Merlin's ultimate end (since "death" isn't quite accurate) and the descent of poor Abu Kasim seem to be strongly interrelated. The main differing element between the two stories is that Kasim's unfortunate circumstances committed unto him by his shoes, or seemingly as a result of Kasim's own actions are, unlike Merlin's demise, not a direct willing result on Kasim's part, but rather an incidental set of actions who, liberally manipulated through chance, and Kasim's unwillingness to part with his tattered footwear. Merlin chooses to allow Niniane to overwhelm him, by the power of his own magics, willingly and knowingly letting himself be captive by what he represented at his essence: powerful and infallible magic. The root of Merlin's power and the strongest characteristic which best describes him is his immense knowledge and abilities of magic. Zimmer says that Merlin had to be bested by his own powers, there being no other way Merlin could be defeated, not simply because it was the only force strong enough, but that Merlin's existence and the ultimate archetype of the power of magic, thus also the powers of faerie and nature, preordained Merlin to eventually succumb to nature itself. Merlin was made, birthed, by the inherent might of nature, so he may never die, only return that borrowed energy back to the wilds. True, Merlin's unfaltering love towards Niniane helped him abandon his resolve to protect the world of men, ultimately returning to not death, but trapped in this tower, Niniane's own creation. Merlin can not cease to be, only cease to influence our world. His end was his own doing, a willing enslavement, not to his lover, but rather to his own undying addiction to magic; Merlin recognized the only way to return to nature was to be conquered by the pinnacle of nature which was his own knowledge of magic.
While Merlin's sacrifice was to love, and also to prevent the powers he wielded to be forever out of man's reach, Abu Kasim's end was brought about through his own inability to disconnect himself from that which most defined him: not his slippers, but his covetous nature. Being a rich (and therefor skilled) miser, his ability to determine the values of possessions and his propensity for bargaining led him to be unable to let go of so simple an item. He didn't value the shoes themselves for their sentimentality but for the way that his voracious approach to consumerism and bargaining was his best asset, the facet of himself that most defined who he was. Following the story of Abu Kasim's slippers Zimmer talks of the inevitable obsession of man, their actions being a result of subconscious impulse. He describes the vice or virtue that pervades the individual through it's spellbinding nature. Merlin, too, fell to this device. It was Merlin's mastery of magic that defined him, so it had to be his inclination (though in Merlin's case, it was clearly conscious) to be entrapped by his own obsession with magic, ultimately becoming literally consumed by it. So, too can we see Abu become driven to his own undoing by firstly being unable to part with his useless remnants, but eventually his inability to stop his attempts to cut himself off from his shoes.
Here we see the culmination of the sacred stages of life, as Zimmer describes; Merlin and Kasim living the hermit stage, Kasim having thrown out all his worldly goods and being deprived of his fortune has lost all. Merlin, conversely, chose his life of seclusion to somewhat protect the world of man from his secrets. It is here that they both turned inward, focusing on themselves, experiencing the hermit stage. Merlin enters the stage of the pilgrim by freeing himself of all obligation and connection to the world by physically removing himself from it, whereas Kasim has lost his wealth and material goods through his own series of actions, though he less willingly attains the pilgrim stage. This repeated function of man's demise being their own doing, whether conscious or unconscious, through each person's most definable attribute, their own element of being, their worst or best function, paints a world where tragic figures exist to be their own undoing, doomed not from their own obsessions, per se, but from their inability to change or abandon their obsession, despite their lifelong initiation through the four sacred stages of life. They are given all the tools to react to themselves, and forsake obsession, but at long last, they are bound to destruction for their previous unwillingness to abandon it, regardless of who they become, the obsession that they used to not only posses, but let define them, can not be expected to allow them to exist.
Monday, April 9, 2012
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Frye was Right
Damn you, Northrop Frye! You were right, as usual. I keep trying to find a way around it, but I cannot deny what seems to ring true as a constant, that the immature, hackneyed premise of reducing everything to the simplest of terms is exactly the best way to understand romance, or more suitably, to understand why people like romance. I keep finding assurance of this in each of my attempts to dissent Frye's opinion, but I find it closer to fact with each mistrial. I loathe a sequel whose existence needs not be. I've been trying to understand the unending cacophony of films begetting bastardized versions of themselves time and time again, other than the demand from the audience for entertainment void of any demand for the redundancy of surplus thinking. I don't want to relearn new characters and shit, just give me the old story with a new setting, please. I am reluctantly finding that the very reason we go to see sequels is the promise of simplicity. We know we're being catered to as if children, but we still cheer inside when the main character doesn't die from a dramatic situation from which there is no drama because we know they are safe, not because the character had a handle on the danger, but because we feel no drama for someone we know, simply because the franchise can't kill them, are safe from any lasting harm. It's bullshit and we know it, but we love it so. Sequels stoop down and spoon-feed us the lowest common denominator because not only do we actually enjoy it in a guilty sense of pleasure, but we have come to actually expect it. Sequels are there in the simplest terms for us to enjoy the movie's event, the explosion of sound and movement, something distracting us from ourselves, it's just a sad reality that we have reduced and oversimplified our distractions to be as focused and predictable as modern sequels or remakes have gotten.
Sequels: Why?
In my last post I raged about the proclivity of game or movie publishers being so attached to the re-imaging of already existing content, and this weekend I saw no true exceptions. I went to see the Hunger Games, not having read the books, and was told countless times before even viewing that this movie did, in fact, already exist. It was a Japanese film called Battle Royale and was also a book before being turned into a movie. Perhaps coincidental, and often debated by the various fans of either movie that they are far from similar, it still represents that Hollywood ideal of don't make something good and new, take something good and make it better; I wasn't even through the previews before this was confirmed by a trailer for the remake of the first film I ever saw, Snow White. My problem with the overabundance of sequels is that they serve no purpose. Sure, some stories can't be told within a single book or film and need that extra time to establish a premise and develop characters in deeper ways, but I always am left asking the question that I fear whomever may speak on the behalf of the filmmakers: why? What was wrong with the other versions of Snow White? Sure, Disney left out the whole part with the huntsman and this new film seeks to amend that oversight, calling the movie Snow White and the Huntsman, allowing the film to portray the story closer to the text than the Christianized context of the Disney cannon. I searched IMDb for films named "Snow White." There were 49 good matches that I can say are related to the fairy tale, so I must ask you, 2012's Snow White and the Huntsman, why? Why do you exist? This story has been told countless times, in countless ways, even variances involving the three stooges and a feature-length animation. What do you bring to the table outside a graphical facelift and the possibility of 3D? How can there be so many discrepancies in style and function between each iteration when they must assumably all have access to the source literature?
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Video Game Sequels
Previously I have talked about the sad need by current entertainment industries to repackage films or stories previously experienced into an unnecessary additional story. I would like to depart from written literature and touch on video games. They are far worse than movies with their inability to break away form repetitious ideas and rehashing of previously executed (and often better) plots, themes and in the case of games also overall gameplay mechanics. What he have now are an overabundance of games ending in "2" or "3" or a colon with a meaningless subtitle such as Angry Birds: Seasons or Assassin's Creed: Revelations. Game publishers are uneasy about pushing their money towards any projects that can't assure stockholders of overall rise in revenue, so most game developers are forced to remake the same game over years and years, some even expected to have yearly releases that make older versions entirely obsolete such as the Call of Duty franchise. The problem, then, is that we aren't seeing many new or innovative ideas out of mainstream higher-grossing companies as they play it safe with investments, taking a safe reiteration of an already popular franchise and just expanding on it.
What I wish we could see in games today is a stricter following to the idea of spiritual sequels. A perfect example of this done right as well as done wrong would be the Bioshock series from 2K Games. The game itself was a spiritual sequel to a PC game called System Shock (which itself also had a sequel, System Shock 2). Though Bioshock shared many similarities with System Shock, it was it's own beast that gained popularity due to the high-quality execution of it's environment as well as providing the player with a story-driven incentive to explore and complete the game. The game starts with your character surviving a plane crash only to was ashore a small lighthouse. As you enter you realise this is no mere building, but the entrance to the underwater city of Rapture, a town without government where men of science and prosperity can exist without the burdon of morality imposing itself on the expansion of new technologies. It was itself a well-focused narrative that slowly reveals the origins of the character you play (in first-person) while you also begin to understand the seedy Atlas Shrugged quality of the city's views on property rights, individualism and how the city fell apart to drug addiction and riots, unable to support it's own ideal society.
Almost three years later Bioshock had itself a sequel. This was the typical drivel produced by the average studio, releasing a product in a hurried and unsuccessful attempt at recreating the booming and unmitigated success of the original. Like so many intellectual products whose appeal is not only the original product itself but the prospects of establishing a series, a pool of preexisting concepts and ideas, all already fully realized, it is easy to make a sequel because it is so much harder to create an original conceptualization of a game that doesn't already have all the groundwork in place. The general appeal of an updated version of an already-known universe is easy to produce and far too easy for audiences to indulge and ask for more of the same, so long as they disguise it as new.
What I wish we could see in games today is a stricter following to the idea of spiritual sequels. A perfect example of this done right as well as done wrong would be the Bioshock series from 2K Games. The game itself was a spiritual sequel to a PC game called System Shock (which itself also had a sequel, System Shock 2). Though Bioshock shared many similarities with System Shock, it was it's own beast that gained popularity due to the high-quality execution of it's environment as well as providing the player with a story-driven incentive to explore and complete the game. The game starts with your character surviving a plane crash only to was ashore a small lighthouse. As you enter you realise this is no mere building, but the entrance to the underwater city of Rapture, a town without government where men of science and prosperity can exist without the burdon of morality imposing itself on the expansion of new technologies. It was itself a well-focused narrative that slowly reveals the origins of the character you play (in first-person) while you also begin to understand the seedy Atlas Shrugged quality of the city's views on property rights, individualism and how the city fell apart to drug addiction and riots, unable to support it's own ideal society.
Almost three years later Bioshock had itself a sequel. This was the typical drivel produced by the average studio, releasing a product in a hurried and unsuccessful attempt at recreating the booming and unmitigated success of the original. Like so many intellectual products whose appeal is not only the original product itself but the prospects of establishing a series, a pool of preexisting concepts and ideas, all already fully realized, it is easy to make a sequel because it is so much harder to create an original conceptualization of a game that doesn't already have all the groundwork in place. The general appeal of an updated version of an already-known universe is easy to produce and far too easy for audiences to indulge and ask for more of the same, so long as they disguise it as new.
Why do sequels exist? Sure in this modern day our generation needs to be bombarded with constant stimuli to even be bothered to pay attention. We've become saturated in an age where so many parcels of our daily lives are conveyed to us through so easy a means that it takes little effort for us to become upset at anything we encounter that doesn't offer complete and instant gratification. The idea of sequels I'm touching on here isn't exclusive to le cinéma, either, as our entertainment dollars constantly pick and chose through funded popularity what intellectual properties continue to exist. Hollywood and even the video game industry have become obsessed and with and work tirelessly towards rehashing an already existing concept.
With written stories or oral traditions, we see similar motifs and themes persisting throughout each medium: the fall of man, the story of creation, the great flood, the resurrection, they've existed in multitudes of cultures, the stories get updated to reflect modern ideas and cultural habits that persist in the time of each tale's reformation. From the journey of the hero to the constantly repeated morals from fables and nursery-rhymes, the same story may be told, but the matter itself, the subjects, the locations, they all change to cater to a specific culture or time. In the more modern sense of sequels of which I'm trying to lampoon, sequels serve no purpose outside entertainment value. The powerful story involving the rise of a chosen one to triumph over the forces of evil with the help of a wise and sagely old wizard has been once told through King Arthur and his court, aided by Merlin, and again through Harry Potter and his needing to be brought up and taught how to grow into his heroic role, similar to Arthur's training. In modern entertainment we produce sequels not as a spiritual reinterpretation of the previously existing story, but so we can spend more time with the specific characters we've grown to enjoy. We don't create similar stories to recapture the compassion and wonder of the original, we carbon copy the first movie, changing little in terms of characters and overall plot. The audience has grown to expect to see the same people from the first film in strikingly similar situations. We, expecting entertainment, hold film studios to high expectations, and when they let a Bond Girl die, or when Indiana Jones gets married, it destroys our image of the characters, which as Northop Frye might agree, is what we need to get that true romantic experience of the movies: we need stock characters whose future actions are easy to discern through their simple dimensionality.
We have been retelling the same few stories from era to era, but with the advent of modern movies and video games, all we expect from a well-told story is that it would be somehow insulting to the original work if we didn't somehow expand it. No one is clamoring for a Lord of the Flies 2 or a prequel to The Importance of Being Earnest because we can respect the original for itself, without having this knee-jerk reaction to needing to spend more time in that fictional world.
With written stories or oral traditions, we see similar motifs and themes persisting throughout each medium: the fall of man, the story of creation, the great flood, the resurrection, they've existed in multitudes of cultures, the stories get updated to reflect modern ideas and cultural habits that persist in the time of each tale's reformation. From the journey of the hero to the constantly repeated morals from fables and nursery-rhymes, the same story may be told, but the matter itself, the subjects, the locations, they all change to cater to a specific culture or time. In the more modern sense of sequels of which I'm trying to lampoon, sequels serve no purpose outside entertainment value. The powerful story involving the rise of a chosen one to triumph over the forces of evil with the help of a wise and sagely old wizard has been once told through King Arthur and his court, aided by Merlin, and again through Harry Potter and his needing to be brought up and taught how to grow into his heroic role, similar to Arthur's training. In modern entertainment we produce sequels not as a spiritual reinterpretation of the previously existing story, but so we can spend more time with the specific characters we've grown to enjoy. We don't create similar stories to recapture the compassion and wonder of the original, we carbon copy the first movie, changing little in terms of characters and overall plot. The audience has grown to expect to see the same people from the first film in strikingly similar situations. We, expecting entertainment, hold film studios to high expectations, and when they let a Bond Girl die, or when Indiana Jones gets married, it destroys our image of the characters, which as Northop Frye might agree, is what we need to get that true romantic experience of the movies: we need stock characters whose future actions are easy to discern through their simple dimensionality.
We have been retelling the same few stories from era to era, but with the advent of modern movies and video games, all we expect from a well-told story is that it would be somehow insulting to the original work if we didn't somehow expand it. No one is clamoring for a Lord of the Flies 2 or a prequel to The Importance of Being Earnest because we can respect the original for itself, without having this knee-jerk reaction to needing to spend more time in that fictional world.
The King and the Corpse is a wondrous tale that is meant to represent the journey of the soul through life, or more specifically, as the full title reveals, the soul's struggle with good and evil, and it's attempts to understand either. The purpose of king's story in the book is meant to reveal the true nature of life's journey, the corpse flying miraculously back to the tree every time the king attempted to answer a question. Whether or not the king was correct in his answers to the riddles was inconsequential, the spirit within the corpse was imparting a life lesson to the king, the long walk back to the necromancer paralleling the life-long journey that is searching for answers to questions, the king's responses mattered little to the spirit in the corpse because he was testing the king's ability to understand life is meant to be experienced, not to have definitive answers. Yet even in the ambiguity of the corpse's message, I see the moral guidance the story attempts to impart. The king's tale may be a gentle guide to understanding the nature of one's soul and in doing so conjures up several other similarities between itself and other religious theologies at large.
The opening reminds me of the fall of man, the monkey acting outside the expected decorum, not disobeying God but disregarding any royal rules of conduct in sitting on and disrupting the king. The monkey came from the women's apartments, which lends the monkey the ability to become a manifestation of women. The moment of great revealing (although the revelation of the necromancer's intention is, as well) comes when the monkey bites into the fruit, which similar to the Christian creation story, is a nondescript species of fruit. There are also elements of the resurrection, the king freeing the spirits of the grounds, and the necromancer's intention to enslave a newly-risen corpse. All religious allegories deal with man's struggle within and without himself against the state of his soul, each attempting to ingrain morality and life lessons, which is why I think the King and the Corpse is just as much a religious narrative, as it is an allegory for improving one's journey through life itself.
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