Musings on art and modern audiences

  The Princess Bride : A fairytale romance for everyone With a title like “ The Princess Bride ,” a film opening with a typical 1980s boy’s bedroom seems a little out of place. But as we discover, that initial setting is an important part of us getting into the film because as we follow the story with that young boy, sick, in his bed and having to put up with his grandfather’s fairytales, we fall just as in love with it as he does. To put it more concisely, when I watched The Princess Bride for the first time, its opening scene was not what I was expecting. Later when I began reading William Goldman’s 1973 novel on which the film is based, it began to make sense. Taking us out of the story and giving us all the details of the story’s tellings, retellings, edits, abridgments, cuttings, and rewritings wasn’t just time-wasting and distraction, it was Goldman’s way of getting the reader truly invested; not just in the story of Buttercup and Co., but in the very processes that allowed ...

Mean Girls and Shakespeare I honestly think Shakespeare would’ve loved Mean Girls . Whilst it’s easy to think of Shakespeare’s work as part of some elite high culture, it’s worth remembering that Shakespeare in his time wrote plays for everyone to watch and enjoy, not just the rich and powerful. Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be watched and talked over by everyone who went to watch them because ultimately Jacobean theatre was a social mixer. Mean Girls , in my opinion, is absolutely aligned with this culture. Chick flick, a monument of 2000s pop culture, and just generally iconic, Mean Girls has cemented itself as a firm classic. The beady-eyed amongst you might recall that Shakespeare does actually feature explicitly in Mean Girls , and it’s Julius Caesar which gets the special mention. The scene is used for comic effect, but one of the things I find funny is that Shakespeare even makes his way into a chick flick like Mean Girls . The thing is, it actually makes sense for Shakes...

  Ponyo and Princess Mononoke : Studio Ghibli’s environmentalism The environmental message of Studio Ghibli’s Ponyo (2008) and Princess Mononoke (1997) comes in large part from the visual and aesthetic emphasis placed on depicting nature in all its beauty, but there are also important messages about humans and our relationship with the natural world expressed through the films’ characters.  The collision of human and non-human worlds in these films isn’t throwing life into disrepair but into productive chaos. If not for the encounter between the characters, there would be no message to convey at all because quite simply nothing will have happened. Nature isn’t something to be feared or vilified into a threat when in reality the relationship between humans and the environment is highly complex. Even as I write this the words “environment,” “nature,” and “human” become increasingly unclear, undefined, and indistinguishable.  Ponyo is a character who occupies both human a...

  The Glass Menagerie : making sense of our memories Can structurelessness be liberating and actually creatively productive? Memory is a fickle thing. The fickleness of memory itself can often make us feel that our lives lack structures or orders from which we can make sense of life. That structurelessness is something which Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie captures. Williams’ play tells the story of a broken family, reminiscing (through the eldest son, Tom) on life before the death of its patriarch. The Glass Menagerie is a deeply personal tale which relates closely to Williams’ own familial relationships, particularly his memory of his mother, his relationship with her, and her values. What happens when we put those memories on stage, under lights, into costume, and ask them to perform themselves to us? What happens when we have to confront our memories as fabrications, fictions, performances - encore after encore after encore, each performance ever so slightly diff...

  Hercules : A legacy of myth-retellings To commemorate one year of the blog, I have very selfishly decided to write about one of my absolute favourite films: Disney’s Hercules (as if I don’t already dictate all the content I produce). If you’ve not seen this film before, that needs to change ASAP, and if you have seen it, enjoy! Myth retellings and new translations have always been popular, but in recent years it seems the publishers have been inundated with them. They all seem to have the same font and a similar cover art design, with reviews harking back to Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (a tear-jerker, to be sure) if it’s a queer retelling and Circe (on my TBR, don’t worry) if it’s feminist. Now, I have few complaints about this aside from having not enough time and too few funds to be able to ever get through all these retellings, but it’s certainly made me think about why we love mythological retellings so much - in particular the ancient Greek ones.  In my o...