Review of Immortals

I saw Immortals last night with my stepson and my opposite-taste-continuum wife, and we all liked Immortals, so that bodes well for its reception by a general audience.  The main thing I can see going against it in this context is violence, and since I think most people these days seem to be pretty comfortable with their blood-thirsty side, I doubt that will hold it back.  If human-on-human violence bothers you, then I bet you'd already know not to go see Immortals, anyway.  I may come back to the issue of violence, but let me also note that if 300's thin storyline bothered you, there's a little more to 300. 

Now for the grousing.  The premise and the plot are still pretty thin in some places.  Why are the Heraklions such jerks?  Why do they want to follow a psychopath to wipe out the Hellenes?  Why would they put up with the stuff Hyperion does to them?  Who made him the boss of us?!

My wife couldn't understand the grousing.  Here I was having seen the kind of movie that I like, it was a good movie, and she was there with me and actually enjoyed it.  Beyond some complaints about story-telling, I think it is all goes back to our current zeitgeist, which prefers radical reinterpretations that have little to no relationship to traditional material beyond a bare minimum. I understand the desire to put your own spin on old material, and this become more important when material has gotten tired and overly familiar, but when it comes to anything demanding Classical knowledge, folks today are hyper-ignorant.  When you look a the picture of Poseidon from the movie above, you know (or guess) it is him from the trident (and this puts you in the top percentile of the population in terms of classical knowledge).  However, I chose to use the only Greek god in the entire film that is indicated by traditional symbology: Zeus has a fiery whip, Athena has either curved daggers or those Japanese one-handed scythes (I know, I'm not in the mood to look up the real name), Ares has a war hammer.  What the Tartarus?  Meanwhile {¡SPOILER ALERT!} the famous Greek hero Theseus, second only to Hercules, has one adventure and then dies?  {Here endeth the spoiler.}  Pffft.  I counter that the contemporary audience is so classics-poor that most of it will seem new to them anyway.  Reinterpretation should happen for reasons, not just for postmodern masturbatory buzz.  The radicalness of it in Immortals and cases like it goes beyond any real reason.  Why not just make up an original fantasy story?  It will be impossible to keep out some points of classical inspiration, anyway.

In addition to complaints about discontinuity with the source material for no particular reason, there is the extremities of its portrayal of combat.  Now, I know complaints about realism are going to be met with rejoinders about cinema and the style of this certain film, which is fair enough, but I still have some issues here.  I note that on the whole, we are moving to grander and grander spectacle with less realism, and my own counter-current desire for an increase in realism.  Sure, I want to be entertained and blown away, but I have two concerns: eroding our ability to visually and mentally detect the realistic and the threatening of suspension of belief for those of us who retain some measure of verisimil-detection.  Do I hope in vain that we would see more films that strike this balance a bit more satisfactorily?  Or is the zeitgeist so strong in the other direction?  I guess the one glaring example is when outnumbered idiots give up the advantage of standing spread out in the open to fight huge numbers constricted by a narrow tunnel.  No amount of style can excuse that for me.  (Hey, didn't you guys make 300?  What was the tactical point of that film again?)

Some of the blends are interesting.  Christian ideas and Byzantine iconography influence this recasting of Greek myth, which has a certain honesty about it, since Christianity has forever changed the way we think about divine matters.  And I loved that fact that they actually used Greek in the movie, and didn't use a pretend Germanic pronunciation of Greek.  But what alphabet is that used throughout the film?  Certainly not Greek.  Was it designed to look cool?  Why not just invent a new Greek script instead of what is obviously a modern typeface?  And using rebar in the film?  Surely that was another look choice and not a cost-cutting measure, but will people really not recognize rebar?  That with the architectural demands the sets would put on an ancient culture, I found myself fantasizing that this was a post-catastrophic Earth of the future that was replaying religious and mythological scripts of the past.

When it comes to ultimate questions, this movie reminded me more of the Clash of the Titans remake than of 300.  And here is where the real post-Christian nature of the film is evident: Exploration of the idea that the divine needs us. From my theological perspective, this is the ultimate in self-flattery from and for folks who have a terrible crisis in identity and worth.  Is the idea that the divine loves us and doesn't need us at all in any inherent way just way beyond the popular capacity to entertain?

To close, I turn to the miscellaneous: Freida Pinto is drop dead gorgeous.  I demand that she play the iconic oracle in any future Pathfinder film.  Mikey Rourke, I don't know if it is you or Hyperion or both equally, but it is hard not to enjoy seeing you beat up.  For pleasures of grand spectacle, genre, and venal indulgence, I recommend Immortals.  It's enough that these days I'm getting some of the kind of movies that I enjoy made and made well, even if they give me a lot to complain about.  And if anybody can find me more information on that typeface/alphabet used in the film, I would really appreciate it.  Yeah, sometimes I go for the eye-candy, too, Phaedra.

EDITED: For clarity.

Remember, Remember...

Remember, remember, the fifth of November:
The gunpowder, treason, and plot.
I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

Who all our there uses political coups (failed or successful) and conspiracy theories (true or false) in their story lines?  I've found them to be a great element in games and stories, bringing with them tension, suspense, and getting caught up in events and powers beyond one's control.  They also provide one with an opportunity to identify with causes or reflect on the problematic of political causes.

Mythopoeia and the Public Domain

I got it into my head that J. R. R. Tolkien's poem, "Mythopoeia," written in 1931 (after one of those BIG conversations that changes the life of intellectuals, in this case, Tollers, Jack, and Hugh Dyson) and dedicated to Lewis, was in the public domain.  I'm not sure how I got that impression, perhaps because it was on Wikipedia at some point?  Anyway, apparently it is not freely available.  And thanks to Sonny Bono, the Walt Disney Co., and various other corporate lackeys in Congress, it will not be in the public domain in the US any time soon.  Now, I'm all for the rights of creators, but at some point, it is reasonable that the creator and the family that she or he provided for have been taken care of, and the culture of which they are a part have a claim on their creation as something that now belongs to a people.  You know, like all those stories that Grimm and Perrault and others published, but then were later available for Walt Disney to adapt in animations that made them tons of money?  So yeah, I'm one of those disgruntled people that thinks that copyright was plenty long already and didn't need a greedy extend that keeps things out of the public domain even longer.  Even if it was simply occasioned by the fact that I was going to republish "Mythopoeia" today until I discovered I was all wrong about its copyright status and that made my life more difficult this Mythopoeic Monday.  Yet another reason to appreciate things like the OGL, Creative Commons, the sharers in the OSR community, and artists like Nina Paley.  I might also mention Paizo's community use policy (found by scrolling down the page, right hand panel).

The problem with grumpiness is that it calls for connections.  Like a connection to the fact that I love the Tolkien volume Tales from the Perilous Realm, illustrated by Alan Lee.  It's an almost perfect collection of fairy stories together with Tolkien's seminal essay "On Fairy-Stories."  Almost perfect, except that it left out the other major work on mythopoeia in Tolkien's corpus: the eponymous poem that is the subject of today's grumpiness!  Ugh!  Another link in the grumpiness chain.  Truly, everything in this life is marked by dukkha.

So you will not be treated to a reproduction of "Mythopoiea" in today's post.  For that matter, any lengthy quotation opens up the tricky question of how much of it I can quote under fair use.  But if you haven't read it, I highly recommend that you seek it out (even though you can't find it in the book I'd love to point you towards buying).  Aside from its literary quality and its historical importance (Lewis' corpus would be utterly different if he had not converted), it is a statement of the nature and value of myths.*  There have been at least two attitudes towards myths other than they are literal statements of historical or natural realities.  One is the view of Plato, that they are dangerous, foundational lies, only justifiable as a necessary evil in the maintenance of a good polis or society, but hence demanding careful and strong social control.  The other is that they are the bearers of deep truths, hidden but of great importance to the cosmos and the individual.  This attitude is at least as old as Plutarch and dominated the thought of ancient Alexandria.  This was the perspective, broadly speaking, to which Tolkien and Dyson belonged and to which they hoped to win their friend, the atheistic Lewis.  Hence its dedication:

"To one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though 'breathed through silver'."

I recommend it to your enjoyment, study, and contemplation.  Finally, the anthropology of the poem sees sub-creation, or the building of secondary worlds, as a part of human nature by virtue of humans' being made in the image and likeness of God.  So, did I setting out complaining about the distortion of human good that keeps people as a group from participating in certain pieces of mythic material so that I could arrive at the point that joining in mythopoesis was a participation in the divine nature?  Yeah, let's say I planned that.

* For that matter, it is also full of keys to what Tolkien is up to in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

King James Rules for Mythopoesis!

This year is the four-hundredth anniversary of the translation of the Bible authorized by King James I of England and Scotland.  Popularly known as the King James Version or the King James Bible,* for over half of its history it was known in English contexts simply as, the Bible, so much so that when an English bishop in the mid-nineteenth century reminded his clergy as he held it aloft that "This is not the Bible," he drew audible gasps.  Along with the works of William Shakespeare, this Bible is both the foundation of and the pinnacle of English literature: the only two works that deserve the designation of primary classics in the English canon.  While this is true of its substance as well as of its language, I am going to set substance aside with an assertion whose truth can rather easily be discovered by those who have yet to learn it: one cannot meaningfully enter the thought world of the English tradition of literature in ignorance of it.  To the extent that you want to locate your mythopoesis in this sphere of cultural interaction, you must have mastered this classic text.  Having dealt with that in one sentential swoop, I am going to focus on other lessons that can be learned from King James' translation.  These fall into two groups: 1. Historical (with an RPG rule suggestion) and 2. Linguistic.

1. The Historical
There are a number of excellent books about the story of the King James Bible available in this anniversary year.  I have just finished Alister McGrath's In the Beginning, and can recommend it as a good and informative read with only two major criticisms.  First, it is much lighter on the reception of the text than it is on its background and production and it would have benefited from the final two chapters being expanded.  Second (and this is probably the fault of Anchor Books rather than the author), though it is written by a scholar, its pitch at a popular audience resulted in its being shorn of foot- or end notes.  Even as a popular work, it should have assumed an educated audience and had minimal notes.

McGrath points out a crucial development that played a part in the transformation from Medieval to Early Modern Europe: the rise of the middle class.  The rise of the middle class resulted in a cycle of more literacy/more demand for affordable books.  And it was this complex of increasing demand and developing the technology to supply that demand that led to the availability of printed codices of translations of the Bible into the vernacular languages (which, by the way, was a significant business interest).

Now, for the fantasist working on setting or world-building, I have often seen the concern raised about the existence of gunpowder and how to handle (i.e., usually eliminate) that.  But this history raises another concern: how widespread is literacy and how is it concentrated in your setting?  How is it related to the existence of a sizable middle class?  Answering these questions will be important for identifying what kind of world it is and how things work in that world, as well as what it will tell you about your characters.

When it comes to fantasy RPGs, these questions are no less important.  Thinking about PCs and NPCs, are they more likely to come from the aspiring, upwardly mobile middle class, the desperate peasants looking to break out of poverty, or failed members of the upper class?  Are they more or less likely to be literate?  Here is an optional rule I have been playing around with: to represent literacy as an accomplishment, require one language slot of a PC to speak a language and a second slot to read and write it, unless the PC is a magic-user [wizard/mage] or cleric.  I will likely try this rule out in the (delayed but hopefully still happening) Ygg campaign.

2.  The Linguistic
If you want to be able to produce exalted, majestic English, all of the King James Bible and a good deal of Shakespeare are your greatest sources.  If you want to produce archaic English, the Bible is a better source than Shakespeare.  Though the two are roughly contemporaneous (Shakespeare starts some years earlier than 1611), the Bible is purposefully archaicizing.  The King's translators were charged not only with producing the most accurate translation based on the scholarship of the day, but with changing as little as possible of the wording of the already existing (but not popular) Bishop's Bible (1568).  Furthermore, the translators recognized the excellence of the work of William Tyndale (1522-1537) and relied heavily on his work as well.  These translations were themselves genealogically related, and coming as they did in a period before changes in the English language accelerated, retaining their constructions meant retaining an earlier form of English (this accelerated phase of linguistic change may be observed in Shakespeare, who is not consistent about using the singular [thou] and plural [you] forms of the second person pronouns and the old verb endings that go with them and who often uses the modern forms [you] we are familiar with today).

It is not easy for someone such as myself, who was raised reading Biblical English, to deal with one of the most lamentable facts of our failing culture: many people cannot read Early Modern English.  My students have forced me to accept this fact.  I expected to find it at the community college, but when I found it at the seminary, I will not describe the extreme acts that tempted me.  So we live in a day where use of the old classic is diminishing, but also in which Shakespeare is paraphrased for college English classes and Richard Hooker is paraphrased for Anglican seminarians.  Speaking for a moment only to native English speakers, cutting ourselves off from our literary past is a severe cultural impoverishment, rendering us only partly literate in our own tongue.

For those wanting to avoid this sad fate, there is no cure other than reading to increase proficiency.  Happily, we live in a day where the best version of the King James Bible ever is available: the New Cambridge Paragraph Bible -- and in cheap formats!  Some folks may also be interested in one of the anniversary reprints that seem to be springing up everywhere.  While these reproduce some important parts of the 1611 printing exactly, the biblical text itself is a reprint of the 1611 text from 1833.  This gives them an old look and reproduces the old spellings, but provides the advantage of a text in Roman type.  I can't imagine modern readers struggling with both the language, the spellings, and Blackletter typeface at the same time.  So if you prize "feel" over easy readability and scholarship, get a commemorative reprint, but if not, go for the NCPB.  However, even if you start with a run-of-the-mill printing like a Gideon Bible, you are entering a world of style and diction that will elevate your own poetry and prose, as well as open up a body of literature that is becoming increasingly a treasure hidden from the masses.  As always, thanks for stopping by, and I hope you profited from this week's Mythopoeic Monday.


NB: The NKJV or New King James Version is not what you are looking for.  Move along.

* Abbreviated variously: KJV, KJB, and AV for Authorized Version.

R is for Ricardian

 WANTED: 

TWO PARTNERS IN LIBELOUS SMEAR CAMPAIGN!

Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein the Younger

The Controversial Cobbe Portrait of Shakespeare

The men you see above, a secular hero and a religious saint, have filled your head with Tudor propaganda, aimed at legitimizing the Tudor line against the heirs of the House of York.  They were both beholden to Tudor monarchs when they produced their works.  An important part of the Tudor strategy was to portray the last Plantagenet king, Richard the III, as a physical and moral monster who murdered his nephews in their boyhood.  Somebody, in short, like this:

Richard III, portrayed by Sir Ian McKellen

Who wouldn't want to be delivered from medieval Hitler?  What?  You say you have some historical questions about the evidence for all this?  Why, we'd hate for you to be a supporter of a bad person we had to get rid of...accidents tend to happen to such people.  Here, watch this play or read this history, and I'm sure you'll be convinced.

Not to worry, my friends.  The eccentric faerie land of England has people that still care about the truth, once such causes are long given up as lost.  I give you the Richard III Society!  And don't worry, my American compatriots, there is an American branch for us as well.  All this too much for you?  Your head is swimming with the possibility that all you knew about the murdering, lecherous, deceitful hunchback could be wrong?  Why not start in the shallow end of the pool, with this wonderful fictional detective story that presents the main lines of the Richardian reconstruction of good King Richard.

Soon, you will join our ranks, my friend!  Long live the truth!  God save King Richard!

PS.  Just for good measure, here are two more Ricardian societies: 1 and 2.  Web searches may turn up branches or organizations in your part of the world not linked here.