The Question in Bodies #20: It Mattered to That One

Evolution (2015)

(This post comes with a content warning for discussion of child abuse. As usual, spoilers abound.)

You've probably heard some variation of the inspirational fable about the little boy who's walking along this beach that's covered with washed up starfish, and every so often he stoops over and picks one up and chucks it back into the sea, and some adult comes up and says, in the way that adults only ever talk to kids in inspirational fables, “What are you doing, kid? There are too many starfish here to save! How does it matter?” And the punchline comes when the kid picks up another one, throws it into the sea, and says, “It mattered to that one.”

Which makes a powerful and important philosophical point about the value of small kindnesses. I like that one. It's one of my favourites. I've used it myself more than once.

And of course, as is the case with all the best parables, which are by nature improbable, it is flawed if taken strictly literally as a narrative. Because of course, it didn't matter to the starfish, because starfish are utterly alien. There's no brain in a starfish, just a collection of nerves and ganglia spread out among its arms, and around its mouth, so that even if you could ascribe the thing with consciousness, it's not a unity, but a collection of joined and sometimes competing consciousnesses that grow and sometimes split, and regenerate lost components of the gestalt. The experience of a starfish is probably impossible to imagine.

I wonder if Lucile Hadžihalilović had this story in mind when making Evolution. The starfish, both in terms of its alienness and the value of throwing one back, is the thematic image that defines the film.

We Don't Go Back #89: I go to sleep before closing my eyes

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Valerie a týden divů) (1970)

Because I touched upon most of the Important Films quite early in this project, when I didn't know what I was doing with it, I feel I gave some of them short shrift. Which is why I gave The Witch, Blood on Satan's Claw and Witchfinder General second goes. My original piece about Valerie was quite good, I thought (it has one glaring error in it, which is going to be fixed in a second edition, though), since it was almost as oblique as the film. In many ways that piece on Valerie was the first one where I thought, actually, you can do something more interesting than just say whether you liked it. But still, I reckon Valerie deserves more. Valerie will always deserve more.

The Question in Bodies #19: I Keep Thinking About Iwona Petry

Szamanka (1996)

All of this is preamble: Szamanka is a film that hasn't been given a certificate by the BBFC. I don't know why. It might simply be that a distributor never took it up over here rather than the BBFC refusing to classify it, for example. But it is quite an extreme film, and it features a lot of graphic – not pornographic, mind – sex. It's consequently quite a hard film to find in the UK, at any rate. And it's not a cheap one. I will nonetheless be giving away plot points, because this isn't, as usual, a review, but you shouldn't feel you can't read this if you haven't seen it. In fact, I went and sourced a copy of Szamanka after having read Kier-La Janisse’s equally spoilery analysis in House of Psychotic Women, which is a book I cannot recommend highly enough, and which made me really, really want to see the film in the first place, spoilers and all.

If you're in the UK, your chance of having seen Szamanka is pretty small anyway. Which is all by way of an unapologetic acknowledgement that yes, there are spoilers, but since it's hard to find, don't worry about that, and anyway, it's such a delirious film that even having spoilers doesn't really make a difference, and anyway, I might convince you that you have quite good reason not to want to see it. Regular readers will know that this is a The Question in Bodies post, so the usual warnings about discussions of trauma, abuse, sex, consent and that stuff apply. You don't need a post about a film you haven't seen ruin your day, so if you think it might be distressing, stay away.

After the cut, I'll begin.

Subordinate to the Spray-on Cobwebs

Sleepy Hollow (1999)

(This post was requested by Thaddeus Urban, who backed the “Whistle and I'll Come to You” tier on the surprisingly successful We Don't Go Back Kickstarter, where I promised to write about a film of the backer's choice. Thaddeus very kindly picked a film that's at least partially on topic, and about which I'd have much to say. Which was a relief, let me tell you.)

One of the criticisms that I often level at Tim Burton is that at some point he went from making movies to making Tim Burton Movies, by which I mean that the tics of his style overwhelm everything else, that they became about certain things that recur, over and over. There is a feeling of sweet decay to a Tim Burton Movie, that its gravestones are decked in spun sugar and spray-on cobwebs, and the gothic excess is accompanied by quirky comedy. Danny Elfman is there, too, making sweet spooky-ooky choral flourishes. A Tim Burton Movie (as opposed to a movie made by Tim Burton) is lush, and overwrought, and reassuringly creepy, and often includes this big, heavy subtext about parents and familial dysfunction, and if it's an adaptation where this isn't explicit, that subtext will be added, even if it's not there to start with. Take the bizarre backstory and coda in his version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), where Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp, as it so often is in Tim Burton Movies) is messed up because his dad, a dentist (Christopher Lee) put him in elaborate Heath Robinson dental appliances and disowned him due to him wanting to be a chocolatier.

Funny, isn't it though, that the charge I laid at the door of his Planet of the Apes was that it wasn't Tim Burton enough? I complained that Burton's trademark aesthetic had been abandoned, and I saw that as evidence that he evidently didn't care about the film, since the marks that make it his were largely absent. So what is it then? The bloke can't win: either he gets you playing Tim Burton Bingo, or he's not being Tim Burton enough. I mean, what is it about films like Beetlejuice (1988) or Ed Wood (1994) that makes them so much more satisfying than a film like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?

Or for that matter Sleepy Hollow?

Written in Water #22: The Miracle of the Sparrows

All I have to show you is this bird

I made with fingers, spit and clay.

I breathed on it like Jesus had, I heard,

To make it come alive and fly away.

•

At the end of the Gospel of John, the evangelist writes,

Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.

John 21:25

I've always liked that as an ending. It feels like a recognition of the shortcomings of the story's form and an assertion of validity in a humble, eloquent way. There are other versions of Christ's story, the evangelist is saying, and they are no more or less valid than this one.

The Question in Bodies #18: I'd Love to Tell You, But You Aren't Ready for the Truth

Poppy (2014-present)

Poppy, if you don't know, is a pop star. Poppy is a fictional character, with a storyline of sorts. Poppy's most recent single, “Time Is Up”, begins with Poppy more or less declaring herself something other than human.

In the factory
In the sterile place where they made me
I woke up alone
Dizzy from the programming
Have I been wiped again?
Oh my God, I don't even know

Over the next three minutes, she declares herself a harbinger of the extinction of humanity over a four to the floor backing of the whitest techno, courtesy of collaborator Diplo. I mean, in terms of actual quality and cultural importance, it's pretty much the 21st century version of Zager and Evans’s “In the Year 2525”, but it's also the most Poppy thing ever.

Artsploitation! Richard Blackburn on Vampires and Apes

Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural, which is honestly one of the most downright fun films I've found since starting my project, was directed by Richard (Dick) Blackburn, and I had the immense privilege to talk with Dick over the phone a couple of times over the last week, and to ask him about Lemora, and also, more briefly, about his voice work on Return to the Planet of the Apes, which makes Dick the nexus of an unlikely crossover of my interests.