Down the rabbit hole

People that know me or have known me, or well, that don’t know me, but meet me in a super market checkout line know that I am a cynical, depressive, fuck, and I do all that I can to reject reality. The world is shit. Life is suffering. Holden was right. One of my favorite books is about dreaming away life. Going to some place that perhaps isn’t better, but at least it is not here. That book is called Dreaming of Babylon by Richard Brautigan. I have become a huge fan of stories that take me down the rabbit hole to a new world with obscure problems. I love to watch characters deal with their problems. It helps me avoid my own. I love to see worlds that mirror reality, but stay outside the walls of truth. Maybe it has some weird magnetic relation with the fact that I share my birthday with Walt Disney. As books and movies go I tend to lean towards the same direction. I skew from time to time, but I always return to the standard style of “leave here, you can fix the problems of here, someplace else.” I’m also a big fan of Hunter S. Thompson, who as anyone who has read his books knows, spent most of his life far from reality. Now there are millions of stories that transport its characters to other worlds, but when they get there the threat is lacking seething evil. True evil must exist in the new world for any growth to happen. Innocence must be stabbed and left bleeding without the hope that help is on the way. The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass are prime examples of how to leave reality and find darkness waiting in the wings. They set the stage for innocence to be challenged. Peter Pan leaves reality and brings the kids to the doorstep of danger and abandons them there. There must be the perfect storm of torture, pain, fear, love, disgust, loathing and acceptance. The danger that waits must far more comforting than the caustic light of reality. There are a few films that have touched on this perfection, such as The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Some films come close, and are good, but they never really hit the mark such as The Never Ending Story, Lemony Snickets, a Series of Unfortunate Events and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Then there are films that miss the mark completely like the revamped version of The Chronicles of Narnia. A couple of movies have come out recently that are pure Picasso reprints of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and are some of the best films ever made. The first film is Pan’s Labyrinth a dark, twisted look at war and change through the eyes of a child. This film boarders on perfection. The fear that comes while watching Pan’s Labyrinth leaves people in a contemplative coma for hours. This film got it right. And when it is done right, when there is a true since of danger, and the character is pushed to the breaking point, when the bad guys might actually win, then and only then can I say that I have felt something while watching a film. Another film that I have recently watched and is pretty much the reason I am writing this is Tideland. Like Pan’s Labyrinth, Tideland is terrifying. It takes the viewer on a ride through the resilient, innocent and dark mind of a child as she deals with the world that she is born into. Tideland is everything that I have ever wanted in a story and a film. Tideland pissed people off at every film festival that it went to. Tideland is at times hard to watch and even opens with a declaimer from the director Terry Gilliam saying “many of you won’t like this film…” Life is sordid, and scary at times, and we have forgotten that sometimes we need to see the ugly to make the pretty things pretty. Tideland is a great movie that no one will see. But if you do, you will see what I mean.