Tag Archives: fictional characters

The Neverending Story: A Movie Review

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Several people had wonderful things to say in response to preceding birthday post, where I restated what has become the mission statement of this blog:  to look for the fantasy in all realities and the reality in all fantasy.  The comments were almost too kind – but not quite – and they prompted me to begin several posts on people and things that have shaped my thinking about imagination.  What jumps to mind first is movie released in 1984.

The Neverending Story, 1979, a fantasy novel by German author, Michael Ende, was translated into English in 1983.  A film was released the following year, which I saw in the early ’90’s, after one of my psych professors said, “It’s a story about our culture’s war on imagination.”

A lonely boy named Bastian loves to read.  One morning on the way to school, he ducks into a bookstore to escape pursuing bullies.  He asks the grumpy store owner about an intriguing book called, The Neverending Story.  “It isn’t safe,” the owner says.  At an opportune moment, Bastian “borrows” the book and carries it into the school attic to read.

The book relates how the kingdom of Fantasia is under attack by the Nothing, a dark void that consumes everything it touches.  The creatures of Fantasia appeal to their ruler, The Childlike Empress, but the Nothing has made her ill.  She summons Atreyu, a warrior of Bastian’s age, to conquer The Nothing, and gives him a magical talisman, the AURYN to guide him on the quest.  The force behind The Nothing summons Gmork, a wolf-like beast who craves power, to kill Atreyu.

The AURYN. Stephen Spielberg keeps the original prop in his office

Nowadays we’d call this a middle-grade book, but 33 years ago, when The Neverending Story was written, that label didn’t exist.  Most books written for young people, then and now, focus on personal issues.  Bastian is lonely and has trouble at school, but this is just the inciting action, not the real subject of the story.  The book and movie are unique in presenting a very adult theme – imagination and the forces arrayed against it – in fiction for this age group.

Atreyu finds no clues concerning the Nothing, so he risks the Swamps of Saddness to find the wisest being in Fantasia. Those who succumb to the sadness sink into the swamp and are lost. This is the fate of Atreyu’s beloved horse, Artax.

The wise being  cannot help, but directs Atreyu to the Southern Oracle, 10,000 miles away.  While trudging through the swamp with Gmork on his trail and little chance of success,Atreyu begins to sink into despair.  A Luckdragon named Falkor rescues him and carries him most of the way to the oracle.

Atreyu and Falkor

The oracle tells Atreyu that the only way to save Fantasia is for a human child, who lives beyond the borders of the realm, to give the Childlike Empress a new name. Then the oracle crumbles, a victim of the Nothing.

Falkor and Atreyu seek the border, and find the Nothing, which has become incredibly strong. Atreyu encounters Gmork who explains that Fantasia is “humanity’s hopes and dreams,” while the Nothing is “human apathy, cynicism, and the denial of childish dreams.”

Atreyu kills Gmork but is wounded and nearly falls victim to the Nothing. He is rescued once again by Falkor, but when he regains consciousness, only fragments of Fantasia remain, floating in the void.  The two make their way to the Ivory Tower, where Atreyu tells the Empress he has failed.

She says no, he has succeeded.  His quest was the only way to draw the attention of the human child, who is listening to them as they speak.  Bastian realizes she is talking of him.  As the Nothing begins to consume the Tower, the Empress begs him to say her name.  Bastian races to the attic window, and cries, “Moonchild!” into the face of an approaching storm.  He finds himself face to face with the Empress, who reveals that the Nothing has consumed all of Fantasia but a single grain of sand.

The Empress gives Bastian the last grain of sand of Fantasia

The Empress tells Bastian that his imagination and wishes have the power to restore the land to its former glory. In the final scene, we see Bastian soaring on Falkor through skies in Fantasia and his own world.  I wasn’t crazy about the ending.  There’s a Disney quality though out, since in the days before digital animation, films like this relied  on animated models and actors in costumes, but that was not necessarily a liability.  Jim Henson pulled it off without missing a beat in Dark Crystal, 1982.

In the last scene of The Neverending Story, I’m aware of watching a children’s movie, which disappoints, since most of the film was greater than any such category.  Even so, in the 20 years that have passed since I saw the movie, I’ve never forgotten the chords it struck concerning imagination.  Please take a look at this clip of Atreyu meeting Gmork to get a sense of the movie’s scope:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDHBZlSNO6w

In succeeding posts, we’ll look at some views of Depth Psychology and certain spiritual traditions.  For both of them, literalism is the enemy of living with soul and imagination.   The Neverending Story tells us this is a battle we each must fight in our own hearts and minds.  The world of practical affairs and the marketplace have never had much use for the world’s dreamers.  Can we still manage to hear the cries of the Otherworld beings who fade into nothing at our lack of attention?  “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane is the dying cry of someone who lost Fantasia.

The Neverending Story echoes world folklore in showing the need otherworld creatures have for humans.  Irish and Scottish fairies steal mortal children.  The fairy queen sought out Thomas the Rhymer to be his consort for seven years, the same length of time the sea nymph, Calypso, held onto Odysseus in ancient Greece.  Why do such beings need us for redemption?

These are just some of the questions this apparently simple “children’s movie” raises.  They are far to complex to answer here, but I plan to take some additional forays into imaginal realms in the next few posts, so please stay tuned.

The Wind Through the Keyhole, by Stephen King: A Book Review

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I recently said I look for “imaginative escapism” in summer reading, and Stephen King’s, The Wind Through the Keyhole, 2012, qualifies on both scores.

This book is a celebration of stories by a consummate storyteller.  It is structured as a frame tale, three levels deep – a story within a story within a story, something you find in some our oldest epics and story collections like The Odyssey and The Arabian Nights.

In case we we miss that connection, King says it another way through his main character, Roland Deschain, who tells his traveling companions, “There’s nothing like stories on a windy night when folks have found a warm place in a cold world.”  Later, during a story concerning his younger self, Roland says, “A person’s never too old for stories…Man and boy, girl and woman, never too old.  We live for them.”

This is the eighth of King’s Dark Tower Novels, and the first I have read, but the introduction caught me up well enough to proceed.  Roland Deschain is a gunslinger in Mid-World.  A gunslinger is a cross between a knight errant and an old west marshall.  Many gunslingers are descendants of “the old White King, Arthur Eld.”

Mid World borders our own and is “filled with monsters and decaying magic.”  In places, there are gates between the worlds, or places where “the veils are thin.”  Three of Roland’s companions come from New York.  The fourth is a billy bumbler, a talking, dog-like creature.

Roland and his companions – his ka-tet – barely have time to find shelter from a starkblast, a devastating storm, with winds like a hurricane, the sudden onset of a tsunami, and temperatures so cold that trees snap and explode.  While the friends shelter by the fire in the only stone building in a deserted town, Roland tells of one of his first assignments as a gunslinger.

In the first story, “The Skin-Man,” Roland rides with his partner, Jamie Red-Hand, to the desolate mining town of Debaria, where a shapeshifter has slaughtered dozens of people.  This a gritty western world, like the bleakest of early Clint Eastwood’s westerns, and the monster is more deadly than the bad and the ugly Clint faced down.

While talking to an 11 year old survivor of an attack, a boy whose father and a dozen others were slaughtered, young Roland tells the second tale, “The Wind Through the Keyhole,” about another 11 year old, Tim Ross, who goes on a dangerous quest to save his mother who has been injured by a treacherous step-father.  Tim sets off to find Maerlyn, aka Merlin, at the heart of The Endless Forest.

Picture an 11 year old on an Arthurian quest, who stumbles into a swamp filled with gators and is saved by a group of plant people who communicate telepathically and give him a strange disk with buttons and lights that speaks and answers his questions in a female voice.  Her name is Daria.  Once she tells him she’ll be “offline” for half an hour, “searching for a satellite link.”

Just when he’d begun to believe she really had died, the green light came back on, the little stick reappeared, and Daria announced, “I have reestablished satellite link.”

“Wish you joy of it,” Tim replied.

Well, why not?  Is a magical iPhone so different from an enchanted sword or magical ring?  A master storyteller like Stephen King can pull of escapades like this because he always has me asking the one question that really matters in storytelling.  To quote Neil Gaiman, that question is, “What happened next?”

There’s adventure, courage, cruelty, humor, horror and much more as Roland Deschain takes us in and leads us back out of three levels of story.  One constant throughout all the tales is the wind, and I think Roland speaks for King when he says:

In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn’t it?  And why not?  Why other?  If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.

The Wind Through the Keyhole is a very satisfying summer read – and quite a bit more.

RIP Maurice Sendak

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If you haven’t heard, Maurice died today of a stroke, at age 83.  Here is a nice five minute interview he gave in 2002 that ran on the PBS Newshour tonight.  It’s illuminating to hear him say, “I don’t know how to write for children.  I don’t think anyone knows how to write for children, and those that say they do are frauds.”

He goes on to say, “I write for me,” and adds that it isn’t always easy to be driven by something internally that is “riotous and strange.” What a great gift he gave to riotous strangers!

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june12/wildthings_05-08.html

The Muppets Get Their Star

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On March 20, the first day of spring, The Muppets received the 2466th star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.  The cast, which has charmed TV and movie viewers for 50 years, now joins a select group of “fictional” stars, which includes Mickey Mouse, Godzilla, Shrek, and The Simpsons.  Miss Piggy pointed out during the news conference, however, that all movie stars are fictional.

Photo by Frazer Harrison / Getty Images

Lisa Henson, CEO of Jim Henson Enterprises remarked that The Muppet’s star, in front of the El Capitan Theater, is very close to her father’s.  Henson created Muppet prototypes in 1955, for a show called Sam and Friends, which ran for six years on WRC-TV in Washington, DC.

Jim and Jane Henson with the cast of "Sam and Friends"

Henson died in 1990, at the age of 53, of complications from a severe strep throat infection.  Associates and family say he was so busy working, he didn’t seek medical help until it was too late.

During the last year of his life, Henson negotiated to sell the Muppets to Disney. The sale was finalized in 2004. The latest Muppet movie was released to DVD yesterday too, a seemingly successful effort to revitalize the cast and introduce Walter, a new character, who was present at the dedication ceremony.

Kermit received his own Walk of Fame star in 2002, but Henson’s little frog would be the first to say The Muppets are a group effort. The group finally has the recognition it deserves.

Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson – An Appreciation

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Twenty years ago, Mary and I got our first real home computer (the Commodore 64 didn’t quite count).  With an Intel 486 processor, 500k of ram, an 8k external modem, and AOL memberships, we were wired!  Full-fleged members of the information age, at least by the standards of the day.

The same year, 1992, Neal Stephenson published a visionary novel called, Snowcrash. In retrospect, it merits the word, “prophetic,” for its sketch of life in the metaverse – a word Stephenson coined – and in the inconvenient world we call “reality.”

Consider:

In Snowcrash, Stepenson posits a world where nation states have transferred most of their power to corporations. Most people are corporate citizens and live in corporate enclaves, or less prestigious burbclaves.  The hero of Snowcrash, Hiro Protagonist, is a citizen of “Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong.”  Military power belongs to private contractors, as do the roadways, which vie for driver/customers.  The post office is gone; private couriers deliver snail-mail.  The United States occupies a smallish territory centered in the Mohave Desert, and keeps it’s employees busy with make-work projects.  The former United States economy hinges on two industries – computer microcode and high speed pizza delivery, which has been revolutionized since the Mafia took control.

Though Hiro is a citizen of Hong Kong, as a pizza driver, he can’t afford to live in their enclaveclave.  Home is a self-storage unit under the flight path at LAX.  Like most of his hip and cyber-savvy generation, he spends most of his time online in the guise of his avatar, navigating virtual worlds.  But something is happening in the online world.  A strange new computer virus, when opened, generates a graphic pattern that scrambles the brains of the user.  They are dazed and speak in tongues.  With a young woman named YT, for Yours Truly, Hiro sets out to unravel the mystery.

The villain turns out to be a charismatic preacher.  In his attempt to secure both temporal and spiritual power, he has tapped into the ancient Sumerian glyphs that first scrambled human speech patterns in the event known as the Tower of Babel.

It’s been 20 years since I’ve read Snow Crash, so I’m writing this from memory.  I’m not necessarily recommending the whole novel.  The first jaw-dropping 100 pages, where Stephenson built his world, flew by and still leave me in awe.  I remember the rest of the book dragging in parts, but I still think of the story all the time.  Most futuristic fantasies prove as silly as the 1930’s movie shorts that show humans zipping along in their air cars between high rise buildings, happy and without any accidents.  This book is different.

In 1992 there were no virtual worlds.  Now there are, and you have to create an avatar to negotiate them.  These days, it isn’t so hard now to imagine a bright young man living in a self-storage shed.  But above all, Snow Crash comes to mind because in the wake of “citizens united,” it’s so easy to see corporate power growing while government power wanes.  With Super Pac money rolling the election year dice, does the government control corporations or do corporations control government?  Neal Stephenson saw this and other aspects of our world coming 20 years ago.

Snow Crash, is a visionary novel that all lovers of fantasy should know.

The Shape-Changer’s Wife by Sharon Shinn: A Book Review

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I’ve enjoyed several young adult fantasies by Sharon Shinn and reviewed one of them here http://wp.me/pYql4-iQ.  Before she published her first YA book, Summers at Castle Auburn, in 2001, Shinn had a solid reputation as an adult fantasy writer.  I recently finished her first novel, The Shape-Changer’s Wife, which won the Locus award for Best First Fantasy Novel in 1995. Shinn was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer that year.  On top of these honors – all well deserved – long time readers of this blog will know I am fascinated by stories of shape shifters (check out three posts I wrote on the theme in Feb., 2011).

At the start of The Shape-Changer’s Wife we meet Aubrey, a young man with a sunny disposition who is already on his way to becoming a skilled magician. His master sends him to study with Glyrenden, highly skilled in the art of shape-changing:

“Learn everything he teaches you so well you can cast his own spells back at him,” the old wizard had said. “Glyrenden respects only those stronger than he is, and those he hates. If you cannot beat him, he will destroy you.”

With the optimism of youth, Aubrey brushes the warning aside and sets out. Even when local villagers react to Aubrey’s request for directions with narrowed eyes and cold responses, his hunger to learn drives him on.

Shinn is masterful in building a sense of menace, which begins the moment Aubrey steps into the 3″ of dust that cake the entry way of the shape-changer’s house.  It builds when he meet the uncanny servants – Orion, covered with hair except for his eyes and nose, and Arachne, a woman who fights a loosing battle against the dust, while muttering curses and shooting everyone hostile glances.  Above all, Aubrey is fascinated by Lilith, the shape-changer’s wife, whose emerald eyes seem to see right through him, who is silent and self-contained, and doesn’t react to anything like any other woman he’s ever met.

Shinn’s presents magic as matter-of-fact.  Shape-changing sounds dramatic to Aubrey, so he is dismayed when Glyrenden hands him piles of books on anatomy and science and makes him practice hours of concentration exercises.  “How can you change into something you don’t understand in all of it’s details,” the shape-changer asks.  In Shinn’s books, magic is seldom dramatic.  More often, it forms an atmosphere like the felt danger offstage in a Hitchcock movie.

By the middle of the tale, Aubrey is hopelessly in love with Lilith, even as he perceives that “She seemed to be fashioned from the idea of a woman, and not to be a woman at all.”  This and other related perceptions lead him to pierce the secret of Glyrenden’s house – why the townspeople fear him, and why no bird or animal will come anywhere near the wizard’s dwelling.  Aubrey learns that the only way to undo Glyrenden’s “barbaric spells” is to kill him or become a better wizard, and even if he succeeds, the spells may prove too strong to break.

“I came to magic with joy.” Aubrey says.  “I thought it was a splendid thing to take the well of power that I found within me and shape it to marvelous uses…But magic, I have discovered…is not inherently good in itself.  And some of it – yes, some of it is inherently evil.  There are wicked spells, savage spells, enchantments that are so black that even to know them withers the heart just a little, taints the soul.  And yet to be a great magician, to be a sorcerer of any ability or renown, those spells must be learned as well.  For if a magician does not know them, they can be used against him.”

With measured pace, Shinn has brings us through her imagined world to one of our oldest stories, that of tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.  The Shape-Changer’s Wife is also a love story, but told with a kind of restraint that is rare in the fantasy genre.

You seldom see titles by Sharon Shinn on the shelves of Barnes&Noble, and never her YA titles.  At first glance, her books are not the stuff of blockbuster series and lucrative movie deals, though I can see them as moody, gothic dramas.

Shinn is a wizard in her own right.  Beyond the pleasure I’ve gained from six of her novels, I return to them often to study the masterful way she can weave character and atmosphere into stories I cannot forget.

Sharon Shinn

King of Morning, Queen of Day by Ian McDonald: An Appreciation

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My recent discussion of unlikely mentors and guardians http://wp.me/pYql4-1J8 reminded me of Tireseas and Gonzaga, two “mystical vagabonds” (book jacket description) in one of the best fantasy novels I’ve ever read.

Ian McDonald, a visionary author who lives in Belfast, published  King of Morning, Queen of Day in 1991.  I still pick it up to read certain passages or a random chapter, to study and enjoy the ideas, the writing, and characters.

The narrative follows three women of three generations who are alternately attracted and attacked by creatures of the Mygmus, a technical name for the infinitely overlapping worlds of Faerie.

“The Mygmus may be viewed not so much as a place, a spatio-temporal relationship, a quasi-Euclidean geometrical domain, but as a state.  The concept is a familiar one in modern quantum physics, in which time is not considered a dynamic process, but a succession of recurring states eternally coexistent.  Such thinking liberates us from our essentially linear concepts of time, with past, present, and future.”  So reads a manuscript given to one of the women by a strange group of deformed, “Midnight Children.”

The first of the women, romantic, Edwardian Emily, dreams of a faerie lover and seeks him out.  First her rapes her, and then she disappears.

Gonzaga and Tireseas help Emily’s daughter, Jessica, battle free of the otherworld threat, which is personified by her mother, who has become a demonic force.

Jessica’s daughter, Enye, modern young woman in Dublin, battles Otherworld manifestations at night with martial arts swords.  Gonzaga and Tireseas charge her blades with high tech wizardry as well as ancient charms that allows her to win her way into Faerie, redeem her grandmother, Emily, and return to modern day Dublin.  The author gives the ending a contemporary twist that I won’t reveal here.

McDonald’s characters are among the most vivid in any novel I can remember, painted with a sure touch both in broad stroke and detail.  Every December, for instance, I reread “Enye’s soliloquy” – my name for it, with a nod to Molly Bloom.  It’s her internal monologue, in response to the question, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have Christmas all year long?”  It’s a long single sentence paragraph – not quite as long as the one that ends Joyce’s Ulysses, but then Joyce doesn’t make me laugh out loud.  I’ll quote the whole thing next December.

With his first book, Desolation Road, 1988, Ian McDonald won critical acclaim, and an Arthur C. Clarke award nomination.  Like other cyberpunk authors at the time, his vision of the impact of  technology at the birth of the internet age continues to amaze.  As a quick aside in King of Morning, Queen of Day, McDonald throws out a challenge to fantasy writers that has largely remained unanswered in the 21 years since it was written.  In the same manuscript that defined the Mygmus, Enye reads:

“I have this dread that…somehow we have lost the power to generate new mythologies for a technological age.  We are withdrawing into another age’s mythotypes, an age when the issues were so much simpler…and could be solved with one stroke of a sword called something like Durththane.  We have created a comfortable, sanitized pseudo feudal world of trolls and orcs and mages and swords and sorcery, big-breasted women in scanty armor and dungeon masters; a world where evil is a host of angry goblins threatening to take over Hobbitland and not starvation in the Horn of Africa, child slavery in Filipino sweatshops, Colombian drug squirarchs, unbridled free market forces, secret police, the destruction of the ozone layer, child pornography, snuff videos, the death of whales, and the desecration of the rain forests.

Where is the mythic archetype who will save us from ecological catastrophe, or credit card debt…where are the Translators who can shape our dreams and dreads, our hopes and fears, into the heroes and villains of the Oil Age?”

Ian McDonald

I haven’t kept up with the work of Ian McDonald in the two decades since I first read King of Morning but returning to the book via the characters of Tireseas and Gonzaga reminded me to do so. McDonald published Planesrunner, his first YA fantasy, in December, 2011. Here’s the blurb:

“When Everett Singh’s scientist father is kidnapped from the streets of London, he leaves young Everett a mysterious app on his computer. Suddenly, this teenager has become the owner of the most valuable object in the multiverse—the Infundibulum—the map of all the parallel earths, and there are dark forces in the Ten Known Worlds who will stop at nothing to get it.”

I don’t know about anyone else, but this is my very next read.

Angels Incognito

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The local California Writer’s Club branch hosts an annual short-short story contest every year.  I hadn’t intended to enter until this morning when one of those end-of-the-night inspirations slipped into awareness.  A story idea:  A reprobate is convinced that “they” are stealing our memories, and he is probably right.

I wrote the opening with relative ease.  We’ll see how it goes; openings are easy, but I also have a great fondness for this kind of character – the guardian or the wise one whose appearance is humble or even repulsive.  You meet him – he is most often male – in various guises in movies and fiction:

Mel Gibson in "Conspiracy Theory," 1997

He is found  in myth and scripture.  John the Baptist is a classic example, who must have dismayed a lot of the city people who came out to hear him.

John the Baptist

Tilopa, (989 – 1069) one of Tibetan Buddhism’s greatest teachers, was expelled from a monastery and made his living as a sesame pounder, a pretty low rung on the social ladder.

Tilopa

Once in a while, you meet someone like this in real life.  I read an account by a man who wanted to go to India in search of a guru, but then found his teacher, a Zen master, earning his living by fixing washing machines in a laundromat 12 miles away.

When my wife was a social worker at Loaves and Fishes, a local center that helps the homeless, she was startled one day as a small hispanic man climbed out of a dumpster in a parking lot. Significantly, his name was Jesus. Mary’s eye’s still light up when she tells what a joyful man he was.  The meeting was so unexpected, but left such a vivid memory, that she thinks of him whenever the subject of angels comes up.

These reflections led me to think of one of my all time favorite fantasy novels, King of Morning, Queen of Day, by Ian McDonald, 1991.  The story features a pair of otherworldly guardians who look a lot like bums as they craft powerful magical charms from bottle caps and debris.  McDonald came to mind when he published his latest novel in December.  I haven’t yet read the new one, but I’ll discuss King of Morning next time.

Meanwhile, has anyone else encountered an angel, a wise man or woman, a mentor or a guardian who showed up disguised as an “ordinary” person but then turned out to be anything but?