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handful_ofdustThe launch on Saturday went well, overall. Really well, actually; people I didn't even know turned up, some bought the whole trilogy, and everyone was very kind about my singing. Then, after dinner, Steve and I went off to see Snow White and the Huntsman, which--while not perfect--turned out to be far more interesting than I'd thought it would. Grantedly, a lot of that had to do with Charlize Theron's Evil Queen, Ravenna (I like it when female antagonists get names), but not all.
Lots of spoilers below:
In a prologue narrated by the titular Huntsman--his name is Eric, apparently, though amusingly, no one ever calls him by it--we learn how Ravenna conquered Snow White's hereditary kingdom through a winning combination of magic and misdirection: She lured Snow's father Magnus, new-widowered and grieving, out to fight a mysterious army made from what look like shards of black glass, let him gain a heroic triumph over her golems, then presented herself to him as a chained, dirt-smeared victim trapped inside a prison cart, grateful and gorgeous. "The very next day, he took her as his queen," the Huntsman tells us, which seems like a pretty hairpin turnaround, even for royalty...yet no one really seems to notice, not even young Snow, who's equally besotted by Ravenna's tall, melancholy blonde beauty. "I feel you and I are bound," Ravenna replies, seeming to mean it. But when you're a sorceress, insights like these come less as gifts than as warnings, and our first glimpse of the "real" Ravenna comes when, as she walks down the aisle in her gold-winged wedding-dress, she suddenly pauses to peer around and down for Snow (walking behind, the perfect flower-girl), staring at her like she's never seen her before. And suddenly, we begin to see what lurks behind the mask.
One of my favourite things about Theron's performance is the way she often seems to be trembling on the verge of tears, feeling things so deeply she almost makes us fear for her along with her potential victims, even though--as an abused child turned functional sociopath--her own sympathies are naturally only for herself. There's something alien about her, a raw nerve quality, wrapped in a shell of glamour fashioned from decay; is it because she's really so old, someone who's aged out of her own instincts, unable to negotiate her way through the world without magic?
Ravenna's inherent tragedy--the reason she's such a ruin of a person--seems to stem from her dependence on a spell that staves off entropy through vampirism; problematic to begin with, especially since the price she pays for it keeps getting bigger and bigger, while the window of effect keeps getting shorter and shorter. (A truly horrifying scene at the beginning of the climactic battle sequence reveals the floor of her chambers littered with sucked-dry fellow beauties, slack corpses drained into artificial old age, while Ravenna stalks to the window to issue her challenge to Snow's army: "Let them come." This is later somewhat undercut by a throwaway shot which implies that after Ravenna's death, the youth and beauty she's sucked out is redistributed amongst those of her victims who still remain alive.)
A flashback shows her mother--obviously some sort of witch--mimicking Snow White's own mother's gestational prayer by letting fall three drops of Ravenna's blood into the snow/a bowl of milk, creating a potion she makes Ravenna drink before the local king hauls her off to be his next queen/chew-toy, thinking he'll eventually be able to replace her as easily as the woman whose place she's being slotted into. "You will be the ruin of me," Snow's father tells her, laughing, to which she replies: "Certainly, my lord...I was ruined once, by a king like you..."
(Is this why Snow White's mother died? Because she poured all her life-force into her own child, without knowing it? In the tower where she's imprisoned until her eighteenth birthday, we see Snow White playing with two figures she's made out of straw, which I think we're supposed to assume are little ancestor-fetishes of her parents--or simply dolls, maybe, since she's later shown putting one together with a girl the age she was when she was first locked away, someone who feels "her age". But when I saw them at first, I though one of them was supposed to be a voult of Ravenna, a curse Snow was about to instinctually lay by throwing it into the fire she'd just kindled.)
So Ravenna's mother's spell creates a circuit, but not a self-sustaining one; the circuit must be fed, constantly. And as a result, Ravenna--not stupid, ferociously strong-willed and presumably possessing some inherent magical power of her own, given the way she builds on it--becomes its slave, unable to grow beyond it, or learn better methodologies. Maybe 200 years old, and while her parlour tricks are pretty amazing (shape-shifting, healing, stopping hearts from a distance, golemization, etc.), she has limits so sharp she constantly hurts herself slamming up against them. Not to mention the fact that she may or may not be crazy, considering how no one else can see the spirit she thinks she's conjuring out of her massive, bowl-shaped hammered brass mirror.
If this was the Tanith Lee story it keeps threatening to turn into, Snow White and the Huntsman might end with Ravenna purified and reborn as Snow White's child, mothered less toxically, able to take her place as Snow White's counsellor and true step-mother, her mentor and partner. Instead, we get an odd side-track into Snow White as Life-Force Personified, a meeting with the Spirit of the Forest yanked from Miyazaki by way of Arthur Rackham, and a return from the dead that transforms Snow into a Jehanne d'Arc Christ-figure. I like that she ends her rambling, semi-possessed-sounding call to arms by asking "Who will be my brother?", thus perhaps explaining why the Huntsman's loyal, platonic, grief-filled kiss wakes her instead of William the Duke's son's inherently greedy, claiming one; I like that she seems to genuinely feel sorry as she tells a stabbed Ravenna: "You can't have my heart." I like that she ends up being crowned alone, a queen regnant, unmarried, true heir to the land.
But what if Snow had elected to share her heart, to use her life-force to jump-start Ravenna's withered soul? That would've been something very interesting, indeed.
Lots of spoilers below:
In a prologue narrated by the titular Huntsman--his name is Eric, apparently, though amusingly, no one ever calls him by it--we learn how Ravenna conquered Snow White's hereditary kingdom through a winning combination of magic and misdirection: She lured Snow's father Magnus, new-widowered and grieving, out to fight a mysterious army made from what look like shards of black glass, let him gain a heroic triumph over her golems, then presented herself to him as a chained, dirt-smeared victim trapped inside a prison cart, grateful and gorgeous. "The very next day, he took her as his queen," the Huntsman tells us, which seems like a pretty hairpin turnaround, even for royalty...yet no one really seems to notice, not even young Snow, who's equally besotted by Ravenna's tall, melancholy blonde beauty. "I feel you and I are bound," Ravenna replies, seeming to mean it. But when you're a sorceress, insights like these come less as gifts than as warnings, and our first glimpse of the "real" Ravenna comes when, as she walks down the aisle in her gold-winged wedding-dress, she suddenly pauses to peer around and down for Snow (walking behind, the perfect flower-girl), staring at her like she's never seen her before. And suddenly, we begin to see what lurks behind the mask.
One of my favourite things about Theron's performance is the way she often seems to be trembling on the verge of tears, feeling things so deeply she almost makes us fear for her along with her potential victims, even though--as an abused child turned functional sociopath--her own sympathies are naturally only for herself. There's something alien about her, a raw nerve quality, wrapped in a shell of glamour fashioned from decay; is it because she's really so old, someone who's aged out of her own instincts, unable to negotiate her way through the world without magic?
Ravenna's inherent tragedy--the reason she's such a ruin of a person--seems to stem from her dependence on a spell that staves off entropy through vampirism; problematic to begin with, especially since the price she pays for it keeps getting bigger and bigger, while the window of effect keeps getting shorter and shorter. (A truly horrifying scene at the beginning of the climactic battle sequence reveals the floor of her chambers littered with sucked-dry fellow beauties, slack corpses drained into artificial old age, while Ravenna stalks to the window to issue her challenge to Snow's army: "Let them come." This is later somewhat undercut by a throwaway shot which implies that after Ravenna's death, the youth and beauty she's sucked out is redistributed amongst those of her victims who still remain alive.)
A flashback shows her mother--obviously some sort of witch--mimicking Snow White's own mother's gestational prayer by letting fall three drops of Ravenna's blood into the snow/a bowl of milk, creating a potion she makes Ravenna drink before the local king hauls her off to be his next queen/chew-toy, thinking he'll eventually be able to replace her as easily as the woman whose place she's being slotted into. "You will be the ruin of me," Snow's father tells her, laughing, to which she replies: "Certainly, my lord...I was ruined once, by a king like you..."
(Is this why Snow White's mother died? Because she poured all her life-force into her own child, without knowing it? In the tower where she's imprisoned until her eighteenth birthday, we see Snow White playing with two figures she's made out of straw, which I think we're supposed to assume are little ancestor-fetishes of her parents--or simply dolls, maybe, since she's later shown putting one together with a girl the age she was when she was first locked away, someone who feels "her age". But when I saw them at first, I though one of them was supposed to be a voult of Ravenna, a curse Snow was about to instinctually lay by throwing it into the fire she'd just kindled.)
So Ravenna's mother's spell creates a circuit, but not a self-sustaining one; the circuit must be fed, constantly. And as a result, Ravenna--not stupid, ferociously strong-willed and presumably possessing some inherent magical power of her own, given the way she builds on it--becomes its slave, unable to grow beyond it, or learn better methodologies. Maybe 200 years old, and while her parlour tricks are pretty amazing (shape-shifting, healing, stopping hearts from a distance, golemization, etc.), she has limits so sharp she constantly hurts herself slamming up against them. Not to mention the fact that she may or may not be crazy, considering how no one else can see the spirit she thinks she's conjuring out of her massive, bowl-shaped hammered brass mirror.
If this was the Tanith Lee story it keeps threatening to turn into, Snow White and the Huntsman might end with Ravenna purified and reborn as Snow White's child, mothered less toxically, able to take her place as Snow White's counsellor and true step-mother, her mentor and partner. Instead, we get an odd side-track into Snow White as Life-Force Personified, a meeting with the Spirit of the Forest yanked from Miyazaki by way of Arthur Rackham, and a return from the dead that transforms Snow into a Jehanne d'Arc Christ-figure. I like that she ends her rambling, semi-possessed-sounding call to arms by asking "Who will be my brother?", thus perhaps explaining why the Huntsman's loyal, platonic, grief-filled kiss wakes her instead of William the Duke's son's inherently greedy, claiming one; I like that she seems to genuinely feel sorry as she tells a stabbed Ravenna: "You can't have my heart." I like that she ends up being crowned alone, a queen regnant, unmarried, true heir to the land.
But what if Snow had elected to share her heart, to use her life-force to jump-start Ravenna's withered soul? That would've been something very interesting, indeed.
