Just watched The Wicker Man and Spirited Away by Miyazaki
Several here would have a field day using Wicker Man as text: Comparative religion, worker exploitation through religion, cultural imperialism, and as a great example of the post-hippie New Age rise in paganism and anti-authority to which the time period (early 70s) gave rise.
One of my favorite scenes in the film shows the police officer, a devout Christian, watching in horror as a teacher instructs a group of children about pagan rites. This fascinates me in light of the current Darwinism / creationism debate going on in red states school boards across the country. I would imagine either side could identify with both the teacher and the officer; the pure outrage of teaching young people something so clearly erroneous and idiotic as creationism…or Darwinism.
The Wicker Man gets characterized as a horror film, which it clearly is not. There’s not a drop of blood in it, and only one person dies. I’m sure it has ended up in horror mostly due to the presence of Christopher Lee (apparently a role of which he was very proud). Other things you get here – Britt Ekland singing and dancing; naked. Edward Woodward, aka The Equalizer as a straight-laced cop who gets played bamboozled through the whole film, and some interesting Christopher Lee speeches about the silliness of Christianity, though how much Lee’s character believes in any religion is open to debate. The version I saw was edited for America and apparently leaves out several minutes of dialogue, including a couple of scenes with Lee talking which I’m going to try to find just to see if it makes clear what his character believes.
The other prescient message I took from the film is how economic hardship can lead to a sharp rise in fundamentalism.
In any case, it’s got a lot of originality for a mystery, and it is worth checking out. Another older film I recently saw that startled me with its timeliness was Wild in the Streets. I saw it right around the time of Bush’s reelection, and think it’s worth seeing now (It’s on an MGM double feature DVD with Gassssss)
Also incredibly original is the animated film Spirited Away, which won the Oscar for best animated film 2 years ago. This is the second time I have seen it, and though it can’t be as shocking as the first time, it really holds up. I started reading books of Japanese myths and ghost stories after the first time I saw this to try to find out how many of the monsters and situations come from Japanese folklore, and how much was pure imagination. One scene after another bowls me over in this film which is funny, sincere, and visually incredible. I’ve watched a couple of Miyazki’s other films (2 more old ones were just released here last week), and while cute, nothing else I’ve seen has come close to Spirited Away.
yes, “spirited away” is just amazing. the others i’ve seen by him are “kiki’s delivery service”, which falls in the “cute” category, and “princess mononoke”, which is closer to “spirited away”. i think this movie might have really scared the crap out of me if i’d watched it as a child–the initial premise is so nightmarish. so mark, did you get some sense of how much of this film’s mythology is invented and how much just borrowed?
time to promote “castle in the sky” in my netflix queue…
I didn’t get many specific examples from the limited books I read, other than obvious references – that there are river spirits, witches, ghosts, humans turned into animals, and so on – all of which happen to appear in classical myths as well.
What I did discover that interested me was the lack of morals of the spirits and whom they choose to reward and punish. This didn’t come up much in Spirited Away – for example the girl’s parents are turned into pigs not out of some god’s whim, but b/c they dared to eat food that belonged to someone else. They “sinned.” In the Japanese ghost story books I read, it seemed punishments were meted out for no good reason; that the spirits were simply mischievous, weren’t judging based on sin, and in some cases couldn’t even be classified as “thinking” (which reminded me of the Cthuhlu mythos, where the malevolence is pure, and the monsters aren’t even really capable of rational thought.)
Then I read something quite interesting – an article by a right wing Christian group (apologies to right wing Christians on here, like Bruns) about the rise in Japanese horror movies like The Ring and The Grudge. The author said these movies were much worse than American horror movies, because people were killed for no reason. In US horror, he maintained, people got killed who had done something wrong; they were promiscuous, had stolen, etc. – they had sinned – and that the characters who were pure of heart would prevail. I didn’t see either US version of Ring or Grudge but saw the Japanese versions of both, and I have to admit, he has a point. The moral guidelines of US horror don’t apply in these movies where you get killed for something as simple as enetering a house or watching a video. It’s a very non-Christian ethic, I think, and interesting as such.
Finally, I would note that in The Wicker Man, the officer does not sin – in fact, he avoids carnal temptation throughout the film, and it is his purity that lets him be killed – or martyred.
A small point about “The Wicker Man”–there’s a persistent thread in British horror fiction about the return or hidden remainders of paganism/druidism. I would name a name or two, like Arthur Machen and Ramsey Campbell, but Mark will demand a substantive bibliography, so I’ll let any who are interested go look for themselves. But we probably ought to tie to that other thread, re British horror and history; here’s an example that sees the past rushing up to destroy or consume the modern, yet it is a very white anglo-saxon past.
I would second Mark’s opinion of Wicker–it’s occasionally dated to the point of near-silly, but then the film is constantly flirting with being a comedy of manners. Watching Woodward stiffen, watching villagers’ meaty faces laughing with bad teeth and sweat prominently displayed, seeing Britt Ekland prance about nude with a bad overdubbed “la la la” soundtrack while Woodward listens from the room next door–funny stuff.
I just watched Princess Mononoke, and unlike Spirited Away, this is a very depressing and even gruesome film.
Everything i’ve read of Miyazaki stresses how strongly he feels about saving the environment, but this film has to be the most overt statement of his on the subject.
It’s still beautiful, and has amazing and startling imagery, but the happy ending seems tacked on, and incredibly unlikely based on everything we’ve seen happen in the previous 2 hours.
I wonder if Miyazaki at some point in writing the story, just decided to give it the ending he knew it had to have (to do otherwise would have been more incredibly depressing) while winking to the audience that in a work of pure fantasy, nothing is more fantastic than a happy ending to this story.
Have others here seen it? And what did you make of it? I’ve said before that I could watch a chunk of Spirited Away every day for the rest of my life and be quite happy. But frankly, I’d rather not ever see another scene of Princess Mononoke again.
‘Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds’ is probably a more overtly environmental film by Miyazaki than ‘Princess Mononoke’ but it was made almost 15 years earlier, and it shows in the quality of the animation. And the final battle scene goes on forever.
Is Mononoke unusual for Miyazaki in having a happy ending? Thinking back on all his movies that I have seen, they all seem to have more or less (and perhaps that is the key difference) happy endings.
I liked ‘Spirited Away’ because it seemed the most fully realized of his films, but I have heard good things about ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ (actually, I think I heard them here!). It is also the fact that he has such strong female leads that helps make his films distinctive.
It wasn’t the fact that there WAS a happy ending (as far as I know, all of his films have had happy endings). It was that the tremendous damage done in the story of the film seemed to me to preclude any kind of happy ending. Everyone is basically given a second chance to correct their previous mistakes. It was that…forgiveness I guess, that I found so ill-fitting to the rest of the film.
Having said that, the love story part of the film, such as it was, is not a traditional happy ending, and the two characters don’t live happily ever after.
I’ll try to see if I can find a copy of ‘Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds,’ if only to see a less polished example of his work.
Man, I can’t stand Nicholas Cage. The trailer for Ghost Rider – Ghost fucking Rider! – is out, and of course looks ridiculous. Is there no longer any idea too stupid for $100 million dollars to be shelled out to remake it?
Well, for whatever reason, Neil LaBute is remaking Wicker Man, with Cage for some reason. My love for this film is great. It encapsulates so many things I love about movies, particularly British ones.
So, the fact that a story about paganism is set in America (or at least North America) already gets me to furrow my brow just so in disapproval.
I’ve little hope of liking this, but as usual, I ask you to give the original a chance in all of its crazy glory.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/thewickerman/trailer1/