Blankety Blank's Thisity That

I recently had occasion to watch Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland. It was an interesting experience. Visually lush, technically proficient, and full of interesting performances, it annoyed the hell out of me by grossly embodying so many of my pet peeves. This essay may only be peripherally about the movie; it's mainly a jumping off spot for my rambling concerns.

First of all, I applaud Tim Burton for putting his name on the product, otherwise incautious people might mistake it for Lewis Carroll's actual tale. But even so the title is misleading. Besides mingling elements from both Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass (a habit just about every film adaptation of Alice indulges in), TBAIW is more in the nature of a sequel, with the grown-up Alice returning to her dream-world to work out her real-life problems. A more forthcoming title (Alice In Underland has been suggested) might have been better, but Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland is a lot more honest than, say, Bram Stoker's Dracula, which was all kind of wrong.

That being said, why is Burton playing with this particular cast of characters, with these images? With their actions and personalities so severely different from the originals (think of the buzzwords for this type of "re-imagining": "darker", "more adult"), why must he use them rather than create his own characters to tell his story? As it is, Burton's tale seems to exist as something as a parasite on Carroll's original tale, sucking "name-brand" recognizability and even affection off of Alice. Somewhat more original re-workings are possible: Woody Allen's Alice leaps to mind, where the old story lies under Allen's movie like a skeleton, unseen but providing form and structure.

And to what end does Burton do this? To have a galumphing adventure tale with the moral (that would have been timely in the 1860's, when Alice was first published) that Girls Are People Too And Should Follow Their Dreams No Matter What Society Thinks. Burton's Alice triumphs by using the Vorpal Sword to cut off the Jabberwocky's head (they call it a Jabberwocky, not a Jabberwock, as it is in the book); Carroll's does it by being gentle, kind, and polite. These virtues are not so popular with modern audiences.

All of Western literature can be seen as a long, long conversation. Homer produces The Odyssey, and Virgil answers with The Aeneid, and Dante chimes in with The Divine Comedy. There are influences, and inspirations, and complete quarrels with various viewpoints. It has always been the authors' way to ring the changes on all the myths and motifs. But we have been plagued recently with a spate of work that verges on plagiarism, parody, and sometimes downright theft. All art, all really good art, challenges everyone. It challenges creative people to produce a creative answer to it. Some people merely draw moustaches on it. And Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland (while being generally enjoyable) comes dangerously close to a moustache.

Oh, Pooh!: Living On Our Cultural Fat

What is arguably the English language's greatest toy-based children's classic is in danger.

Eighty years after A. A. Milne dotted the last line of his magical, melancholy tribute to the memory of childhood and childhood's end ("So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing."), The A. A. Milne Estate and Trust (which at this late date does not include Christopher Milne, who spent most of his life trying to move out of the shadow of having been Christopher Robin) has decided that was not the end, and have hired author David Benedictus to pen a new volume, Return To The Hundred Acre Woods, slated for publication this October. To take the curse off and remove any objections, The Estate has dedicated 2/3 of all profits to charity, and have declared as long as some of the money goes to poor kids and people can enjoy new stories, what's the harm?

This is all part of an alarmingly increasing trend of what I call living on our cultural fat. Instead of producing new works, publishers are all too often choosing books with "name brand recognition" (like The Wizard of Oz or Peter Pan) and turning them into franchises or re-visionings, dumbing down longer books for modern children who no longer have parents to read to them before bed-time and explain the harder words and passages, or removing any politically incorrect elements from the past (Doctor Dolitttle in his original form is almost completely extinct). The point is that works of genius are bastardized or pastiched to become sellable with little care for the original author's intent or talent, and the millions of dollars projected for this Pooh project is a hefty profit even minus the charity.

It is a slippery slope. L. Frank Baum himself could not match his original quality of the first two Oz books, and when Ruth Plumley Thompson began carrying on the series, first from his notes and then from her own imagination, the nature of Oz changed from unique to increasingly ordinary. These books are little read today save from curiosity or by Oz completists. Christopher Tolkien has only published work actually written by his father JRR (albeit edited), but the concept of a new movie by Peter Jackson, Phillipa Boyens, and Fran Walsh based only on hints of what happened between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings must give us pause, since the most jarring elements of the popular movies have turned out to have all been scripted by the ladies; one can but fear that the original spirit of Tolkien might take backseat.

In the Middle Ages there was produced what could be considered the first literary fantasy, Amadis of Gaul, based not on legends but produced by one anonymous author. It proved so popular that it spawned dozens of continuations of varying quality, until Cervantes in Don Quixote has his fictional people burn them all except the original, which even these skeptics accept as a work of genius. True, the original Pooh books will remain, but they may well become (as I would argue the Tolkien books have become) like a beautifully inspired house in the middle of a slum that has grown up around it, composed of parodies and "takes" on the original architect's idea.

God save Winnie-the-Pooh.