MirrorMask (2005)

[randy_byers]

I watched this DVD with Sharee back in February, and she hung onto it because she liked it so much. Ended up lending it to a bunch of her new friends up there. I just got it back from her when we were in Vancouver, and I watched it for a second time last night.

In the meantime I had seen Circus Contraption, which gave me a different context for the modern circus section that opens the film. I had also in the meantime seen Coraline, which is also based on a Neil Gaiman story. What is it with Gaiman and bizarre, evil mothers?

I picked up the DVD because of C. Jerry Kutner's comments about it (contrasting it to Pan's Labyrinth) in his series of Women in Wonderland posts at Bright Lights After Dark. (Coraline was another movie that he wrote about in the series.) Kutner basically dismisses the opening realistic section and focuses on the look and design of the fantasy world. It seems to be mostly animated, with live actors playing the main characters. Some of the live characters, however, are modified with masks and costumes so that they look fantastic themselves. The design work really is wonderfully weird and surrealist. Kutner compares it to Bosch and Ernst. There's a lot of play with masks of various types and with faces treated as separate elements, perhaps even as another type of mask. There may be a bit of Miyazaki, too, in the symbolic, dreamlike strangeness of the creatures in the other world.

Kutner argues that MirrorMask was less acclaimed than Pan's Labyrinth because MirrorMask is truly strange and singular, while Pan's Labyrinth is conventional and thus easier for people to absorb. I find this a dubious proposition. I'd say Pan's Labyrinth benefited from the fact that Guillermo del Toro has a relatively large fan base and from the fact that there was a much greater effort to promote it. I saw trailers for Pan's Labyrinth many times, whereas I don't remember seeing trailers for MirrorMask at all. In fact, my impression was that it came pretty close to being just dumped direct to video.

MirrorMask as actually a fairly conventional story too, as Kutner seems to acknowledge when he advocates ignoring the opening 20 minutes. It's the other world that's something rich and strange.

I'd be interested in what other people thought of this one too.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Pan's Labyrinth is conventional??!?

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

To quote Kutner, "Worst of all is the fairytale kingdom at the film’s end where the little girl becomes a princess. It looks like a Burger King commercial!" I agree with that particular judgment. I was really put off by the twee ending in which the faun is transformed from a menacing mentor into a smiling courtier. But I also found all the fantasy elements to be plot coupons, and I never felt it cohered into a true vision of an other world. There was no there there for me, which is another reason why the happy ending felt false (and yeah, conventional).

I will say, however, that on a design level one thing the two movies have in common is a murky color scheme. I'm sure that murky color will one day be looked on as a distinguishing feature of movies of the Noughties.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Oh for ghu's sake. Kutner's Not Getting It is epic.

[mcjulie.livejournal.com]

Based on what Mssrs. Gaiman and McKean had to say at ComicCon when they were working on MirrorMask, the film was inspired when the Jim Henson company (or maybe whoever owns them now) realized that, although The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth weren't big hits when they were new, that they had extremely steady and solid sales over the long term and were, actually, very profitable. So they wanted something kind of like that. In fact, they weren't even certain at first that there would be a theatrical release. And the budget was tiny.

Both MirrorMask and Pan's Labyrinth tell fairly conventional fantasy stories -- any concept that goes all the way back to Alice in Wonderland can't exactly be considered brand new.

But fantasy stories are always going to be a bit strange compared to, say, your typical romantic comedy.

Pan's Labyrinth was more of a tear-jerker, and much more of a horror film. I don't know if that's why it made more of a splash, or if the whole thing comes down to distribution channels.

I also think Kutner missed the beauty of Pan's Labyrinth because he misunderstood the ending. She dies. That's her fantasy.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I understand your last point about the ending, although I'll agree that Pan's Labyrinth is more of a horror film, which is no doubt another reason I found it off-putting.

Interesting point too about the Henson company. They were involved in producing MirrorMask, and it did at times make me think of Labyrinth (more than The Dark Crystal, which I would say is more successful than either Labyrinth or MirrorMask at creating a true secondary world).

[mcjulie.livejournal.com]

What I mean is, I believe the ending comes across as "twee" because it isn't real. It doesn't really happen. It's a fantasy she has as she is dying. In fact, I read the golden soft-focusedness of it as a clear signal to the audience that it isn't real, even if you assume all the fantasy elements up to that point were objectively real.

However, I believe that also is in doubt. Which might be something I was more primed to recognize because I like horror films. It is very typical for horror films to blur the line between perception and reality, where the audience isn't entirely sure if everything we're seeing as a perception of the character objectively exists in the world of the film. Most of the more conventional horror films eventually resolve that tension -- by, for example, having someone else see the ghost.

Which actually makes me think that both Pan's Labyrinth and MirrorMask deserve some credit for being aconventional, because of the way they both refuse to fully resolve the distinction between objective and subjective reality.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how saying that it might not be real solves the problem of the ending. Do you think her self-sacrifice really saved her brother's life? If so, what was in it for her? Are we to be horrified that she did it for a twee delusion? To me the ending read as a Christian resolution of redemption through self-sacrifice. Or maybe her self-sacrifice didn't really save her brother's life, which makes the ending even more horrific. Is it actually a satire of Christian redemption? It sure didn't feel like it. Or maybe her self-sacrifice did save her brother's life, but not for the reasons (delusions) she thought and she only needed the delusions to talk herself into doing the right thing? (But why was her brother's life more important than her own?)

[mcjulie.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how saying that it might not be real solves the problem of the ending.

That depends entirely on what your problem with the ending is. It sounded like your problem -- in agreement with Kutner -- was that it was an overly pat and sugar-coated happy ending. So I suggested that it wasn't actually a happy ending at all.

I can't really answer the list of questions you post, but that list of questions is why I think it's important that the ending is probably not real. Interpreting the ending as a fantasy sequence leaves those questions lingering in the mind of the audience, while interpreting it as objectively true seems to wrap everything up.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I guess I'd have to watch it again to see how the ending goes down when I know what's coming. Sometimes that really changes how I see things.

[angriest.livejournal.com]

I thought Mirrormask was pretty awful really - some occasionally pretty visuals and a very dull story.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

See, I would say that Stardust was awful, because it didn't even have pretty visuals to keep me interested. I'm mostly interested in movies as a visual experience anyway. (That's one reason -- to refer to a recent post of mcjulie's -- that I've come around on Ang Lee's Hulk, which I disliked when I first saw it. But the visuals have won me over upon further viewings on DVD.

[angriest.livejournal.com]

Stardust I really enjoyed because it was bright and breezy, and Hulk I really enjoyed because Lee was trying something interesting and different with the superhero movie.

Mirrormask just bored me. The visuals were good but didn't have enough money thrown at them to really work, and the film just dragged for me.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Well, I wouldn't mind seeing Stardust again at some point, because, well, hey, Claire Danes and Michelle Pfeiffer, but I remember thinking that the lead character was a total dud.

Hulk really is a different kind of superhero movie. I think it takes a few false steps (I go back and forth about whether the hulk poodles are supposed to be funny), but in the end it creates a beautiful mood of mystery and repressed strangeness. Great inward-spiraling score by Danny Elfman, too.

[angriest.livejournal.com]

The Elfman score is doubly impressive in that it was a last-minute replacement he whipped up over about a fortnight.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

That's very interesting, because I actually don't generally like his scores, but that one (which he apparently modeled on Bernard Herrmann's score for Vertigo) is really cool and sounds completely different from anything else of his I've heard.

[mcjulie.livejournal.com]

What is it with Gaiman and bizarre, evil mothers?

I don't know, but until LoTR Peter Jackson had a definite thing for killing off mother figures in his films.

Fantasy in general has an evil mother fixation. But it's not because fathers are good in contrast, it's because fathers don't end up being important to the story.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

This is a good point. The father in MirrorMask does come off as ineffectual (after all, it's Rob Brydon!) and irrelevant, although he's shown as loving and supportive (also similar to the father in Coraline.) Now I'm suddenly remembering that Brydon plays a character in the other world as well, but it's an unimportant character. Hm.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

I missed MirrorMask on its UK run (it was woefully under-promoted here, too); must catch up sometime soon.

[mlamprey.livejournal.com]

I also felt MirrorMask was utterly conventional fantasy of a type, except for the McKean stylings, which I loved. It reminded me of Labyrinth.

The best part of Pan's Labyrinth was how it managed to spend so little time in the fantasy world--he did well with lowered disclosure and that made the edges of the nightmare seem more extensive.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

This is kind of making me want to see Labyrinth again, although I didn't care for it much when it came out. It actually had another theatrical release relatively recently for some reason.

I need to watch Pan's Labyrinth again at some point, but there wasn't much about it that worked for me, except -- typically enough -- the villain and the monster with the eyes in its palms.

[mlamprey.livejournal.com]

I don't like much of anything about Labyrinth at this point, and someone here was watching it again last week, so I say that as someone who has heard the songs recently.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I remember being disappointed in the movie at the time as a Bowie fan. I hadn't even considered that you might be watching some of these movies because of your girls!

[wrdnrd]

What's interesting to me isn't that Gaiman's necessarily fixated on using the evil mother motif, but that those are the movies of his work being made. Does that say something about Gaiman as a storyteller, or something about the business of modern cinema?

(Hmm, now that i think about it, i wonder how Gaiman's "Beowulf" fits into this. I haven't seen it (hate "Beowulf," actually), but i understand that his interpretation of Grendel's mother was ... interesting. Is that more the source material or his reworking of the poem? Must think about that.)

I had also noticed that these 2 movies explored the relationship between mothers and daughters -- probably because it's a relationship i have trouble navigating myself. But i found how the resolution of the troubled relationship was handled in both movies was ... unsettling. Then again, as a daughter with a troublesome mother, i'm going to be put off by any ending that brings about some sort of epiphany for the daughter without having the mother examine any of her own actions. [shrug]

[mlamprey.livejournal.com]

This reminds me that last week at the gym, I overheard two mothers bragging about their kids by pretending how upset they were about the books they had to dig up for their honors English classes. The book they were having a hard time finding was this one called, as she put it, BIOWOLF.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Fascinating perspective! By "these 2 movies" to you mean MirrorMask and Pan's Labyrinth or MirrorMask and Coraline? I was really bugged by the portrayal of the mother in Pan's Labyrinth, but hers is a different, more passive, kind of evil.

I had forgotten about Gaiman's involvement with the Zemeckis Beowulf. The winter before last I saw about half of it with Sharee in the theater before she dragged me out because she was not digging it and was falling asleep from jetlag besides. It's been years since I read Beowulf (although I occasionally like to shout "hwat!" just for the hell of it), but I sure don't remember the part where Grendel's dam takes the form of a naked woman with bodacious ta-tas. Not the sort of thing I *think* I would have missed. My impression is that the movie also makes the king Grendel's father, so that the "evil" is all in the family, which is also not in the poem.

I actually haven't read anything by Gaiman except for a couple of issues of Sandman, so I have no idea how much the evil mother motif pops up in his work.

[paulcarp.livejournal.com]

I loved both movies, MirrorMask and Pan's Labyrinth.

However, I thought MirrorMask did something (perhaps unconventional) that I'm not used to films doing. I thought it told a girl's coming-of-age story. That's probably why it's easy to think of Alice in Wonderland.

Pan's Labyrinth may also be seen as a girl's coming-of-age, but I felt that it was a metaphor for nearly anyone oppressed in Eastern Europe. That is, the age one is coming to was set in a time everyone shared. In MirrorMask, the events are symbolic of something everyone goes through, but not at the same time as each other.

Why this distinction? It changes the support structure. In Pan's Labyrinth, there is no support. Even the girl's closest ally (her mother) acts against her interests. In MirrorMask, there is familial support. The antagonist is within. It's about, I dunno, hormones, emotions, belligerence, self, being your enemy.

[mlamprey.livejournal.com]

It's true there aren't as many girl's coming of age movies. Company of Wolves stands out as well.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Company of Wolves is an excellent (and also highly surrealist) movie that I only discovered a couple of years ago thanks to a discussion of The Brothers Grimm right here on this very LJ. Prompted me to read Angela Carter's collection, The Bloody Chamber, which has the original short story and is bloody fantastic as well.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how you're defining coming-of-age, but there's been a mini-wave of Alice in Wonderland type movies lately. Along with the two discusses here, there's been Coraline, Tideland, and The Fall that I'm aware of. But I do give credit to Gaiman for being behind two of them. I wonder if he has daughters too.

Your distinction is interesting. It's true that the girl in Pan's Labyrinth is more isolated, although I'm trying to remember if anybody in the resistance is friendly toward her. Maybe Mercedes, who idiotically doesn't kill the captain when she has the chance.

Regarding the hormonal aspect of MirrorMask, I was wondering whether the movie could be read as saying that hormonal girls are evil. The alternate Helena -- who argues with her father and snogs with bad boys -- is the root of the narrative problem: the sickness of the good mother. But I don't think that's quite right. Helena is acting out her internal hormonal turmoil, but the moral of the story (as in Coraline) seems to be that she needs to learn to be less selfish.

[paulcarp.livejournal.com]

Late reply -- I worded my comment poorly. I meant that, when MirrorMask came out, coming-of-age movies about girls was rare. Since then, a floodgate has been opened.