nothing left to imagine

Ursula Le Guin on fantasy

‘For all our delight in the entrancing flicker of electronics, we also long for the unalterable. We cherish the old stories for their changelessness...People turn to the realms of  fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities.

And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an industry.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitudes. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitised, made cute, made safe. The passionately concieved ideas of the great storytellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys moulded in bright-coloured plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable’. 

( from the Foreword, Tales From Earthsea)

Spot on, I reckon. Even the seductively beautiful, magical 3D of world of Avatar, when I examined it afterwards seemed hollow, despite it’s seemingly ‘green’ /pro-environment/ anti-capitalist politics etc.  And of course it’s  still the white American Male hero  who saves the day, gets the girl etc

I also wonder if  the pumped-up, served-up  ‘perfection’ of computer-generated fantasy worlds doesn’t makes the less glossy but far more profound beauty of Real Nature harder  to see.

 I have moaned and wailed many times about the lack of  good children’s films. Though there are usually  at least a few really good  adults movies every year. 

So it’s been a mostly futile quest to find anything I’ve  wanted my child to see. There seem to be hardly any  kids’ movies with real substance, originality, or anything to nourish the spirit. Like a  satisfying story, for example. 

I often feel like I must be an old killjoy. Everyone else has seemed perfectly happy with Finding Nemo and Harry Potter and Ice Age etc. And it’s 'only entertainment', they say.  And so dazzlingly clever technically. But what a shame the content is so banal, so cliched, so empty. Like junk food pumped with msg. 

And then there is the awful Disney-fication of  delightful old English classics like Winnie The Pooh etc. Should be a law against it. 

Visiting Disneyland last year with my son was, I have to admit, lots of fun. But the ‘appropriation’ thing really struck me. They’d grabbed everything from Alice In Wonderland, to Mark Twain, to Jules Verne, to Robinson Crusoe, and turned it  all into some tacky ride or experience, leaving nothing to the imagination. Some of them - like the ‘20,000 Leagues Under The Sea submarine were done with incredible attention to detail. Others  - like Alice In Wonderland, just felt like a heap of plastic crap... but I’d better stop. I’m in rant-mode. 

Please don’t tell me Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar looked like this plastic toy

Onboard the MarkTwain Paddle Steamer