First Contact: Labyrinth

A puppet-filled, dream fantasy journey

Despite its enduring popularity, I had never seen the classic 1986 film Labyrinth until this week. I should have identified with a bookish, dreamy, fantasy-obsessed, teen girl protagonist. I have enjoyed, or at least consumed, many similar fantasy films from that time period. But the truth is, missing Labyrinth was not an accident. I deliberately skipped the film over the years because something about the vibe seemed a bit too juvenile. This is likely because of the large volume of bouncy, grotesque puppets in the trailers for the film. Now, before you send letters, please know that I live in Atlanta, home to the Center for Puppetry Arts. I loved The Neverending Story, The Princess Bride, and, of course, Star Wars: A New Hope—all of which had varying degrees of puppet-based fantasy. I was raised watching Sesame Street, which I loved, and watching The Muppet Show, which I tolerated just fine. But the film that broke me was The Dark Crystal, which, I admit, I did not enjoy. For me, The Dark Crystal amounted to too many creepy-style puppets and not enough plot. So I always feared Labyrinth would be too close to that vibe despite the plucky YA heroine and the presence of superstar David Bowie in a leading role.

I watched Labyrinth on a nighttime flight from LAX to Atlanta. The sleepy, small screen environment with dim lighting and the hum of cold air was a perfect setting for the dreamy, psychological journey of a self-absorbed teen feeling disquieted and generally irritated with the discomforts of her life. The film does a great job of efficiently delivering a lot of backstory for the protagonist Sarah in a few seconds, then it dives right into the plot. The story goes as follows: [minimum spoilers] Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) is a bored suburban teen, living with her dad, his new-ish wife, and Sarah’s toddler half-brother, Toby. It’s initially unclear whether Sarah’s mother is divorced/absent or deceased, but by the ending scene, it seems to be the latter. Sarah enjoys acting out a scene from a fairy tale about a princess who confronts a goblin king who has stolen a child. She is a sixteen-year-old cosplaying before cosplaying was cool. Her make-believe moment is interrupted when she remembers she is scheduled to babysit her baby brother while her parents go out on a date. Stuck with the crying toddler, she holds the child to comfort him, then, in frustration, verbally wishes him to be taken away by the goblin king from her storybook. The child disappears, and a frantic Sarah is told by the goblin king, Jareth (David Bowie), that the child is now his. To get Toby back, she has to navigate a massive labyrinth to reach the goblin king’s castle and rescue her brother. In the labyrinth she encounters various creatures who are variably grotesque or adorable, kind or dangerous, annoying or wise, and who are mostly in the form of puppet creatures. In particular, she meets grumpy goblin frenemy Hoggle, idealistic dog-like Didymus, and loveable fuzzy giant Ludo. On her journey, she learns the value of friendship (of course), the dangers of assumptions, and a new understanding that life isn’t fair as she is forced to stop whining and grow up.

First impressions: Jennifer Connelly is intensely, perfectly, young and dreamlike in the role of Sarah. She looks like a 1980s Snow White, and her dialogue and voice inflection are artificially fairy tale-like. It’s almost borderline annoying. But Sarah is actually the archetype of the unhappy teen searching for something more. In contrast to her sweet appearance, she hates her brother enough to wish him dead, straight out of the gate. The initial scene of her holding her crying brother was stressful for me to watch. There is no child abuse, but the intensity of her anger hovers over the moment in a way that worried me. Ironically, she is bitterly angry because she has to babysit for one night, although she concedes that she literally had nothing else to do. She’s not missing prom, her senior art show, or even a date with friends. Sarah is angry because babysitting Toby has interrupted her fantasy playacting. It’s clear that there are larger issues of grief and discomfort, as well as impatience with the mundaneness of ordinary life compared with the allure of fairy tales.

As she journeys through the labyrinth, Sarah periodically meets Jareth, who repeatedly encourages her to forget the search for the child and just enjoy her fantasy life. Sarah shows her growing maturity by refusing to give up. Sarah also encounters lots of the aforementioned goblins and other fantastical creatures who both help and hinder her in her classic journey story. The story overtly references The Wizard of Oz and Where the Wild Things Are (Sarah has copies of the books in her bedroom), but it also contains clear references to Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland.

As a classic journey story, I felt I knew where the plot was heading, and I was mostly right. However, there were a few story elements which surprised me. Sarah’s frenemy Hoggle sprays poison to individually kill fairies (sentient, humanoid). Sarah initially finds this horrifying, but then rolls with the fairy killing after one of them bites her finger. She ignores the rest of his poisoning and enlists Hoggle’s help to find the entrance to the labyrinth. Sarah’s pivot from sentimental to pragmatic was a little startling. Labyrinth is a dreamscape, so I guess philosophical concepts of life and death are primarily symbolic. Secondly, David Bowie is perfectly cast as the goblin king Jareth. He is naturally quirky, chaotically elegant, but creepily enamored with Sarah. Additionally, there is a dreamlike scene of a masked ball with elegantly dressed humans dancing together, including Sarah and Jareth. Despite my fears about creepy puppet creatures, the attractive humans at the masked ball felt even more creepy and disturbing. That emotional irony was an artistic high point for me in the film. Another visual highlight was the room of dimension-defying steps where Jareth, Sarah, and Toby all navigate multi-directional, freeform stairs in an Escher-inspired, Inception-style scene.

In Labyrinth, Sarah is repeatedly accused of taking things for granted. I initially assumed this meant she did not appreciate the things she had (her comfortable lifestyle and relative freedom). But she is actually being reminded of the dangers of making assumptions about people and about life. During setbacks, she repeatedly complains “that’s not fair,” and eventually Jareth sarcastically tells her, “You say that so often. I wonder what your basis of comparison is.” It’s a great line. He is effectively telling her to grow up and face reality, a still timely lesson about the unfairness of life even while acknowledging the validity of the search for justice. In the same way, in a final scene, Sarah’s labyrinth friends remind her that they will still be there when she needs an escape. Labyrinth confirms the importance of living in the real world while also acknowledging the value of play, fantasy, and imagination. Hopefully, that is a life lesson that we can all agree on.

Highlights:

• Classic journey coming of age film
• So many puppets
• Timeless dreamscape

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Poetry

Through the darkness of future past
The magician longs to see
One chants out between two worlds:
Fire walk with me

It has been a little over a week since Twin Peaks ended. Ended? I'm almost halfway through re-watching the new series by now, and while certain things do make more sense after having seen where this is all going, it remains clear that all things will not be made clear.

I've been thinking a lot about what to make of, or, honestly, how to even think about what I saw over the 18 episodes of this resurrected series. It gave me my favorite hour of television ever — the bleak, inscrutable, horrifying, surreal episode eight, "Gotta light?" — and delivered more good episodes of Twin Peaks than the entire run of the original series. It opened up the world in a way that allowed us to ask a million more questions about what's "really" going on, what's behind the veil in the Twin Peaks Universe, and over the 18 episodes, answered about 35 of those questions. There are bad jokes, goofy happenings and characters, seemingly pointless scenes that go on for a long, long time, and scenes of miserable violence and suffering. WHAT'S IT ALL MEAN?? That's what it seems like everybody wants to know. And I kind of want to know, too.

But does it have to mean something? Really?

For me, now, the question "What the hell did I just watch?" has changed, and given way to "What the hell did I just feel?" And I think that's maybe the place I was supposed to get to.

It occurred to me that Twin Peaks at least this incarnation (much less-so the original series) is poetry. Many, many years ago I made peace with poetry by no longer requiring of myself as a reader that I "understand" it. It became far, far more important to me that I feel it. And that was enough.

This is the water, this is the well.
Drink full and descend.
The horse is the white of the eyes and dark within.

I love e.e. cummings with a burning passion. It's fine if you don't. The first time I read "anyone lived in a pretty how town," as a child...maybe a teenager but maybe not...it brought tears to my eyes. Actual, oh-God-don't-let-anybody-see tears. In high school, when I saw that we were going to study that poem in English class, I was thrilled. And then we "broke it down" and "analyzed" it, and it robbed the poem of its magic. I mean, in that moment. Nothing can rob it of its magic, but it was a grind. Ok, yes, "Anyone" and "Noone" stand in for people's names, sure. And why is it a "how town"? Because people are busy, I guess? I mean, look. Sure. You can pick it apart, you can ask why "floating" comes before "many," you can unpack how many times the same dream metaphor is used for death. You may hit the egg with a hammer to see what's inside, but you won't have an egg anymore.

Sometimes it is enough to intuit, and to feel, and to put the analytical away. Why, in your dream, might you be terrified of a jug of milk on a counter? No reason, except you know you should be terrified of it. It doesn't matter if they really met last year at Marienbad. It is enough to wonder.

So that's where I'm at with Twin Peaks, and thank you, thank you to the executives at Showtime who gave us this artwork. I don't know that they got what they needed out of the business part of this show, but I feel like we have been given a gift. I don't love everything about it, but the fact that it exists in the world gives me joy, and ties me up in knots, and makes me ask questions I so, so rarely get to ask while watching TV.

Why is Monica Bellucci a dream detective? Because that scene is magic. Why is Phillip Jeffries a tea kettle? Because David Bowie died and his character had to be something. What happened to Becky? Or Audrey? Or, hell, Laura Palmer? Savage men do terrible things, and these cycles should stop, but often don't. If there was a message to these 18 episodes, I think it was that. But Dale Cooper is always, I think, the best of us. That part of us that wants to always fight against these corrosive, destructive cycles, even if we do not win. Even if we cannot, ultimately, win.

And that, for me, is enough. Even if I'm wrong.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012, Emmy-winning producer, and singer of loud folk songs.

Microreview [book]: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

A disheartening look at humanity, and the perfect Cold War zeitgeist book

Published in 1960, A Canticle for Leibowitz is one of the books credited with forcing the mainstream press to begin taking speculative fiction seriously. Upon publication, even if it wasn't reviewed terribly positively, it was at least reviewed in some heavyweight publications that normally wouldn't touch sci-fi with a ten-meter cattle prod. In the five-plus decades since, it has continued to make appearances on prominent lists of the Greatest Sci-Fi Books ever.

To cut to the chase, reading it with fresh eyes today, it's not the pinnacle of the genre. It is, however, an engaging cornerstone of Cold War science fiction.

Over the last year, and for no particular reason apart from random chance, my reading list has included On the Beach by Nevil Shute and The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis. I realized in reading A Canticle for Leibowitz, however, that these three books together give a profound, eerie, and usually moving picture of the Cold War-era zeitgeist. Tevis' book is about an alien that comes to Earth in an effort to save his own people, but falls victim to crushing alcoholism due in part to his realization that the planet cannot help but do itself in with its rapidly proliferating nuclear weapons. On the Beach is a haunting, unshakable portrait of the post-war world, where the few Australian survivors of the nuclear wars wait for the fallout clouds to come far enough South to poison and eventually kill them all.

Walter Miller's book begins several hundred years after the wars. Or, "The Flame Deluge," as the book's inhabitants refer to it. After the wars, there were few unaffected humans left, but those that remained rebelled against all knowledge, as too much knowledge had caused their destruction. The cities were all flattened, the books burned, literacy made verboten, and the outlands became dotted with tribes of murderous mutants. Seemingly the only thing that survived the transition from industrialized, nuclear-capable society to the new dark ages was the Catholic church. A Canticle for Leibowitz, like a medieval painting, presents a triptych of tales that cover some 1800 years of future history.

The first story concerns a young novice who stumbles across a fallout shelter that likely belonged to "the blessed Leibowitz." The cosmic joke here is that Leibowitz was probably a low-level electrical technician in Bell Labs or General Electric who probably worked on government contracts (and happened to be Jewish, to boot), but after 600 years he is on the doorstep of beatification. The second story takes place in essentially the second Middle Ages, when mankind has only just rediscovered science, and the monks of the Order of Leibowitz, who have been keeping the sacred documents (basic science texts and blueprints) for 1200 years, unwittingly hold the keys to scientific knowledge that predates The Flame Deluge. The final story, set some 1800 years after the nuclear decimation of the Earth, presents a futuristic setting that finds mankind capable of space travel, but on the verge of another nuclear conflict. History repeating, no less.

As grim as it may be to think that we'd annihilate the entire human race out of hubris and then do it again (...and again...and again...and again...), Miller's reminder is a prescient one. When the United States is currently locked into a presidential race that is echoing the worst rhetoric of the last 100 years of institutionalized mistakes, it is a chilling, and motivating, reminder about where we were as a nation just a half century ago. This is the best of what science fiction does. Through the lens of a fantastic world, it shines a light on our own. Walter Miller's book did that in 1960, and it continues to do it today.

Some of the prose, and some of the insights, are truly eloquent. That said, the book comes across as pretty solidly dated. There are, by my count, three women in the book. One of the things that the efforts of so many writers over the last few generations have shown us is that if we limit our storytelling to one group of people, or one gender, we're necessarily missing part of the story. So when I read the book today, I felt like there were a lot of good ideas that went into the world-building, and that the book presented a lot of philosophically and historically interesting notions, but I keenly felt aware that I was only getting part of the story. As much as I admired the noble intentions of the Brothers of Leibowitz, I found myself wondering often about the sisters outside of the abbey walls, and how they were navigating this post-apocalyptic future. And why did we return to a solid patriarchy? If we burned the books and plans and literacy that nearly wiped us out the first time, why did we not burn the patriarchy? The answer is probably because Walter Miller took it for granted. That's not intended as a knock on him, given the time he was writing and all that, but as a reader I was keenly aware of the fact that I was looking at "history" through the eyes of a bunch of white guys, and that there was a lot more going on in this world that I simply wasn't hearing about because those people's experiences were just out of frame.

On the whole, the book was keenly observed, and a solid, early example of thoughtful world-building, but not as emotionally resonant as the other two books I now consider the Cold War Zeitgeist Trilogy, and by virtue of the things it left out, it simply couldn't be, today, as pointed an examination of the human condition as it seemed evident it was intended to be.

The Math

Bonuses: +1 for managing the hand-off between three different tales in an emotionally continuous way; +1 for being such a precise barometer of the Cold War zeitgeist

Penalties: -1 for feeling dated in the very essence in the story it was telling

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10. It's still pretty good, but don't necessarily defer to every Best Sci-Fi poll you read online.

Posted by Vance K -- cult film reviewer, Cold War aficionado, occasional book reviewer, and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together, since 2012.

Reference: Miller, Walter M. A Canticle for Leibowitz [EOS, 1996 (Reprint)].

Retrospective: David Bowie and the triumph of the alternative

Either too much or too little has been written about the musician, actor and visionary who died just over ten days ago. Depending on your opinion of course, the end to David Bowie's life has brought a range of reactions from 'oh no' to 'oh well', and nowhere has the 'oh no' reaction been louder than in the competing, untrustworthy bleatings of writers out in the press and online. This flood of response has been, in the UK, at least, possibly too much, resulting in my mind at least an odd diminishing of Bowie himself in the spotlight which feels so focused on the commentators themselves and how they feel. Granted, an unexpected event that touches so many takes a while to process, and there can be no denying the enormous popularity and influence of his work, and that should be fully acknowledged. Yet as these words being written now dare to join the carnival of grief, nostalgia and remembrance, my first thought isn't 'Everyone! I have something important to add!' but 'Should I even bother?'. We have all read and heard the hundreds of tributes - some beautiful, some educational... and some bandwagoning (fuck you, David Cameron). It would be a bit like spitting in the rain to just say 'We loved him too; can we join in the sadness festival?'. I also want to distance the man's work and his varied message from the celebrity, the Fame, the clamour of the gutter press. Yet, whilst not wishing to add to the chorus unnecessarily, we at Nerds of A Feather, Flock Together do want to show our huge appreciation for his work and mourn his passing. And, despite my cynical phrasing above, I as sole Brit on this blog am very proud and not a little nervous to take on the task. Please, please comment below critically because I don't think I've succeeded and your nuggets of Bowie connection will say far more than any generalised view can. But here I go nonetheless ...

As I was growing up, his smile, suit and dancing (and hair) make me think he was hosting a party I was too young to go to, and his music was too minor key to quite delight. Let's Dance and its other-worldly video was released while I lived off the road in Bromley where he spent most of his youth (the "jumping off point" of suburbia) and so I was particularly interested in him. Yet for every moment of instinctive joy in the "and if you say run" of that song there was the alienating wail of "put on your red shoes" and my brother and I felt our immature ears squirm. So, born in '76, I was slow to appreciate him, but once I did I realised his lyrics, his melodies, his rebellion and most of all his constant refusal to pander to the mainstream, the banal, had already become a part of me and how I saw the world. That process of falling in love with something (as opposed to someone) can be more gradual, and that often makes it more powerful. So, to share awkwardly my own 11th of January moment, I was driving to work with "Black Star" having been stuck in my head for three days straight, and so I put on the radio to change my ear-worm, at 7:08, the exact moment that BBC 6Music announced his death. The rest of my drive was dominated by shock and gentle tears as, turning from station to station (pun intended), his music seemed to float up from the speakers to the sky ( I also listened to traffic news and stopped for a coffee and Twix; let's not get too melodramatic, now).

One joyful aspect from the loss of someone who produced such a huge body of work is the opportunity and inspiration to revisit that work, or discover new sides to it. I had never got around to listening to the Heroes album properly, for instance, and hadn't given his early 90s albums much of a chance. My days since have been almost entirely full of his music and I've watched Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and The Man Who Fell To Earth with fresh feeling, albeit one born from death.
One very sad aspect, meanwhile - and perhaps the key one - is of course that he was still producing, still writing, still singing and playing so well. Blackstar will now forever be seen through the biased prism of what happened two days after its release, but it is on any basis a complex and challenging experience, and in my opinion a clear proof of how we are robbed of more great work (unlike, say, Michael Jackson, arguably). I think it's 70% incredible and the rest is pretty damn good from someone in their late sixties who has been experimenting and innovating since the late sixties.

However, we scribblers on both sides of the Atlantic here want to celebrate him in particular for what he brought to the table in our corner of the universe. The left-field nature, the starry gazes and the individuality of the writers, filmmakers and artists often on the fringes, whom we all celebrate , and the genres we cover; all these in some fairly direct way link to what Bowie was preaching on alienation, transformation, discovery, fantasy and exploration of human life.

It would be all too easy to draw a lazy line in haste between some of the sci-fi space worlds we look at on the blog and his Life on Mars, Starman and Space Oddity. However there is no denying his appropriation of sci-fi and the era within which those pieces were composed. The Cold War loomed large, the 50s sci-fi of wonder and confidence, then horror and fear, mutating through the changes of the 60's and the rise of the counterculture and such writers as Ballard and Aldiss appearing in New Worlds and elsewhere, towards the 70s sci-fi films of, well, more fear, and the space programme was at its height. Indeed, Oddity was inspired by young Davie Jones's trip to see 2001 and was used by the BBC in its coverage of the first moon landing. The avowed bookworm and sci-fi fan who read Starman Jones as a child was throughout his life immersed in the writers we love at NOAF - always intrigued by the future as a way to escape our past and present, and always disturbed by how wrong the future could become. I do wish his 1984 musical had come to full fruition, for random example. What a lovely head-fuck that would have been. Lazarus, though, his parting stage gift, seems from what has been said, a worthy addition to his continued love affair with science fiction.

Despite some cocaine-led confusion and mania diluting his focus, Bowie was also perfectly positioned to warp the fading days of hippie fantasy and transcendental thought into the harsher political climate of the seventies and its subsequent darker look at humanity. 'Ziggy' and co were the ideal conduits for the confusion, paranoia and alienation of the time, as well as the hedonistic escapism which reached its zenith in some ways that decade. In addition, as his own escape to Berlin led to less character-based and more realistic, earthly lyricism, he was by then a world-famous emblem of counter-culture and transformative identity that he was easily morphed into the film actor Bowie even as he retreated from the spotlight in music. Often criticised as 'just playing himself' and credited as the very definition of pop starts failing as film stars, I and I think my colleagues here would firmly and passionately disagree. Watch his eyes and body in The Man..., watch the bubbling larva of emotion in that kiss in Merry Christmas... , look with clear, uncynical eyes at his dominance of the screen even when surrounded by Fraggle Rock  on acid in Labyrinth and his assured presence and frank sexuality in The Hunger and countless others. This was a fine (cracked) actor in full control of his performances.

He pushed (along with, let's be fair, countless other creative souls of the half-century he worked within) the doors open for musical, social, sexual, gender and racial revolutions (albeit with some missteps in the last three and he was no alien to some disgusting sexual and narcotic-inspired behaviour, as several articles have more than illuminated recently); revolutions that continue to allow many of the writers we celebrate to do what we cherish here on this site. He also raised a son - and read him Dick and Wyndam - who is already a great sci-fi director, and championed and in some cases produced many musicians whose own work have soundtracked many great genre works, particularly in the 1990s (Massive Attack and Trent Reznor spring to mind), when again he pre-dated the pre-millennial dread of others and enjoyed the slight return to cyberpunk with Outside . He was also the Devil for Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic; this alone would merit a tribute on this site! It will be a long while before another creative force can give such a lengthy and successful yet combative, and eccentric, creative sourcing to so many, and yet the very memorialising we do today will ensure new generations will be turned on and turned inside out by him, and this will feed back into literature, music and film over and over. Long live the cheeky boy from Brixton...

In my local park this week