Bad fantasy

[sistermagpie]

So I'm watching Life is Beautiful. It's a movie I read about when it was out and it seemed like some people thought it was a triumph of the human spirit (always a bad sign to me) and other people thought it was offensive or ridiculous. From the plot descriptions, I was leaning towards ridiculous.



The beginning of the movie was fine, with his romance with his wife. Why on earth did they add this stupid concentration camp idea? For anyone who doesn't know, the main character and his son are sent to a concentration camp, along with his wife (who makes them stop the train so she can go with them). The "triumph of the human spirit" part is that Guido convinces his kid that the whole thing is a game, that they are getting points for following rules and competing for a tank.

The weird thing is, I like movies where imagination triumphs over reality, where someone's deciding to see something a certain way, or especially a child having a story that "tricks" him into being ultimate happy and successful is great. But as odd as it sounds, I feel like it still has to be done honestly, and this movie just tried my patience. I've heard people get offended when anyone suggests the movie should have portrayed the concentration camp more realistically, with efficient guards who keep control of the camp, violence that couldn't be explained away or just peeked tastefully out in isolated moments, or actual signs of starvation and abuse. But part of that is just that obviously you want to use the Holocaust for a reason, and since that's a recent event your having to completely change everything to make your story work at all is pretty much an admission of deception. I've heard people demand, "Why does it have to be a realistic depiction of the Holocaust? It's not a documentary!" Well, it doesn't. But the question the movie seemed to beg to me was, Why can't it be more realistic? Is it because, perhaps, that would have required a less facile handling of the situation?

It's really not that I don't think it could be done either, but honestly, I think the imaginary plot has to fit the situation. Actually, now that I think about it, there's another Holocaust book that also deals with fantasy that I much prefer, Jane Yolen's Briar Rose. It's a totally different situation, but there's a little similarity there somewhere. So, like I said, it's not that I even have a problem with it being a fable. I just thought the fable kind of sucked. Maybe if Guido's fantasy had been something I could imagine suffering for--that game they're involved in sounds tedious and dull. And, as I said, in order to work the kid has to be stupid and the situation has to be not too bad at all. Basically Joshua's family gets sent to a rather shabby summer camp. If the movie is supposed to be about the triumph of love and imagination over reality, then show me some reality, for goodness sake!

So like I said, I think the whole "imagination is good" theme sometimes just seems very hard to do. It's odd for me, maybe, because on the one hand I love imagination--I think it's one of the best things people have and that believing in fantastic possibilities is a great thing. Otoh, though, I hold truth to be very very important. Even if the truth is painful, I think I'd almost always rather have it than a fantasy. If I choose to make up a story to escape from that reality or better yet to have power over my reality or understand it more, then that's a great thing. But to do that I need to know what the real reality is. If one just denies it, imo, then one is giving the reality power over you. I think that's another thing I started to think during Life is Beautiful. What was so wrong about this kid knowing the truth? To me the truth was a lot nobler than the idea that they were purposefully putting themselves in this situation. Plus his not dealing with the reality did lead both him and his father to take risks that would have gotten them killed, probably along with other people.

This movie now goes up with Radio Flyer with "bad uses of imagination" movies, though RF still takes the cake. It was worth seeing for Elijah Wood's performance (which was incredible), but jeez, what a creepy story about child abuse. Great message here: Ignore the reality of child abuse. Make excuses for a mother who knowingly chooses an abuser over your well-being. If a responsible adult offers to help, deny there's a problem. Cover up the abuse because you promised your brother you wouldn't upset Mom with this situation-yes, that's just the kind of promise a kid should be taught to keep. Make sure when you're a parent yourself you encourage your own children to do the same--if one of you is being hurt, and you promise not to tell, make sure you don't! Dad doesn't want to know! Remember, you don't need any practical help like law enforcement or other adults. It's just much cuter when you send away for monster repellent and ask God to help and plan on flying away. It's so Little Match Girl! And you remember what happened to her, right? She froze to death frittering away her matches on fantasy.

Children often find themselves in situation in which they have no power, and I'm all for coming up with an imaginary scenario that gives them power. Anything to survive in the environment. But to have a kid choose to not seek out any real help, in fact to REJECT it when it walks up in the form of a friendly policeman, or cover up abuse for their abuser? That's not healthy imagination. That's fantasy, which Justin Theroux (in an interview about Mulholland Drive distinguishes from "dreams" by its having no basis in reality. Iow, a person who's got a good arm deciding to try their luck by trying out for the major leagues is following a dream. Somebody with no acting experience or talent who shows up in LA expecting to be discovered and put on television is living a fantasy.

Comments

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

OMG...word :-) i used to hate SL until i saw LIB...now I've used it to teach how *bad* Holocaust fiction works...there aren't enough words to describe my utter disgust with that movie!!!

briar rose is in a completely different camp, i'd argue...or maybe we can handle the duality of magical realismn in writing better than in film? there's a bunch of fantastic tales like the ogre, the last of the just, a blessing on the moon (my personal favorite) and even the painted bird. eh...sorry, more than you wanted to hear, i'm sure :-)

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Oh no, I'd love to hear more! And on SL too, and how bad Holocaust fiction works in general. When I went for the link on Imdb I was looking at the boards and there were all these people saying how it was so great and people who didn't like it just, "Didn't get the message," and I thought, yeah, we get the message, we just think the message is awful.

I do think BR is in a different camp...maybe part of it is that the woman there is really a mystery. She chooses to speak of her experience in this way, but the experience itself is still real. It's more a code than a fantasy, it seems. So there when the reality poked through it was more effective, I thought. This movie was like...there's fanfic that probably does a better job with a Holocaust-type setting.

imagination and escapism

[shusu.livejournal.com]

Oh, you'd love Foster's House of Imaginary Friends. Mojo Jojo made a cameo. "And some kids aren't that creative and just copy what they see on TV."

.......I liked Little Match Girl. Not the stupid dudes who wouldn't buy matches from her, but the whole idea that she could get all that from a match. The ending seemed like a cheat to me at the end. I can't remember why. Re: the ending, what do you think of The Little Mermaid? Am curious.

Principesa! Love that film. He's an exuberant guy irl. Re: risks.... maybe to preserve the spark of childhood in his eye? The one the father kept -- till that one brutal scene in the mist, where it was clearly a symbolic death of the father's spark, then he worked all the harder to preserve it in his son. (IIRC, it's been a while.)

I'm really thinking about imagination as a theme in my next story. Someone once said they taught their child the difference among fact, fib, and make-believe. To him it was a third category, like Santa Claus or the Great Pumpkin -- we need to believe in such things. And some things were mixes of the two. I also think it's age specific. (I'd be more precise but alas I'm in a hurry.)

If you see Digimon Tamers (which I highly recommend) there's a section where they're wondering what these all powerful blue cards are -- and one of the non-battling kids gives his friend a crude markered blue card and it works. They really ramped up 'the power of belief' in 02 and Tamers (3). But they also had 'bad' fantasy like the sort that clouded vulnerable characters (Kari and Ken in this case) and made them think it was all hopeless. But a lot of it was using that power to go somewhere. One of my favorite quotes is Terry Pratchett on escapist literature -- people find it acceptable as long as you are escaping to rather than escaping from.

Re: imagination and escapism

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I think Little Match Girl cheat part is the idea that her dying is happy maybe? The match part is cool, but why can't she just get some dinner rather than dying?

See, I tend to agree with David Denby's review where he said if there was one thing the Nazis were about, it was efficiency, specifically in going after that spark of childhood. Not that people didn't survive with a love of life fully intact. It was just that spark was obviously, to me, pretty unchallenged in the movie, until the end when you were supposed to be all sad that he got shot. But since it seemed like it was obviously That Time in the movie it didn't effect me that much. Before then I'd never been worried for him because he was always obviously going to come through just fine.

In general I love the idea of imagination in dealing with reality, though. There was a story we did at work that I totally pushed for an worked on that my boss originally didn't get the point of, which was sort of the same idea. A mother just did something totally impractical to keep her kids believing in Santa or the magic of Christmas or something. And I loved it-and it was really popular. This version of that theme just bugged me!

[go-back-chief.livejournal.com]

I shouldn't really be answering this post since I've been planning to write my own essay on Life is Beautiful, where I intended to go into depth about what I think is the ambiguiety that the director is purposely leaving open, but I couldn't help myself from responding to this:

But the question the movie seemed to beg to me was, Why can't it be more realistic?

Because the entire movie -not only the concentration camp part- is showing us what Guido tells himself and his son to be reality, if we had been shown any of the horrors Guido is so insistant on telling himself aren't there, it would have sort of lost its point. This is so thoroughly done throughought the entire movie; the hints we get of what's really going on are never shown, we only get to see the result of them, results that Guido insists on explaining away.

For instance, in the very beginning, his uncle is attacked, physically assaulted it seems (since he's rising from the ground when Guido and Ferruccio enters), and his home is vandalised, but we see none of it. We only hear some noise, and see the culprits running away, and we see the disorder and the uncle rising and shaking the who incident off, as if nothing has happened. The uncle is quite like Guido in this scene, insisting on keeping his eyes shut from reality, but that changes later on in the movie, when his horse get painted to be exact. Here again, we don't get to see the actual painting of the horse, we only get to see the result: a green horse, and a devastated uncle, who unlike Guido, is becoming unable to shut his eyes from the truth. But Guido keeps denying it, telling himself and his uncle that it's nothing to pay attention to. So he doesn't, and neither does the movie, because the movie is "Guido's screwed-up perception of reality", so to speak.

It keeps going this way, we see the men taking Guido away from the store, right in front of his eyes, but we don't see what happens to him at the interrogation, because it belongs to a part of reality that Guido keeps denying. And he's continuing in exactly the same track once they get to the camp. Of course, when it's got that far, he knows deep down what's really going on, but because of his son, he keeps pretending and shutting his eyes to realities. Maybe he wouldn't have done that if it wasn't for Joshua, but I do think he's doing it as much for himself as for his son; the essence of his character is after all, that he's unable to deal with the uglier parts of life -something which has been well established since the beginning of the film. So, on that note, we see him working hard, but we don't see any real consequences, we only hear about what will happen to someone who quits working, but of course neither Guido or we are seeing it, because Guido doesn't want to. We also see the number he's gotten, but we don't see the nazies actually burning those marks into him or anyone.

Closer to the end of the movie, we get some hints of his strong will to keep reality shut off, faltering, and thus we get the scene with the doctor, and the scene where he sees the dead bodys, but we still don't see anything actually happening, because he's still insisting on the lie. It seems very important to me that when he's killed in the end, we don't see that either, we only hear it. And so, his son is "keeping the lie alive" for him, by insisting on percieve reality exactly as he knew his father wanted him to. I don't think Joshua is stupid, there were hints that he deep down knew what was going on, but his father is teaching him to keep his eyes closed to the uglier side of life, and he must notice how important it is for Guido that he follows his lead, so he does, because that's what he's been taught, and because he'll do anything for his father. Much like most children, in other words. (He is also very young, five years old or something, if I remember correctly.)

To be continued

Cont.

[go-back-chief.livejournal.com]

So the narrative of this story is staying so close the way Guido wants to percieve the world, that it wouldn't, in fact, be possible to be more realistic, because Guido perception of reality is as far from realistic as you get. I don't agree that the movie is doing this because it's simple, on the contrary, I think it was harder to do, than to have some realism in it. The narrative has to rely completely on the viewers, that they know enough about the persecution, nazism and the holocaust, so that they are able to fill in what we don't get to see (which is pretty much everything), and it does.

Finally, the reason I like this movie so much, is because I think the hero (Guido) is morally ambiguous, to say the least. I don't think Benigni is trying to tell us that he is making the right choice, I think he's just showing us the choice Guido is making, and letting us be the judges of that choice. Personally, I think it's the wrong choice. Seeing the bottle as half-full is one thing, but denying reality is another. As you say, his choice put both him and his son in danger on several occasions, and if he had never shut his eyes to reality in the first place, he might even have been able to go into hiding with his family, or at least he could have tried to. Instead, he just keeps living in his dream-world at a time when taking personal responsibility is more important than ever. But that's a choice too. Anyway, I'll go more into these things when I write my own essay. Will memorise this entry 'til then, so I can perhaps give some better answers.

Anyway, this is not trying to force you to like the movie or anything, just providing an alternative opinion.;-)

Re: Cont.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Because the entire movie -not only the concentration camp part- is showing us what Guido tells himself and his son to be reality, if we had been shown any of the horrors Guido is so insistant on telling himself aren't there, it would have sort of lost its point.

That's what I think makes the whole thing kind of pointless to me. If this glorious story Dad is telling can't hold up against the reality (which another story could) then why would I believe it worked? What's it saying, exactly? I know at least a bit about what would have really been going on, so my focus was never on the story Guido was telling Joshua, but the story the director was telling me. I had more questions than Joshua. It seemed like it would be saying that if a concentration was just a lot less horrible you could pretend it was a game. If we were dealing with the reality, for instance, could we really believe a child would choose to stay in, say, Sobibor? What kid wouldn't want to go home?

I mean, the beginning of the movie had more reality in it, like a sign that said, "No Jews or dogs allowed in store." The stuff that happened did happen to some extent--He did marry Dora, they did have a child etc. It didn't change the sign to say something else. When the Nazi gives them instructions that Guido pretends to translate we understand that he's really saying something else. But what was the reality? It didn't know what exactly to see underneath, since the storyline often depended on the place conforming to make Guido's schemes work.

So, like, it didn't seem to me that it was choosing to be "not real" so much as trying to be real in a half-assed way, skimming over the question of how this stuff could happen. I mean, to me it seems a lot harder to write a convincing scene where an inmate of a concentration manages to break into a guarded watchtower and make a very long announcement on the PA without any guard getting in to stop him (it's not like they don't know where he is) and then get out again than it is to have him do that and just rely on the audience to fill in that this could be dangerous in a real camp and assume he did it somehow. In a real camp it would be an amazing thing to do for his wife and probably get him and others killed. In this camp it was just business as usual. So I went by the reality of this camp where you knew dad couldn't die until the story demanded it. I wasn't scared for him until the scene where he was obviously going to die. So there was no tension for me, it was just sort of watching this guy flit around his little camp doing one cute thing after another while the guards were kind of slow. And then when it was time in the story he died.

It's not like Guido was particularly clever, after all. For instance, when he pretends to be the school inspector he gets away with it because the real inspector stands there and says nothing until he makes his mistake. Then later the Nazis appear just as obligingly ineffectual.

I see what you're saying about the father being morally ambiguous, though I thought the movie clearly thought what he did was good. And I didn't think in the end that reality won, thus showing that Guido had made the wrong choice. The title seems strange to me, because for someone to say "Life is Beautiful" with any real weight I think they would have had to have found beauty in a concentration camp. Not just convinced their kid he was in a sort of reality-tv show competition. (And btw, if you've ever seen real kids in those shows you'd know Joshua would not have been so compliant.)

Re: Cont.

[go-back-chief.livejournal.com]

If this glorious story Dad is telling can't hold up against the reality (which another story could) then why would I believe it worked?

I'd say it works because Joshua, too, wants to believe it. He doesn't, really, but it's a way to deal with a horrific reality, and it's clear to him that his dad wants to believe him to believe it, so he believes it for him.

If we were dealing with the reality, for instance, could we really believe a child would choose to stay in, say, Sobibor? What kid wouldn't want to go home?

Well, I thought that scene just proved that he did know that he couldn't leave, and that he decided to keep up the act, the game of pretence for his dad.

I mean, the beginning of the movie had more reality in it, like a sign that said, "No Jews or dogs allowed in store."

I don't think the beginning of the movie had more reality in it. Yes there were that sign, but there were plenty of other scenes that were just not realistic at all, the inspector-scene that you mention being just one of them. The whole "date" with Dora for instance, not realistic at all, the ball where they exited on the green horse, etc, etc. And just like there were snippets of reality in the first half of the movie, there were snippets of reality in the second part as well; the scene where the uncle undresses for the "shower" for instance, and the scene where Dora finds the cat amongst the clothes of people killed, insinuating the girl who owned it was gassed, the pile of corpse, the final attempt to kill the survivors before the Nazis cleared from the place. So I think it the fairytale theme was definitely established from the beginning, and the glimts of pure reality were few and far in between, consistantly.

I mean, to me it seems a lot harder to write a convincing scene where an inmate of a concentration manages to break into a guarded watchtower and make a very long announcement on the PA without any guard getting in to stop him

Yes, I agree. Supposing that really did happen. My interpretation is that it didn't. The son is telling the story, after all (implied in the voice-over in the beginning and the end), I've always assumed it's the way he remembers it, the story they were both imagining. I don't think we're supposed to take those scenes that really couldn't have happened as a literary description of what happened.

I see what you're saying about the father being morally ambiguous, though I thought the movie clearly thought what he did was good.

I didn't mean that the movie was claiming it was the wrong choice, I think it was presented as one choice, a choice the audiences could judge how they liked. And I agree that he definitely didn't make a statement of "having reality winning". I just don't think that the message came across as "Imagination defeating reality" either, and I don't think he necessarily intended for either of those messages, I think it was a much more open ending than that. We don't see what happens after, after all. It's true that the final words of the movie is "We won", but as a viewer you're left to wonder what that means exactly, have they really won, and if they have, at what cost? I mean, not only have they personally lost two family members, but six million people have been killed, the survivors are left with physical and emotional scars that in many cases will never go away, if "the spirit" indeed "has won", it has been at a terrible prize. And I don't think the movie denies that.

[alchemia.livejournal.com]

I've seen a rather wide variety of responses to the movie. I suspect its because it wasn't a documentary in any way , which is what people tend to expect I think on this subject. The movie was supposed to be a Fantasy and Surreal Comedy, and I think that upsets some people, and confuses some people. Benigni said it was impossible to fathom what it was like, and any attempt to portray it would be inadequate, that he didn't want to try to that and he didn't want the audience to look for any realism in the movie. I don't think its an issue of why couldn't it be more realistic, because that’s not the kind of movie he was making, that to me would be like wondering why Schindler's List couldn't have more humour in it. I don't think its offensive that its not realistic, I couldn't get my grandmother to see it because of language barriers (and even if there wasn't I don't think she would), but my grandfather would have seen it. He always had to put some odd little amusing comment in the middle of stories about that time period (they faught in the war and were in camps), and I think that’s just how some people deal with horrible things like that. If he was alive, I don't think he'd have found the movie offensive either, because I can see a bit of Guido in him.

The kid in the story was still very young. He probably DID know what was going on, but because it was horrible and didn't make much sense (a child like that wouldn't know why this happened, the politics, why people would do these things etc.), he went along with the game, no matter how ridiculous it was, because that was simply easier. Even adults have thought things like that, so I don't think it would be difficult for a child to actually believe/accept/play-along-with the idea even though he sees the reality. I believe Benigni got the idea of the game from Primo Levi who wrote If This Is A Man and said that they were all standing there naked and he's thinking, What if this was all just a terrible joke or game.

That all said, I don't think it was the "greatest movie" of the year or whatever. Nor am I making excuses for what it was attempting. I think it was a decent movie, it didn't greatly irritate me or anything as it seems to have for you, but I think it could have been better.

I just seem to be at the end of this spectrum from you, instead of wondering why it couldn't be more realistic, I wonder why it couldn't be more surreal! The first half was fine IMHO as fantasy, its the 2nd half int he camps that I'd have been MORE surreal! I don't feel showing the reality is necessary since the audience is assumed to already be familiar with that via other books and movies. The camp could have been more eerie and surreal, more looming, odd angles and shadows, shot from a child's eye level, iow, make it right out of a child's nightmare- that for me would have made it seem scarier and more horrible from a child's POV, while strengthening the surrealism of it all, and making the fantasy/imagination/game more "believable" within this context.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

The thing is, if it were *more* surreal I think it would have made more sense. I'm not offended by humor in that setting, or anything. I think the idea of seeing people who have an attitude that protects them from despair in a place like that is great. So it's not the idea the movie's putting across to me that doesn't work, but the way it's executed, for me. I think a lot of people probably did get through the Holocaust by giving meaning to their experience in their imagination-that's a good thing. But in this case the story just didn't seem to fit the experience.

I mean, it's really not true that we "can't imagine" what it was like. We can't imagine what it feels like to live through it or experience it maybe, but we know what it was like. We have evidence and films and testimonies. Didn't he even do research and then toss it out? There are certain things we do know, and if those things made it impossible for things in the movie to happen, they were just not explained. It reminded me of reading a fanfic where the person wants to use something for angst but then can't deal with it in any realistic way. Not that I think these things have to be dealt with realistically--it's just it seemed like the way this movie used it seemed like it was trying to have it both ways. It wanted to use the Holocaust because it has a heavy meaning but then change it to fit the plot instead of making the plot work around that. And since the movie was about a triumph over ugly reality I felt like the triumph was just to say, "Let's pretend it was like this instead to make my point."

[alchemia.livejournal.com]

The thing is, if it were *more* surreal I think it would have made more sense.

Ok, so we are in agreement on that =)

Didn't he even do research and then toss it out?

Yes, his father actually was in a German camp and he and others on the film crew worked closely with the Center for Contemporary Jewish in Milan as well as other survivor groups. While he was going for surrealism, there are many elements in the film that are historical.

[alasandalack.livejournal.com]

i wonder whether anyone has considered how royally this "game" would have fucked up the kid's ability to tell reality from fantasy and trust his own perceptions.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Personally, I think I might have been scared with my father telling me this nonsense. I'm cold and hungry and I want my mother. And that guy is not just funny and yelling a lot, he wants to kill me.

[ex-lonicera600.livejournal.com]

There are no words to express how much I hated this movie when I saw it. Especially as the two parts did not really fit, imo.

The first part feels like a cheesy dream sequence and all the indoor scenes look as if they're playing out on a stage. Then the concept of a young, goodlooking, educated and wealthy woman falling in love with an ugly, pathetic, socially inferior man maybe working in a fable like the one where the princess kisses the frog, but is highly unlikely to happen in RL. This was Harlequin Novel stuff.

Then the second part inside the concentration camp goes from cheesy to plain indecent, in my worldview. To deal with that subject in such a way feels like totally and utterly lacking respect for those, who actually had this experience, and for reality itself, for me.

I was appalled when I saw people raving about how great this movie was. Because I think it's one of those movies where everyone thinks they *have* to say they love it to prove how concerned, understanding and sensitive they are.

Well, I'm nothing of the kind. I'm plainly disgusted.

Totally OT

[ex-lonicera600.livejournal.com]

What do you think about this:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/lonicera/3658.html?mode=reply

???

Am afraid, am very afraid.