Alice in Wonderland (2010)
Thursday, May 13, 2010
12:59 AM
0
Marxian Rating:
Why's a raven like a writing desk? Because they cost the same!
by Gabriel Tupinambá
There is an old english proverb that goes like this:
“Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves”
By the time Lewis Carroll was writing - Alice in Wonderland was published in 1865 - England, like most European countries, was deeply concerned with finding out what had been the causes and consequences of the Industrial Revolution.
1865, for example, was also the year Marx published Value, Prince and Profit - and only two years later the first book of Das Kapital would appear to courageously affirm that something had happened.
By the beginning of the XIXth Century the work force had grown exponentially, the ever-growing inclusion of child labour as a cheaper option to operate industrial machines was consolidated through easy-to-bypass laws prohibiting it, and though the bourgeoise class was unveiling itself like a beautiful and vibrant flower, all around Misery seemed like the only muse. (Why the past tense, I wonder...)
No surprise then that such a saying, advising people to pay attention to the little pieces of metal, circulated almost like some sort of counter-currency. Not only was money as scarce as food but more importantly: Was this not the time in History in which a man could finally be taken as a little piece of metal himself? And what about the pounds? Well, those took care of themselves - by accumulating pence!
Against this background, the Duchess tells a confused Alice:
“Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves”.
Alice was finding out herself that people could be little pieces of something, something that could be accumulated and exchanged by a senseless force. Lost in Wonderland, the little girl found herself constantly implicated in the interplay of exchanging sense for non-sense - and this with such all-encompassing drive that the exchange was somehow able to take hold of even the most intimate core of her, so that she didn’t know who she was anymore.
Lewis Carroll had written a children’s book (?) engendered by the very mathematical and scientific thought that was coming to light at the time - a development to which he also contributed with books on symbolic logic. The notions that Capital would require in order to consolidate the functioning of the capitalist market were being elaborated in those works.
In England, by 1865, a lesser-known little girl named Alice, maybe working in a cotton mill, might have found out with similar confusion of an ideological discourse that was based on the exchange of pence for non-pence - and this with such all-encompassing drive that the exchange was somehow able to take hold of even the most intimate core of her - as something that could be accumulated and exchanged... by a pence-less force!
Both books featuring the character Alice, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, were later repeatedly adapted to the cinema screen (a medium curiously developed in parallel to the clumsy history lesson given above).
What was to be the future of this narrative - based in so many ways on an homologous structure to the capitalist one, the one which created the possibility for cinema in the first place?
From Cecil M. Hepworth’s 8 minute silent film (1903), through Norman Mcloed’s classic (1931), Walt Disney’s animated version (1951), and Jan Svenkmajer’s Neco z Alenky (1988), amongst others: The history of cinema is repeatedly punctuated by different adaptations of this same story, which turns these films into reference points for us to examine how the capitalist ideology has been dealing with the mass display, in such bare terms, of the basis of its own logic.
Tim Burton is a hollywoodian filmmaker that, like Tarantino and others, is known to work with a more rigorous definition of style, and thus fall into the category of an cinematic author. Some of his most distinctive traits are to set his films always in dark and sightly surreal scenarios, while attaching to some of the characters a nonsensical undertone, the source of their comedy as well as their empathy. Surely, Lewis Carroll’s influence has always been there, helping Burton to make his aesthetic choices.
From his extensive filmography, the films with larger-than-life, eccentric and often surreal characters attest to this quite directly. Beetle Juice (1988), Batman (1989)... and almost every film which features Johnny Depp: frequently there’s a character which seems to speak from a position of intimate contact with Wonderland. With the exception of one - Sleepy Hollow (1999) - which instead deals directly with the ideology that produced the carrollian universe itself: the arrival of scientific knowledge into places governed before by mythical savoir-faire, the same moment in history that produced the likens of Frankenstein and Edgar Alan Poe’s detective Dupin.
In a way, Tim Burton had been working his way towards this adaptation: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) had been a trip into the strange inner-workings of a enjoyment factory; Corpse Bride (2005b) also ventured into the ‘land of the dead’, its own different version of an otherworldly place, with its mysterious traps. Somehow, though, by comparing those films and his version of Alice, it becomes very clear that the previous forbidden places where much more accessible than the actual Wonderland.
It is a known fact that both theatrical and cinematic adaptations of Alice stumble on the same problem: neither one of the Alice books is a proper narrative - in the aristotelian sense of having the main character to change his position through the facing of a conflict in the plot. Alice is a girl that goes from episode to episode, changed in her body and identity, but always remaining in the same position of almost perverse curiosity. This becomes a big problem when adapting it to the big screen, because Alice doesn’t have enough consistence to even be a main character in a Hollywood film.
What is this consistence? What does a film character need to represent so it can take its place in the aristotelian narrative structure? The move from Alice-the-novel to Alice-the-3D-experience helps us to understand this.
The film starts with young Alice interrupting her father’s business meeting (we later learn that he is a british business man that works with importing/exporting with China, Britain’s colony at the time...) and he tucks her to bed while she tells him of this strange dream she had. She says she dreamt of this strange surreal land, and her father calms her down with some fatherly words about us all being crazy anyway. The father then dies and many years pass. Alice is now a young woman.
The whole adventure in Wonderland is then comfortably presented within the moral dilemma of being torn between her unorthodox, juvenile behavior, related to her father - their game of ‘imagining six impossible things before breakfast’, for example - and the duty of growing up and marrying an english Duke, who doesn’t appreciate her spontaneity: At the precise moment the Duke asks her to marry him, she sees the white rabbit from her dream and follows it, down the rabbit hole.
This creates a substratum for everything that will happen in Wonderland, distorting it into a good vs. evil scenario in which Alice must choose. Her true story is the one of becoming who she really is...deep down. All the characters she meets there tell her that her return was expected, and that she is the One - the One who will kill the Jabberwocky.
The rest of the film tells of Alice’s journey towards becoming conscious of who she is, and accepting that she is not dreaming, and then finally becoming herself and killing the terrible enemy. This, of course, is the exact structure of the first Matrix (1999) film - we are on familiar territory! (To accompany the Wachowski brothers’ premiss, there is also some Lord of the Rings battle scenes in it).
Finally, as she manages to accept her heritage, quoting the killing of the monster as one of the ‘six impossible things’ she believed in before breakfast, she can now return to ‘Nowonderland’ and refuse the Duke’s marriage proposal.
Once she is back, Alice decides to take on the family business and sail to China. She turned that thirsty imagination of hers into a creative businesswoman’s mind. And the film ends as she sets sail into the very well known.
So, how was the character’s consistence achieved here? How did they turn Alice-the-novel into Alice-the-3D-experience? Let’s do a list of...’six necessary things to believe before breakfast’ in Hollywood:
1. I am a special individual with a personal conflict and a particular story to tell. If I cannot show how multidimensional I am through the story...at least now I can do it by being visually tri-dimensional!
2. I am multi-dimensional, but I am also the One - because of that, I need to learn how to believe in myself.
3. There are oppositions in the world either because the two sides haven’t heard each other’s stories, or because the story of one of them is that of being a parasite to the first one’s. Being multidimensional, I understand this within myself.
4. The One solves oppositions by bringing them together or by eliminating the insubordinate excess. Being the One, I have the power in me to create such a unity.
5. I am the One and there can only be Two insofar as I make One with the other.
6. If I am multidimensional, then I have different, complex urges. If I am the One, then I am unique. If I make One of Two, then my will is relentless. If I am a unique, complex and passionate subject, I demand unique and complex objects. To believe in myself is then to believe that these objects should be available to me.
(Bonus corollary belief: Thus I should move to China and open a McDonalds, fighting for the right to be One, to be multidimensional and to be ‘in love’.)
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a great example of how ideology works today not so much because of the short-circuit that happened inside the directors head when he had to use his carrollian influence to shoot an actual Lewis Carroll film, but because of the base material.
It is true that Tim Burton was preparing a disaster when he decided to use the Master Signifier (Carroll’s silent influence) and re-inscribe it back as just any other signifier, de-sublimating it, changing its organizing function into just another source of surplus enjoyment - putting Lewis Carroll to work together with the cotton mill girl we invented at the beginning - this change of function prevents the writer’s influence to have any impact whatsoever, turning it into a simple excuse to make a colorful movie.
But - beyond Tim Burton’s sentencing of his Master to Goulag - it was Lewis Carroll himself who wrote a story that, dwelling mostly in the senseless realm of the symbolic, playing with puns and how logic is dissociated from meaning, cannot be made consistent without losing its most basic effect. (I wonder if this failure to make the story fit a non-mediated narrative arch doesn’t point to the importance of structuralism in Brecht’s ideas on the alienation-effect and the purpose of theatre).
When Dante was writing his own Wonderland (slightly different from Carroll’s) there was a trick specially famous amongst italian poets that he used to prevent censorship: to create the poem’s rhyming structure in such a way that if one wanted to suppress one line many other lines would have to go as well, because the rhymes weren’t contained in one tercet (the classic terza rima). The narrative relied on such an important - and senseless - structure, that distorting the content would leave a traceable mark in it.
In the same way, Lewis Carroll wrote a story so tangled with its own structural presuppositions that it is impossible not to leave an imprint of our censure on it.
And by the time Alice springs back from the - conveniently refurbished - underground of her victorian society with an answer to the Duke...
Alice Kingsley: Sorry, Hamish. Can't marry you. You're not the right man for me. Sorry if that troubles your digestion.
[Alice turns to her sister]
Alice Kingsley: I love you, Margaret. But this is my life, and I'll decide what to do with it.
[Alice turns to Lowell, meeting his sour look with a stern glare]
Alice Kingsley: You're lucky to have my sister for your wife, Lowell. You be good to her. I'll be watching very closely.
[Alice goes up to Aunt Imogen and takes her hands]
Alice Kingsley: There is no prince, Aunt Imogen. You need to talk to someone about these delusions.
[Alice walks past Lady Ascot, looking sternly at her]
Alice Kingsley: I happen to like rabbits. Especially white ones.
[Alice goes up to her mother]
Alice Kingsley: Don't worry, mother. I'll find something useful to do with my life.
[Alice turns to the Chattaway sisters]
Alice Kingsley: You two remind me of some funny boys I met in a dream.
Lord Ascot: You've left me out.
Alice Kingsley: No I haven't, sir. You and I have business to discuss.
Lord Ascot: Shall we speak in the study?
[Alice smiles and starts to head to the house, when suddenly she turns back to the crowd]
Alice Kingsley: Oh, and one more thing.
[Alice lifts the hem of her dress to her knees and does the futterwacken]
...we get the nonsensical impression ourselves that the old english proverb and Lewis Carroll’s paraphrase of it somehow got mysteriously linked together....
....“take care of the pounds and the sense will take care of itself”.
by Gabriel Tupinambá
There is an old english proverb that goes like this:
“Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves”
By the time Lewis Carroll was writing - Alice in Wonderland was published in 1865 - England, like most European countries, was deeply concerned with finding out what had been the causes and consequences of the Industrial Revolution.
1865, for example, was also the year Marx published Value, Prince and Profit - and only two years later the first book of Das Kapital would appear to courageously affirm that something had happened.
By the beginning of the XIXth Century the work force had grown exponentially, the ever-growing inclusion of child labour as a cheaper option to operate industrial machines was consolidated through easy-to-bypass laws prohibiting it, and though the bourgeoise class was unveiling itself like a beautiful and vibrant flower, all around Misery seemed like the only muse. (Why the past tense, I wonder...)
No surprise then that such a saying, advising people to pay attention to the little pieces of metal, circulated almost like some sort of counter-currency. Not only was money as scarce as food but more importantly: Was this not the time in History in which a man could finally be taken as a little piece of metal himself? And what about the pounds? Well, those took care of themselves - by accumulating pence!
Against this background, the Duchess tells a confused Alice:
“Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves”.
Alice was finding out herself that people could be little pieces of something, something that could be accumulated and exchanged by a senseless force. Lost in Wonderland, the little girl found herself constantly implicated in the interplay of exchanging sense for non-sense - and this with such all-encompassing drive that the exchange was somehow able to take hold of even the most intimate core of her, so that she didn’t know who she was anymore.
Lewis Carroll had written a children’s book (?) engendered by the very mathematical and scientific thought that was coming to light at the time - a development to which he also contributed with books on symbolic logic. The notions that Capital would require in order to consolidate the functioning of the capitalist market were being elaborated in those works.
In England, by 1865, a lesser-known little girl named Alice, maybe working in a cotton mill, might have found out with similar confusion of an ideological discourse that was based on the exchange of pence for non-pence - and this with such all-encompassing drive that the exchange was somehow able to take hold of even the most intimate core of her - as something that could be accumulated and exchanged... by a pence-less force!
Both books featuring the character Alice, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, were later repeatedly adapted to the cinema screen (a medium curiously developed in parallel to the clumsy history lesson given above).
What was to be the future of this narrative - based in so many ways on an homologous structure to the capitalist one, the one which created the possibility for cinema in the first place?
From Cecil M. Hepworth’s 8 minute silent film (1903), through Norman Mcloed’s classic (1931), Walt Disney’s animated version (1951), and Jan Svenkmajer’s Neco z Alenky (1988), amongst others: The history of cinema is repeatedly punctuated by different adaptations of this same story, which turns these films into reference points for us to examine how the capitalist ideology has been dealing with the mass display, in such bare terms, of the basis of its own logic.
Tim Burton is a hollywoodian filmmaker that, like Tarantino and others, is known to work with a more rigorous definition of style, and thus fall into the category of an cinematic author. Some of his most distinctive traits are to set his films always in dark and sightly surreal scenarios, while attaching to some of the characters a nonsensical undertone, the source of their comedy as well as their empathy. Surely, Lewis Carroll’s influence has always been there, helping Burton to make his aesthetic choices.
From his extensive filmography, the films with larger-than-life, eccentric and often surreal characters attest to this quite directly. Beetle Juice (1988), Batman (1989)... and almost every film which features Johnny Depp: frequently there’s a character which seems to speak from a position of intimate contact with Wonderland. With the exception of one - Sleepy Hollow (1999) - which instead deals directly with the ideology that produced the carrollian universe itself: the arrival of scientific knowledge into places governed before by mythical savoir-faire, the same moment in history that produced the likens of Frankenstein and Edgar Alan Poe’s detective Dupin.
In a way, Tim Burton had been working his way towards this adaptation: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) had been a trip into the strange inner-workings of a enjoyment factory; Corpse Bride (2005b) also ventured into the ‘land of the dead’, its own different version of an otherworldly place, with its mysterious traps. Somehow, though, by comparing those films and his version of Alice, it becomes very clear that the previous forbidden places where much more accessible than the actual Wonderland.
It is a known fact that both theatrical and cinematic adaptations of Alice stumble on the same problem: neither one of the Alice books is a proper narrative - in the aristotelian sense of having the main character to change his position through the facing of a conflict in the plot. Alice is a girl that goes from episode to episode, changed in her body and identity, but always remaining in the same position of almost perverse curiosity. This becomes a big problem when adapting it to the big screen, because Alice doesn’t have enough consistence to even be a main character in a Hollywood film.
What is this consistence? What does a film character need to represent so it can take its place in the aristotelian narrative structure? The move from Alice-the-novel to Alice-the-3D-experience helps us to understand this.
The film starts with young Alice interrupting her father’s business meeting (we later learn that he is a british business man that works with importing/exporting with China, Britain’s colony at the time...) and he tucks her to bed while she tells him of this strange dream she had. She says she dreamt of this strange surreal land, and her father calms her down with some fatherly words about us all being crazy anyway. The father then dies and many years pass. Alice is now a young woman.
The whole adventure in Wonderland is then comfortably presented within the moral dilemma of being torn between her unorthodox, juvenile behavior, related to her father - their game of ‘imagining six impossible things before breakfast’, for example - and the duty of growing up and marrying an english Duke, who doesn’t appreciate her spontaneity: At the precise moment the Duke asks her to marry him, she sees the white rabbit from her dream and follows it, down the rabbit hole.
This creates a substratum for everything that will happen in Wonderland, distorting it into a good vs. evil scenario in which Alice must choose. Her true story is the one of becoming who she really is...deep down. All the characters she meets there tell her that her return was expected, and that she is the One - the One who will kill the Jabberwocky.
The rest of the film tells of Alice’s journey towards becoming conscious of who she is, and accepting that she is not dreaming, and then finally becoming herself and killing the terrible enemy. This, of course, is the exact structure of the first Matrix (1999) film - we are on familiar territory! (To accompany the Wachowski brothers’ premiss, there is also some Lord of the Rings battle scenes in it).
Finally, as she manages to accept her heritage, quoting the killing of the monster as one of the ‘six impossible things’ she believed in before breakfast, she can now return to ‘Nowonderland’ and refuse the Duke’s marriage proposal.
Once she is back, Alice decides to take on the family business and sail to China. She turned that thirsty imagination of hers into a creative businesswoman’s mind. And the film ends as she sets sail into the very well known.
So, how was the character’s consistence achieved here? How did they turn Alice-the-novel into Alice-the-3D-experience? Let’s do a list of...’six necessary things to believe before breakfast’ in Hollywood:
1. I am a special individual with a personal conflict and a particular story to tell. If I cannot show how multidimensional I am through the story...at least now I can do it by being visually tri-dimensional!
2. I am multi-dimensional, but I am also the One - because of that, I need to learn how to believe in myself.
3. There are oppositions in the world either because the two sides haven’t heard each other’s stories, or because the story of one of them is that of being a parasite to the first one’s. Being multidimensional, I understand this within myself.
4. The One solves oppositions by bringing them together or by eliminating the insubordinate excess. Being the One, I have the power in me to create such a unity.
5. I am the One and there can only be Two insofar as I make One with the other.
6. If I am multidimensional, then I have different, complex urges. If I am the One, then I am unique. If I make One of Two, then my will is relentless. If I am a unique, complex and passionate subject, I demand unique and complex objects. To believe in myself is then to believe that these objects should be available to me.
(Bonus corollary belief: Thus I should move to China and open a McDonalds, fighting for the right to be One, to be multidimensional and to be ‘in love’.)
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a great example of how ideology works today not so much because of the short-circuit that happened inside the directors head when he had to use his carrollian influence to shoot an actual Lewis Carroll film, but because of the base material.
It is true that Tim Burton was preparing a disaster when he decided to use the Master Signifier (Carroll’s silent influence) and re-inscribe it back as just any other signifier, de-sublimating it, changing its organizing function into just another source of surplus enjoyment - putting Lewis Carroll to work together with the cotton mill girl we invented at the beginning - this change of function prevents the writer’s influence to have any impact whatsoever, turning it into a simple excuse to make a colorful movie.
But - beyond Tim Burton’s sentencing of his Master to Goulag - it was Lewis Carroll himself who wrote a story that, dwelling mostly in the senseless realm of the symbolic, playing with puns and how logic is dissociated from meaning, cannot be made consistent without losing its most basic effect. (I wonder if this failure to make the story fit a non-mediated narrative arch doesn’t point to the importance of structuralism in Brecht’s ideas on the alienation-effect and the purpose of theatre).
When Dante was writing his own Wonderland (slightly different from Carroll’s) there was a trick specially famous amongst italian poets that he used to prevent censorship: to create the poem’s rhyming structure in such a way that if one wanted to suppress one line many other lines would have to go as well, because the rhymes weren’t contained in one tercet (the classic terza rima). The narrative relied on such an important - and senseless - structure, that distorting the content would leave a traceable mark in it.
In the same way, Lewis Carroll wrote a story so tangled with its own structural presuppositions that it is impossible not to leave an imprint of our censure on it.
And by the time Alice springs back from the - conveniently refurbished - underground of her victorian society with an answer to the Duke...
Alice Kingsley: Sorry, Hamish. Can't marry you. You're not the right man for me. Sorry if that troubles your digestion.
[Alice turns to her sister]
Alice Kingsley: I love you, Margaret. But this is my life, and I'll decide what to do with it.
[Alice turns to Lowell, meeting his sour look with a stern glare]
Alice Kingsley: You're lucky to have my sister for your wife, Lowell. You be good to her. I'll be watching very closely.
[Alice goes up to Aunt Imogen and takes her hands]
Alice Kingsley: There is no prince, Aunt Imogen. You need to talk to someone about these delusions.
[Alice walks past Lady Ascot, looking sternly at her]
Alice Kingsley: I happen to like rabbits. Especially white ones.
[Alice goes up to her mother]
Alice Kingsley: Don't worry, mother. I'll find something useful to do with my life.
[Alice turns to the Chattaway sisters]
Alice Kingsley: You two remind me of some funny boys I met in a dream.
Lord Ascot: You've left me out.
Alice Kingsley: No I haven't, sir. You and I have business to discuss.
Lord Ascot: Shall we speak in the study?
[Alice smiles and starts to head to the house, when suddenly she turns back to the crowd]
Alice Kingsley: Oh, and one more thing.
[Alice lifts the hem of her dress to her knees and does the futterwacken]
...we get the nonsensical impression ourselves that the old english proverb and Lewis Carroll’s paraphrase of it somehow got mysteriously linked together....
....“take care of the pounds and the sense will take care of itself”.
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