Changeling
I had another AWOL Friday, but from pure exhaustion this was an at-home skive. I played with Elsie in the morning, who was clearly making up for our absence yesterday, with numerous visits and requests for snacks and attention. I had a few catnaps myself, which took on a surreal and rather sad tone as the rolling news went over and over Michael Jackson's death which we just caught breaking late last night. But I woke myself up this afternoon and watched Changeling, which took up a good two and a half hours but was really absorbing; more so than our previous Watch Again choices.
Gruesome, admittedly, after its initial set-up, and with satisfying enough thematic strands such as corruption of the LAPD (1920's version of); the lazy accusations of failed maternal instinct and female frailty (at an admittedly very physically frail looking Jolie); the dreadful locking away and 'treating' of such problematic women under the sinister LAPD 'Code 12' (if you've read Elaine Showalter's 'The Female Malady' you'll be aware of the history of medical models of suppressing difficult, 'hysterical' female subjects); a crime story. No real backstory for Christine Collins, despite her real-life basis, and barely a whisper of incipient romance. Slated by some critics I noticed but actually for a Hollywood movie rather a relief. And all with a nugget of the uncanny in the eponymous changeling child, whose substituted version remained closed, mostly silent, stolid. Unnerving. Easy enough for the child actor concerned but effective nevertheless.
I remember folk and fairy stories about changelings as a child; enjoying their rather frightening narratives. Often the human infant is deemed to have been substituted by an elfin or otherwise otherwordly creature. Sometimes indeed by just a 'stock'; a plank of wood which gradually loses its facade of anthropomorphic animation; withers and dies.
These supernatural hustlers usually get a bad press but poetry finds an enchantment within the enchantment sometimes. Yeats for instance in his early Celtic Twilight period.
Come away O human child!
To the waters and the wild
with a faery, hand in hand
for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Yeats' refrain to 'The Stolen Child'. Here the implication is that following the faery invitation may save you from a lot of adult sorrow and horror. Or (in the last stanza) it may not. Something Michael Jackson might have had some sympathy with. Displaced or unnaturally prolonged or revisited childhood tends to go rather wrong.
Ok to regress for a day or two though. The movie didn't have much of a fairytale ending - not a family drama at all in terms of suitable viewers. There was a sort of sliver of hope remaining which hovered effectively between the faint echo of a happy ending and an uncomfortable suggestion that Collins' character was not entirely sane in her clinging so strongly to hope after all.
One last thing though: Jolie's lipstick throughout was magnificent. Her character was a working woman in prohibition America throughout her fight for justice, but I couldn't help thinking of all the British women who wore bright red lipstick throughout the second world war as a gesture of strength and defiance, a statement that they would not be broken. Scarlets; crimsons, speaking where words couldn't. Sonic cosmetics indeed.
Gruesome, admittedly, after its initial set-up, and with satisfying enough thematic strands such as corruption of the LAPD (1920's version of); the lazy accusations of failed maternal instinct and female frailty (at an admittedly very physically frail looking Jolie); the dreadful locking away and 'treating' of such problematic women under the sinister LAPD 'Code 12' (if you've read Elaine Showalter's 'The Female Malady' you'll be aware of the history of medical models of suppressing difficult, 'hysterical' female subjects); a crime story. No real backstory for Christine Collins, despite her real-life basis, and barely a whisper of incipient romance. Slated by some critics I noticed but actually for a Hollywood movie rather a relief. And all with a nugget of the uncanny in the eponymous changeling child, whose substituted version remained closed, mostly silent, stolid. Unnerving. Easy enough for the child actor concerned but effective nevertheless.
I remember folk and fairy stories about changelings as a child; enjoying their rather frightening narratives. Often the human infant is deemed to have been substituted by an elfin or otherwise otherwordly creature. Sometimes indeed by just a 'stock'; a plank of wood which gradually loses its facade of anthropomorphic animation; withers and dies.
These supernatural hustlers usually get a bad press but poetry finds an enchantment within the enchantment sometimes. Yeats for instance in his early Celtic Twilight period.
Come away O human child!
To the waters and the wild
with a faery, hand in hand
for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Yeats' refrain to 'The Stolen Child'. Here the implication is that following the faery invitation may save you from a lot of adult sorrow and horror. Or (in the last stanza) it may not. Something Michael Jackson might have had some sympathy with. Displaced or unnaturally prolonged or revisited childhood tends to go rather wrong.
Ok to regress for a day or two though. The movie didn't have much of a fairytale ending - not a family drama at all in terms of suitable viewers. There was a sort of sliver of hope remaining which hovered effectively between the faint echo of a happy ending and an uncomfortable suggestion that Collins' character was not entirely sane in her clinging so strongly to hope after all.
One last thing though: Jolie's lipstick throughout was magnificent. Her character was a working woman in prohibition America throughout her fight for justice, but I couldn't help thinking of all the British women who wore bright red lipstick throughout the second world war as a gesture of strength and defiance, a statement that they would not be broken. Scarlets; crimsons, speaking where words couldn't. Sonic cosmetics indeed.
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