From Oz to Outer Space -- Dorothy is still The One

According to the Wachowskis' WSJ interview, the heroine of Jupiter Ascending is supposed to be a new, improved version of Dorothy Gale:

“And then ‘The Wizard of Oz’ was on television,” continues Lana. “I remember having a conversation with Andy about how there’s something missing from my experience in ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ Dorothy is pretty much the same at the end as she is at the beginning. Whereas Odysseus goes through such an epic shift in his identity.”

So Jupiter Jones (Ms. Kunis’ character) has a few things in common with Dorothy Gale from “Wizard of Oz.”

“That’s why she has the blue and white gingham on when [Jupiter and Mr. Tatum’s character, Caine] first meet,” Lana says. Together they go on a wild, otherworldly adventure. Jupiter Jones returns not only with a new appreciation of her life at home but with greater confidence and power.

The Wachowskis even set up Mr. Tatum’s part-canine role as a sort of Toto-like traveling companion.

Their claim that Jupiter Ascending is a sort of feminist, empowered remake of The Wizard of Oz is a very curious one, because one consistent complaint about this movie is that Mila Kunis' character is simply a passive vessel, the conitinuous recipient of infodumps, rescues, and grand destinies without having her choices affect the outcome of the plot -- or many choices at all, really. Whereas Dorothy sets everything in motion by being willing to risk everything and run away to save the life of her dog Toto from a malicious neighbor, and to use this occasion as the stepping stone to the new life she's always dreamed of, in the childish faith that a new location will magically solve all her problems -- the Myth of the Frontier, subverted.

And while she has no control over the tornado that transports her or the way that a tyrant is killed in the process, she quickly steps up to the challenges presented by this new place, and at every step of the way her choices forward the action of the story -- she rescues the Scarecrow and then the Tin Man from their own circumstantial traps, and finally the Cowardly Lion by making the latter face the consequences of his bullying bluster, in the course of her quest.

 

Jupiter dreams of riches and waits for rescue, while Dorothy dreamed of freedom,
sought her fortune, gave voice to the voiceless and stood up for the small --
just like that other young witch in white and blue, Tiffany Aching...

 

So it's only turnabout as in fair play, or karma manifesting exceedingly quickly, when her companions are later able to rescue her from the Wicked Witch's vengeance -- and even there, it's her quick-thinking action to save her friend's live that saves the day, even if it's only coincidence that she simultaneously slays her nemesis, a mirroring of her completely-accidental deed at the beginning that shows how Dorothy has leveled-up as a hero, while still keeping her soul as an essentially kind-hearted and non-violent protector of the helpless intact.

And the final choices are also hers -- to continue to demand justice from a "benevolent dictator" who turns out to be a living embodiment of the Peter Principle, promoted infinitely far beyond his ability, both unable and unwilling to dismount the tiger of government (although it isn't explicitly stated, there is a strong hint that the Wizard's facade of magical power is what kept the Bad Guys at bay before Dorothy's arrival, and equally implicit that Glinda was perfectly well aware it was only illusion all along!)

And her role as protector -- first of Toto, then the Scarecrow, and by extension of the entire magical realm -- is matched by her role as liberator -- again, first of her own pet, in a confused and half-deliberate way as the little dog escapes back to her and they run away together, then of Munchkinland in a completely accidental way, and then with increasing volition of others, strangers who ask for her help -- or don't, because they can't, either physically or otherwise prevented from appealing for rescue from their situations by disability, or the social conventions that insist that men Lions must be violent and aggressive, or world leaders all-knowing and all-competent, and certainly never asking for help from a ragtag bunch of kids and creatures!

So, too, the Wizard is freed from the trap of his throne, and literally takes flight to a new life, by the help of Dorothy and her dog-daemon, while she in turn rejects any temptation to take over herself, to become the new ruler and all the risks thereof -- Dorothy as Galadriel! -- which were implicit in that first question, "Are you a Good Witch, or a Bad Witch?" (And yet, even the Winged Monkeys and the army of the West weren't evil, just -- quite literally -- misguided!)

Her quest remains the same -- and yet, by the end, even that choice to return to her loved ones is no longer simple and involves desperate heartbreak, tearing her between her old world and the new one she did not choose to enter, but did choose to help, all the same. (And isn't this the choice we all have to make? None of us chooses to be born, or how we are made, but we can either choose to help others, or to control them, in so far as we are able.)

So Dorothy was, for her time, a shockingly empowered heroine -- the Hero of her own story, with her own Journey, just as she was in the original books by L. Frank Baum, although the 1939 film undercut their fantastical reality with the "all just a dream" coda, even as the Tin Man's truly Grimm-dark pre-transhumanist tragedy was left out. (Although changing him from a cyborg yearning for lost human emotion to a robot yearning like Star Trek's Data for feelings he doesn't think himself capable of, was also dramatically very effective.)

But sadly, she seems to be a shockingly-empowered heroine for our time as well, with passive MacGuffin girls offered as substitutes today, whether they are "strong female characters" who wield swords like Mia Wasikowska's Alice in the recent Tim Burton-and-Johnny-Depp remake -- but are still the Pawns of Destiny, mere Chosen Ones who have no say in their own choosing -- or screaming, flailing traditionalists like Mila Kunis doing her best Fay Wray impersonation as Jupiter Jones, a passive vessel for others to pour information into, carry about, and try to impregnate or shatter as though she were only a pretty but fragile pitcher.

It's classic Campbellian nonsense, in which the "heroine" is simply a living, breathing, trophy cup for the real hero of the story -- even if she's given a bit of sassy banter or a moment of badass against sufficiently low-level baddies, she will always be trumped by the Generic Young(ish) White Guy and cannot be allowed to either kick his ass (physically or intellectually) or do any rescuing of her own, before surrendering to his charms.

It is particularly sad that the Wachowskis of all directors have fallen to such reactionary gender roles, when one of the particularly charming aspects of their breakout hit was the way that Trinity held her own as a force to be reckoned with, as heroines heretofore had not been shown to do on the big screen in Hollywood movies -- and the role-reversed Sleeping Beauty moment at the end where she played The Price, to bookend her role-reversed White Rabbit personification at the beginning.

(Alas, those of us who hoped for even more and better subversion of old tropes --  were rewarded for our long wait by a Trinity repeatedly damseled and then fridged instead, while the fate of the world came down as always to two ordinary white guys angsting athletically at each other.)

And they certainly deserve full marks for ripping out the egregious, exploitative, Frank Miller-esque conventionially-bourgeois sexism in Alan Moore's V for Vendetta, by giving Evey both a job beyond "whore" and a backstory that tied neatly into her on-screen choices, and replacing the antihero's slut-shaming monologue portraying Justice as a cheating girlfriend with a far superior speech mourning her as an absent goddess-in-exile -- for all its multiple issues including but not limited to a facile treatment of violence and political oppression (problems present in the source material), their adaptation had a stronger moral centre and lacked the sick-making equation of villainy with unconventional sexual activity between consenting adults as much as with sexual abuse in Moore's original story, along with a generally dim editorial view of female sexuality and a creepy male-gaze voyeurism in David Lloyd's art to go with the contempt for feminine males and BDSM -- all of which undercut Evey as the central character in the story. These changes made for a far less alienating experience that did not reinforce the unthinking patriarchal conventions of pop culture, and even the long-dead narrator of the flashback sequence was given a role of greater autonomy and influence, before the Orwellian takeover.

But Dorothy, in both 1900 novel and 1939 movie, changes the strange new place she finds herself in, for the better, by her own deliberate deeds, after having made the choice to change her own life back in our dimension, and before being swept away by the tornado -- a perfect metaphor for this reality in which our own decisions are often overturned or made meaningless by events in the wider world around us, be they natural disasters or acts of warfare or the small personal catastrophes of family tragedies from disease or car accident or some combination of external and internal forces such as the recent Depression, Prohibition, Dust Bowl and resultant job losses, all mirrored by similar events elsewhere in the world, exacerbated in Europe by the greater impact of WWI.

She doesn't get forced into a new setting she had no desire to see -- she specifically gets, in the movie, her wish-come-true -- to see the "Other Side of the Rainbow" she had longed for in the famous song -- and learns by experience that merely travelling to a glamourous new setting doesn't of itself magically fix your life, that the same old problems of lack of autonomy and hostility and an uncaring society too busy dealing with all their own worries and issues to take time for yours will still afflict you, until you choose to put yourself forward and make yourself heard! And so she does, and in saving herself, saves the Land of Oz as well.

It seems, on the surface, silly to call Dorothy Gale as embodied by Judy Garland a feminist icon, particularly given Garland's own unhappy fate in reality -- but the question of how many Hero's Journey stories with a heroine at their centre there were in pop culture in 1939 is sadly not irrelevant in 2015, when Jupiter Jones' sole power is Extreme Good Luck, not Wisdom ("a Brain") or Empathy ("a Heart") or Courage ("the Nerve") -- and that includes the luck to be born Disney-Princess-pretty.

But the chronic "PPP" or "passive protagonist problem" is only exacerbated in stories about princesses. The destined "Chosen One" narrative takes away autonomy, sacrifices the specialness of people doing their own choosing, whether boy or girl, man or woman. The only way to deal with it is to subvert it, by putting a twist in it so that the protagonist must earn that unreasonable elevation over everyone else -- as Dorothy must grow into the Ruby Slippers she won by coincidence and chance, by walking every step of the Spiral Path she starts out so uncertainly, and meeting every challenge head-on no matter how frightened, reluctant, or unworthy she feels.

She embodies "Imposter Syndrome" perfectly in the beginning, but by the end of the story a spiteful neighbor holds no terror for her, because she's faced much worse on the other side -- and according to the older spiritual traditions of shamanism, the fact that it takes place in a dream-world takes nothing from its "reality" as an adventure, for such other planes can only be accessed by dreaming. Whether one believes such things literally or not, it is certainly legitimate to interpret the story of The Wizard of Oz in such light, and overcome the "only a dream" disappointment factor that way.

But Jupiter Jones only wants a better life, without being willing to take any risks or chances to make it happen -- she doesn't run away, she is captured, then rescued, recaptured, re-rescued, on and on and on, with all her own choices being bad ones that the virile wolf-man must save her from yet again.

Contrast that with the way that Dorothy saves Toto, over and over, protecting him from a harsh outside world that doesn't treat small creatures well, no matter how brave they may be -- there's no comparison! Stonewalled by uncaring impersonal rules at first, she talks her way in, awakening empathy in the gatekeeper with her sad story like a latter-day Orpheus -- though in this tale she is also Euridice rescuing herself, and her backwards-looking at the end doesn't trap her in the Underworld. No such Gordian solution is employed by Jupiter in the face of Kafkaesque bureacracy, just tame obedience to the rules -- a fitting state of compliance for a passive protagonist, pushed about by greater forces, but not a patch on Dorothy Gale!

It's signficant that the principle imagery that the directors and studio have chosen to represent their film centres, not Kunis, but Channing Tatum -- a clear sign that whatever the title and the ostensible plot, this is a story about male heroism, and that of the most conventional sort.

For Tatum's Cane Wise isn't a Fragile Trickster like Toto -- who, despite being an actual dog in the original story, advances the plot by his own intelligence and actions, imprudent as they may sometimes prove when he attempts to defend his home and mistress against an aggressive neighbor.

He sneakily escapes being taken to the pound all by himself making his own way back to Dorothy, leads her into danger after danger by his curiosity and courage, and in the end solves the mystery and saves the day by having no more reverence for political power or supernatural authority than a cat looking at a king -- or an archbishop!

 "Though (s)he be but little, (s)he is fierce" and it isn't really a stretch to see "your little dog too" not simply as Dorothy's familiar, showing her a true witch if as yet unaware of her nature -- I don't know if Baum was familiar himself enough with classical mythology to know that black dogs, not cats, were the animals originally associated with witchcraft as the creatures most sacred to Hekate, but if not it was a singular coincidence -- but, retroactively, as her "daemon," the spirit-animals given physical in Phillip Pullman's Golden Compass series.

It is entirely possible that consciously or not, Pullman was himself influenced by The Wizard of Oz, since it's a minor plot point in those books that one's daemon is usually of the opposite sex, which in turn indicates one's orientation, as well as reflecting humans' inner selves. So in this Jungian-influenced interpretation, Toto as a small-but-courageous male dog who consistently rushes ahead and boldly confronts hazards known and unknown would be the literal embodiment of Dorothy's anima, the part of her that yearns for adventure and wants to resist unjust authority, but which her conscious self, seeing herself as "small and meek," doesn't dare to take.

When we first meet her, that is.

By the end of the story, she boldly confronts the Wizard, no longer restrains Toto -- from whom she has been separated, in a significant twist, and in this interpretation of Toto as familiar and spirit animal (and a familiar was always traditionally understood as carrying in some mystical sense the witch or wizard's consciousness far afield) the imagery is not so much Dorothy damselled in the power of the wicked queen, waiting for the menfolk to rescue her, but Dorothy divided against herself, her conscious self, conditioned by society to be a Good Girl and obey authority, helpless against the larger-than-life embodiment of said social authority in her "real" life -- until her subconscious and instinctive side, now truly empowered by the Virtues of Intellect, Empathy, and Courage that she has unlocked, one by one, in her Quest, comes to release her from the shackles of convention and challenge her to her greatest deed yet -- fighting to defend herself at last, but not simply herself!

Remember, in the 1939 movie, all of this adventure is taking place inside her mind! So this is not an unreasonable interpretation, retroactively imposed on the film, to see it as part of the then-newly-resurgent tradition of allegorical, symbolist Mystery and Miracle plays, most notably Everyman, which gave its name to the famous early 20th-century "library" of reprinted affordable international classics, and evoked by T.S. Eliot in 1935's Murder in the Cathedral.

(Remember that The Wizard of Oz, as an instant intergenerational literary hit -- long before Harry Potter! -- went through decades of successful presentations on stage across America, before ever being adapted for the screen, and as such could not help but be influenced by contemporary theatrical movements -- and note that contemporary performances of Everyman were genderswapped, casting a woman in the role of Universal Human struggling with the effects of a lifetime of apathy and self-indulgence now called upon to face the universal human condition of Mortality. The time was ripe for a Heroine's Journey, in other words, even if it would be many years before universal suffrage was achieved and true equality still a distant dream.)

So when Toto is left behind with the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion after Dorothy is carried off to the Witch's castle, it is the little dog who galvanizes them into action as they dither, paralyzed by the greater number of enemies in front of them -- it is his brash attempt to rush into battle, unable to be shushed by the other, more rational personas, that attracts the attention of hostile forces and compells them to rise in turn to the occasion.

And, of course, the secret of their character arcs is that they, too, like Dorothy, possessed their longed-for qualities all along, but couldn't recognize them until others also saw them for who they are -- a sort of fractal, even kaleidescopic mirroring of the main storyline.

Which makes perfect sense, in light of their roles as embodiments of her own good qualities, here envisioned as the strong, good, yet flawed men in her own extended family, who are not as competent as her Aunt, though clever enough to invent useful things, nor brave enough to defend her from Authority, though courageous enough to defend her from purely physical hazards. (Remember, too, that we first meet Dorothy doing something daring and stupid of the sort that is usually the province of little boys in fiction -- trying a circus act around big fierce animals that she doesn't respect enough for her own safety!) Thus they must first be freed by her and instructed by her as the adventuring party's leader, before they can assist her -- logically enough.

But Jupiter Jones is only allowed to be pushed about by the men in her world -- and there is something unspeakably icky in the choice of circumstances that replaces the whirlwind which sweeps her from her Midwestern daily life, both in the fact that she is reduced to her body as her greatest value (and no, you cannot just walk in and sell your eggs like that, as if you were hocking a guitar!) not simply in her own mind (76 years after Dorothy ran away to seek her fortune!) or her brutish cousin's, but by the narrative itself, where it is her genes that make her a potential challenger to the established authorities, not the fact that her home was accidentally weaponized in such a way that the credit seemed to be legitimately hers (and in the context of fairy-tales, a Baba Yaga being crushed by a flying house steered by the questing Orphan Girl makes perfect sense) and thus her real value consists in her being married off for her inheritance, an interstellar Sansa Stark with better luck in paladins.

Indeed, I wonder if Baum himself wasn't influenced by the Russian fairy tale "Vasilisa the Beautiful and Baba Yaga," in which the Cinderella-like heroine is sent off on an impossible quest by her wicked Stepmother -- ordered to bring back fire from the infamous Witch's own hearth -- receives help from a Good Witch (for in this story the Crone though dangerous and frightening is not the Bad Guy) and after passing the tests of her apprenticeship, returns home with the exact thing she was sent to bring back -- which, like Medusa's head, destroys the tyrants who sent her to an intended doom.

And that mythological parallel isn't a stretch, because Baba Yaga sends her home with coals in a skull -- there had already been remixing of stories across international and cultural boundaries, by the time the "traditional" tales were collected and published in the 19th century by the likes of Andrew Lang and Ivan Bilibin and Joseph Jacobs.

The honest, innocent girl oppressed by bullies with greater social stature, her older male relative unable or unwilling to protect her from them, protected only by the memories of her dead mother, sent by the local legal authority to retrieve something from a powerful sorceress, a helpful witch, the element of fire and the symbolism of the broom-turned-torch, and especially the inadvertent slaying of her oppressor by a karmic blow -- all of these fit so well when the two stories are superimposed that I would be more surprised if it wasn't the case that Baum was familiar with the Russian tale, and likewise at least some of the screenwriters for the movie.

So no, I don't accept Jupiter Jones as a new-and-improved Dorothy Gale, because a Hero needs to do things, not be a parcel shuttled from one location to another by forces outside her control, a Hero has to walk her own path, make her own friends by saving her own allies, choose things because she has goals of her own -- the Dorothy who mindfully and with sadness refuses to take the Wizard's throne at the end but to return to her kindly-if-imperfect adoptive family is not the same Dorothy who, having tasted a wider, stranger world for the first time, only fearfully longs to scuttle back to safety in the beginning.

And, just as critically, not the naive and reckless youth who rushed off without any thought or foresight into the outside world the same way she tried to tightrope-walk the hog pen fence. She goes back only after having gained knowledge of many kinds in the Otherworld, and so is far better prepared to face the future than she was before her Ordeal -- the essence of the Hero that Campbell insisted on defining as quintessentially male!

Jupiter, on the other hand, is exactly the Campbellian "heroine," the trophy that is the Hero's reward and whose womb symbolizes the "cup of wisdom" -- a far more secondary character than even the Princess of Mars whose erasure from the title of her own story was the first harbinger of a film doomed by its transformation from a story about a man who must save himself and the strange new world he finds himself in by his wits and empathy as much as his physical abilities and courage, adapted by a clueless director convinced that no "geek girls" exist and no male science fiction fans are interested in sexy alien warrior princesses by legendary genre authors, but that he could trick audiences into paying big money to uncover the "mystery" behind the generic John Carter.

(Spoiler: he couldn't. That's another entry in the series of mismanaged "epic" adaptations to consider in light of Exodus: Gods & Kings, Lone Ranger, The Spirit and all the rest.)

It's interesting to think that a "boy's own adventure" novel written more than a century ago, which does very much follow the Campbellian pattern of a male Hero going into a dangerous Otherworld, facing various dangers and trials to win the right of leadership and the hand of the Princess who symbolizes Knowledge, nevertheless had a more proactive heroine than Andrew Stanton was willing to acknowledge.

Heroines, rather, since there are really two Martian princesses in Edgar Rice Burroughs' book -- one red, John Carter's love interest Dejah Thoris -- the environmental scientist who boasts of her descent from the builder of the first aqueduct! -- and one green, the despised "throwback" Sola -- solitary, or solace? both, rather -- a teenager in Martian terms, who rebels against her harsh Spartan upbringing to help strangers and even enemies in need. And although, because the story is told first-person, it cannot technically pass the Bechdel test, it nonetheless hinges upon friendship between women, as well as enmity between women, occasioned by but not dependent on their shared acquaintance with the men of this interplanetary bromance.

For all the swashbuckling and high adventure of A Princess of Mars, it's the protagonist's empathy and kindness towards others that enables him to save the world -- but he is merely the catalyst, and his efforts would all come to nothing, were it not for the sisterhood expressed in these lines!

"Yes," cried Dejah Thoris, "come with us, Sola, you will be better off among the red men of Helium than you are here, and I can promise you not only a home with us, but the love and affection your nature craves and which must always be denied you by the customs of your own race. Come with us, Sola; we might go without you, but your fate would be terrible if they thought you had connived to aid us. I know that even that fear would not tempt you to interfere in our escape, but we want you with us, we want you to come to a land of sunshine and happiness, amongst a people who know the meaning of love, of sympathy, and of gratitude. Say that you will, Sola; tell me that you will."

No women in this tale fight each other over jealousy for a man -- even though John Carter is afraid it will happen, at first! -- there's no love triangle, only interlocking triangles of friendship, kinship and alliegance. The women who do so, are motivated by opposed worldviews and contrasting ideologies of what a superior species looks like, and it's a daughter's love for her lost mother that spurs her to help overthrow her callous social order.

But this wasn't important to a director who thinks that no women love science fiction and no men care about women, regardless of the fact that A Princess of Mars was a classic, homaged in 2010's YA novel A Wizard of Mars by no less than Diane Duane -- who has also written television scripts asl well as respected tie-in novels for Star Trek and Spider-man.

And so Dejah Thoris' original storyline, in which she meets John Carter after her scientific mission is shot down by one of several rival nations, grows to respect, then love him only after much time spent together in which they fumble up against their respective cultural barriers repeatedly, and her own free choice to marry the heir of another enemy city-state against her father's will is made from political expedience and an earnest desire to spare her beloved people further horrors of war -- and this only because she believes her True Love to be dead, and worst of all was never quite sure that he was as serious about her as she was about him, because he never proposed to her properly,  as she had been raised to think of such things -- is thrown out for the tired old "runaway princess trying to escape an arranged marriage forced on her by her father, gets into trouble and has to be rescued."

Edgar Rice Burroughs was able to imagine a royal heir working as a civil servant in a highly technical field, falling afoul of enemy military and ending up a POW in the line of this civilian duty, then going against king and country to make a self-sacrificial choice in order to bring about peace in the strength of individual conscience, who just happens to be a woman, and thus a Princess -- in 1917!

Which brings us back around to the lamentable fact that it's now almost a hundred years later, a hundred and fifteen years after we met the Witches of Oz, and our media trendsetters cannot imagine as much.

It is a lovely bit of poetic justice that Stanton's recasting of A Princess of Mars into the modern macho Campbellian paradigm -- under the supposed reason that this was the only way to make it profitable or attractive to modern audiences! -- failed so heartily at either.

(It probably didn't help that the beloved original was strongly homosocial, and with unmistakeably homoerotic overtones, in its depiction of the growing affection between John Carter and the valiant men of Mars he comes to see as friends, no matter what colour nor how many limbs they have -- while they're all running around "stark bollock naked" except for their regionally-distinctive jewelry and sword belts. I truly think it's unfilmable, so long as we remain as prudish a society as the Victorians he left behind on Terra.)

But while John Carter's quest to first get his two friends out of immediate danger and then marry his beloved once they've found safety with her people is the primary story in the book that spurs all the swashbuckling action, the secondary plot -- which is the major personal conflict, because the meet-cute of the offended princess and the confused stranger is never portrayed as having any real doubt of its resolution -- is whether or not the great chieftain's lost daughter will ever be able to recover her birthright, and avenge her mother, and thus change the customs of their society which make her the equivalent of a bastard, because she knows who her father was.

That's the suspenseful thread, the question of will Sola's story end in tragedy, or triumph; will Tars Tarkas' inner decency win out over the Spartan rigors of his culture, which elected to stamp out all gentler emotions as weakness in the face of looming environmental collapse, to better aid their survival -- or will he continue to be the loyal, dutiful officer of the corrupt king who murdered his secret wife, never learning their child survived?

Far from being a stock hero, John Carter -- by preaching a doctrine of kindness and compassion to people and domesticated animals alike as both compatible with a warrior ethos and the key to species survival, combined with a recognition that all sentient races must work together in the face of inexorable environmental change, instead of fighting over the scraps as their world dies around them -- is the radical outsider who threatens to disrupt Martian society completely. It's a weirdly subversive take on the "boy's own adventure" genre, and if it isn't progressive by the highest ideals of the early 21st century, it's amazingly so for the early 20th -- and a far sight better than most of what genre entertainment is put out by Hollywood today.

A significant part of John Carter's adventures consist of walking around the countryside, meeting people, and talking to them before leaving peacefully to continue on his journey with their generous assistance. These people just happen to be the nation at war with his beloved's homeland -- so what? They're advanced aliens who live for centuries, who look different to him -- so what? And so, when the grand battles come, when characters are at risk, and even when "Redshirts" are killed, the emotional heft of these situations is earned. John Carter grows, learns, and changes, and so is able to help change the new world of his rebirth for the better.

But most pertinent is the fact that both princesses in the 1917 novel -- the acknowledged and the hidden -- had more agency, more intelligence, and more personality than the nominal heroine of this planetary romance from 2015.

And it is also relevant that in both the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie and the 1900 novel it's based on, Dorothy's choice is not between being a "good girl" or a woman of power, but what sort of witch she chooses to be -- how she will wield that power, if she is not to be merely a pawn.

All too often in modern media, the alternatives are framed as women wielding power is automatically bad, while men wielding power may be good or bad -- and the more traditionally "manly" they are, the better, with Jupiter Ascending being no different, the villainous Abrasax princes depicted as fey, glamorous and effete in a homophobia reviewers tiptoe around with words like "campy" and "outrageous" -- in stark contrast to the unadorned honest muscularity of the warrior heroes who protect Jupiter. Prettiness is (perhaps) appropriate for women, never for men -- and I acknowledge how strange this apparent embrace of strict traditional gender roles is given the directors' own experiences, but people are full of internalized contradictions.

So there's something else terribly subversive in the original Oz stories having a traditional ugly and wicked Witch straight from the gloomy Grimm forests of fairy tale, confronted by a beautiful and sparkly magical woman who is not a Fairy Godmother as one would expect but also a Witch -- declaring, again, that the crucial difference between them is not what they are, but what they do with their abilities.

(Jupiter Ascending notably reverses this, with Kunis' Dorothy-substitute being told that it's her innate, unchosen Chosen One status that matters, not her actions.)

Thus, while on the surface it seems very conventional to show the wicked Witch as green and ugly, the Good one as pink and pretty, it is a little more complex than that, and highly symbolic -- cruelty, greed and oppression as hideous and not at all glamourous, while gentleness, kindness, and refusal to control others as shiningly beautiful and, paradoxically, stronger. It was a radical statement in 1939, and it remains such today.

Almost as radical, and equally sad to say so, as depicting the contest between good and evil inclinations with two older women, and a younger woman the soul pulled between them.

As an externalizing of the personal journey of an individual of good will from immaturity to awakened adulthood, from uninformed naivete and impulsiveness to self-aware competence and autonomy, Glinda's frustrating refusal to solve Dorothy's problems for her "by magic" but insisting that she learn to stand up for herself and others first (while keeping her from getting into serious trouble behind the scenes) is contrasted with the Witch of the West's demands that Dorothy simply give up her new-found powers and submit to her authority -- which she does, or tries to, but it is not so easy to give up one's will, fortunately!

Really quite grim imagery for a kids' movie -- but not so grim as the real 1930's

And as a social fable, The Wizard of Oz expresses the dream that the pomp, circumstance and bombast of oppressive regimes is both ugly and empty, a brittle shell that crumbles when resisted by concerted efforts of people all very different as individuals but united in good will, which was a message timely but too late in 1939 -- and yet, never too late, always timely, and blending seamlessly into the theme of Dorothy's personal growth.

Because there are always people in positions of power trying to convince the younger, the "small and meek" to give up control of their life's journey to tyrants, and it's always been the easy path -- you can be a Munchkin, living in relative prosperity so long as you keep your head down, or you can be a soldier guarding the castle, or even an elite Winged Monkey, and no one will dare bother you -- and no one will come to your rescue from on high, except yourself.

For Hekate's other chief symbol after her black dog, is the blazing torch -- if it's a coincidence and not a deliberate classical mythical reference that the heroine of Wizard of Oz must take the extinguished torch of her nemesis to prove her victory, it's an astonishing one -- and the climate in 1939 was not hospitable to the idea of feminine power or individual autonomy combined with an empathic care for others, whether they were part of your own group or strangers.

A worldview celebrating a particular definition of strength as masculine, violent, miliatristic and intolerant of difference and physical weakness or disability was then ascendant, and the choice to release a silly, light-hearted, family movie based on a childrens' book, showing a young girl triumphing over worldly power with the help of a motley band of outcasts even more damaged and vulnerable than she, was a statement that struck a chord deeper than we have ever been able to explain, then or since.

Was there a deliberate intention to make the familiar heroine -- beloved for almost forty years already -- into an anti-Imperialist symbol, a sort of rebel young Liberty, putting out the torch whose promises the elder generation had failed to uphold in a time of increased misery and repression? Hard to say, if the apparent challenge to an America then flirting hard with fascism is only sharp in the mirror of hindsight.

But the symbolism is there, layer upon layer added by the generations of our encounter with it, even as the 1939 film added the resonance of WWI and Flanders Field to Baum's original image of the Poppies that had signified in 1900 only the same sort of dangerously-benign-seeming distractions as Odysseus encountered in the land of the Lotos-Eaters -- the Odyssey being the other influence the Wachowskis cite, as a superior protagonist to Dorothy.

 

But Odysseus though he does not change much if at all in his wanderings, returned home to do battle and take up his old role as king of Ithaca, and Jupiter Jones -- though framed and lit to look like Katniss awaiting her turn in the arena -- does not return from her journey either the warrior or the rightful sovereign taking battle to the usurping foe.

It seems a smirking joke, to proclaim her superior to Dorothy and equal to Odysseus, when she spends so much of her time falling, screaming, and being rescued like a luckier Gwen Stacy by a high-tech Peter Parker -- or Perseus, with rocket boots in place of winged sandals, and the allusion is made clearly deliberate by the shot of a spaceship with Cellini's famous statue as its figurehead.

 

But the old fairy tale made the poor stepdaughter into a Perseus in her own right, and the new one carried on that theme with its own twists -- but there is a reason that the promotional materials showcase Channing Tatum, and not Mila Kunis, and that is because they only reflect the truth. The old Dorothy won her magic shoes in battle, first by accident and then earning them in actuality -- the new, 21st century Dorothy gets them as a present for surviving a series of ex machina rescues and keeping her mouth shut, instead of bringing back her new insights to tell her people, as the old one did.

 

The old story might have been named The Wizard of Oz -- but it was about Dorothy the heroine's quest to discover him in more than once sense, and though this new fantasy is titled Jupiter Ascending, it's just as misleading and twice as reactionary in its gender politics. But I suppose it wouldn't have made a difference if it was called Caine Wise Flies To Her Rescue, in the end.

Not "Someday My Prince Will Come"

 

Exodus: Gods & Kings recreated nothing -- so what was it doing instead?

To anyone with at least a 5th-grader's enthusiastic appreciation for Ancient Egyptian culture, the oft-repeated claims that at least Ridley Scott and his production team put a lot of effort into recreating the splendour of the New Kingdom on the big screen are simply laughable.

From the very first publicity stills and trailer footage showing horseback riders (!) in full armour (!!) waving big phallic swords (!!!) at each other in what was supposed to be a reenactment of the Battle of Kadesh, this was a facepalm-worthy notion.

Egyptian armies wore short kilts and heavy sandals, not full-coverage mail with Greek-style greaves and breastplates! We know this because they made lots of pictures and dioramas of their armies.
Where were the khopesh blades, those distinctive curved weapons that practically defined Egyptian warfare? Why were the Egyptians and Hittites dressed like Crusaders of several thousand years later, and how were they using military technology -- cavalry saddles -- and techniques -- fighting from horseback -- that wouldn't be developed for almost a millenium (and far to the north, not arriving in Egypt until much later) in the first place? In short: WTF, Ridley Scott? Who are you trying to fool here?

Yes, I know that Scott found a tame Egyptologist to claim that mounted cavalry was A Thing then, if somewhat exaggerated in number for the movie -- to which all I can say is, Citation Needed! and also No.

This is, in terms of relative absurdity, rather like having Hawker Harriers at the Battle of Britain. It completely breaks the suspension of disbelief for anyone who has the slightest familiarity with ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern art or the history of equitation -- but then everything shown in the first fifteen minutes was so far away from anything remotely resembling New Kingdom Egypt that clearly this was even less of an object than it was for Cecil B. DeMille.

And DeMille's variances from the historical record were always, as remarked before, in the service of greater visual impact and heightened drama, using anachronistic or unhistoric hues in costumes for thematic symbolism, and at least trying to make it all look like things you'd see in a museum or on a tomb fresco, for The Ten Commandments -- just as his actors all at least tried to act with appropriately regal bearing or convey at a bare minimum that they came from a culture and way of life that was very different to our own, so as to point up the sharper similarities.

So we must either assume that Sir Ridley along with everyone who works for him is simply incapable of seeing the blatantly obvious -- of not noticing that straight blades were confined to daggers and that swords were hooked, or that nobody in an Egyptian battle scene is wearing full armour (the reason that that crossover-wing breastplate is always used for Pharaoah in these movies is because that is literally the only visual evidence of an Egyptian wearing armour of any sort) and that you may search in vain to find anyone on horseback in Egyptian art -- or that they simply didn't care.

But why, then, make a movie purportedly set in Ancient Egypt? Why spend a fortune crafting armour for the "cast of thousands" that looked visibly out of place both in time and space, to everyone who has any knowledge of the subject? Why put the effort into designing a production with costumes that alternate between Greco-Roman, Medieval, and random fantasy-East with a few hilariously-misplaced dashes of Egyptian clip-art? (Why do this, and call it historically-accurate, instead of openly emulating the anachronistic High Fantasy free-for-all of Renaissance era bible paintings? That would certainly be a valid stylistic choice, if an eccentric one these days, and the honesty of it wouldn't leave us wondering what else they were lying about...)

I think the answer is that Ridley Scott is no longer trying to make movies as we understand them at all, and that -- like the increasingly incomprehensible string of films prior to it -- Exodus: Gods & Kings is an attempt to make a thinly-veiled political allegory of his own devising and pass it off as an historical picture. Which is also a valid artistic tradition, if one not much seen these days either any more than clouds full of fluffy pink cherubs overlooking famous historical figures -- but again, be honest about it!

I don't even think that criticism of religion -- while certainly part of it -- is the main point of Scott's efforts, and this is why even as a critique of religion it fails on all but the most sophomoric "raising questions" level...although his storytelling style is so inept that one has to question how much of that is due to failure-to-convey.

But if we consider that this was never meant as a Torah retelling, not even from a skeptical perspective, but a retelling of previous famous retellings of the Torah in order to attack and subvert their metatextual social and political messages -- then it begins to make a certain amount of sense...including the bizarreness of it all.

Because DeMille's Exodus retelling critiqued empire-building and racial/religious inequality, called out workplace sexual harassment and the whole notion of biology-as-destiny on multiple levels, held up human freedom as a primary value in a way that would have got him burnt at the stake for talking heresy during the centuries of European history when divine right was A Thing, and snuck an interracial romance under the radar in a way that only Classicists would get -- or anyone who paid attention to what he said in his own behind-the-scenes videos and went to look up Moses in Josephus, and tied that to Western uranium prospecting efforts in East Africa at the time -- all of which is glaringly obvious when you rewatch the the 1956 movie in contrast with the 2014 version. (The 1998 Dreamworks animated one as noted added a modern horrors-of-war sensibility and amplified the brother-versus-brother tragedy, but stuck in largest part to the DeMille storyline derived in part from Josephus and the Midrash.)

So what was Scott doing by making a ham-handed -- but CGI-shiny -- derivative of it? I think there were two goals, two primary targets, a higher one and a lower one, that he aspired to.

And it is important to remember that this was all his baby -- he came up with this project and let slip that he had been working on it for a while even before it was initially anounced, during the Prometheus promotions, that the then-unnamed Moses biopic was something dear to his heart in 2012 -- and rushed it through at an extremely fast pace while his fans were clamouring for news of a Blade Runner sequel.

We cannot blame this mess on poor dear helpless Ridley having something foisted on him by those higher than he -- the Robin Hood mess was of his own creation, choosing to meddle and re-meddle with a highly-acclaimed script (Nottingham) until it no longer resembled anything like a decent story, and feature his own darling Russell Crowe as the star no matter how laughably inappropriate he was for it.

Actually, the story as it eventually came out is even stranger than that: Scott bid on the Nottingham script but lost it to another studio, who cast Crowe for whatever incomprehensible reason -- who insisted that they get Scott to direct him, and thus between them they proceeded to tear a lauded and novel treatment of the old legend into unrecognizable shreds replace it with a mass of tired clichés (most of them stolen from his own back catalogue) with scriptwriter after scriptwriter doing revisions to ever-worse effect, blowing their budget to no return and burning bridges with Universal in the process.

But the lure of Scott's reputation insulated him from the usual consequences of hideous failure -- how many other people would be given huge budgets to play with and studio marketing and distribution, after so many bombs? Neither Body of Lies nor A Good Year came anywhere near breaking even on domestic returns.

And to be sure the gamble paid off respectably -- though not in fact spectacularly well -- for Fox with Prometheus, although I'm not sure if after the twofer of The Counsellor and Exodus: Gods & Kings there will be any bloom remaining on that rose.

But for the time being we can't simply accept the excuse that he wasn't allowed to make the (far better) hypothetical movie that he wanted to -- that he has less Hollywood clout than Terrence Malick or Guillermo del Toro or Angelina Jolie -- even given the long-ago Kingdom of Heaven fiasco. If he really couldn't tell that story in less than four hours he should have stuck to his guns like Malick always has -- but then again, if he couldn't tell it properly in more time than Branagh's Henry V (144-min theatrical runtime vs 137) maybe he isn't that good at his craft after all -- or needs a good editor to teach him how to film stories that aren't flabby. But at this point, it's clearly a lost cause -- he's making the movies he wants to, and nobody can teach him a thing.

The first attempted target of Exodus: Gods & Kings, I think, was to shoot down by overwriting in the popular imagination the earlier versions -- note that there has been strong speculation as to the connection between Scott's announcement of his Moses pic and Spielberg cancelling his own intended live-action Dreamworks version which would have been called Gods & Kings, the way that Scott's Prometheus led to the studio scuttling del Toro's planned At the Mountains of Madness as redundant, but I haven't yet seen anyone put 2 + 2 together to come up with the conclusion that Scott has a habit of stealing marches on other directors, despite the shenanigans he clearly pulled to get control of Nottingham and apparently also did earlier to replace director and lead actor on American Gangster -- a bit of returned favour/backscratching that Crowe may have come to regret (eat?) in the wake of Robin Hood.

Regardless,  his boastful pre-release talk about how big and grand and important his version of the Exodus story was going to be, gives the lie to my facetious speculation at the start of this series that he was making such an abysmal movie to make other biblical epics look better. I think he may have believed -- despite all auguries! -- that the Batman-loving fanboys who fondly recall Gladiator and gave 300: Rise of an Empire its box office success last year, would flock to his obvious attempt to invoke all of the above this time.

They certainly marketed heavily to that audience, while blatantly neglecting religious blogs (reinforceing my belief that this was never intended as a religion-themed film, not even an anti-religious one intended to deconvert, rather than inspire, believers.)

This, in spite of loud, widespread fandom disappointment in Nolan's finale to the trilogy and growing disillusionment with Christian Bale's acting as one-note and that a growl, the lackluster reception of Robin Hood among fantasy-adventure fans -- I sure hope it's better than Robin Hood! being so frequently expressed in all the pre-release publicity responses, the severely-mixed reception of Prometheus and subsequent wariness voiced by even die-hard Scott fans concerning future science-fiction films by him -- all of which should have been a warning that massive numbers of that most coveted demographic, the young presumably-white males aged 18-29, might not in fact flock to theatres...let alone take Exodus: Gods & Kings to their bosoms to be rewatched fondly year after year around the family television-hearth, thus passing on his admittedly-incoherent message to future generations.

But can he truly have been totally unaware of all of this potential for disaster? Given how Scott has teased and taunted and interacted with fans over recent years, starting with all the lead-up publicity for Prometheus, it doesn't seem likely any more than it's likely he's unaware of the critical and box-office failures of the majority of his work since Gladiator (and far too much before that.) So if we assume he realized that popular victory was an unlikely outcome -- that he knew he was giving people what they didn't want, hadn't asked for, and wouldn't like once they tried it, like something out of a Fawlty Towers sketch -- why even bother?

And that I think is where we come to the alternate target -- which may have become his principle goal in life, since he certainly doesn't need the money (his net worth is reported at $140 million, as much as Hayao Miyazaki, Kenneth Branagh, and Guillermo del Toro's fortunes put together) or the publicity either -- and that would be Trolling his fans and the critics alike, because he can, because he doesn't care about his reputation, because he doesn't have any respect left for his audience.

After all, this is a man who has made no secret of his resentment of both sets of viewers for daring to prefer his older movies to his newer ones, for considering Ellen Ripley to be his most important creation, for thinking he did an infinitely-better job with the adaptation of Philip K. Dick's story in Blade Runner than he has since any of his own original projects -- he commissioned the script for A Good Year from his neighbor in France so that he could film it in his backyard, and I would surmise that there was some behind-the-scenes pre-negotiation with Cormac McCarthy given the suspicious lack of any "Black List" type advance notice of the script before it was announced that Scott was going to film it -- and that he has done Sigourney Weaver no career favours and certainly no artistic ones for Russell Crowe since initially making them household names.

Audiences have not been shy over the years in criticizing his bizarre casting and narrative choices, or simply ignoring them which is even worse -- 1492 and Hannibal, and even post-director's-cut Kingdom of Heaven gets it with Orlando Bloom, vs. the collective Meh towards Matchstick Men and Body of Lies. So what does a man like Scott, a proud man -- and moreover a man who has never been photographed smiling except once that I've seen, and that was at a premiere where it looked like a rictus or a snarl, an attempt at making a human gesture by a Terminator robot that had never grasped it -- what does such a man do, when challenged by the hoi polloi?

Why, he doubles down, of course. He thumbs his nose at them, by telling them all exactly what he thinks of them and their criticisms in his next films, mocking them and killing them off in effigy, creating surreal political parables of what he thinks they (meaning we) think about the world and why we are wrong, and getting us to pay him for the privilege of being insulted.

Of course this is a game that you can only run for so long before the con wears thin, and I'm pretty sure that has happened for everyone now. When the Prometheus fan forums are calling for someone else (anyone else!) to direct the next installments of your own series, you've lost it. (Though I am sure that another studio will take a chance even if Fox decides that this is a straw too much on top of The Counsellor, because Hollywood studios learning from experience is a stretch of disbelief far greater than monsters or space-aliens or CGI miracles-that-aren't.)

But if you look at Exodus: Gods & Kings, and The Counsellor, and even yes Prometheus, as all being variations on a theme -- and that theme being a combination of Get off my lawn! and Things were better when... men were men meaning stoic remorseless hetero warrior types, and white men were in charge, and women and brown men and gays knew their proper places at our feet, and all you touchy-feely live-and-let-live liberal wusses have ruined it, RUINED it for the rest of us with your dismantle-the-Empire hogwash and tolerance and equality and graargh argh snargle bargh!!!

--it all falls surprisingly neatly into place. Many people have noted, over the past few years, both fans and professional critics, that there almost seems to be a level of parody or something weird going on, in Scott's recent work -- and I would say they are exactly right, except they don't trust their own senses enough (naturally enough, because it is a preposterous thing for anyone to do, to be sure) to accept that what he's doing is a sort of encrypted meta commentary on the twin themes of Kids These Days! (where "these days" goes back to at least 1945) and No More Of My Pearls ForYou Swine!

Or to put it another cinematically-referential way -- he's farting in our general direction and counting on prevailing winds to take the blame away from him, only the winds seem to have swung round at last.

And ridiculous as it seems as a premise, it has the Ockham's edge of not requiring us to accept that a legendary director with multiple awards to his name cannot tell that he is making movies that fail at being movies -- on the most basic levels, because I count every reviewer's admonition to only see a film on the big screen/in IMAX/3D as a declaration of cinematographic failure, an admission that the movie is framed and staged so poorly that none of its visual quality remains at a smaller size, a lower resolution.

When older movies -- like the 1956 Ten Commandments, or Casablanca, or the original Star Wars, or yes Scott's own creations, even the critically-panned 1492: Conquest of Paradise -- look better on the big screen, but still look great on the small screen, even as stills, even reduced almost to thumbnail size, and new films -- unfaded, undamaged, and filmed in HD -- look like mushy, incoherent mud in any other mode of viewing, something has gone badly wrong with the artform.

Just compare any frame or sequence in the critically-acclaimed Prometheus with classics like 2001, Forbidden Planet, or the 1953 War of the Worlds -- you can tell what is going on in each scene, the compositions are dramatic, and the colours, the light-and-shade contrasts glow off the screen despite the age of the films. By comparison, Prometheus looks like grey mud, sallowly tinted with emergency bulbs, even in its better scenes:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

And Forbidden Planet -- also from 1956 -- is supposed to be grim and grey; but even so, it has luminosity and texture. And it is relevant, because it's the direct linear ancestor of all the "away-team" stories of Star Trek -- but also of the (related) "haunted house/monster movie IN SPACE!" genre, where the obvious danger comes from ancient alien technology but the greatest threat is psychological rather than simply physical and the true enemy lies within -- in other words, it's directly responsible for Alien, and thus for the failed prequel-or-maybe-not of Prometheus.

(It may look tranquil and lovely, but others thought so too...)

And Exodus fares even worse in terms of visually explaining the action or making vivid pictures, though it replaces the sulfurous charcoal of Prometheus with anachronistic sepia washes shot through with the occasional dash of colour, like a faded print of Gladiator.

I don't think this is accidental at all -- I think that Ridley Scott is deliberately insulting viewers, and making a statement thereby, in which he is declaring that we of the 21st century are a shabby lot, a poor copy of past greatness, an untidy rabble compared to his ancestors, who have doomed civilization by our insistence on individual freedom and rejection of the "glory" of the Empire on which the sun never set and its next-gen iteration the Pax Americana. (This goes along with his recent promotion of FOX luminary Bill O'Reilly's fictional histories.)

So in his Robin Hood, England is doomed by a young luxury-loving and uxorious king badly raised by his ineffective mother (surely the greatest cinematic slander on Eleanor of Aquitaine to date! matched only by the similar slander on William le Marechal) and only a hardened older -- but still vigorous -- real man can undo the damage to the nation with the support of a good woman before the villainous French invade, actual ethnicity of the Plantagenets aka Angevins be damned.

The bizarrely-ahistorical and much challenged replication of D-Day WWII landing craft out of wood for the climactic battle becomes less incomprehensible if we understand that what we're seeing is a sort of "Greatest Generation" fanfic mixed up with a bit of commentary on Edward VIII and his role in decreasing public reverence for the Crown and thus the whole edifice of the State and status quo with it. Russell Crowe is playing John Wayne as Winston Churchill sans cigar, and Cate Blanchett's initially-reluctant character coming around to his side with the band of Wild Boys show us how we ought to have behaved in the post-war past, instead of rejecting the Raj and him with it.

It's a parable of modern folly as Scott understands it that hinges on contemporary "Anxious Masculinity" and old-fashioned xenophobia, and a love that cannot say its name except in conservative academic circles -- or BNP party meetings -- because even the Tories are publically accepting of the need for at least some social progress and admit that the Empire wasn't perfect, these days. But I don't think that it's simply the movie's uncontested artistry that makes Zulu one of Scott's favourite films.

 

(Why WOULD the Engineers have a giant Mask of Tragedy as the focus of their temple?)

The fact that even after that much-deserved box office fiasco, audiences and studios were still eager to let him try again with another big-budget epic is a testament to the power of Hope, but he did exactly the same thing with Prometheus -- a diverse crew of completely incompetent younger people goes to the mountain to seek knowledge and steal fire, aka technology, from the wise Old Ones, the Ancient creators of life on earth who thus might as well be the Olympian gods, sponsored by an old white man who foolishly goes along with this, handing his power over like Lear to his greedy, jealous, cowardly daughter and gay-coded foster son, in his own quest for immortality--

"He doesn't even LOOK like an old man!" "--I know! Why is he pretending to be a centenarian?"

It ends badly, of course, and that's the point -- when you let a bunch of black and Asian guys and white women who embrace (literally!) multicultralism and the whipped white boys who heed them run anything, be it an expedition or a nation, the result will be tragic disaster for the whole planet, "mere anarchy loosed upon the world."

 

(Where do cobras come from, after all?)

And, because of our naive self-confidence, we can't even understand why the Great White Fathers of the 19th century and earlier would be violently furious with us, if we were able to call them back from the grave to judge our works and what we've made of "their" creation. It's not even subtle!

 

"I knew El Aurens, and you, sir, are no Peter O'Toole!"

It's just such an audacious statement -- outside the aforesaid-confines of National Review, FOX News and BNP/UKIP get-togethers (not to mention sundry internet forums, some more mainstream than others, given that the casting of Idris Elba as Marvel's Heimdall to this day brings out far too many fanboys' inner Stormfronter and the idea of a solo superheroine movie causes no end of masculine angst) -- that most viewers who caught whiffs of it in Prometheus dismissed it as accidental or at least unconscious.

 "Look, honey -- we're going to be descendents!"

But look again at the Prometheus stills, and contrast them to the Forbidden Planet imagery: we are obviously intended to see the "modern" version of this expedition as a slovenly, lazy, undisciplined bunch of self-interested slackers totally out of their depth by comparison:

  

 

 

 

 

 

To say nothing of the difference between the guarded ship in the older film, versus the two leaders of the Prometheus abandoning their station to go have (dubiously-consensual) sex off-stage, managing to combine racist and sexist stereotypes in a single moment of directorial fail:

(So that it comes as no surprise that unlike the C-57D, the Prometheus will meet the same fate as the Bellerophon, at least by the conventions of slasher movies -- whereas in Alien moral virtue wasn't bound up with sex and there was no question of anybody "deserving" their fate except for the traitor. How the mighty have fallen, etc.)

Well, as they say, "three times is enemy action," and we are up to at least four now, depending on when you start counting. (I suspect that 1492: Conquest of Paradise with its sanitizing of the character of Columbus through the revisionist externalizing of his self-admitted atrocities onto a villainous Spaniard ought to be counted, and not simply as a precursor of the now-routine extended title: now with punctuation!)

The fact that nobody likes his fables any more, let alone gets them -- well, to an old cane-shaking crank revelling in his self-appointed status as unheeded Cassandra, a man who no longer needs money or fame and has no respect for his public, that's just gravy. He gets to cackle "I told them so! But they were too stupid to understand!" and get paid megabucks for it, as he literally declares: "Apres moi, le deluge!"

 

But wait -- isn't the point of Forbidden Planet that we need to understand our own shadow-side and deal with our aggressive impulses properly instead of masking them under old-fashioned formal courtesy and pretense until they break out and kill us all in a global war -- again, only this time with technology we can neither fully control nor comprehend, let alone resist? Possibly with a bit of anti-colonial commentary therein--

(I'm not saying it's Thermonuclear Warfare, I'm just saying it's PROBABLY Thermonuclear War...)

And isn't the moral of the story that the old father's jealousy and pride are deadly even to those he cares about, and must be fought to the death in a symbolic battle against our own "dark side", that only comprehension of others -- even others so extremely alien as the long-lost architects of this empty world (which can be read as a need to study history lest we be doomed to repeat it one last time) -- can help us break the cycle of destruction, and that a vanished utopia full of seething-but-denied hatreds wasn't really a utopia at all?

 

Well yes, and I agree that Scott's attempts at parable-making are severely muddled by his incoherent narrative building -- as well as the fact that, as Sir Terry Pratchett would say, he is battling against the forces of Story itself -- and this leads to the impression that he has totally missed the subtexts of these classic films for the shallow surface imagery of a bunch of square-jawed clean-shaven white guys doing manly things in them to the admiration of a pretty girl--

 

 

-- that he didn't notice that the Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter was a Voice of Wisdom for all her unworldliness and that military might is utterly helpless against the unfathomable power of the  Monster from the Id, that the soldiers can only triumph when one makes himself vulnerable in self-sacrifice to understand the Aliens--

 

  

(Everyone ELSE in the scene sees it, of course.) 

 

Or that he simply didn't see that the black Princess was introduced as a potential royal bride for The Hero far superior to the white Princess, let alone the allusion to uranium in her gift of a jewel to Moses, and still less the more direct references to the ongoing Civil Rights Movement, by subjecting his manly hero to chains and loss of privilege because of his race--

 

 

It rather looks that way, because Scott can't totally manage to make his characters unsympathetic no matter how he wishes to -- which, again, is the sign of a bad director subjecting his storytelling to his ideology, whereas Cecil B. DeMille is explicit in his behind-the-scenes video that even his great villain Ramses is sympathetic and has admirable qualities -- in large part because his Prometheus actors were just too good for the humiliating material he inflicted upon them, leading to most viewers instinctively rewriting the movie in their minds to reflect this._

 

. But mainly I think that he just disagrees with them, and is challenging the symbolism and tacit challenges to 1950's mainstream ideals of conformity and hegemony by holding up ambivalent mirrors to the West under the guise of "Long Ago & Far Away"...

 

 

"Are we supposed to be playing 18th-century Rakes, or 21st-century Hipsters?"
"Damfino, Old Bean. The director certainly doesn't!"