We were asked to watch Tarsem Singh’s The Fall for one of my classes and I have to say I was pretty disappointed with it. First off, I don’t think it does much new as a nested story of a hospital patient telling a story to a little girl and (predictably?) the story changes in the telling. I also found it to be a major miscue for the characters in the fictional story to have “real-life” counterparts and for the girl to be taking things from “reality” into her fantasy world. Problem number one: this has already been done in The Wizard of Oz, and Singh’s not adding anything new by using this technique.

Problem number two, and the real reason I didn’t like the movie, is that the fantastic becomes “just” a story, one with no real consequence. Compare The Fall with a far superior movie, Pan’s Labyrinth, and the contrast is striking. In Pan’s Labyrinth, there is no wall separating the fantastical from the real, which means that the fantastical has the same set of consequences as our perceived reality—to put it another way, fantasy danger is real danger. Die in that world, you die in this one.

The Fall continues a long and fairly insulting tradition of infantilizing fantasy. Fantasy becomes escape for adults and a way to metaphorically relate “adult situations” to children; fantasy has no direct consequence in this world, the version of reality championed by a strict rationalist viewpoint.

I much prefer dangerous fantasy, the kind in Pan’s Labyrinth, where the division isn’t between the “real” and the fantastic, but rather between layers of reality that we choose to see or not see. Fantasy is not the “other” but rather the here, the now, the real—just a different kind of real that should not be taken lightly, and is not fare for children.

Just a thought.

Current Mood: Bleh |