Exodus: Gods and Kings opened this past weekend,
and as mean-spirited as it is, I have to admit I was disappointed to see it top
the box office, beating Mockingjay:
Part One and Chris Rock’s Top Five.
I’d say I’m boycotting it because of the whitewashed cast, but that implies I
would’ve had the slightest interest in seeing it otherwise. Racism and director
Ridley Scott being
a jerk about said racism aside, this movie contributes to a recent
Hollywood trend that I find particularly frustrating: revisionist takes on
myths that don’t have any actual mythology in them.
Theoretically, Hollywood’s
newfound obsession with reinventing myths – whether it’s fairy tales, Biblical or
otherwise religious stories, historical legends or classical mythology – should
be right up my alley. Though I enjoy real-world dramas as much as the next
person, I have always found these kinds of stories fascinating not only for the
way they blend recognizable archetypes with the fantastical, but also for how
integral they are to storytelling as an art, revealing the values and deeper
truths of historical moments, individual cultures and humanity as a whole.
While fairy tales and such have often served a didactic function, teaching
children and even adults how to lead a proper, moral life, they also speak to
people and shape their understanding of the world around them on a fundamental,
almost primal level. Where most stories benefit from specificity, myths feel
universal. Just think of how many different ancient civilizations, ones that
likely had little direct contact with each other, have similar legends about
massive floods, or Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, as simplistic and
patriarchal as that concept might be. My point is that these stories are designed to be reimagined and retold,
boasting an inherent, abstract fluidity that has kept them alive for, in some
cases, centuries on end.
So, if myths are so open to
reinterpretation, then why are Hollywood’s latest versions, with Exodus, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah and Maleficient being this year’s most prominent examples, so dull? In
part, this could probably be attributed to the mainstream filmmaking industry’s
general lack of inventiveness and risk-averse mindset. To an extent, that’s
almost understandable in some of these cases. Considering how protective fans
can be of something as comparatively trivial as Star Wars or the Marvel comics, commercial productions can only
afford to be so radical when you’re dealing with material that’s literally
gospel for millions of people. Judging by reviews,
Exodus in particular seems to have
been hampered by the creative team’s uncertainty over how faithful they should
be to the original text, their attempts to mesh together a variety of
approaches ultimately producing a final product that will likely satisfy no
one.
Despite the fact that few of these projects have been successful from
either a financial or artistic perspective, Exodus
et al. appear to represent only the beginning of this trend. Coming up, you can
look forward not one, but *two* live-action Jungle Book movies, a Cinderella
“retelling”, two Robin
Hood “reboots”, a non-Disney The
Little Mermaid, a live-action Tarzan, Joe
Wright’s already controversial Pan
and Guy Ritchie’s potential
King Arthur franchise – and that’s mostly just counting ones currently best
known as animated Disney movies. Ridley Scott might even return to the Bible
for a King
David-related flick. Of course, one or all of these movies could turn out
to be good, even great (Sofia Coppola directing Mermaid sounds intriguing), but looking at the descriptions, the
one available trailer
and the sheer quantity of them, I’m not getting my hopes up. Given that world
history is rich with thousands of different myths and folkloric tales, these
selections are hopelessly Euro-centric, and Hollywood seems weirdly fixated on the
most unavoidably racist stories possible (see: Jungle Book, Tarzan,
apparently Peter Pan). I, for one, would
much rather see a new take on Aladdin
or one of the other tales in One Thousand
and One Nights than yet another
version of Beauty and the Beast.
Still, for most part, my disdain for this trend of fairy tale/mythology
adaptations stems less from the source material than from the total lack of
imagination in the filmmakers’ and studios’ approach. Instead of embracing the
magical or spiritual nature of these stories, they seem intent on scrubbing
away any offbeat, distinguishing features, leaving us with a tedious assembly
line of what I’ve started to call Three G (generic, grim and gritty) movies.
This revisionist trend first became apparent to me back in 2012 when we
got two Snow White adaptations – the oddly juvenile Mirror Mirror and the Three G Snow
White and the Huntsman – within three months of each other. Though this
very well could have been just a random coincidence (after all, 2006’s The Illusionist and The Prestige hardly signaled a growing obsession with magician
films), it came not long after Universal and Ridley Scott (him again?)
attempted a Three G
revival of Robin Hood, Disney made a live-action Alice in Wonderland and Robert
Zemeckis sent Beowulf
through the Uncanny Valley armed with worse graphics than many modern video
games.
In a way, like many tendencies found in blockbusters nowadays, these
movies’ general preference for a vaguely “realistic” aesthetic over one that
produces genuine feelings of wonder can be blamed on what I consider the 21st
century’s best – and, therefore, most influential – franchises so far: The Lord of the Rings and Christopher
Nolan’s Batman trilogy. Now, those movies certainly inspire plenty of awe, but
for me at least, that sensation can be attributed more to their overall quality
and craftsmanship than to the actual worlds that they created. Characterized by
a love of muted colors, portentous dialogue and the use of familiar trappings
to ground fictional settings (medieval England for LOTR’s Middle Earth and a New York City/Chicago hybrid standing in
for Gotham in the Batman movies), both franchises pushed a generation of
fantasy and science-fiction films away from the more whimsical experimentalism
that characterized many earlier works and toward a sort of mournful gravitas.
None of this would necessarily be bad if it didn’t feel like every project was
being forced to follow the template for a spectacle-driven action epic,
regardless of how appropriate that tone is for each particular story.
So, you get a Snow White and the
Huntsman that didn’t reinvent either the Brothers Grimm or even the Disney
version so much as it grafted the most basic elements of the plot onto a
cookie-cutter Chosen-One-defeats-evil-ruler flick. It feels only superficially
different from, say, Ridley Scott’s Robin
Hood and Exodus, which in turn
both seem like rather sad attempts by Scott to recapture his long-lost Gladiator glory. Even the Greek gods got
brought down to earth in the 300-wannabe
Immortals, and the 2005 Troy erased their presence completely in
its retelling of the events of The Iliad.
All these stories could not be more diverse in terms of their origins, so it’s disheartening
that their contemporary counterparts are so homogenous and lifeless.
Here, then, is my advice to Hollywood: embrace the inexplicable. Whether
that means acknowledging the possible existence of a god (or gods) or incorporating
the mysticism of classic fairy tales and myths, refraining from the temptation
to rationalize the fantastical would make these stories feel not only more
faithful to their origins, but also more adventurous and unique. For example,
instead of making King Arthur reboots with essentially the same aim as the last one, why
not look to Edmund Spenser’s delightfully surreal yet layered The Faerie Queen for inspiration? Or how
about a big-screen adaptation of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, which is still the most compelling modern
reinterpretation of the Arthurian legend that I’ve seen? Actually, what I would
love to see more than anything is a movie or TV show to do for King Arthur what
the short-lived series Kings
did for the Biblical King David.
Set in a seemingly contemporary but alternate universe, Michael Green’s Kings combined the grand narrative arcs
and dialogue of Shakespeare with political intrigue and moral introspection.
Most of all, it dealt with God very directly without ever coming off as
condescending or preachy, showing that pop culture is more than capable of
exploring issues of faith in nuanced, intelligent ways.
It’s no surprise that some of the best recent fairy tale-esque films have
been ones that use the genre’s tropes without adhering to a single existing
narrative. Pan’s Labyrinth emphasized
the gothic elements, recognizing that, if fairy tales are indeed the stuff of dreams,
then they must also be the stuff of nightmares, and Hayao Miyazaki’s films like
Spirited Away realized universes
filled with enchantment more effectively than Disney ever had. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
perfectly fit director Terry Gilliam’s madcap sensibilities, blending a dour
London with vibrant, absurdist fantasylands and offering one of the more
interesting personifications of the Devil that I’ve seen lately. Even more than
the fact that they weren’t positioned as the cornerstone for future franchises,
these movies work because they know that magic isn’t inherently silly or juvenile,
and getting rid of it doesn’t automatically make a work of art more mature or
worthy of serious attention. Few things peeve me more about criticisms of Lost’s ending than detractors’ smug
derisiveness toward the very idea of religion, organized or not, and anyone who
might find meaning in it, their insistence that logical, scientific
explanations are always more valuable and better storytelling than spiritual or
emotional ones. Magic isn’t a copout. In fact, it’s embedded in the very fabric
of storytelling, and it’s time Hollywood welcomed that instead of burying it beneath
interminable action set pieces and boring aspirations to “realism”.
Photo Links:
No comments:
Post a Comment