Alice in Pretentious Artsy Self-Satisfied Modern Bigotry Land (Part II)

(Part I)

I wanted to scream at the audience around me: don't you people understand. This society of nineteenth-century Victorian England was one in which the vast majority of people, except for a narrow elite, lived in a poverty that we cannot even imagine. Do you know what it means to have a society in which starving to death is a real issue? The only thing saving our elites from falling in with the wretched masses is the force of tradition. Anyone who plays with convention is pulling at the spider's web that keeps not only them feed but everyone around them. I would like to see you tolerate such a person. This was particularly true for women, who were limited in their labor prospects and lacked the sort of education that might have allowed them to hold well-paying jobs even if society let them. Can you imagine the position of a widowed mother, living with the trappings of wealth and its expectations, knowing that without her husband to support them there is nothing to stop her and her daughter from sinking into abject poverty? And by poverty we do not mean food stamps, but the slow demise over years due to malnutrition and disease as you work yourself to death. The only thing saving this person is the prospect of a good match. How dare you any of you smirk or feel superior when such a person decides that whether her daughter is in "love" might not be of utter importance.

We now move from the film's pointless introduction to having Alice fall down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. My father often likes to say that comedy is the hardest genre to perform. Comedy is an either/or proposition. Either you are funny or you are not. There is no in-between or partial success. With drama you can always hope to salvage something even if the project fails as a whole. Humor is not a science; it is something that happens sometimes, but cannot be created at will. You can have genuinely talented people who get out there and, through no one's fault, the material just does not work. Without a question, there were some talented people in this production. The team of Tim Burton, Johnny Depp and Helen Bonham Carter is nothing to be laughed at. (Just watch Sweeny Todd.) There is no logical reason that this team should not have once again produced something absolutely magical. Except that for some unfathomable reason the material just failed to click.

This failure may have had something to do with the fact that, as Lionel put it, they tried to mix whimsical fantasy with epic fantasy. It was not enough that Alice should explore this strange and downright psychedelic world; the film also had to have her go on a quest to defeat the Red Queen, restore the White Queen to her rightful place and defeat the Jabberwocky. Tolkien just does not go with Carroll. This could have still worked as tongue and cheek. The problem is that of all comedy, I would argue that tongue and cheek is the hardest. For tongue and cheek you have to succeed on two counts. In terms of comedy, you still have to actually be funny and as drama you still need to produce characters who make sense and whom the audience connects with on a deep emotional level. One can always try to cover trash by saying that it is only meant tongue and cheek. Saying that something is meant only tongue and cheek can in no way be an excuse for bad writing. I have so much respect for people like Joss Whedon, J. K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer who use tongue and cheek and make it work. To all those who turn their noses up at their work as popular entertainment that "anyone" could do, I say give it a try.

I could not end this without saying something about what happens back on the top side of the rabbit hole once Alice comes back to her Victorian world. She rejects her upper-class twit of the year and approaches her father's old partner about a really radical business venture, trading with China. Someone needs to offer the writers a history lesson and explain that even our stuffy Victorians were up to trading with China; there was nothing radical in the nineteenth-century about such a prospect. The West even fought several opium wars to open China to western trade. Even people in the Middle Ages were imaginative enough to try trading with China. This was how we got Columbus accidentally discovering America in the first place.

I really wanted to like this movie. I was waiting for it since I heard about it this past summer. I even had a poster of it up as my desktop background. (This proved to be a mistake as some of my little Haredi cousins wanted to use my laptop and started screaming about the not "tznisudic," immodestly dressed, girl in the picture.) However much I respect the people behind this film, it was a failure and not even having it in 3-D could save it.

Rape is Never Funny (Except when it Involves Shakespeare or Stanley Kubrick )

A few weeks ago, in our book club, one of the guys made a crack about rape. This elicited a heated response from a number of people, particularly one of the girls who declared: “rape is never funny.” This past week we got a visit from one of the administrators of Aspirations who spoke to us and told us in no uncertain terms that, while we were all adults and it was acceptable to talk about adult topics, jokes about rape would not be tolerated in the group. With all due respect to feminists and other concerned people, while rape is a horrible act, it is one horrible act among many others and like all other horrible acts, and, in part, because it is such a horrible act, it is subject to humor and can be very funny.

One of my all-time favorite films is Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It is about the world getting blown to bits in a nuclear holocaust, courtesy of Peter Sellers (in three roles) and George C. Scott. The climax of the film is a man falling out a bomber while riding an atom bomb and waving his cowboy hat. This is soon followed by mushroom clouds going up across the globe to soft relaxing music. I may be perverse but I do find something funny about the annihilation of almost the entire human race. (Those lacking a convenient mine shaft to flee to.) It would seem only a matter of consistency that if I could laugh at the idea of billions of people dying than I should also be able to laugh at the idea of one person being raped. And Stanley Kubrick helps us on this front with Clockwork Orange, which has rape set to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.

Clearly, rape can be funny; even Shakespeare uses rape for laughs. In Titus Andronicus, Demetrius and Chiron rape Titus’ daughter, Livinia, (and, for good measure, they also cut off her hands and slice out her tongue.)

Demetrius: So, now go tell, and if thy tongue can speak,
Who’t was that cut thy tongue and ravish’d thee.
Chiron: Write down thy mind, bewray thy meaning so
And if thy stumps will let thee play the scribe.
Demetrius: She, how with signs and tokens she can scrowl.
Chiron: Go home, call for sweet water, wash thy hands.
Demetrius: She hath no tongue to call, nor hands to wash:
And so let’s leave her to her silent walks.
Chiron An ‘twere my case I should go hang myself.
Demetrius: If though hadst hands to help thee knit the cord.
[Titus Andronicus act II scene IV)

For all you feminists out there, Titus gets his revenge on Chiron and Demetrius; he cuts their throats and has Livinia hold a bowl in her stumps to catch the blood. Titus then bakes them into meat pies, (so Sweeney Todd like) which he serves to their mother Tamora. (Titus then kills Livinia to “end” her shame.)

Rape can even make for good family-friendly musical fun. Consider the Fantasticks with its Rape Song:

Rape!
R-a-a-a-pe!
Raa-aa-aa-pe!
A pretty rape!
A literary rape!
We've the obvious open schoolboy rape,
With little mandolins
and perhaps a cape.
The rape by coach;
it's little in request.
The rape by day,
but the rape by night is best.

Just try to see it.
And you will soon agree, señors,
Why Invite regret,
When you can get the sort of rape
You'll never ever forget.
You can get the rape emphatic.
You can get the rape polite.
You can get the rape with Indians:
A very charming sight.
You can get the rape on horseback;
They'll all say it's new and gay.
So you see the sort of rape
Depends on what you pay.
It depends on what you pay.

And the song continues for several more verses, all involving suggestions of possible styles for a good “rape.” (This is meant as a staged abduction of a girl by a theatrical troupe so that her neighbor will be able to come to her “rescue” and bring about all manner of happy endings.)
I raised some of these issues with the administrator. I asked him if we would even be allowed to read something like Titus Andronicus, considering how it makes fun of rape. I also asked him if he thought the Fantasticks, with its singing about rape, could be considered funny. His response was that yes such things were funny, but that it was only funny when done by such people. Apparently, rape is only funny when it is in a published source. I am reminded of the Haredi response when faced with the fact that great rabbis in the past had done something that they now wish to ban: "it was ok for them, because they were so great and because they lived in holier times. But we should not be allowed to do this."

I am not trying to minimize the real-life horrors of rape. I also recognize that society has certain conventions about making jokes about bad things in front of people who have suffered them. (For example one does not crack Holocaust jokes in front of Holocaust survivors.) I can accept that rape is included in this convention so one must be careful in whose company one makes rape jokes. But to say that somehow rape is not funny is absolutely ludicrous. Personally, I take Shakespeare, Stanley Kubrick, and the Fantasticks as better guides to what is funny than any angry feminist.

Girls Who Love Murderous Barbers (or at least those played by Johnny Depp)

My friend, Dragon, recently saw the Sweeney Todd film and has now been converted into a fan of the musical. For those of you who are not familiar with Steven Sondheim’s masterpiece. It is about a nineteenth-century London barber named Sweeney Todd and his downstairs neighbor Mrs. Lovett, who runs a pie shop. Todd likes to murder his customers as his way of taking revenge against the world and Mrs. Lovett, ever the practical one, helps dispose of the bodies by grinding them up into her delicious meat pies. What can I say; Dragon is a very cool person and she has excellent taste.

What befuddles me though is that her favorite song from this musical is Green Finch and Linnet Bird. The song introduces Johanna, Todd’s lost teenage daughter. This is a run-of-the-mill song about a young girl coming into her womanhood and wanting to be free to experience the world. It is a pretty song but there are much more interesting versions of this type of song. I would point to Cosette’s In My Life in Les Miserables or Luisa’s Much More in Fantasticks. Much More is the source for my most fervent prayer: “Please God please don’t let me be normal.”

To me going to Sweeney Todd for a song like Green Finch completely defeats the purpose. It lacks Sondheim’s trademark complexity and furthermore, the song contains not a single reference to blood, guts, or anyone getting murdered. Green Finch is not My Friends, in which consists of Todd singing to his razor blades and demonstrating a truly remarkable ability to transition up and down the music scale. What about Todd singing Johanna, which is him slitting the throats of his customers, and singing how he no longer needs to get his daughter back as he now has something else to live for? And then there is Priest in which Todd and Lovett sing a duet about how various people might taste as pies.

Mrs. Lovett: It’s priest. Have a little priest.

Todd: Is it really good?

Mrs. Lovett: Sir, it’s too good at least. Then again, they don’t commit sins of the flesh, so it’s pretty fresh.

Todd: Awful lot of fat.

Mrs. Lovett: Only where it sat.

Todd: Haven’t you got poet or something like that?

Mrs. Lovett: No, you see the trouble with poet is, how do you know it’s deceased? Try the priest.

Todd: Heavenly. Not as hearty as bishop, perhaps, but then not as bland as curate either.
Mrs. Lovett: And good for business – always leaves you wanting more. Trouble is we only get it on Sundays.

I must confess that the musical tastes of women lie outside of my field of comprehension. My musical sensibilities are rather simple. I like powerful heroic songs with loud bangs, like what you get in Richard Wagner. If it has some really dark humor and blood to go along with it, then I am all the merrier.