So some people made fun of me when I said I wanted to see this movie (namely my 14 year old stepbrother), but it turned out to be really good and a little applicable to this class. Of course, it was a fantasy movie about...wait for it....ALIENS. The trailer explained almost nothing so I'm going to leave that for you all as well and not give anything away. It just brought up thoughts regarding this class. Our theme is the dark fantastic. We focus on the creepy, supernatural, etc. Now, watching this movie made me realize that in books in movies there always has to be a bad guy. And in I Am Number Four the bad guys really did fit into the idea of "the dark fantastic" while the good guys were...light fantastic? So my question is this: doesn't all fantasy kinda require some manner of the dark in order to develop an interesting story? I mean Casper the friendly ghost type stories really get old after a while. Heck even in those there are bad guys. Maybe this a stretch that my mind came up with to satisfy my need for a blog post this week...but hey here it is.
Oh and I also saw a trailer for the Jane Eyre movie when we went to see I Am Number Four. I had no idea Jane Eyre was a kind of dark tale. Any of you know anything more about the story than what the movie trailer lets on?
5 comments:
We read Jane Eyre in my senior English class. It is pretty creepy, because
(*****SPOILER ALERT*****)
he locks his crazy wife in a hidden room. She later goes on to burn down the house and commit suicide by jumping from a window. I think what's dark about this is the fact that Jane lived for years at the mansion with Mr. Rochester and had no clue his wife was stashed away upstairs and fell in love with someone who could hide such a big dark secret so well.
I think that it's easy to make fantasy appealing by making it about the struggle against a dark force. However, one of the best fantasy series I have read, a song of ice and fire by George R R Martin, tells its story from all viewpoints and sometimes its very hard to tell who is bad because all are doing what they believe is right.
The dark part is pretty important to a lot of fantasy simply because it allows for some conflict. I mean, Harry Potter wouldn't be nearly as much fun if it were just the characters bitching about potions class since that's the biggest evil in their lives. Adding darkness creates fear and conflict, and it helps to drive the story. It also gives the readers something to rally against (or for, depending on the story and your personality) and that draws them deeper into the story.
Bad guys are overrused in all fiction, not just fantasy. I tend to leave them out of my stories, and make my students wean themselves from them, too. Worldviews that divide the cosmos into Good and Evil are reductive at best, and dangerous all too frequently.
I Am Number Four, conceived simultaneously as a book and movie, is a product of what New York magazine calls "James Frey's Fiction Factory." You can read the article here.
Though Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, which is well worth reading, has no supernatural elements, it is rife with self-consciously Gothic ones: madness, suicide, sinister houses, prophetic dreams. It has inspired a host of sequels, prequels, pastiches and rewrites, some of them fantastical, such as Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie, Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair, and the inevitable Jane Slayre, in which Jane fights vampires.
Funny story: so I'm on the editorial staff of a new literary journal, DewPoint. We accept prose, poetry, and critical works. Someone submitted a paper discussing all the evidence that Jane Eyre had supernatural powers. We didn't end up using it for publication, but we were quiet amused.
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