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Friday, September 3, 2010
Down a New Yellow Brick Road
Illusive Arts Entertainment's Dorothy
The line between myth and fairy tale and fantasy blurs when you get past the point where people started saying "God is Dead."
Before God died, or whatever happened when psychology became mainstream and all the other great gears of change started happening in the modern world that led to the birth of that phrase, we had myth. Or perhaps we had myth before we had standardized religion. Myth was religion. Myth still is, if you're standing in the right part of the world at the right moment and you see a crow fly into the sun, or feel that sense of time rolling like deep water underneath your feet.
Myth is closer to fairy tale now, really. Fairy tales served the dual-role of parable and ghost story, after all, and when you stop believing that myth gives order to the world and explains away the shadows and the fear, then they become little more than pretty stories as well.
Either because we want a mythology of our own, or because myth does not want to go away, we tend to find our own stories as the old ones lose relevance. I've said before that we've found our old gods in the pages of comics, finding pantheons in four-color print and mantras in mottoes issued in tales written to entertain young boys. Although there's something to be said that the overall perspective of America is that of a young boy, arrogant and earnest with dreams of heroics, and of course we would find our gods in "up, up and away," or "hi-ho Silver."
The last phrase is telling, of course, because not all of our accidental mythology comes from comics. They can come from television, and radio shows, and even in this oft-illiterate place from our books. When characters have taken on a life of their own, when the places their adventures are contained in spill over into the general psyche of the populace to the point where we know them without ever having read them ourselves, then they've become a sort of mythology of their own.
I bring this up because there's a quiet little project that, either knowingly or not, has the potential to be the convergence of modern quasi-mythology all by itself: Illusive Arts Entertainment's Dorothy, a modern retelling of the classic Wizard of Oz story.
L. Frank Baum's story has without a doubt entered into American mythology. Try to find someone who isn't familiar with the story, who doesn't instantly know the phrase "there'’s no place like home," who has never heard of Dorothy's ruby (or silver, as they were originally written in Baum's novel) slippers. Generations have grown up in illogical terror of flying monkeys and long-snouted witches, and Emerald Cities sitting majestic and impossible on the horizon.
Accidental mythology is full of stories, but Oz is absolutely a charter member of that collection. Whether it's your coworker rubbing his temples and muttering "I wish I had a brain" or a tired friend clicking her heels together absently, or Farmer telling Union in The Monarchy that he was there when Oz fell, it is a place we all know.
But modern myths aren't the same as the ancients. You toy with them at your own peril. But the team at Illusive Arts has taken that risk, and their strange and beautiful project is paying off.
Dorothy might catch your eye as an attempt at a change-up in comic art that has rarely, if ever, worked out well, using photography as sequential art in comic book format. Usually the style is out of place and awkward, sweat pants at a black-tie wedding or a bathing suit at a nude beach. But somehow Dorothy bypasses that awkwardness. Perhaps it's sensory overload of the art itself, colors amped up to a thrilling and exotic degree, with warped and grotesque creatures solid and tangible on the page. Or maybe it is the petulant charisma of Catie Fisher, the actress portraying a thoroughly modernized version of Dorothy, stomping through Oz with ruby-red Doc Martens and a ruby-red sneer.
Like all popularized myths and fairy tales, "Oz" has been sanitized over the years, softened for the delicate palates of youth much more capable of handling the strange things that twitter in the shadows than their adult protectors believe them capable of. This book is not sanitized, not at all, a fairy tale for adults. We walk with Dorothy, pierced and Kool-Aid haired and too angry to be scared, through territory we should be familiar with – we've seen it in Technicolor, we've seen it on television, maybe we've even seen it on the printed page – with new eyes. And this time there's no one covering our eyes during the scary parts, like her encounter (layered in meaning) encounter with the snake beneath the waterfall.
This time the blood is bright and ruby-like on the page.
It's not a perfect project. There are moments of stilted language here and there, bumps in the yellow brick road, but there's a little poetry too – see such moments as when, in Chapter III, the changed and strangely beautiful vision of this wicked witch looks down over Oz with her grey companion and talks of war.
Or in the tiniest of moments, when Dorothy looks up at the alien form of the Scarecrow (with "the eyes of a baby") and tells him she is in need of a friend.
Dorothy accomplishes quite a bevy of things in its first three chapters, in providing a successful and attractive use of photography, in recreating an adult version of an old world both familiar and now frightening, and in unwrapping the source material to show those things we may never have seen.
Perhaps its greatest achievement will be if it inspires those who have never set foot into Baum's original vision of the world, who only know it traipsing along behind Judy Garland, who may have avoided the source for whatever reason – it's Populist undertones or a fear of a lion based on William Jennings Bryan – might walk down the first golden road.
Myths are made for retelling, though, and Dorothy is a lovely new vision of a story we already know.
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
