I believe that I read the book long before the movie was in production. I was just young enough, when I read it, to be completely taken in by the framing story. I believed in S. M. Morgenstern. I believed in the skinny, frigid wife Helen and the tubular child. I believed in the starlettes and the book store and the several volumes and all of it.
When I discovered that the framing story was untrue, I felt a flash of betrayal, just a cold touch on the back of my neck reminding me that the world was not a fairy story, even though we need to believe in them. The book is very dark. It weaves a pretty fairy tale, made of air and light, but the structural supports are of steel and bone, and now and then there's the brilliant flash of gunfire.
It's the darkness I prize in that book. The cold fingers of death reaching through the archetypical tale of happy endings, creating a depth and shape that wasn't there, before. For me, the mixture of the bleak, Vietnam-era despair and the tale of a golden-haired princess meld into a true tale, where neither of them had been true on their own. I wish I had the book to hand. What's the Grandfather's description? All that.
It was once described to me as an anti-Vietnam book. That chimed, instantly. I understood it completely. I haven't been able to explain why I agree with that assessment, but I think it is a true one. The war in Vietnam was supposed to be the good guys riding in to save the downtrodden, chase the bad guys away, and everyone would live happily ever after. Real life and real death interfered with that ideal. There's a way in which many Vietnam War supporters seemed as if they were choosing to live in a fairy tale, rather than grapple with the fairy tale and it's underpinnings, pretending that the only thing going on what was on top.
If I can disconnect my brain from the book, the movie's all right. There's an occasional scene that I think is just horrible -- the sequence on the boat with Buttercup, for instance -- but over all, it's an average movie. If only they hadn't made it out of one of my favorite books.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2003-09-10 10:16 pm (UTC)When I discovered that the framing story was untrue, I felt a flash of betrayal, just a cold touch on the back of my neck reminding me that the world was not a fairy story, even though we need to believe in them. The book is very dark. It weaves a pretty fairy tale, made of air and light, but the structural supports are of steel and bone, and now and then there's the brilliant flash of gunfire.
It's the darkness I prize in that book. The cold fingers of death reaching through the archetypical tale of happy endings, creating a depth and shape that wasn't there, before. For me, the mixture of the bleak, Vietnam-era despair and the tale of a golden-haired princess meld into a true tale, where neither of them had been true on their own. I wish I had the book to hand. What's the Grandfather's description? All that.
It was once described to me as an anti-Vietnam book. That chimed, instantly. I understood it completely. I haven't been able to explain why I agree with that assessment, but I think it is a true one. The war in Vietnam was supposed to be the good guys riding in to save the downtrodden, chase the bad guys away, and everyone would live happily ever after. Real life and real death interfered with that ideal. There's a way in which many Vietnam War supporters seemed as if they were choosing to live in a fairy tale, rather than grapple with the fairy tale and it's underpinnings, pretending that the only thing going on what was on top.
If I can disconnect my brain from the book, the movie's all right. There's an occasional scene that I think is just horrible -- the sequence on the boat with Buttercup, for instance -- but over all, it's an average movie. If only they hadn't made it out of one of my favorite books.