An Intellectual Snob's Guide to Appreciating Crappy Films.

Every now and then you'll be caught in a conversation where you'll be forced to admit you adore a film that is regarded as objectively poor.

Or you may find yourself listening to a self-styled gatekeeper as they give you vague reasons as to why a crap film is not quite so crap as you've been led to believe. You may wonder about what the hell they are blathering.

In both these situations, there is an accepted code:



 

They Say...	They mean...
“It's fun.”	Explosions. Eye candy. Don't judge me.
“Schlock”	If you didn't like it, you were paying too much attention to the plot.
“Anyway, it's a different beast entirely from the source materiel”	Don't judge me.
“It's true to the spirit of...”	You're judging me, I can tell.
“It's done with total commitment...”	You DO NOT get to judge me.
“I love it unironically”	I have chosen this hill, and I will die on it.
The aesthetic is... ...convincing ... handled well ... is astonishingly realised.	I own the soundtrack, but am too embarrassed to tell you. No, but there some serious eye candy, tho. Actually, I'll come clean. I have a sexual fantasy that looks like this film.
“I know it's (insert derogatory term) but it has it's moments.	Some of the actors are kind of hot.
“Yes, I have a special place in my heart for X.”	You mean X?
“I really liked X's performance”	Yes. I mean X.
“X is better than the vehicle, certainly.”	Damn.
“X's performance felt very true to the book.”	Because I fancy the character, too, right?
“Yes. I mean you compare it to Y's interpretation of the role – and I just feel X captured something that Y didn't.”	Yeah, totally. And while Y is the more respected actor, I just don't fancy them.
“Very much so. Y's portrayal lacked the energy of X's”	It's a no brainer, really.
“X's performance is very much the high point of the film.”	That arse.
“And, also, PAUL MCGANN.”	And we're totally just talking about his fine acting, right?

That fine, fine acting.

Many thanks to Anna V Strauss for the insight. Feel free to leave any more suggestions in the comments.

What's really going on in Labyrinth: Conclusion

I do but beg a little changeling boy to be my henchman

What's it to be then? Is Jareth actually Sarah's shadow, or her sexual fantasy? 

Right from the start, he is far more ambiguous than the parameters of an ordinary narrative would allow. He, the story and the characters all insist that he is motivated by love for Sarah. And if love is characterised by wildly disordered behaviour, boy, is it believable. He throws tantrums, displays bombast, changes his clothes more times than a sane man would think plausible, and yet... yet he is constantly sending her away. "Turn back," he tells her, "turn back before it's too late"

“Go back to your room,” he says, “and play with your toys. I have a gift for you.”

But what is he telling her when he turns her away? Especially as this gift (and, one assumes, by extension, his love) is, “not for an ordinary girl who looks after a screaming baby.”

Doesn't that translate as, "go and be a child, but be beholden to me"? "Get out of this mystical landscape but don't be ordinary."?

Besides, how is looking after a screaming baby a 'normal' thing for a fifteen year old to do? A modern, middle class, American, fifteen year old? Oh, and hey, that's twice Sarah has been thrown up against 'normal' behaviour for someone her age, twice it has been thrown away. She'd rather dress as a princess than have dates, rather go against a dashing supernatural tyrant than meekly accept his love.

Jareth continues in this erratic vein for the whole film, his malevolent laughter is continually underscored by melancholy, by the certainty that “she should have given up and gone home”. He pushes her, again and again, threatens, bribes, cheats, but never actually causes her harm. He is not a shadow, but he is willing to play her shadow; as he says at the end, “You trembled before me. I was terrifying...”

Is the labyrinth itself is Jareth's creation? Or Sarah's?

This would be easy were he simply a rogue figment: it would be her creation through him. But if he is a figment, then he is not the exact figment she believes him to be: why else would she view him with such incomprehension? And if he is wholly independent as an entity, if the labyrinth is his, as much as her own, we must accept that, to some extent, it is under his control. So, at the risk of sounding paranoid: why, in a landscape which the villain maintains, does Sarah meets the exact helpers she needs to complete her quest? More than that –why are those helpers deliberately sent by Jareth to perform certain role – freeing Sarah from the oubliette, blocking the exit to the bog of eternal stench? After all, it is their obedience to his instructions that permit her to show her mettle, allow her to triumph.

Interestingly, the very mettle that these companions cause her to show in herself - a willingness to be both flexible and ruthless (Hoggle), to display her bravery and kindness (Ludo), her logic and honour (Sir Didymus) - all these are characteristics that Jareth displays and appears to value. He himself adapts, changing his approach, his plan. He defends his realm with tricks and puzzles. He calls her out on her boast, “upping the stakes” to achieve his ends. Despite this, he does not go back on his word, neither will he allow her to rescind hers, “What's said is said.” Finally, defeated, he reasons with her, “I ask so little...”¹

But “kind?” I hear you ask, with Sarah, “what has he done that is kind?”

Convenient how this wall gives way so very close to certain death

Isn't it curious that, in a landscape whose laws operate entirely at the behest of the villain, Sarah is never in any actual danger? Ludo vanishes down a pit, only to appear where she will be in four minutes time. She falls into the oubliette – Hoggle rescues her. The Cleaners have them trapped – a wall gives way. They are plunging into the bog of stench and not one, but two handholds appear to stop their descent. 

I'm curtailing this particular line of reasoning before this post turns into one of those calmly delusional conspiracy websites, and limit myself to saying: if we consider that Jareth claims to love Sarah, it is reasonable to suggest he prevents her getting hurt.

So, here's the payload, chaps. 

Here's what's really going in in Labyrinth.

A supernatural entity falls in love with a lonely, somewhat dreamy, girl. (Even if we cut all the stuff about abandonment and misplaced affection for her absent mother's new partner, Sarah alphabetises her toys and spends her Saturday afternoons pretending to a be a Princess in a park. She unlikely to have vast numbers of friends.) This entity sees her frustrated by the role of surrogate motherhood that has been laid upon her. While her father and step-mother relieve their youth by having date nights nearly every Saturday, this assumption of adult responsibilities actually stops Sarah 'growing up', by limiting the roles and experiences she can attempt,  Freed from Toby, Jareth assumes, she could develop, become the adult she promises to be, dreamy, intelligent and - dare I say it – grateful. Freed from Toby, she is free to love him, in time.

This, however, is no ordinary girl.

It is not Jareth's love which makes Sarah special; that quality, of bravery, of imagination, of power, comes from her herself. We can only assume that it is the sheer strength and complexity of her imagination which has summoned him to her in the first place. So, when she refuses the gift of a child-free evenings with his crystal to entertain her, this is a decision Jareth respects.

To take the baby would be throw her back into childhood, and he does not want her to remain a child. He loves her, remember? He wants her to be an adult woman, capable of loving him in return. So, he gives her a different gift – not a harmless day-dream, but the very adventure quest of which she has fantasised, a spirit journey that will guide her out of childhood and into the difficult waters of adolescence. Into, one assumes, his arms.

To complete the quest, all she must do is remember the baby. But... but... if she remembers the baby, she'll take him home, good-hearted young woman that she is, and be that surrogate mother again. If she succeeds in this dream-quest, he will be the villain in her story. If she succeeds that very strength he admires will defeat him and his interest in the matter. So he tells her, “Turn back, Sarah. Turn back before it is too late.”

But each attempt to discourage her is overcome, each danger only shows more of that strength which he loved in the first place. As the quest progresses, Jareth's feelings for her deepen and her rejection of him becomes more assured. 

Come on, he makes a fantastic villain.

Alright, alright. My own idiot crush tends to misguide me on this². Yes, Jareth is flawed. Yes, he hugely morally ambiguous. Yes, he follows a morality that can never be considered human (baby troubling you? Want me to turn it into a goblin for you?) But that isn't all of it. He wants so badly to be loved, needs, desperately to be everything Sarah desires, that he has played his role too well. He makes such a good villain.

So, what does he do? Pushed into extremis, once again, he ups his game. "Wait, I have a better idea." You can handle childhood challenges so well, Sarah. How do you respond to adulthood? So she falls into a dream, a sexual, fevered, dream full of inexplicable grown-ups and infinitely desirable men, full of a sense of loss, of confusion; the dream we mere mortals call puberty.³

But as an adult, Sarah is lost. Still, rather than succumbing, rather than being the victim of this seduction she has enough savvy, enough guts to draw her own line under this, to say quite clearly, “I am not comfortable.” No victim, Sarah, she closes the uncomfortable conversation, ends the relationship.

Once more, she is stronger, better, more loveable, than Jareth believed.

So, now we come to the final confrontation. Sarah has emerged, not quite an adult, no longer quite a child. She is strong enough, now, to face this alone. Her responsibility, her grounding in reality, protect her from imagination's charms. She has to save Toby, no matter what temptation or distraction is laid in her way. She loves her dreams, but she will not be ruled by them. Into the unknown, into certain death, she leaps.

"I can't live within you"

Jareth must, simply must, win the love of this woman.

So what happens? The 'Goblin King' comes clean. The baby's safe, the 'war' is over, what is there to lose? He breaks the script, makes one attempt to reason, one last attempt to show her adulthood, to offer what he always wanted to give her, “her dreams”.

What happens next is open to debate.

Either, once again, Sarah is not ready. Jennifer Connelly plays this scene as if in a trance, as if not seeing, not hearing the words that are being said to her. Facing Jareth's heartfelt rhetoric, she quotes from a book, spouting words that do not connect, still playing the game, still following the childhood script, as though unaware the rules have changed. Jareth tries, fails, to interrupt, to break her concentration, but in the end, rote learning of the hero/villain narrative has proved too strong. She banishes him, and away he falls, leaving the gift he had promised her all along: dreams at her command. They burst on her fingers. As an owl, away he wings, to wait, or to seek another mate.

Or, perhaps more interestingly, Sarah knows exactly what is going on, knows exactly what is being offered, that, at last, she is no longer fighting the idea of the villain, but is fighting Jareth himself, this supernatural entity riding piggyback on her imagination.

After all, the text is, “Fear me, love me, do as I say, and I will be your slave.” To echo another supernatural word-battle about a boychild, his offer can be summed up with, “Am I not your Lord?”

"You have no power over me."

And, with all the dignity of a Titania, seeming to realise it for the first time, Sarah tells him where to get off: “Then I must be your Lady.”

As lovers, they are doomed. The very tests and trials that prove her as worthy, more than worthy, of his love are the things that show her too strong to be a handmaiden, too self-aware to take a secondary role. Whereas I, and all my friends, would probably have fallen swooning at this point, Sarah stays strong. What is offered her is a poisoned chalice. Why should she need that? Her will is as strong as his, her kingdom as great. She owes him nothing. The only powers he has over her are the ones that she allows him.

So, Jareth is banished, forced to watch from outside as the woman who is too strong for him reclaims what is rightfully her own. You can feel desperately sorry for him as he flies away, his choice vindicated, his love refused, without ever disbelieving that Sarah was right.

Chose the ending that gives you most pleasure. As for me? I veer between the two, depending on how feminist I'm feeling. Truly, in either case, a remarkable film.

Yeah, but what about the baby?

The Hero's Journey: What's really going on in the Labyrinth (part 2)

So, supernatural entities have been invoked and provoked, and our heroine is off on a dream quest to restore her baby brother to his rightful home.

And, speaking in generalities, Labyrinth is a dream quest in the fine old style. Inhabitants must be befriended, puzzles solved, fears overcome. What's more - as so many have pointed out - Sarah's journey takes place through an echo of her childhood room, through the country of her unconscious mind. The baby's cry becomes a call to her, and she journeys towards it and – the makers of the film would have us believe – responsibility.

But the implications of what is happening here are much more subtle, more interesting that that. We are not simply dealing with a dream landscape, we are dealing with the territory of childhood turned against its rightful ruler. A dark force is in Sarah's imagination, controlling it, manipulating her through it, and at every turn, Sarah forces it back, with courage, with kindness, with ingenuity.

This should really be a picture of the party at the end.

Still, so far, so Hero's Journey. It brings her right to the centre of the Labyrinth, where she faces her shadow and speaks those immortal words, “You have no power over me.” The malevolent force is banished, and she can return, as she does, to the real world. 

But to leave it there would be to forget the magical puppet party where the heroes and villains get together to throw confetti and be friendly. I'd always been bothered by that, felt it was a cop out. Felt that she somehow got both worlds, that she turned down magic, but still got to play with it. Then I thought about it properly, thought about what it means: she's safe getting down with the Fire Gang, Ludo can party with his ex-tormenters. What it means is that this isn't hostile country any more, that she isn't dealing with enemies. What that means is that Sarah's imagination is hers to control. That she is the queen of all this, like she always should have been. She's in charge now - not that rat who calls himself Jareth.

Come on, that's a brilliant prize. And she deserves it.

Still, if this were all it were, then the makers of the film would be right. A coming of age story, a powerful one, a beautiful one, but nothing particularly special. A girl grows up and overcomes the dark side of her imagination. Yes, she takes control, and by implication, learns to be less selfish, accepts her role as a surrogate mother. But I said this story was special, and two things make it so: the first is Bowie's performance as Jareth (more of that later), the second is a sequence that occurs just before the final confrontation.

Adults and adultery: Cleaning up Dumas onscreen.

Some time ago, I watched the recent film of The Three Musketeers. The one with the airships.

If that wasn't a big enough deviation from common sense, I then watched 1993 Disney version and promptly choked on my own boiling spleen. This blog article has been over a year in the writing, mostly because trying to work on it it causes me to start spewing blood before I collapse, shivering, in a corner in some literary form of post traumatic stress syndrome.

Oh, I wish I were joking.

It did not look like this.

Before anyone points out that a movie is not the same thing as a novel, I'll clarify; I wasn't expecting it to look exactly like the novel. Films and books are different art-forms, with different requirements. For example, in the novel, the fight between the Musketeers and the Cardinal's Guards is three against five. In these circumstances, D'Artagnan's offer of assistance brings a realistic chance of victory while still showing the Musketeers as superior fighters - four against five: more than plausible. In a film, though, that wouldn't look so hot, so I was fully expecting improbably large numbers of the Cardinal's guards and one heck of a sword fight. That's fair enough. In the same way, I'd hardly expect screen minutes to be wasted explaining the fact D'Artagnan had to serve out the equivalent of an apprenticeship in another regiment because the Musketeers isn't open to raw recruits. Alright, maybe it was going a bit far to disband them entirely, but we'll run with that, shall we? In movies, we do exposition differently.

And then the characters. Again, I knew there would be some drift. I get it, I honestly do. You want a sympathetic Athos, not an alcoholic psychopath. And, yeah, Richelieu needs to be a plain-dealing-villain, not an anti-hero politician trying to do what he thinks is best for France... Sure, we lose a lot of depth, but we also cut the need for a lot of exposition.

I can handle all that. Really. I can. It makes me itch, it makes me mutter, sometimes it elicits a scornful laugh or two, but it comes up every time I watch a film adaptation of a book I happen to love. It does not reduce me to putting my head into my hands and whimpering, “Make it stop, please, kill me. Kill me now.”

It does not make me get the fucking novel out and start shouting quotations at the television.

So what was the problem, then?

...or indeed an appropriate prize for Bible study.

And I will answer you, oh my dear hypothetical ideal and obliging reader, Sex is what bothered me. Well, sex and Milady.