Tonal Oddities in Sleepy Hollow

I've been emptying out my DVR this week, trying to get through some of the new shows that have piled up over the course of the fall semester.  I always watch my die hard favorites first, so now I have a bunch of newbies I need to peruse, to see if they'll make the final cut and stay on my TV roster.  This week I've been watching Sleepy Hollow, a show that revives the tale of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman in contemporary times.  

This show has everything I should love.  It's pretty much a fantasy series, set in the 21st century.  It has sword fights and mythical love stories, evil demons that walk the earth, magical spells, mysteries stemming from our storied Revolutionary past, all with religious tie-ins and a plot to SAVE THE WORLD.  Its also full of pretty decent special effects, awesome costuming, and gorgeous sets - which actually might be where I start getting a bit thrown.  About half the series looks like a gothic set piece, complete with hidden tunnels under the city, a police warehouse that looks more like an Enlightenment laboratory, and secret masonic cells meant to imprison Death himself.  And that's in contemporary Sleepy Hollow, not the 1770s.  It just feels strange.  The verisimilitude is off...  It doesn't have to be realistic - shows like Supernatural or Grimm pull off the same thing just fine, perhaps because they embrace the hokeyness inherent in such combinations of weird and ordinary - when appropriate, of course.  But there's just something about the tone, the incongruity of Sleepy Hollow that makes me pause.  I can't equate the police precinct with the warehouse, which is supposedly part of the same building complex.  I can't come to terms with a town I can't even imagine as a holistic thing - is it a small town or a city?  How does a supposedly small village have such a big SWAT team?  And why are there so few actual people in the city? (Look at the population sign in the first episode - there's no way a town with so few people would have a police department that big).  In a fantasy show like this one, I shouldn't have to think about these kinds of things.  I should take the world as it is and not worry about silly little issues like realism or whether they follow their own rules all the time.  Hell, I loved LOST and that made no sense at all.  But Sleepy Hollow, because it takes itself so seriously is so many strange ways, makes me start to wonder.  

I'm going to keep giving the show some time to find it's way, however.  There is a great leading man, with all the looks, charm, wit, and intelligence a lit prof could hope for.  Tom Mison, who plays Ichabod, is especially fun when he has to deal with new world realities - after all, he is a 18th century history professor and army officer who has somehow been pulled into the 21st century.  The scene in episode 8, "Necromancer," where he learns how to fist bump is pretty great.  And his tirade on taxes in one of the earlier episodes is particularly amusing.  Plus, unlike so many British stars on TV today, he gets to keep his English accent.  So we're all good on that front.    

The other leading characters don't always fare as well, thought there are some casting choices I really like.  Nicole Beharie, who plays Abbie Mills, Crane's partner, does a great job with her character.  She is especially good when fighting the bad guys, dealing with emotional issues, or teasing Crane.  John Cho is one of my favorite parts of the show - he plays an undead cop who has a thing for Abbie, but has to work for the evil demons instead.  Lots of fun anguish in that role.  But the rest of the characters don't really have any resonance.  And I think that's mostly because of the tone created by the show.  They have to play things so seriously - and when I say seriously, I don't mean Batman seriously (all scowls and squinty eyes and deep, menacing voices).  I mean they have to play it straight - the world is going to end and they are the soldiers meant to stop it.  That's it.  And that would be fine... if we had some sort of stakes in this world or with these characters.  Do I care about Crane?  Yes, but mostly because he's hot and British.  Do I care about Abbie?  Maybe - I don't know her well enough yet.  Do I care about the others?  Nope, not one iota.  I don't even care about the world they are trying to save.  It's all too clinical, too black and white - they jumped into the deep end way too quickly and I don't really care if they drown.  

That, I think, is what distances this show from something like Supernatural or FlashForward or Fringe (one of my favorite shows of all time).  In FlashForward they had to save the world and there was a giant revelation/problem/unexplained occurance in the very first episode.  But we didn't get all the info about saving the world in the very first episode.  We didn't spend time creating a giant backstory right away.  The mythology came second to the characters (though that might be why Flashforward was cancelled - they spent a bit too much time on characters and not enough on plot).  Perhaps if we didn't have to have such a long intro at the beginning of each episode of Sleepy Hollow I might be more willing to love it.  That much mythology for a show that's only 9 episodes in?  I just don't know... But for right now, I'll still keep watching, if only to see Ichabod Crane try to figure out how to leave a message on a cell phone.  

Magical Realism in Beasts of the Southern Wild

I've been having several conversations lately with all sorts of people about a movie that has recently been nominated for an Academy Award: Beasts of the Southern Wild.  I saw the movie back in the fall with my sister at the Belcourt and was all set to absolutely love the film.  It had great reviews, all my friends loved it, and it was supposed to be, at least in part, magical realism.  That label caught my attention - I'm a bit fan of magical realism and was excited to see how the film would handle it, especially since several reviews also said the film was about the End of the World (I've capitalized the letters because that's how it sounded to me, like the trope and not just a lower case end).  And perhaps that's why the film just didn't live up to the hype for me.  The movie really isn't about the End of the World; the end of a world, perhaps, but not a full blown apocalypse.  Nor did the film really deal with magical realism, at least not any of the Latin American varieties.  So I've been spending some time trying to come to terms with how I feel about the film.

First, let me say a bit about my big quibbles with the movie.  In many respects it's a great film.  The acting is VERY well done, the scenery beautiful and atmospheric, and many of the main themes are well conceived and portrayed.  On a certain level, the film is a haunting reproach to how our country handled hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.  But... here is where the End of the World scenario just doesn't work for me.  The Great Flood, the river Styx, swimming to Elysium - all these symbols have pride of place in the film.  Yet they don't quite seem to add up to anything.  Towards the end of the film, the characters leave their homes and try to swim to Elysium (a brothel in this version).  But only the children (only the little girls) go there.  And then they swim back again.  Why do this?  Why reference Elysium at all?  And though they save animals from the Great Flood on a boat, there is no covenant with God to renew the land, nor any rainbow to mark a new beginning.  The allusions are there as guideposts, but they don't really guide us anywhere... All the elements are there for a full blown apocalypse, one that affects not just the people of the Bathtub (the marginalized island/estuary zone that houses the heroes of our story), but everyone else in New Orleans and beyond, but that apocalypse never comes.

This is of particular interest to me in a scene when the men of the Bathtub blow up a levee so they can drain the floodwaters from their homes.  Presumably that water goes somewhere and affects others, but we don't get that story.  Yes, we know the water goes elsewhere and we can guess what happens, but that isn't the point.  I expected something bigger here, based on reviews I'd read and the symbolism used throughout the film.  Yet we never get to the big payoff - the film only goes so far and no further.  We only get a perspective based on this small community.  Which isn't itself a big issue, if the film wanted to remain linked to that metaphor.  The end of a community as the end of the world.  Get to the thick of things through microcosm.  But the movie overlaps these issues with a larger version of the end of the world.  The ice caps are melting (which supposedly causes the storm that floods the Bathtub) and that will eventually release the Aurochs, human-eating creatures from a pre-hisotric time.  These creatures are cut into the story throughout the film to give us feeling of impending doom, not just for the residents of the Bathtub, but for everyone.  Yet when they appear they could be nothing more than a figment of a little girl's imagination.  Another very intriguing metaphor, but one that remains problematical.  Are these animals real?  Can others see them?  Why do they leave so easily?  Where is the big payoff for the story and for the themes surrounding these symbolic creatures?  In short, is this or isn't it magical realism?

Magical realism was first introduced to the Americas through the introduction to Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World.  Carpentier called it lo real maravilloso or marvelous realism, but it is usually considered the initiating point for magical realism in Latin American.  Carpentier saw this marvelous realism as something that is very American - it occurs when a pre-columbian or pre-eurpoean mystical tradition (in the case of his novel, a specifically African tradition) comes in contact with a more 'realistic' European culture.  This then flourishes in the Americas, where the two cultures meet.  Marvelous realism relates events realistically, but includes the fantastic qualities of life inherent in the Americans as part of that reality.  Gabriel García Márquez and his 100 Years of Solitude, however, is what most people refer to when they discuss the definition of magical realism.  García Márquez's works were published at a time when Latin American texts were highly sought after for translation, so his version of the idea become popular within the US very quickly and caught the attention of a wider audience.  100 Years of Solitude, though based in Columbia and filled with exotic locales, foreign cultures (at least for North American readers) and strange occurrences, attracted universal attention because of its straightforward style and attitude toward those miraculous events.  At the death of one character, García Márquez chronicles flowers falling from the sky.  He writes:

He saw through the window that a rain of tiny yellow flowers was falling.  Through the night they fell over the city in a silent storm…  So many flowers fell from the sky that the dawn revealed the streets carpeted with a compact quilt. (García Márquez 173, my translation) [i]

In this passage, the flowers are not presented as a miracle or a strange, otherwordly incident.  Instead, the author depicts the event as he would any other flood, with precise, descriptive wording and an even, credulous tone.  This, along with the fact that everyone in the town - everyone in the world - accepts these magical happenings as fact, as reality, defines García Márquez's style.

And this is what bothers me about Beasts of the Southern Wild.  It tries to be magical realism and falls short.  The whole world doesn't really believe in the aurochs, nor do they even see them or acknowledge them by the end of the film.  And the film itself, though filmed with incredible, gritty realism, does not treat the animals with the same non-challance.  The film appears almost gothic, Edgar Allan Poe meets Cormac McCarthy, not really like 100 Years of Solitude at all.

I did, however, read a recent article that helped me to reevaluate my opinions on this matter.  In the article (which you can find here), the author suggests a new kind of magical realism, based not on the Latin American variety (which has found a place in the US through writers like Cristina García and Toni Morrison, among others), but on a new, North American variety.  The reviewer writes:

What's interesting about the possibility of magical realism flowering in North America is how much this species may differ from the original South American variety. South American magical realism also occupied the fringes, the marginal zones where the individual mind, not the consensus of the real, could rule. But in Latin American fiction, this often took place in a joyful, florid explosion of inner identity; from Gabriel García Márquez to Like Water for Chocolate, indigenous fables and aromas burst through from a pre-colonial past through the hard paving of the Europeanised present.

Beasts of the Southern Wild hollers exuberantly, but there's something frenzied about it as well. It's an intoxicated wake, as well as a celebration. American magical realism, if it comes to pass, could mean a retreat into the imagination, rather than a reunion with an inner self. America's golden-age protagonists – its chatty hacks, taciturn PIs and secretive dames, eyes always ahead – never had much time for the inner self. Hushpuppy, drunk on dreams of ancient creatures and impending floods as she searches for her lost mother, certainly has one, but it threatens to wash away the whole of reality in the film.

I think the possibility of a new American magical realism is very intriguing, especially as we start to look inward instead of outward.  And I think I'll have to leave that possibility for another post.  But think on this: if magical realism can be explained in this way, where we don't reveal the inner self and retreat to the imaginary, does that mean that American Psycho is really just magical realism?
[i] “Vieron a través de la ventana que estaba cayendo una llovizna de minúsculas flores amarillas.  Cayeron toda la noche sobre el pueblo en una tormenta silenciosa…  Tantas flores cayeron del cielo, que las calles amanecieron tapizadas de una colcha compacta” (García Márquez 173). 

Hello, hello!

Hello, hello!  Welcome to "Notes from the Villa Straylight."  I'm starting this blog based on the urgings of my sister, who keeps telling me I need to write down some of our conversations about popular culture, film, tv, literature, and all things in between.  The aim of the blog is to get a conversation going about things we may not get to talk about on a regular basis.  These posts will most likely question the use of melodrama in Downton Abbey versus Mad Men or tackle why Mad Men is such an intriguing example of postmodernism.  I may figure out why I just can't bring myself to love Beasts of the Southern Wild, even though, by most criteria, I really should.  Or maybe I'll simply discuss what I'm reading this week and why it should (or shouldn't) be on everyone's reading list.  Any way one looks at it, I want this blog to be a catch-all place where discussions on all sorts of levels, from popular to academic and wacky to serious, meet.  Hence the title "Notes from the Villa Straylight."  As some of you may know, I'm a bit of a William Gibson fan, and Neuromancer is one of my favorite novels.  The Villa Straylight is one of the most interesting settings in the novel, a "Gothic folly," as one inhabitant calls it, an elite family estate shoved into the narrow, concrete terminus of a spindle-shaped space station (Gibson 172).  Straylight is a infinitely complex series of passages and rooms, each filled to the brim with artifacts and antiques, piled up with no specific order or purpose.  As one characters states, "Straylight was crazy [...] but is wasn't a craziness he understood" (202).  This is what I want to get at... I want to see if we can work our way through popular culture the way one wanders about in the Villa Straylight.  See if what we watch or read has been cut down to fit our expectations or freed from its original purpose in some way.  Straylight presents a simulation of what our civilization could have been, but then cuts all the doors to fit the space: "rectangle[s] amid smooth curves of polished concrete" (179).  Neuromancer therefore presents our dreams of progress and enterprise and culture as "a dream long lost in the compulsive effort to fill space" (179).  So let's rummage around in that space and see what catches our eye.  Let's wander the corridors of the Villa Straylight and perhaps find something to write home about.

* Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Science Fiction, 1984. Print.