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Ringing all the underwater, underwater, underwater bells
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
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I like your thoughts on outing in Splash. It always struck me as mysterious and forced that he was so horrified by her mermaidness. He had **seen** her as a kid. And didn't he ever read fairy tales? 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.
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Same here. I would make an alternate universe just for that.
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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
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There are so many movies from alternate history I want to see.
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What you (via
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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.
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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?
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Clearly she's iconic.
Nine
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Peter Cushing would have been my ideal Andrew Ketterley, even better than Ernest Thesiger
I agree completely with this concept. That said, why should we have to choose one? The world has room for both the 1938 Graumont Pictures Magician's Nephew with the haughty, entitled Uncle Andrew, and the 1969 Hammer Films Magician's Nephew with Uncle Andrew the beaten, self-pitying martyr to Science.
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It's one of the formative movies of my childhood: we taped it off the television when I was four or five and by the time I was twelve, I had lost count of the number of times I'd watched it. (And I wasn't a particularly movie-watching child. This one just rang on all the right frequencies.) Then the tape got misplaced or drowned or God knows what and I didn't see the film again until grad school, when I was given the DVD for my birthday; and then I watched it on Wednesday and this post is the result. I have never written extensively about Splash; I'm not sure I could be coherent about it. I can be critical—it's not a perfect film. There's a tonal shift toward the end that is particularly huh? But it corrects itself; and the shape of the story is right. And Daryl Hannah's Madison is perhaps the best mermaid put on film.
The world has room for both the 1938 Graumont Pictures Magician's Nephew with the haughty, entitled Uncle Andrew, and the 1969 Hammer Films Magician's Nephew with Uncle Andrew the beaten, self-pitying martyr to Science.
Well, the book was published in 1955. That said, I'll take one of each, please.