The Secret World of Arrietty

Hayao Miyazaki is a Japanese filmmaker with a genius for interpreting the magic of English children’s literature. As with Howl’s Moving Castle, The Secret World of Arrietty is an adaptation of a book that I adore.

When I say I adore Mary Norton’s The Borrowers series, I mean I was obsessed with it, even more so than with books like The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynn Reid Banks. (This obsession struck me right after my horse phase, and seems as essential a part of my girlhood as anything.)  Riding in the car, I would look out for exposed tree roots and hiding places that would make good Borrower nests. In my bedroom closet, I used pins and string to make it easier for the Borrowers to climb to the top of my shelves. In the backyard, I used leaves and stones to furnish a tiny 'house', imagining what it would be like to see the world from such a tiny perspective.

A teeny tiny jungle of a room - just as it should be

So when I heard that my favorite filmmaker, Hayao Miyazaki, was adapting The Borrowers, I was thrilled. I couldn’t imagine a more perfect imagination to transform this book.

There are beats in The Secret World of Arrietty that seem strange to me: Sho casually telling Arrietty that it’s likely her kind is doomed to extinction (I realize that he is facing his own mortality, but it's still a dick move), the housekeeper’s strangely reckless attitude toward the little people she's heard so much about, and the uncertainty of the ending. Will Sho survive? Will the tiny family? The American version tidies these ambiguities up neatly with narration, but the Japanese version does not.

As with the placid lakeside scenes of Howl’s Moving Castle, Miyazaki is interested in making us feel this world and how the characters live inside of it. The sound of a cat walking through grass is crashingly loud. Crows and rats are menacing, and a human boy’s casual attempts to “help” are disastrously disruptive and terrifying to his tiny neighbors.

Through Miyazaki’s storytelling, I understand why Homily loves her safe, comfortable home furnished with scavenged and repurposed items, and why Arrietty is eager to explore the unimaginably vast world outside. Miyazaki’s films succeed in the realm of fantasy because he is always interested in setting, and worldbuilding is crucial in that genre.

As with any Miyazaki movie distributed by Disney, it can be helpful to watch it twice—once in subtitles with the original Japanese voices, and once with the American dubbing. (Or watch the American dubbing with the subtitles turned.) The versions are noticeably different. For example, Homily Clock, Arrietty’s mother, is considerably altered between versions; her fussiness and nervousness are emphasized for comedic effect in the dubbed, but her concerns seem more rational and less self-centered in the Japanese.

A movie cannot fully match my imagination, but The Secret World of Arrietty transformed my memories and enriched them with Miyazaki’s vision. I love this movie, no matter what its miniature flaws may be.

I am thrilled beyond belief to hear that Miyazaki is planning on coming out of his semi-retirement to expand a short film Kemushi no Boro (Boro the Caterpillar) into a feature-length film. More Miyazaki, please!

The Theater of Oppression

This week I finished reading A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator's Rise to Power by Paul Fischer. The subtitle sums it up, but the full details of the story are incredible.

During Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il's over-long reigns as dictators of North Korea, they made a policy of drug trafficking, terrorism, and kidnapping foreign citizens, while starving, imprisoning, and systematically brainwashing their own. The stories of suffering in North Korea, all gained from accounts related by escapees from the secretive country, are bizarre and saddening.

Actress Choi Eun-hee was a survivor of the Korean War, and she and her director husband, Shin Sang-ok, lived in South Korea afterward making films. They divorced after Shin's public affair with a younger actress, and when Choi disappeared, there were accusations that Shin was behind it. Then Shin himself was taken, and for several years they were kept apart in North Korea as an attempt was made to reeducate them. No one knew what had happened to them, and neither Choi nor Shin knew what had happened to the other until they were reunited by Kim Jong-Il as part of his plan to use them for propaganda creation.

Choi and Shin - aren't they cute together?

Kim Jong-Il was a lover of film, and spent a large part of his country's money on creating a library of pirated films for his own personal enjoyment. He took Choi and Shin in an attempt to prop up the lackluster North Korean film industry, a propaganda machine for his father's reign, and later for his own.

I've read one other journalistic account of life behind the DMZ (the extraordinary Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea), and George Orwell's Oceania pales in comparison. North Korea is a country where for decades the Great Leader (Il-Sung) and the Dear Leader (Jong-Il) paraded their citizenry like puppets, all the while expecting them to swallow astonishing lies. For example:

[....] the Central News Agency exhorted the Korean people to celebrate [Kim Jong-Il's] fortieth birthday two years in a row, as if nothing had happened.

This wasn't out of vanity, but simply to place Kim Jong-Il's birth at the numerically significant 30 years after his father's, instead of 29 years. It's the least outrageous of the lies told by the Kim regime.

The story of Choi and Shin's lives before and after captivity is fascinating, and I highly recommend this book to anyone who has never read anything about North Korea. The author cites many news articles in his bibliography, and I suggest taking a look at those as well.

One thing this story does, more than anything, is show what value art can have in the lives of people who are oppressed and suffering:

There is an old Asian saying that 'drop by drop, the water perforates the stone.' Kim Jong-Il had kidnapped Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee to help promote his regime and tighten his control on his people's thoughts. Instead, Shin and Choi's movies were drops of water, each one slowly but surely wearing away the Kims' supremacy. (278)

I certainly hope this proves true, and that the corrupt Kim dynasty will one day face a reckoning - not from a foreign power, but from within. In the meantime, do yourself a favor and read this book!

Choi with Marilyn Monroe, 1954

Gods Like Us

Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame by Ty Burr
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Charting the highs and lows of stardom from the silent idols to today's over-exposed pantheon of celebrities, film critic Ty Burr examines the cultural history of Hollywood fame.

As a longtime reader of Us Magazine along with other trashy entertainment news, one of my favorite pasttimes is learning the incredible history of celebrity. The scandals of today often pale in comparison with the hushed-up doings of the old studio stars like Clark Gable, Clara Bow, and Charlie Chaplin.

Celebrity studies (a fascinating new field that merges film/literary criticism with cultural history) examines the pleasure of watching beautiful and talented people enact fantasies that at once reflect and change our shared culture. Burr, a film critic for The Boston Globe, writes ably of the trends of Hollywood then and now. Even the most ardent buff will add unfamiliar titles to the list of films to see and find him or herself googling unfamiliar names to see the Julia Roberts and Harrison Fords of yesteryear.

If you read everything by academic Anne Helen Petersen (who writes classic celebrity biographies for The Hairpin as well as posting on her own blog, Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style, her Twitter account, and Facebook page), then you may recognize a few of Burr's anecdotes. His book is more than simple history, though: it's also criticism, and it's a pleasure to read Burr's insightful assessments and descriptions.

The stories are fantastic and sometimes unbelievable: for example, the casting of Scarlett O'Hara for the adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's blockbuster novel Gone With the Wind took a full two years and encompassed every star in Hollywood, even the ones that in retrospect make little sense: Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Paulette Goddard, and even a young Lucille Ball. Nationwide auditions were held, exciting a frenzy of speculation and amateur enthusiasm: one woman actually shipped herself into the producer's office in a crate to give him a surprise reading and bonus striptease. In the end, the most coveted role in Hollywood went to an unknown Englishwoman: Vivien Leigh (who at the time was quietly carrying on an adulterous affair with Laurence Olivier).

There are also anecdotes about an entire studio taking daily nooners; the way the studio system cold-bloodedly cultivated its stars (to the point of arranging a marriage for gay actor Rock Hudson); how silent film actors first discovered the crushing wheel of celebrity (Florence Lawrence's trajectory is familiarly tragic), and many memorable turns of phrase from Burr (John Wayne, he writes, emerges like a "Venus on the half-saddle").

Burr mentions stars of prestige and popularity, and various mixtures thereof. There are many eras to examine: the earliest silent films, the bumpy transition to talkies, the heyday of Old Hollywood glamor, the rise of the counterculture (embodied by Marlon Brando, arguably the best actor of all time), then TV, cable, VHS, MTV, indie films, the Internet, and dreaded "reality" television (ugh). Hollywood has always reflected the world around it: bloody wars, new technology, shifts in culture, and larger-than-life personalities show up in Tinseltown as in a funhouse mirror, history's players morphing in unexpected ways. It's fascinating for any student of contemporary culture or of American history.

Marlon Brando, acting god

For your next read, I definitely recommend picking up Anne Helen Petersen's book when it comes out: Scandals of Classic Hollywood. David Thomson has also written extensively on the history of films. With Netflix and the trusty Criterion Collection, even the oldest films hardly seem out of reach any more, so I highly recommend checking them out. A look through past Oscar Best Picture nominees provides a convenient list to start with (though the Academy often got it wrong in their choice of winners).

Quotable:

"When [director D.W. Griffith] tried [the closeup] out in a Biograph film his bosses were horrified. 'We pay for the whole actor, Mr. Griffith,' he was scolded. 'We want to see all of him.'" - 21

"The history of modern fame, from the first movies to today, is a struggle for control between the people who make the product and the people who buy it." - 84

"If anything, star singularities force a need for their persona into the culture rather than the other way around. There was no call for Fred Astaire before Fred Astaire existed. ... The young Katharine Hepburn seemed so eccentric to mainstream audiences that it took fifteen years for them to come around. Edward G. Robinson looked like a toad and was built for character parts and ethnic caricature, but he had the crude forward momentum of a sex symbol; he was a star because he acted like one." - 104

"The problem with gods who look and act like us is that they get old like us, at which point they cease to be gods. So we continually choose new ones as young and beautiful as we hope we are when we look in the mirror. Each freshly born divinity is a reflection of who we think we are at that moment in time and culture, or, more precisely, who we might want to be." - 143

"As always since the very invention of movie stars, these actors and their peers each embody an idea, a narrative whose potential energy is shaped by aspects of physical appearance, attitude, talent, and luck." - 321

In the Realms of the Unreal

I've had a DVD from Netflix sitting on my bedroom floor for over a month now, and a few nights ago I finally got around to popping it into the player: I was glad I did! The film was the documentary, In the Realms of the Unreal, directed by Jessica Yu.

In the Realms of the Unreal is a unique look at the life and work of Henry Darger (1892–1973), a man who worked as a janitor by day and by night was a prolific writer and painter, the hero of his own vast novels. His mother died when he was young, and his father died after Darger was institutionalized. He later escaped the institution and returned to Chicago. Though fully capable of caring for himself, Darger was certainly eccentric (and possibly autistic, but not mentally ill). He lived in almost complete isolation. The people at his church and in his apartment building were vaguely aware of his existence, but for the most part his relationship with the world was what Yu termed "mutual indifference."

When Darger was moved into a Catholic mission to be cared for at the end of his life, his landlords Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner came across his huge body of work: "four unpublished manuscripts comprising more than thirty thousand pages of text; more than three hundred watercolor paintings that are often longer than nine feet; and thousands of ephemera Darger collected and used in his artistic process" (The Henry Darger Study Center).

Nathan Lerner was a photographer, and immediately recognized the unusual beauty and worth of Darger's art. After Darger's death the Lerners remained in charge of the estate and advocated for it so well that Darger is now internationally known. His work is considered the most famous example of outsider art.

"At Sunbeam Creek, are with little girl refugees again in peril from forest fires..." by Henry Darger

Darger's most famous book spans 15,145 pages and is titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. It is the story of a vast war between enslaved children and their oppressors, the evil Glandelinians.

Darger also wrote an autobiography/novel ("Thank God!" says Yu - we would know next to nothing about his life if not for that) called The History of My Life. Only about 206 pages deal with his life - the other 4,672 tell the story of the charmingly named twister "Sweetie Pie" (Wikipedia).

Never formally trained, Darger often traced his figures from magazine pictures which he clipped, repeating his favorite images throughout his works - you might even recognize the Coppertone Girl or Little Annie Rooney. His use of colors is extraordinary, and the paintings have a strange beauty to them. Part of their strangeness stems from the fact that he frequently depicted the Vivian Girls with penises. (It is unclear if he was even aware that girls are physically different from boys.)

Director Jessica Yu spent five years studying Darger and creating her documentary. The DVD has a fascinating interview with her where she talks about her storytelling choices and her own perception of Darger's life. She chose to tell the story almost entirely with pieces of Darger's autobiography, excerpts from The Realms, and his illustrations (which have been animated). Dakota Fanning narrates portions of the film with uncanny maturity. She is an appropriate choice given that she was about the same age as Darger's heroic Vivian Girls: when the film was released in 2004, she was only ten years old.

Much of Henry Darger's life and mind remains mysterious in spite of the volume of his work, and Yu does not attempt to resolve all the mysteries with easy answers. There are no art critics or psychologists interviewed in her documentary, just Darger's own naïve, passionate, unselfconscious voice interspersed with the narrative. There are moments of real darkness here - and real beauty, too. Yu's film is certainly not trying to be the definitive biography, but as an introduction to Darger's work it is excellent.

For a more thorough traditional biography, see John M. MacGregor's 2002 book Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal. For more about the art, see Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings, edited by Michael Bonesteel. The American Folk Art Museum has a large collection in its Henry Darger Study Center. Today Darger's works sell for more than $80,000 - amazing when you consider that during his life he was unable to spend five dollars a month extra to own a dog, and that he died in the same poorhouse as his father.

Side note:
This documentary  reminded me of Séraphine (starring Yolande Moreau), a beautiful film about the life of a French painter Séraphine de Senlis (her gorgeous paintings are examples of "naïve art", but considering her later institutionalization you could probably consider her an outsider artist as well). Séraphine is available streaming on Netflix, but In the Realms of the Uncanny is only available on DVD.

Homage to Hornby: Books Bought, Books Read

Lately I've been reading Nick Hornby's collected essays from his Believer column (Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, The Polysyllabic Spree, and More Baths, Less Talking. The format goes like this: at the beginning of each essay, he lists the books he's purchased and the books he's read for that month. Like most bibliophiles, those two lists rarely match up.

While I'm still experimenting with the best way to structure this blog, I'm going to steal a page from Hornby's amusing and smart books and present you with my lists (the links will take you to the Goodreads profile or to my reviews):

Books bought in February:
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (Nook)
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (Zones of Thought #2)
The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge (Zones of Thought #3)
The Fiction Writer's Handbook by Shelly Lowenkopf (Nook)
Zig Zag: The Incredible Wartime Exploits Of Double Agent Eddie Chapman by Nicholas Booth
Hunk for the Holidays by Katie Lane (Nook: don't judge - he has whiskey-colored eyes! I love whiskey!)
A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana by Haven Kimmel
Black Sheep by Georgette Heyer
Frederica by Georgette Heyer
The Convenient Marriage by Georgette Heyer
A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer
Revenge: A Story of Hope by Laura Blumenfeld
Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan
I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination by Francis Spufford

I swear I don't normally buy so many books in a month...you should see my library hold list for an indication of my more frugal self. This list is the result of some late-night buying at Powells.com, where it's all so cheap, and shipping was only $4 for everything from Zippy down!

Books read in February:
Jane Austen: A Life by Clair Tomalin
Going Postal by Terry Pratchett (Discworld series; re-read)
The Two Princesses of Bamarre by Gail Carson Levine
Nonfiction Readers' Advisory ed. Robert Burgin
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (Zones of Thought #1)
The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick (audiobook)

In progress:
The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne Valente
A Few Good Books: Using Contemporary Readers' Advisory Strategies to Connect Readers With Books by Stephanie L. Maatta

The one wrinkle I'll add is that I downloaded a HUGE number of books from the fantastic Project Gutenberg this month--far too many to list in one entry, or even ten.

So instead I'll give you a teaser of the obscure (and not so obscure!) classics that I'm excited to read about, and the reasons for my enthusiasm (links will take you to free copies via Project Gutenberg):

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy (1905)
A swashbuckling adventure story along the lines of The Three Musketeers, this is the story of a Frenchwoman named Marguerite who marries a handsome fop, Sir Percy Blakeney, at the start of the French Revolution. Their love is meant to be, but a terrible misunderstanding estranges them as the Terror begins in France, where a mysterious hero who calls himself the Scarlet Pimpernel is smuggling French aristocrats out of the country.

For movie fans, the 1934 adaptation starring Leslie Howard will make you forget all about the limp Ashley Wilkes (Gone With the Wind). Not to get sidetracked or anything, but the actor Leslie Howard died in 1943 when his plane was shot down by Nazis. He may have been acting for British Intelligence at the time, though the official story is that he was doing anti-Nazi propaganda. So Howard was a bona fide spy, playing a fictional spy! He was a talented actor whose life was tragically cut short, and the rest of his filmography is worth checking out, too.

I'll stop here for now, but there are so many fantastic books available for FREE through Gutenberg that I'm sure you'll be hearing more from me on the subject in posts tagged Three Free Books.

State Home for Manic Pixie Dream Girls

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, it's a common trope of movies and television. If you think of the characters played by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown, Natalie Portman in The Garden State, and Zooey Deschanel in everything, then you've got a good sense of what she's like.

The term was coined by Nathan Rabin of the TV AV Club in his review of Elizabethtown in 2007.
 
(For a list of films starring the MPDG, see the TV AV Club's list here.)

To properly understand the nature of the MPDG (and for a hint of the scorn heaped upon this type by feminists), check out this short explanation by Anita Sarkeesian (whose series discussing Tropes vs. Women at Feminist Frequency is great, though as a Christian I have problems with her discussion about Mystical Pregnancy - but more on that later).

Two folks at NPR discuss this trope, mentioning my personal favorite Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby.

Jezebel calls the MPDG the "Scourge of Modern Cinema" and I'm inclined to agree.

Writer Sadie Stein dubs her "The Amazing Girl", though she targets real-life women who fit the stereotype, particularly the famous muses of history, who is "the Romantics' ideal of the pure and naturally innocent woman, a creature morally inferior to men but capable of spiritual perfection -- in short, a childlike vessel for the projection of masculine ideals." Basically, the MPDG is the modern muse.

I had read the Jezebel article about a year ago, but hadn't thought about it much after that. However, I recently volunteered to do a consumer survey at a local movie theater. I was asked questions about my movie viewing habits, watched a trailer, was asked questions about my response to the trailer, and then asked to watch the trailer again, followed by more questions. (It took longer than I thought it would.) It was an interesting glimpse into the very intentional marketing done to attract moviegoers via trailers. The film was called Ruby Sparks, and you can see the trailer I watched below:

It bothered me that not only is Ruby the perfect MPDG, with literally no private existence of her own, but that she is also literally created by a man and can be manipulated by him at will. She comes into being to fulfill his needs by pulling him from his funk. Does she have her own needs? Is she allowed to?

Part of the problem with MPDGs is their lack of personal dreams - much less ambition. They exist to be shallow characters whose effervescent quirkiness brings joy to the life of a man. Everything they do is darling, as cute as a basket full of puppies and kittens. But they lack power, they exist for the pleasure of men, and they're basically adorable little dolls. Everything a feminist dislikes. (Although I love Hepburn. Katharine, not that twit Audrey with her stupid accent.)

Ruby Sparks is the quintessential MPDG, and I kind of hate her. (The movie theater most likely showed that trailer to me because I'm a young woman, though I realized during the survey that I never see anything without explosions on the big screen anymore. It seems a waste of money if nothing blows up.)

But here, to refresh your palate, is a brilliant send-up of the type, created by Natural Disastronauts. Enjoy!

Found via The Society Pages.

Maneaters

The fearsome sexuality of women:

Via The Society Pages.