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

[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.