Had to blow snow out of the driveway again tonight. My neighbor, who also has a blower and used to do it himself, tells me his is out of commission right now.
I think I made a good investment.
One of our readers sent me a link to the trailer for an animated movie called How to Train Your Dragon, scheduled to come out next month. He asked me what I thought of it. I’m glad he did, because I’d seen it before, and meant to do a rant, but somehow it slipped my mind.
First, the obvious things. It’s supposed to be a movie about Vikings, and they wear horned helmets. If you’ve been reading this blog for any time at all, you surely know that the Vikings didn’t do that. The horned helmets come from Wagnerian opera.
But I can forgive that. It’s a cartoon.
The main character’s name is Hiccup. I’ve been trying to figure that out. Is that supposed to be a play on words? If so, what word? I don’t know of any Viking name that sounds at all like Hiccup.
But here’s my real objection. The movie’s apparently about a kid who discovers that dragons are JUST MISUNDERSTOOD! NOTHING WE KNOW ABOUT THEM IS TRUE!
This is classic contemporary Hollywood. “Let’s do something transgressive! Overturn a long-standing cultural prejudice! Prove that it’s we who are the monsters, not the mythical creatures!”
First of all, this isn’t creative. The sympathetic dragon has been done. And done, and done. It was a fresh idea back when Kenneth Grahame wrote The Reluctant Dragon, but that was in freaking 1898, for pete’s sake.
I haven’t kept count of the sympathetic treatments of dragons I’ve seen in my lifetime, but it’s been enough to make me tired of them.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to write a good sympathetic dragon story. Grahame’s story, as I recall it, is quite good. But it worked because of the surprise element. Nowadays, sympathetic dragons in movies are as surprising as child-molesting priests, hypocritical Christian fundamentalists, and Government Conspiracies at the Highest Level.
Listen—dragons don’t exist in the real world. They’re what scholars call “fabulous creatures”–creatures of fable. They have symbolic meaning, and that meaning is Powerful Evil (Chinese dragons mean something else, but we’re not in China).
Dragons are powerful. They fly; they have big fangs and claws, and they breathe fire. They’re protected by natural armor.
They’re evil. They eat livestock and human beings, and sometimes they demand human sacrifices as extortion payments. Theologically, they represent the devil—the serpent of Eden after millennia of good meals and regular exercise.
Modern movie makers (and many modern writers) don’t like this. They believe that people who say, “Dragons are evil,” are only really saying “I fear dragons because I don’t understand them.” For them, hatred of dragons is a symbol of all the bigotry they think they see in our society.
That might be true if there weren’t actually things in the world that deserve hatred. There are things that are not only frightening, but worth being frightened of. When a human being faces such an evil, an evil that can kill him, he is, metaphorically, facing a dragon. And traditional dragon stories help him find courage in that useful activity.
So the real issue is whether you think evil exists. This appears to be a movie for people who think it doesn’t.
I’m fairly sure that the people who produced this movie don’t live in Iran. Or North Korea. Or Somalia.
Category Archives: Fiction
storySouth Million Writers Award Open
The storySouth Million Writers Award for good writing published online is now open for nominations.
A Golden Ticket
About two years ago, author and critic Jeffrey Overstreet wrote about how his very good fantasy novel Auralia’s Colors was accepted for publication. “In short: Somebody dropped out of the sky and gave me a golden ticket.” It was an answer to prayer.
High Praise for Overstreet’s “Raven’s Ladder”
Jeffrey Overstreet now has three very imaginative fantasy in his Auralia’s Colors series. Here’s a review of the third one.
High Praise for Overstreet's "Raven's Ladder"
Jeffrey Overstreet now has three very imaginative fantasy in his Auralia’s Colors series. Here’s a review of the third one.
Scandinavian Mysteries
Scandinavian crime fiction is popular these days, for example, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Laura Miller writes about it for the Wall Street Journal.
“Counterintuitive as it may seem, the Scandinavian brand of moroseness can be soothing in hard times. Its roots lie deep in the ancient, pagan literature of the region, preserved in sagas that were first written down in medieval Iceland. The sagas, created by and for people who led supremely difficult lives, are about love, death and war, like all great stories, but above all, they’re about fate.”
Mini-review: Final Victim, Stephen J. Cannell
This will be a mini-review. I’ve reviewed one of Stephen J. Cannell’s novels already, and will doubtless review more (I’ve become a fan). Final Victim isn’t a world-changing novel, but I thought it very well crafted, and I just wanted to meditate on its virtues.
Cannell, as you likely know, is one of the most successful television producers in the industry. He’s also a prolific script writer (though, interestingly, he’s dyslexic). As a professional, he knows how to tell a story, seizing the viewer’s (or reader’s) attention with a wrestler’s grip, and never letting go. Continue reading Mini-review: Final Victim, Stephen J. Cannell
Flying Dutch, by Tom Holt
A couple of my friends are Tom Holt fiends, and they’ve contrived to place in my hands three of his best novels (I reviewed the other two here). Flying Dutch is another offering in his original idiom (to quote, appropriately, Sir Lancelot in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”), the legend-based farce. (He’s moved into actual historical fiction with his more recent novel Meadowlands, a story of Vikings in America which I haven’t read yet.)
As you may have guessed, this is the story of the Flying Dutchman. In legend, the Flying Dutchman is a sea captain who cursed God, and so was condemned to sail the seas forever, allowed to visit shore only once every seven years, until some condition (true love, in Wagner’s opera) is fulfilled.
Holt’s version is slightly different. The Dutchman, Cornelius Vanderdecker, is indeed immortal, along with his crew, and only gets shore leave once in seven years, but the reason is somewhat more prosaic (I won’t spoil it for you). His story gets entwined with that of Jane Doland, an English accountant who stumbles onto the financial complications that naturally result from owning a still-in-force, three century old insurance policy.
As she investigates, and eventually gets to know the Dutchman herself, the true story is gradually revealed. We encounter among other elements alchemy, an immortal cat, and the meddling of a television producer who has figured in other Holt novels.
Once again, I felt that Holt’s writing resembled nothing so much as P.G. Wodehouse’s. Holt isn’t as great a genius as The Master, but he can be very funny, and the plots are similar—a colorful cast of characters, many of them none too bright, meaning well and crossing one another in multiple boneheaded ways. There’s a hint of politics, with some mild criticism of the United States, and the conventional assumption that nuclear power is purely evil, but you’re not intended to take any of it seriously. The ending is satisfying, if off-center.
No offensive elements that I recall. Recommended, if you can find a copy (it’s out of print, sadly).
Robert Crais interview
Thanks to Aitchmark, for sending me the link to this National Review “Between the Covers” interview by John J. Miller, with author Robert Crais (whom I’ve reviewed frequently here). He discusses his new novel, The First Rule.
Android Karenina from Quirk Books
It’s the 100th year anniversary of Tolstoy’s death, so Quirk Books plans to revamp one of his great novels with robots and stuff.