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malsperanzawispy grasses, with something for the classicist as well as the modern purist.
Last Thursday I kicked a chair. (Don't be upset: it was a veryverybad chair; it deserved to be kicked.) On Friday my toe gave notice that it was pretty sure it was broken, but I ignored my toe (I mean, fuck it: it's just a damn toe) and went to the theater, where Bill Irwin (wonderful, splendid Bill Irwin) ran through the audience during a scene and--yes--trod on my toe. My toe gave notice that it was planning to resign its post.
All this is by way of saying that I spent most of the weekend, dolce far niente, on a sofa, eating bonbons and reading books and watching DVDs, with my foot on a pillow, like Henry VIII with the gout, except for the DVDs.
I therefore have Thoughts.
I watched The Great Dictator, Brazil, Pirates of the Caribbean (about 30 times), Withnail and I, and Spirited Away.
I read most of vol. 1 of Churchill's biography of Marlborough and chunks of a book called Trickster Makes This World, by Lewis Hyde, which is a brilliant book, and about which more shortly.
Now, the thing is, all of these movies and books have something in common, and it is a veryverybig Something which, I think, has interesting connections with fanfic, with Potterworld, and with the issues of genre writing that often occupy this LJ community.
Before I get to the Great Big Cut Tag, I just want to stop and wibble a bit about the audio commentaries on DVDs. I am addicted to them. The directors' commentaries aren't all that great, but I <3333333 the screenwriters' commentary on PotC. Of course, part of the reason I love it is that I am proven right about everything I thought about this movie when I first saw it :D. Now I know what I suspected: that the screenwriters and Johnny Depp knew--and understood--the nature and purpose of that great universal character, the Trickster. Shakespeare would be veryveryproud.
The screenplay of PotC is a fine, well-crafted thing, which manages to fulfill all the requirements of romance and adventure convention without cliche, and then elevates the conventions to a higher level.
Well, the Trickster. The clown, the fool, the one who turns the world upside down. Chaplin does this in The Great Dictator by making the Jewish barber a twin of the evil dictator. Chaplin always walks a fine line between the archetype figure of the Trickster and that of the Fool, the Innocent, Candide. His Little Tramp is sweet and ingenuous, but not quite as naive as he seems; he is clever, quick, adaptive, cunning, and on occasion malicious and vindictive. These are traits of Harlequin (Arlecchino), who traces his roots to the little devil in Dante named Alichino. Chaplin's Tramp is both self-interested and selfless.
One of the many extraordinary things about The Great Dictator is what happens to the Little Tramp in the world as reshaped by Hitler. For Hitler is a madman who managed to convert the real world to the upside-down world of Tricksters. Hitler was a sort of Monster Trickster. The caricature Hynkel in the movie is, in a strange way, as charming, idiosyncratic, whimsical, and fey as the Little Tramp--or, indeed, Jack Sparrow. His ballet with the globe-balloon is a classic clown's set piece--hilarious and beautiful and absurd, but rendered appalling by its inner truth: in 1940, when the movie was made, Hitler was indeed playing with the world like a toy.
As Chaplin knows, the Trickster is not cute, is not safe, is not sweet. He is an immense, powerful character. He is a Lord of Misrule, a Master of Disorder. Lewis Hyde's book about him is worth quoting at length, though I haven't time tonight to transcribe quotes. Will post some bits later that show how closely the character of Jack Sparrow matches that of the classic Trickster.
In Withnail and I Withnail is a Trickster, a con artist, a scammer, clever and mad and disorganized, unfocused and lacking either a goal or the means to achieve any sort of place for himself in the world. It's what makes him a great actor, as he reveals to us in the final moment, when he gives us Hamlet's speech.
In the screenwriters' commentary on PotC, one of them remarks that "cinematic predecessors for Jack [Sparrow] are Bugs Bunny and Groucho Marx. Jack Sparrow is a classic trickster character. ... The way that character works is that he has to inhabit a reality, a world where [such a] character could exist. So Murtagh and Mulroy [the two clown soldiers] have to play a certain level of absurdism."
In Withnail and I, we see such a reality--a world that closely resembles ours, but is a little more absurd, in which everyone behaves a little bit off, everyone speaks in a slightly peculiar, poetic language that is not quite natural ("In my youth I used to weep in butcher shops." "I feel unusual." "We've gone on holiday by mistake." "There is a certain je ne sais quois about a firm young carrot." Strangle the chicken quickly, before it tries to make friends with us. How do we make it die?" "We are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell." "Hairs are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos." "If I spike you you'll know you've been spoken to." "Come on lads, let's get home, the sky's beginning to bruise, and night must fall." )
I have discovered that for a mere $1,000 I can have a Withnail tweed hunting coat made to order. As Jack Sparrow says, Not all treasure is silver and gold, mate.
Brazil--well, there's a movie one could say a lot about. The de Niro character, Tuttle, is the Trickster, and of course Gilliam is the real Trickster, and this is a world in which the Tricksters have taken over, and Misrule is the rule of the day. And they are not Tricksters of goodwill; they are Loki, Alichino, monstrous, aimless, disorganized. Alls I can say is: people should be throwing money at Terry Gilliam and begging him to make more movies. He is getting the same treatment Orson Welles got in his latter years: the man who made Citizen Kane couldn't get financing. Makes no sense.
A side note: How odd to see Jonathan Pryce as a young Everyman in Brazil, the Little Tramp caught in the terrible gears of the world, and then to see him in PotC as the figure who represents tedious, priggish, unimaginative, ordinary reality--all that Mad Jack is not.
Spirited Away ... well, another movie full of tricks and tricksters, in which Chihiro is without doubt the heir to Roadrunner, nemesis of Wile E. Coyote (the most inept of all Tricksters).
Ah, I see that this is veryverylong, and it is late and getting later, and it is dark and growing darker. So I will save til next time my many notes on Jack Flash, Jacksauce, Jack Frost, Jack Tar, Jack-be-nimble, Jack-in-the-pulpit, Jack Ketch, Jack of Hearts, steeplejack, Union Jack, jacknife, that jacks-playing jackbooted jackanapes, Jack-of-all-trades (master of none), jackdaw, jackrabbit, jack-in-the-box, lumberjack, highjacker, car jack, jackoff, jack-o-lantern, jacket-wearing jackhammer, jackstraw, jackpot... every man-jack don't know jackshit ...
...Jumping Jack Sparrow, that jackal, that jackass. That Giant Killer.
I also finished Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver,
...which is more than I can say for Quicksilver itself. I reallyreallylove Cryptonomicon, and I love Quicksilver too, but the book doesn't end; it just stops more or less in mid-thought. Well, it's true that The Fellowship of the Ring doesn't really stand alone as a novel, so I suppose I can accept that Quicksilver is just vol 1 of a bigger book, but still. Nevertheless: good book.
So my question is: Who is the Trickster in Harry Potter?
Last Thursday I kicked a chair. (Don't be upset: it was a veryverybad chair; it deserved to be kicked.) On Friday my toe gave notice that it was pretty sure it was broken, but I ignored my toe (I mean, fuck it: it's just a damn toe) and went to the theater, where Bill Irwin (wonderful, splendid Bill Irwin) ran through the audience during a scene and--yes--trod on my toe. My toe gave notice that it was planning to resign its post.
All this is by way of saying that I spent most of the weekend, dolce far niente, on a sofa, eating bonbons and reading books and watching DVDs, with my foot on a pillow, like Henry VIII with the gout, except for the DVDs.
I therefore have Thoughts.
I watched The Great Dictator, Brazil, Pirates of the Caribbean (about 30 times), Withnail and I, and Spirited Away.
I read most of vol. 1 of Churchill's biography of Marlborough and chunks of a book called Trickster Makes This World, by Lewis Hyde, which is a brilliant book, and about which more shortly.
Now, the thing is, all of these movies and books have something in common, and it is a veryverybig Something which, I think, has interesting connections with fanfic, with Potterworld, and with the issues of genre writing that often occupy this LJ community.
Before I get to the Great Big Cut Tag, I just want to stop and wibble a bit about the audio commentaries on DVDs. I am addicted to them. The directors' commentaries aren't all that great, but I <3333333 the screenwriters' commentary on PotC. Of course, part of the reason I love it is that I am proven right about everything I thought about this movie when I first saw it :D. Now I know what I suspected: that the screenwriters and Johnny Depp knew--and understood--the nature and purpose of that great universal character, the Trickster. Shakespeare would be veryveryproud.
The screenplay of PotC is a fine, well-crafted thing, which manages to fulfill all the requirements of romance and adventure convention without cliche, and then elevates the conventions to a higher level.
Well, the Trickster. The clown, the fool, the one who turns the world upside down. Chaplin does this in The Great Dictator by making the Jewish barber a twin of the evil dictator. Chaplin always walks a fine line between the archetype figure of the Trickster and that of the Fool, the Innocent, Candide. His Little Tramp is sweet and ingenuous, but not quite as naive as he seems; he is clever, quick, adaptive, cunning, and on occasion malicious and vindictive. These are traits of Harlequin (Arlecchino), who traces his roots to the little devil in Dante named Alichino. Chaplin's Tramp is both self-interested and selfless.
One of the many extraordinary things about The Great Dictator is what happens to the Little Tramp in the world as reshaped by Hitler. For Hitler is a madman who managed to convert the real world to the upside-down world of Tricksters. Hitler was a sort of Monster Trickster. The caricature Hynkel in the movie is, in a strange way, as charming, idiosyncratic, whimsical, and fey as the Little Tramp--or, indeed, Jack Sparrow. His ballet with the globe-balloon is a classic clown's set piece--hilarious and beautiful and absurd, but rendered appalling by its inner truth: in 1940, when the movie was made, Hitler was indeed playing with the world like a toy.
As Chaplin knows, the Trickster is not cute, is not safe, is not sweet. He is an immense, powerful character. He is a Lord of Misrule, a Master of Disorder. Lewis Hyde's book about him is worth quoting at length, though I haven't time tonight to transcribe quotes. Will post some bits later that show how closely the character of Jack Sparrow matches that of the classic Trickster.
In Withnail and I Withnail is a Trickster, a con artist, a scammer, clever and mad and disorganized, unfocused and lacking either a goal or the means to achieve any sort of place for himself in the world. It's what makes him a great actor, as he reveals to us in the final moment, when he gives us Hamlet's speech.
In the screenwriters' commentary on PotC, one of them remarks that "cinematic predecessors for Jack [Sparrow] are Bugs Bunny and Groucho Marx. Jack Sparrow is a classic trickster character. ... The way that character works is that he has to inhabit a reality, a world where [such a] character could exist. So Murtagh and Mulroy [the two clown soldiers] have to play a certain level of absurdism."
In Withnail and I, we see such a reality--a world that closely resembles ours, but is a little more absurd, in which everyone behaves a little bit off, everyone speaks in a slightly peculiar, poetic language that is not quite natural ("In my youth I used to weep in butcher shops." "I feel unusual." "We've gone on holiday by mistake." "There is a certain je ne sais quois about a firm young carrot." Strangle the chicken quickly, before it tries to make friends with us. How do we make it die?" "We are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell." "Hairs are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos." "If I spike you you'll know you've been spoken to." "Come on lads, let's get home, the sky's beginning to bruise, and night must fall." )
I have discovered that for a mere $1,000 I can have a Withnail tweed hunting coat made to order. As Jack Sparrow says, Not all treasure is silver and gold, mate.
Brazil--well, there's a movie one could say a lot about. The de Niro character, Tuttle, is the Trickster, and of course Gilliam is the real Trickster, and this is a world in which the Tricksters have taken over, and Misrule is the rule of the day. And they are not Tricksters of goodwill; they are Loki, Alichino, monstrous, aimless, disorganized. Alls I can say is: people should be throwing money at Terry Gilliam and begging him to make more movies. He is getting the same treatment Orson Welles got in his latter years: the man who made Citizen Kane couldn't get financing. Makes no sense.
A side note: How odd to see Jonathan Pryce as a young Everyman in Brazil, the Little Tramp caught in the terrible gears of the world, and then to see him in PotC as the figure who represents tedious, priggish, unimaginative, ordinary reality--all that Mad Jack is not.
Spirited Away ... well, another movie full of tricks and tricksters, in which Chihiro is without doubt the heir to Roadrunner, nemesis of Wile E. Coyote (the most inept of all Tricksters).
Ah, I see that this is veryverylong, and it is late and getting later, and it is dark and growing darker. So I will save til next time my many notes on Jack Flash, Jacksauce, Jack Frost, Jack Tar, Jack-be-nimble, Jack-in-the-pulpit, Jack Ketch, Jack of Hearts, steeplejack, Union Jack, jacknife, that jacks-playing jackbooted jackanapes, Jack-of-all-trades (master of none), jackdaw, jackrabbit, jack-in-the-box, lumberjack, highjacker, car jack, jackoff, jack-o-lantern, jacket-wearing jackhammer, jackstraw, jackpot... every man-jack don't know jackshit ...
...Jumping Jack Sparrow, that jackal, that jackass. That Giant Killer.
I also finished Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver,
...which is more than I can say for Quicksilver itself. I reallyreallylove Cryptonomicon, and I love Quicksilver too, but the book doesn't end; it just stops more or less in mid-thought. Well, it's true that The Fellowship of the Ring doesn't really stand alone as a novel, so I suppose I can accept that Quicksilver is just vol 1 of a bigger book, but still. Nevertheless: good book.
So my question is: Who is the Trickster in Harry Potter?
