Jadis—both for the comedy and because it illustrates a measure of her sheer power: after meeting her, Digory is never afraid of his uncle again—and I don't know if Ernest Thesiger, supremely bitchy as he was, could actually do abject terror. And the height would have been right, and the sharp face, and the rather epic hair. And in an impossible alternate universe, he and Tilda Swinton would have been something to see on the same screen.

Alexander Waugh's The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War (2008) is a densely and stylishly written combination of biography, case study, and sociopolitical history and I am delighted to be halfway through it, but, man, do not read it to cheer yourself up.

Comments

[sovay]

I would *love* Peter Cushing as Andrew Ketterley

I wonder if Lewis ever had anyone in mind for the role, or if he simply didn't think that way.

and I would love Tilda Swanson as Jadis when she was vivid, rather than drained of color as the White Witch (though she was a good White Witch.

I can't decide whether I wish the film series would make it to The Magician's Nephew just so I can see Swinton as Jadis or whether I think they would eff the rest of the book up so badly, I might as well pray they never get close.

Though don't get me started on those films, as I really don't like them.

You can start if you like; I disagreed in places with the adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—its White Witch was a major redeeming factor—but Prince Caspian managed to excise the two sequences that have always been most resonant for me (the night the trees are almost awake, the second coming of the pagan world with Dionysos in the streets and the breaking of the river-god's chains) and substitute a lot of nonsensical battling in their place. And I have it on good authority that the trailer for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader will, if you liked the book even a little, just depress you.

And didn't he ever read fairy tales?

And the sea is important to him: he visits the mermaid fountain, he keeps tanks of tropical fish, there's ocean-type art on his walls. He's never learned to swim, but the falling-down drunken night after his longtime girlfriend breaks up with him, he gets a cab driver to take him up to Cape Cod; there's something there he can't remember, but he misses it.

How can anyone who's ever heard of mermaids, let alone seen a real one as a kid, find the concept so apparently offputting? But yeah, discovering something unacceptable about your sexuality and then coming to terms with it--that I could buy.

Thanks. I could still be utterly wrong, but it seemed to click.

I should get hans_the_bold to discourse at some point on Disney's The Little Mermaid (1989); he's the person who pointed out to me that the film handles Ariel's desire for the human world like an issue of sexuality or gender identity. If she merely fell in love with Eric at first sight, then we might have a subtext of interracial or cross-cultural romance, but she's obsessed with the land long before she saves a prince from drowning. The cave where she stores all her treasures of the world above, she has to keep carefully secret from her father, like clothes she's not supposed to wear or (in the days before internet) magazines she's not supposed to look at. And when he does find out, he destroys all her human things in the same kind of horrified fury; and is sorry afterward, because he's hurt his daughter, but he still can't understand why she wants what she wants; he doesn't want her to want it. Consequent to this interpretation, I can accept the movie's ending as a valid shift in story protocols as opposed to the Disney inability not to close with a smile and a song—there are enough stories already where non-mainstream desire ends with rejection and death, including Andersen's original, thank you.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I did see the trailer for Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and it did depress me. From the first movie, and more strongly in the second and third, the ... producer/director/writers/whoeverall it is seem to be moving further and further away from the source material and substituting just generic fantasy adventure what-have-you. The thing about the Narnia books, all of them, is that they're intimate. With The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it's the interiors of Mr. Tumnus's cave, the beavers' lodge, or even the courtyard of what the witch calls her "house" that we see. There's a battle, sure, but as important as the battle is the poor squirrel that gets turned to stone as the witch is slogging her way through the emerging spring, and the mice gnawing at Aslan's ropes. And yes, you picked the two best parts, in my opinion, in Prince Caspian. The pagan revival isn't intimate in the way that, say, Mr. Tumnus's cave is, but it's *personal*--the schoolgirl who tears off her shoes to follow Bacchus (am I remembering right? or was it the schoolteacher?), the town-sized (not Moria-sized) bridge over Beruna. And Voyage of the Dawn Treader is precisely about personal trials: Eustace peeling off the dragon skin, Lucy eavesdropping on her school chum, Caspian having to give up on going to the utter east. Not about, uh, the return of the White Witch and battles with what look like the Pirates of the Caribbean in the Dark Dream Island.

What you (via hans_the_bold?) have to say about Disney's The Little Mermaid is fascinating. He doesn't want her to want it --yes, precisely.

[sovay]

The thing about the Narnia books, all of them, is that they're intimate.

Yes. And it's not that there aren't battles, but they are never the focus of the story. They happen in order to get to the next bit.

--the schoolgirl who tears off her shoes to follow Bacchus (am I remembering right? or was it the schoolteacher?)

That's the schoolgirl, I think; Gwendolen. It's the tired mathematics teacher whose unpleasant students all disappear in all the Dionysiac commotion (but they say afterward that some remarkably fine little pigs could be found in that part of the country). And the old woman who is dying, but Bacchus draws water from the well and it's wine when he hands it to her, and she jumps out of bed.

and battles with what look like the Pirates of the Caribbean in the Dark Dream Island.

. . . no.

What you (via hans_the_bold?) have to say about Disney's The Little Mermaid is fascinating.

That's all Hans; I'm just relaying it.

[hans-the-bold.livejournal.com]

That's a good summary of my view of The Little Mermaid. Along with Beauty and the Beast, it represents the best that animation has ever offered, in my opinion, because it slips a real message past the Disney urge for cliches and happy endings. And the message is more profound than the similar one in Beauty and the Beast: Belle feels out of place in the little provincial town, but is comfortable throughout with her own identity, with who and what she is. Ariel suffers very much like someone who is transgendered; her own body does not fit her desired conception of herself, and even those who love her most cannot understand why she feels as she does. In fact, she doesn't understand it herself. But she does feel, and she displays the courage to act on these feelings, making a sacrifice of a basic part of herself to become what she deep down believes that she is.

That's what makes The Little Mermaid a masterpiece. Eric, the "hero", is entirely secondary, and the story really revolves around Ariel's self-determination. It also shows how those who honestly love her learn to love who she is, fins or no. Where Beauty and the Beast is a story of loving despite appearances, The Little Mermaid is deeper, I believe, because it is about discovering who you are, having the courage to face that person, and it is about loving despite both appearances and that which is deeper.

And all that with all the usual and very nice Disney music and fun. I think the pity of it is that a lot of people criticized the film because of the love story (my sister-in-law and I had this debate some years ago), seeing Ariel as representing only the cliched girl who is obsessed with falling in love to the point of not doing anything else. The reality is that she is doing something very profound, and the love story is really not that important.

I note that Howard Ashman was gay, and I've often wondered if The Little Mermaid might reflect some part of his life and the way that any of those who are different have to hide in our rather repressed society. Did he have a cave of treasures?

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. I went looking for an article I read not awfully long ago about very young transgendered boys, many of whom seemed obsessed with The Little Mermaid, and found a British support group "for teenagers and children with gender identity issues" called Mermaids.

Clearly she's iconic.

Nine