Happy Halloween!
Hope you have all enjoyed your day. We paid Halloween more attention than usual… decorated a little bit, wore something colourful (but not spooky or dressy), and had a family Halloween dinner. We have a ceramic pumpkin from Aldi’s, in which we burned cinnamon and orange tealights. We had no guisers and are having to eat all the sweets ourselves. That’s why I suggested Mum get monkey nuts and apples, but it went in one ear and out the other.
TV was kind of boring… Harry Potter was on, but it was the dull, dark one where the Ministry of Magic takes over Hogwarts. Hermione in the book is one thing, but I never liked the one in the film. Mum said she’s never been keen on either her or Harry, but we both like Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint). While watching, I kept considering the words of a friend who has noticed a particular trend in books and films… people get what is considered their just deserts, no matter who else is hurt along the way.
If we take Harry Potter…. we don’t want Voldemort to win, but, as far as I could make out from the film (not having read the book), Harry is supposed to have looked into his mind and understands something about the way Voldemort thinks. And, I suppose, he’s strong enough to reject Voldemort’s way of thinking, otherwise he would become like Voldemort himself. At one point he tells Voldemort something like: “You will never have any friends or love. And I feel sorry for you.”
I’ve seen that kind of comment before, coming from the good guy and directed at the bad one… but it has never struck me as “I really am sorry for you”… but more as “you’re a bad guy to think that way, and you deserve to be lonely. We will leave you to your misery, and be happy that things have worked out better for us.”
When I was younger, I was totally on board with evil getting his just deserts, but I’m increasingly uncomfortable with these stories… both old and new. I don’t want evil to win, or the (relatively) innocent to lose, but in some stories it seems that even marginally weak characters end up with some quite nasty things happening to them. “Well, he wasn’t worth that much to us; it doesn’t matter if the dinosaur eats him! Serves him right for spilling Hero’s coffee and then giving him the wrong change.”
Of course, it’s the story itself that is ruthless. Probably Hero stands helplessly out of reach, watching with sadness… and then he shrugs, and turns away, and gets on with saving the people he actually cares about, including some cross and outspoken female. But it still means the audience is supposed to take satisfaction from the fact that Mean Coffee Man is getting paid back for having got out of the wrong side of bed that morning.
Another thing I’ve observed is that strong and decisive qualities triumph in films, whereas gentler, more anxious souls tend to be treated with contempt. Particularly so in women. Even nicer women turn out to have a soul of steel or a black belt in judo! Or they’re being heralded as some mother protecting her children, in the face of whose fury any childless person (male or female) is as nothing.
Hmm… me not relating, right at the moment.
November 1, 2009 at 7:29 pm
I think that is why my favourite movies from childhood were the Star Wars movies and the Dark Crystal. The bad characters were very bad…but it was for a reason, and the good people had genuine pity. In the end the evil people were allowed to be redeemed and welcomed back.
I’ve never seen the “you’re evil so you get waht you deserve” to be fair. Yes sometimes it’s satisfying and feels good to say, but in the end it tends to be how someone ended up that way anyways. I like characters who remain good and don’t sink to their level to solve things. I know it’s rather idealistic and probably not the way it would go in real life…but hey – I’m overly optimistic and tend to look for the redeeming parts in people.
We had more children than usual at our door this year. I still ahve candy leftover but this year I bought stuff I like so it’s great. Mmmm…sour candies and fizzy candies. Yum.
November 2, 2009 at 9:33 pm
“TV was kind of boring…”
Actually, I had meant to blog that Bong Joon-ho’s The Host was on Channel 4 after midnight. It’s one of my favourite films of the past few years. Although I suppose that watching it in the small hours of the morning with advert breaks is hardly for the best.
“whereas gentler, more anxious souls tend to be treated with contempt. Particularly so in women. ”
Amelie’s a nice antidote to that.
November 9, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Interesting theory there…I’ve not really thought too much about it before, even though I studied theatre/film for a while… I’ve read some books where the “weaker” characters triumph over the “stronger” ones, but these stories are normally older books – Dickens etc…and not as much fantasy-based. But then again (I may get my head bitten off here by some), in the Twilight series, Bella is considered the “weak” character…and in the end, she finally gets what she wants, but she has to go through a lot to get to that point. If you haven’t read the books, I’d recommend them…but it just feels a bit like the media portrays the stereotypical reader of Twilight, and the film’s fan-base, as teenage girls…but I really disagree with this!! How will they transfer the scenes in the last book into the film I wonder…it gets a bit exotic…haha! Women in fiction seem to be getting stronger and more firm-willed…it’s great to read
November 12, 2009 at 12:35 am
Thanks for the comments; sorry I was slow getting back to this!
I loved Dark Crystal; watched it a couple of times. Would probably have seen it more, but the video we bought back then had no captions. Star Wars I’ve been more iffy about, but I like the more recent ones.
I watched Amelie once; at the moment I can only remember something about chocolates and photographs. It might be worth watching again.
I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot while watching TV recently; films do handle it in different ways; I think it could be some of the more mindless adventure films that annoyed me, but even there we’ll find some depth and the odd touching moment.
Recently watched Miss Congeniality; Sandra Bullock as a tough FBI woman under cover in a beauty pageant. She starts out being tough and plain-speaking, but even then probably wasn’t as bad as some women in real life! But I like the fact that she ends up realizing the girls in the beauty contest are just ordinary human beings… no worse or better than anyone else.