Apocalyptic apes and an apologist
Dec. 11th, 2005 08:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkDark clouds looming over London following an oil refinery fire in Hemel Hempstead. Not really where I 'd imagined the Dark Lord to start his next assault on Minas Tirith but the sky looks the part.
Papers are full of King Kong reviews and features, with the consensus seeming to be that Jackson has succeeded brilliantly in what he set out to do but it's hard to generate much enthusiasm for it. Partly because the idea of a giant gorilla falling in love with a small blonde human female just crashes my personal suspension of disbelief barrier and the more realistic the CGI performance the harder it's going to break. It just brings back too many memories of all the female aliens who would inevitably fell under Captain Kirk's thrall as if humanity were the universal standard of beauty. For we are made in the very image of God. Gorillas are traditionally thought to be the most faithfully monogamous of primates (although DNA testing may have changed that), but they fall in love with other gorillas. So would they compare each other to a summer's day? Or a sweet-smelling nest or the first taste of ripe papaya? Someone should rewrite Kong in the vein of Max mon Amour. But in any case the whole Beauty and the Beast thing is hard to parse without coming up against the idea that it's the natural and ordained role of the passive, female beauty to bring out redeeming qualities in the big, black very male Beast. Which kills him, so patriachial jam either way.
The other film in review is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which again I'll probably miss, despite a serious longing to see Tilda Swinton playing Jadis. Of the Narnia books it and The Magician's Nephew are probably the ones I could still enjoy reading, it's really not the overt Christian themes that are off-putting. In several of the later books it feels as if Lewis's insecurities have got the better of him and he's started using the stories to launch one-sided attacks on various bete-noires from liberal parenting and progressive education to girls caring about their appearance. I'm not really being fair. I think a lot of the reason I read is to get inside someone else's head, to come away from the book momentarily feeling their responses to the world rather than my own but there are some people you just don't want to be in the heads of.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
truepenny had a recent post that oursin linked to about her very personal and not entirely rational, gut-level hatred for John Milton Well Lewis is my Milton. Other authors can be just as opinionated and ever present, George Eliot for one, but I like the old bat and secretly enjoy listening to her up on her high horse. Of course she wasn't writing for children so the tone is necessarily different. Likesay, not fair.
Papers are full of King Kong reviews and features, with the consensus seeming to be that Jackson has succeeded brilliantly in what he set out to do but it's hard to generate much enthusiasm for it. Partly because the idea of a giant gorilla falling in love with a small blonde human female just crashes my personal suspension of disbelief barrier and the more realistic the CGI performance the harder it's going to break. It just brings back too many memories of all the female aliens who would inevitably fell under Captain Kirk's thrall as if humanity were the universal standard of beauty. For we are made in the very image of God. Gorillas are traditionally thought to be the most faithfully monogamous of primates (although DNA testing may have changed that), but they fall in love with other gorillas. So would they compare each other to a summer's day? Or a sweet-smelling nest or the first taste of ripe papaya? Someone should rewrite Kong in the vein of Max mon Amour. But in any case the whole Beauty and the Beast thing is hard to parse without coming up against the idea that it's the natural and ordained role of the passive, female beauty to bring out redeeming qualities in the big, black very male Beast. Which kills him, so patriachial jam either way.
The other film in review is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which again I'll probably miss, despite a serious longing to see Tilda Swinton playing Jadis. Of the Narnia books it and The Magician's Nephew are probably the ones I could still enjoy reading, it's really not the overt Christian themes that are off-putting. In several of the later books it feels as if Lewis's insecurities have got the better of him and he's started using the stories to launch one-sided attacks on various bete-noires from liberal parenting and progressive education to girls caring about their appearance. I'm not really being fair. I think a lot of the reason I read is to get inside someone else's head, to come away from the book momentarily feeling their responses to the world rather than my own but there are some people you just don't want to be in the heads of.
truepenny had a recent post that oursin linked to about her very personal and not entirely rational, gut-level hatred for John Milton Well Lewis is my Milton. Other authors can be just as opinionated and ever present, George Eliot for one, but I like the old bat and secretly enjoy listening to her up on her high horse. Of course she wasn't writing for children so the tone is necessarily different. Likesay, not fair.![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-12-11 09:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-11 11:46 pm (UTC)I read the books quite young but they never realy grabbed me like the Tolkein did either. I think it was partly the derivative thing, I was into all the kids versions of greek myths so I already knew about fauns and centaurs but the Christian thing sailed over my head untill the last two books or so - we didn't get much religious instruction at school and most of it was comparative.