Bethany Watches Movies Everyone Else Has Already Seen: Jim Henson's Labyrinth

                It’s (past) that time again! Time for another episode of Bethany Watches Movies Everyone Else Has Already Seen.

I know other rock stars were considered for the role, but can you really imagine anyone other than David Bowie playing a convincing Goblin King?

                I know I’ve seen parts of Labyrinth before, and I feel like I must have watched it as a child, but I have more memories of hearing about it than I have of seeing it. There’s a lot I could say about Labyrinth, but what really strikes me is how much it is a story about puberty—specifically, female puberty. Forgive me if I delve briefly into “over-analyzing children’s movies” (this is my favorite game, after “over-analyzing comic books”).

Middle-school me wants every single thing in Sarah's room.

                Jareth is a combination of symbols of male power and sexual fantasy, which explains Sarah’s uncertain relationship with him. (Seriously, the whole Goblin Kingdom is full of phallic imagery, never mind David Bowie’s. . .er, “magic dance.”) The story Sarah tells at the beginning is about the Goblin King being in love with her and offering her some of his power. Pre-journey Sarah is in love with the romantic and fantastical, but her baby brother represents the realities of adult responsibility (and real human relationships). Sarah wants the freedom and power she assumes are attached to adulthood (and romance), but she rejects their responsibilities, particularly the responsibilities of family, which she associates with her stepmother, while idolizing what she assumes was the more romantic life of her deceased actress mother.

                Before Sarah can accept the world of adult responsibilities, however, she has to go deeper “underground,” into the world of dreams and wishes, into her own subconscious.

Me and ever other Muggle who didn't get their Hogwarts letter.

                As with most hero’s journey’s, what the journey represents is change within the hero. As the story continues, Sarah begins to befriend creatures in the labyrinth, she looks for wisdom instead of easy answers, she becomes more generous, and she stops expecting the labyrinth to be “fair.”

                I know people have commented on how the dream ball scene seems a little creepy given that David Bowie is obviously so much older than Jennifer Connelly. Add that to David Bowie’s unsavory history with underage girls, and it becomes difficult to view this scene the way I think it was intended. But if you consider that everything in the Goblin Kingdom comes from Sarah’s fantasies, it’s a little less disturbing. The Goblin King is the romantic “other”—intriguing and sexually mature, dangerous and different, exciting and frightening, but also less threatening than a real flesh-and-blood boy Sarah’s own age would be.

It’s not really clear why the Goblin King would want a baby, but that doesn’t bother me. In puberty logic, it’s not really clear why anyone would want a baby; we’re just vaguely aware that is a thing people want.

                When she momentarily wakes from the dream, she thinks she is looking for “Lancelot”—her bear, but also her dream of courtly love—but what she is really looking for is her baby brother (representing family and responsibility) and her creature friends (representing, well, friends). Her childhood toys represent selfishness and an unwillingness to face adulthood, but paradoxically, her stories from childhood give Sarah the determination she needs to break free from the illusion that the self-centeredness of childhood can last forever.

                When Jareth says that he is “exhausted from living up to your expectations of me”—well, of course he is. He is a projection of everything Sarah thought she wanted. Jareth is pure fantasy, and he promises, “Just let me rule you, and you can have everything that you want.” In other words, “give in completely to fantasy and never have to face the hard world of reality again.”

               

I know, Sarah. This is pretty much what I thought adulthood was going to be like too. (For the record, I am severely disappointed by the lack of masquerade balls in my life.)

When Sarah remembers the line from her book, “You have no power over me,” she is finally realizing her own power—power that has not been given to her by Jareth or any figure of romance, but that is completely her own. And this is the point of story: to give us tools to face our own goblins, to remind us of our power.

                The dance party of rejected goblins that takes place in Sarah’s room at the end might seem to contradict the idea of leaving the realm of fantasy behind, but it actually shows Sarah’s ability to now incorporate her fantasies into her real life without letting them take the place of her real life (it also hints at Sarah now having the ability to make friends). Sarah has accepted reality. She sees that her treasured childhood toys are “junk” when compared to the value of her baby brother. She has traded the black-and-white childhood definitions of “fair” and “unfair” for a view of people that is both less naïve and more forgiving (allowing her to forgive Hoggle’s betrayal). And she is able to see both that she needs others (like Hoggle) and has a power of her own.

Why can't all movies have Escher stairs?

                All that aside, while Labyrinth is fun, and I appreciate seeing a fantasy coming-of-age tale with a female protagonist, it can a bit. . .tedious. I think this is partially because the movie is trying give the viewer a sense of also being trapped in a never-ending labyrinth, which makes the pacing much slower than the average children’s movie (and raises the question: who exactly was this movie intended for?). This also partially because the dialogue becomes repetitive, and at times, falls into the “if a character repeats and repeats something, with increasing freneticism, it must eventually become funny” fallacy. Also, Sarah is not a particularly enjoyable character for a good fourth of the movie (Jennifer Connelly plays a fairly one-note petulant teenager).

                All in all, I enjoyed the movie, even though I frequently caught myself checking the time. I give it three and a half plastic bracelets out of five. 

The Breakfast Club: Bethany Watches Movies Everyone Else Has Already Seen

It's time for the first "Bethany Watches Movies Everyone Else Has Already Seen" post that I talked about last week. (Here are the general guidelines, in case you missed them.)

I decided to start with The Breakfast Club both because it’s been mentioned on this blog before and because I’ve recently had friends ragging on me about my ignorance of eighties teen movies.

(Do we ever see them eat breakfast? Did Brian get to pick the group name ‘cause everyone else was too lazy to work on the essay?)

Guys, I don’t know how to break this to you. . .The Breakfast Club isn’t a great movie.

Yes, it’s iconic. Yes, it has some great lines. Yes, it is more eighties than a Rubik’s Cube. But it’s got problems.

The first is that for a movie all about how high schoolers don’t fit neatly into little boxes, it sure likes to put all its characters into little boxes. 

Were cliques in the eighties really like the caste system in 19^th century India?

The minute we met John Bender, my mind went “Abuse. He’s being abused at home.” (Were we supposed to be surprised? Did the “troubled kid” trope not exist before the eighties?)

And all of the other characters fit quite neatly into various tropes: brainy kid feels stress over grades, jock kid feel pressure from his dad, popular princess feels like her parents are using her, neurotic girl feels ignored. It’s not wrong to make use of these types, but when the thesis of your movie is “each of us is a Brain, and an Athlete, and a Basket Case, a Princess, and a Criminal,” I’m kind of relying on the movie to show me that.

To be fair, I’m really not into teen movies, so I’m not the target audience for this film.* I was homeschooled, so maybe I just don’t understand the American high school experience. But was high school ever like this for anyone?

Even with weed introduced to the picture, why are these characters so quick to confess all their insecurities and family issues? I understand that putting a group of people in a confined area and giving them a common enemy (the principal, and more importantly, all adults) is a good way to get them to bond—but they spend most of their time insulting each other. In real life, insults don’t usually encourage sudden outbursts of vulnerability—and those make up so much of the movie that Sudden Outbursts of Angry Vulnerability makes more sense as a title than The Breakfast Club. 

It’s like the director said weed and all Emilio Estevez heard was speed.

 

Part of the problem is that in most other “band of misfits” stories—coughGuardiansoftheGalaxycough—the band eventually finds a task to complete, and it is within the completion of this task that skills, vulnerabilities, and mutual respect emerge. But part of the point of The Breakfast Club is that the characters don’t have a worthwhile task to complete (even though most of the characters are dying for something to do): it’s a metaphor for high school.

Things this kid needs: a safe home environment, a responsible adult, a lunch, and a pencil. Things he gets: an earring and a girlfriend.

John’s face destroyed me in the above scene—even if you didn’t feel sympathy for him when he revealed how his father treats him, I don’t know how you couldn’t feel it when he's being threatened by the principal. But “sympathetic character” does not equal “boyfriend material.”

I know teen movies really like to pair up characters, but the Claire/John romance bothered me deeply. One of his first lines is “Let’s close the door and see if we can impregnate the prom queen.” There’s “ooh, angry sexual tension,” and then there’s straight up harassment. Never mind when he tries to stick his head up her skirt while she is lying to protect him. Andrew and Allison actually seem to care about each other’s feelings by the end, but John is an unhappy young man who is looking for someone to bully, and Claire is so insecure about being a virgin that she will accept cruelty in exchange for experience.

John asks her why she started kissing him, and she says, “So you wouldn’t”—which comes across to me as “I figured you were going to try to violate me, so I thought I should beat you to punch line.” Ah, young love.

Also, was there some kind of Reverse-Hays-Code going on in the eighties? High schoolers in eighties movies swear more than high schoolers in movies now. They swear more than high schoolers on Tumblr, and I didn’t think that was possible.

Enough negativity; let’s look at some of the things I liked:

·         Molly Ringwold’s clothes,

·         Brian wearing sunglasses and doing imitations (be honest—if you were going to be friends with one person in this movie, Brian is the best choice),

·         pointless dance break,

·         some really good acting, and

·         now knowing where Bender from Futurama gets his name.

Rating: Two nicely packed lunches out of five.

Have you seen The Breakfast Club? Did you like it? What do you think I should watch next?

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*To be even more fair, I recently finished watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzimyka (the television series and the movie), and that’s a high school story that I ended up loving in spite of myself (and it definitely has problematic elements). So maybe if The Breakfast Club had spent more time looking for aliens and time travelers I would have enjoyed it more.