cjh (01/20/83)
In response to your message of Fri Jan 14 09:00:38 1983:
Your analogies are inaccurate and insufficient.
First, an opera is \expected/ to have very little in the way of plot (to
borrow Leonard Bernstein's example, compare the complexity of Shakespeare's
Iago with the same character in Verdi's OTELLO ("I believe in a cruel God who
created a vile world in which we live disgustingly and die forever" set to
suitably evil music, replaces the two-page soliloquy). As for rescuing Humper-
dinck from obscurity---I doubt that anyone even on net.music can think of
anything else he wrote. Certainly it's possible for dreadfully sappy works to
continue in some sort of popularity, but around here HANSEL AND GRETEL is
OCB (Opera Company of Boston) 's Christmas piece and that's \it/ (\nobody/
else does it---even AMAHL AND THE NIGHT VISITORS is done by some other groups).
By contrast, a movie is expected to have at least the depth of a novella
because of the combination of normal speed dialog (instead of everything being
repeated endlessly and slowly to music) with a more controllable background.
In a movie there's time for at least some character development or plot
complication---none of which appears in DARK CRYSTAL.
Certainly fairy tales, properly told, are grim, but so is good Disney
animation (SNOW WHITE had trouble in its first release because the scene where
she's fleeing through the forest was judged too frightening). The problem with
DARK CRYSTAL is not the grimness but that it goes beyond the purely ritual
content of the fairy tale (the splitting of the UrSkekses, -"of course you
don't have wings---you're a boy!"-, etc.) without doing anything to deepen the
shallow content of its predecessors \or to help visualize the basic hopes and
fears which form the foundation of fairy tales/ \or to use these developments
in any interesting way/! (Consider how telegraphed was the merging of Skeksis
and Mystic.
For all the mundanity of its background, THE RATS OF NIMH is a truer
successor to the great, early Disney than THE DARK CRYSTAL, which goes to the
huge effort of creating another world (just as necessary these days for fantasy
as for SF) without doing anything with all the pretty pictures. Remember why
most people disliked STAR TREK: THE MOTIONLESS PICTURE? The producers had spent
all that money on special effects instead of getting a decent script and
director and backing them up (how many times was the first one announced, and
with how many directors?). By contrast, STAR WARS succeeded (to whatever extent
you grant its success) because the effects were almost tossed away. Remember
the shock right at the beginning of seeing the Imperial cruiser coming
endlessly over the top of the screen? How many times did you get the camera
lingering on that later? None, right? Certainly there are grabbing scenes in
DC (e.g. the banquet) but too many of them are just plain unconvincing, even
silly, for them to mask a plot that isn't even a good fairy tale.
Fairy tales "succeed" (are remembered and passed on, affect readers and
listeners) because they address problems that all of us can feel with---would
you (could you!) walk on blades forever for love, or risk \everything/ you have
for a chance at everything you could ever want, or give up that everything to
raise someone you see as more deserving, or. . . . Modern written fantasy is
appreciated partly because of the science-fictional sweep of some authors
(Tolkien was not the first world-builder but he was the first to have that much
detail (depth and texture) behind what was printed) but partly because of those
same problems (consider anything by McKillip, or much of deCamp). The only
point where DC comes near this is at the moment where Jen has to guess whether
he can save Kira if he doesn't try to heal the crystal and the scene is staged
so badly that there's no tension in it.
SW was grabbing to many people because it realized their personal dreams on
screen, dreams that in print came out mostly as dreadfully purple prose (an
older fan in this area came out of the first showing babbling "Doc Smith! The
Death Star is a dirigible planet!"). I think far fewer people have in common
the visions of DC (certainly it developed from the personal, plotless visions
of Brian Froud, rather than from the general SF background (based plots and on
visions from words) behind George Lucas); without this the absence of
tension---the absence of any real decisions or the who-cares feeling in the few
cases when decisions are made---in DC becomes gapingly obvious. (David Gerrold
argues that the best episodes of Star Trek could be boiled down to "Kirk (or
someone close) has to choose between X and Y (e.g. love and saving the
world---sounds trite, doesn't it, but THE CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER deserved
the Hugo and Screen Writers Guild awards it got.)
DC is not simply a bad movie; it would be much easier simply to dismiss (or
simply to laugh at, like PLAN NINE or KILLER TOMATOES) if it were. It is a
thoroughly unfulfilled promise, a combination of works (that's what "opera"
means, incidentally) with one piece left out (imagine, if you can, a piece of
music written in N parts but performed without one of them)---and that is why
so many of us are so disappointed with it.