moragmacpherson | Bits of Alice meta

Finally caught Alice in Wonderland last night and am trying to figure out if it worked. (I read it as an attempt to finally make Campbell's Hero's Journey work with a sexually mature female in the Hero role - I'm pretty sure it fails at the very end, but it's going to take longer to pull the various threads together) There's a lot more of this meta, but I'm still sorting out some of it, may or may not ever actually make it up here, but a few pieces that I felt like sharing right off the bat.

Attempts at giving the Hero a Woman's Face

First off, they've aged up Alice, which brings them into dangerous territory. Alice is famous as a pre-pubescent female protagonist - and while it's hard for women to pull it off, there are plenty of examples of girls going on the Hero's journey. In general, male storytellers have serious problems with characterization in post-pubescent but pre-menopausal woman - they'll do very well with preadolescent girls - the sexes/genders haven't diverged too far in childhood; and/or they do very well with old women, as the paths converge once again. I'm talking up a divide between male and female that is less precise and separate in real life than it is in this sort of story - but myths - big stories - are about Archetypes, and you can transgress against the Archetypes, but they're still the basic building blocks of This Story - you either accept them or reject them, but there's no denying the existence of them.

Near to birth, near to earth - the borderlands, the extremes, lots more in common with each other than with the vast middle. In Campbell, the middle's where the hero gets lost, and it's sexually mature women that trip up many great male storytellers. It's not a question of talent or cleverness, it's just a lapse in their portfolios - Pratchett's the one who jumps to mind, maybe because I've been thinking in his universe for the last two months, but compare how strong his little girls and old ladies are as characters with how he completely punts on Angua in The Fifth Elephant. He just couldn't figure out what to do with her - Vimes swooped in and took over her story for her. I may have just written a story that attempts to make that twist make some form of sense.

Whedon's made a couple of tries to match up women to the arc - Buffy, of course, but River was trying to own her destiny at the end there - but he does best by his heroines while they're still in their teens, things get a little awkward as they get into their twenties.

Alan Moore deliberately strips Evey not just of her femininity but also of her humanity to make her a hero (this is less clear in the movie than the comic). Valerie's a slightly better example, but she's a peripheral character.

Philip Pullman - ask me tomorrow if Lyra (just barely post-pubescent anyway) works as a Hero, I'll give you a different answer than I did today, so it's a questionable example at best.

Less successful authors wind up writing dudes with breasts - they don't read like women at all - and yeah, I'm looking at you, Frank Miller and Grant Morrison.

Trying to think of a great female storyteller who tried to make a Heroine With a Thousand Faces, but can't think of one off hand - they tell fantastic stories, but not That Story, at least not with a female in the Campbell-Hero role. Haven't read Mists of Avalon, maybe it's there, don't know, could be, but regardless, it would be the exception, not the rule. Feel free to offer other examples if you know them. This Alice is written by a woman but directed by a man (an odd man, but a man all the same), could be an interesting blend.

The Queen of Hearts and Sex
The Red Queen/Queen of Hearts, call her Hearts, that's the name she claims - hedgehog croquet a nod to Baba Yaga, who knows names are important? Are we running a virgin/whore dichotomy here? Her intro would argue for it - the only thing they didn't do to evoke oral sex was whip out a giant cock and stick it in her mouth. Fussy frog footmen initially seem like a British pun, but then she's accusing them of "eating her tarts" as she wipes the "squidberry jelly [jam?]" weeping out of the frog's slit of a mouth and licking it off of her finger, only to flounce off after she orders his head to be cut off, saying she'll eat his young, "she likes tadpoles almost as much as she likes caviar." To top it all off, Hearts flops into a chair and demands a drink so that she can suck on the straw. Anviltastic there, Mr. Burton. Seriously.

Oral sex as a way of controlling the sex act without harnessing the creative power of it? She both makes the rules and is the only one allowed to break them, which she does without thinking. Needlessly cruel, but also whimsically kind. She is sexual, but uses sex as a weapon - a virago. Portrait of the dead king looks remarkably like Henry VIII - is she a gender-reversal of his story? Her sister condemns her to exile - no one will call you friend, but actually, no one does in the first place. This is her tragedy - she is all about earthly pleasures - when did it get corrupted into this twisted thing?

Soundtrack Allusions and Connections

What is the connection between the Knave (starts around 2:15) and Jack Skellington (esp. around 2:40)? Or was Elfman just recycling?

The recent trend in the reluctant hero's theme in E minor (I'm pretty sure it's E minor) - Alice: "Young Alice" (and repeated motif), Buffy Summers: "Sacrifice," the Doctor: "The Doctor's Theme" also bits of it for Rose in "Doomsday," Dean Winchester: "Things I'd Do For My Family" (repeated motif), triumphant versions in Alice, V for Vendetta: "Valerie," (section starting at 3:45 is a melancholy variation, builds to triumphant form around 5:50m and "Evey Reborn" (esp. from 1:35 on). (Actually, the main Alice theme seems to draw a lot from V For Vendetta as well as the Doctor Who's All the Strange, Strange Creatures)And isn't that funny: so many of the characters involved are attempts (with varying degrees of success) to create a sexually mature female Hero to fit Campbell's arc.

Also quite a bit of pulling from the Frodo themes from LotR, but I'm not going to get into that one.