As a means of forcibly restraining my rant, I'll try to be succint. The book centered around the seduction of conformity, the appeal of being "normal" and "accepted" in society. The negative images of the suburbia and the processing center were off-set by the visceral power of IT, drawing people into a world where there truly was no pain, no loss, no unhappiness. In a sense, it was a precursor to the Borg, and the most insidious aspect of the conformist ethic was that the "evil" was overt (red eyes, giant brain) but one instantly fell into its rhythms anyway because it was so seductively reassuring. What is more terrifying: the evil one recognizes and is repulsed by, or the evil one recognizes and yet can't seem to resist no matter how repulsive it is?
The movie transformed much of this into a Fustian bargain and an appeal to the power of ego. There were traces of the original themes, but when Meg starts reciting the periodic chart in the movie, it becomes apparent that there's something major missing -- reciting rote rhythms in the book made sense...reciting them in the movie seemed to come out of nowhere. Charles Wallace was drawn out by his ego, to be sure, but not because IT or IT's henchmen made much of a deliberate appeal to this aspect. Rather, the danger in the book was almost entirely the debasement/twisting of our desires and intentions by ourselves. The movie became about power and control. The red-eyed man offered Charles Wallace a deal, a challenge that appealed to his ego, and much of the rest of the process -- both the first and second time they converged on Meg -- was about what power and control IT could offer Meg. In the book, it was simply the most basic of appeals...freedom from pain, freedom from unpredictability. Meg fights back by reciting multiplication tables to create her own rhythm opposed to the normative rhythm of IT, but those are drawn into the rhythms. She recites squares tables, ditto. It is when she begins to recite the Declaration of Independence that she begins to find escape..for there are some rhythms that break free of the generic rhythms, and it is then she realizes what Jefferson was saying about "equality." So when the movie turned that whole confrontation into a incoherent mishmash of campy behaviour and Helsinki Syndrome-ish dialogue, it basically ruined the most important -- thematically -- scene in the book.
As a final note, the feel-good "freeing the society" of the movie wasn't even remotely part of the book for a good reason -- they barely escaped IT. Evil is never so easily vanquished, and the fact that IT was brought down so...easily just made it seem cheap. And the means -- Meg expressing love for Charles Wallace -- was somehow twisted into a deus ex machina in the movie. CW keeps saying "you hate me" (why? what would motivate IT to get him to say that?!?) and that sparks Meg and 45 seconds later, IT is dead from...something. The original premise was that IT could offer everything...except love. IT was the perfect analytic organism -- for love is, in this light, actually a weakness -- but it is human flaws, human emotions, that make us capable of resisting the darkness. For every person who does stupid, irrational things out of emotion, there is always another who does unspeakably beautiful and transcendent thigs out of emotion. But those are for ourselves, and evil is not so easily defeated...the book is saying we have to fight, but sometimes the battle isn't to defeat the enemy directly, but to save ourselves and the ones we love. The whole deal at the end where the three "witches" were expressing their admiration and love for humans...ghaaggh! The book made no bones: humans were a grubby, dangerous lot, almost as deeply in the shadows as Cammazotz, and only a few, shining luminaries helped redeem us (Meg starts citing those too, fighting against IT.)
Okay, a little longer than intended, but nowhere near as long as I might have gone, given that I haven't even addressed 2/3 of the major issues I had with it.
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branchandroot
Re: Heh.
Date: 2004-05-12 07:40 am (UTC)The movie transformed much of this into a Fustian bargain and an appeal to the power of ego. There were traces of the original themes, but when Meg starts reciting the periodic chart in the movie, it becomes apparent that there's something major missing -- reciting rote rhythms in the book made sense...reciting them in the movie seemed to come out of nowhere. Charles Wallace was drawn out by his ego, to be sure, but not because IT or IT's henchmen made much of a deliberate appeal to this aspect. Rather, the danger in the book was almost entirely the debasement/twisting of our desires and intentions by ourselves. The movie became about power and control. The red-eyed man offered Charles Wallace a deal, a challenge that appealed to his ego, and much of the rest of the process -- both the first and second time they converged on Meg -- was about what power and control IT could offer Meg. In the book, it was simply the most basic of appeals...freedom from pain, freedom from unpredictability. Meg fights back by reciting multiplication tables to create her own rhythm opposed to the normative rhythm of IT, but those are drawn into the rhythms. She recites squares tables, ditto. It is when she begins to recite the Declaration of Independence that she begins to find escape..for there are some rhythms that break free of the generic rhythms, and it is then she realizes what Jefferson was saying about "equality." So when the movie turned that whole confrontation into a incoherent mishmash of campy behaviour and Helsinki Syndrome-ish dialogue, it basically ruined the most important -- thematically -- scene in the book.
As a final note, the feel-good "freeing the society" of the movie wasn't even remotely part of the book for a good reason -- they barely escaped IT. Evil is never so easily vanquished, and the fact that IT was brought down so...easily just made it seem cheap. And the means -- Meg expressing love for Charles Wallace -- was somehow twisted into a deus ex machina in the movie. CW keeps saying "you hate me" (why? what would motivate IT to get him to say that?!?) and that sparks Meg and 45 seconds later, IT is dead from...something. The original premise was that IT could offer everything...except love. IT was the perfect analytic organism -- for love is, in this light, actually a weakness -- but it is human flaws, human emotions, that make us capable of resisting the darkness. For every person who does stupid, irrational things out of emotion, there is always another who does unspeakably beautiful and transcendent thigs out of emotion. But those are for ourselves, and evil is not so easily defeated...the book is saying we have to fight, but sometimes the battle isn't to defeat the enemy directly, but to save ourselves and the ones we love. The whole deal at the end where the three "witches" were expressing their admiration and love for humans...ghaaggh! The book made no bones: humans were a grubby, dangerous lot, almost as deeply in the shadows as Cammazotz, and only a few, shining luminaries helped redeem us (Meg starts citing those too, fighting against IT.)
Okay, a little longer than intended, but nowhere near as long as I might have gone, given that I haven't even addressed 2/3 of the major issues I had with it.