MOVIES: Anna Friel and Ed Speleers play Artemis and Actaeon in a short silent film

I am thinking I might start expanding this blog to mythology as well. Myths and fairy tales go very well together, both ancient stories that we tell over and over, changing them for our purposes, and often living them without knowing it. They both explore what it is to be human.

Here is a beautiful silent short film with Anna Friel (Pushing Daisies, Timeline, Bathory) and Ed Speleers (Downton Abby) depicting an Edwardian retelling of the story of Artemis and Actaeon, based on the Titian painting. For those who don't know the story, Actaeon sneaks a peak at Artemis bathing, and she turns him into a stag and his own dogs tear him to pieces.

The acting in it is superb. You can tell the attention is unwelcome, but in no part is Artemis the victim. She does not hide her body. She can shame him with her glance. The trippy abstraction of her spell makes you wonder if she did turn him into a deer, if she poisoned him, made him hallucinate and killed him, or what? Absolutely stunning visuals.

Roundup: Sleeping with the Beast, Disney and Gender Roles, and Why Hollywood Can't Get it Right

“La belle et la bete” by Julie Faulques

Hello Ladies and Jellyspoons!

This month has been crazy, so I have not had a chance to write as often as I like. Once May begins, everything should calm down, and I will be able to post more regularly. In the mean time, I give you a quick round up of fairy tale ephemera and news that has peeked my interest!

Jack Zipes on Disney's Snow White
Tales of Faerie takes on fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes, rebutting his view on Disney's Snow White. It chronicles a history of the film, lists what Disney changed from the original tale, and tempers Zipes' strong opinions on gender roles with a more middle of the road approach:

"I always come back to the fact that-whereas suppression of women was a real problem in the past, we can be grateful we live in a time where there is much more freedom for each gender to break beyond stereotypes. We don't have to resort to the opposite extreme and see all stereotypes as evil. I personally am not bothered by female characters who do housework. I currently earn my own living as well as taking care of my home, and it just doesn't occur to me to get offended."

I certainly enjoy traditionally female gender role activities as well as non-traditional ones. I feel it is just as limiting to say that women should not be seen cooking and cleaning as it is to say that they should only be seen cooking and cleaning. Thoughts?

Why Can't Hollywood Make a Decent Fairy Tale Movie?
Charlie Jane Anders at Io9 examines what he believes the recent fairy tales are missing. He explores the modern films that have flopped and the older ones (like Disney) that have stood the test of time and he finds those that last have "a sense of sincerity and good humor." Disney felt fairy tales should have this formula:

"To captivate our varied and worldwide audience of all ages, the nature and treatment of the fairy tale, the legend, the myth have to be elementary, simple. Good and evil, the antagonists of all great drama in some guise, must be believably personalized. The moral ideals common to all humanity must be upheld. The victories must not be too easy. Strife to test valor is still and will always be the basic ingredient of the animated tale, as of all screen entertainments."

Anders feels that modern fairy tale films "turn the strife into CG and the valor into banter." They are lacking that heart and sincerity that make us so attracted to things like The Princess Bride. Anders feels it is the perfect time for fairy tales because "fairytales become more relevant when people feel powerless — many of us actually are in the position of having made bargains with entities whose true names we're not allowed to know, thanks to the magic of mortgage securitization. At the same time, we still dream of being lifted up from our drudgery to noble status — and we dread having everything that makes us part of middle-class society taken away, if we fall through the cracks the way so many people have."

Perhaps the sincere story is what we need right now, without all the wink-wink, nudge-nudge that post-Shrek Hollywood thinks is necessarily for success.

Villeneuve's Beauty and the Beast: To marry or to sleep with?
Tales of Faerie challenges Jack Zipes again, this time on his translation of the "original" Beauty and the Beast tale (a novella by Madame Gabrielle de Villeneuve). She compares the original french to his translation. Zipes tells the story with the more well-known formula, where each night the Beast asks Belle to marry him, and she refuses. In the French version, however, it seems he was asking her each night to sleep with him. Which actually makes a lot more sense to me:

"Ce charmant spectacle ayant suffisamment dure, la Bete temoigna a sa nouvelle epouse qu'il etait temps de se mettre au lit. Quelque peu d'impatience qu'eut la Belle de se trouver aupres de cet epoux singulier, elle se coucha. Les lumieres s'eteignirent a l'instant. La Bete, s'approchant, fit apprehender a la Belle que de poids de son corps elle n'ecrasat leur couche. Mais elle fut agreablement etonnee en sentant que ce monstre se mattait a ses cotes aussi legerement qu'elle venait dele faire. Sa surprise fut bien plus grande, quand elle l'entendit ronfler presque aussitot, et que par sa tranquillite, elle eut une preuve certaine qu'il dormait d'un profond sommeil."

Strangely, it is not even "sleep with" in a sexual sense. He just wants to lay next to her, and when he does, he falls right asleep. It is kind of sweet, actually!

I will have a Once Upon a Time Review Dump coming soon!

Movies: Snow White and the Huntsman's Dwarves' "Latent Sexuality"

(From Bill Willingham's Fables)

In a recent interview at Wondercon from Movieline Rupert Sanders made an interesting remark about the dwarves in his movie:

“The dwarves really, you know, dwarves mythologically are latent sexuality, you know, they’re half-men. So, they’re kind of, they’re about sexual awakening,” Sanders said. [Sanders explains there will be no dwarf gang bangs in his movie]. “It’s really about another group of people who have lost everything because of the [Queen's] reign, and they are touched by Snow White and they decide that they will fight for their pride again alongside her.” (Full Article)

I had never heard this before, but it makes sense. I can understand in the context of the movie how they represent impotence (in terms of power, not sexuality) and how the coming of Snow White gives them the ability to take control of their lives again. I am a bit relieved he is not playing up the sexual angle. These dwarves come off as kindly uncles (though personally in his heyday, I think Bob Hoskins was rather sexy).

Fables, the comic by Bill Willingham, certainly goes in the sexual direction. Snow White is enslaved by the seven dwarves (sons of the dwarf in Snow White and Rose Red) and is abused both physically and sexually. It is also a common theme in erotica and comedy - how could Snow White live with seven men for so long and not sleep with them? <eyeroll>.

Dwarves have been portrayed as both benevolent and malevolent from Norse myth to fairy tales to Tolkien and beyond. Often they are portrayed as characters with the desire to do something, but do they do not have the power to do it. Does anyone have accounts of sexual dwarves? It is ringing a bell for me, but I can't find it.

[EDIT: Just to clarify, I am talking about the mythological dwarf, not those diagnosed with dwarfism. Though I believe that people with dwarfism may have given rise to the myths, in this article, I am only referring to dwarves as the mythological species as represented in literature.]