Review - Lemony Snicket's: A Series of Unfortunate Events
[I've started this review many times, trashed it and redid it, then thought I lost it in a computer glitch and then found it again after regaining the strength to start over... in short: it's been through hell and it hasn't fully returned yet. I am sick of it holding me hostage, however, and need to keep moving forward, so I am publishing it in its incompleted form. I will finish it, but need to do so while doing other things as well. Check back every now and then. If this little note at the top disappears, then you'll know it's done.]
I'm not sure if I've spelled this out before or not, so I'll just do it. The interpretations that I have about things is at least as much about me as it is about the things I'm commenting upon. It's that way with all of us, but I'm just going to be really honest about it. Art brings out what's inside of the artist and the observer. So in my attempt to tell you about these artists, I'm also going to tell you alot about me.
How many times have I seen it?
I've seen this movie two times and I wanted to see it again but didn't get the chance.
What I’d heard about the movie before I went.
I first heard about this story from my kids who read the books years ago. When my daughter first told me about it, I thought it sounded like the fruit of a twisted and sick mind and wondered if there were any standards at all about what kinds of books to allow in elementary school libraries. All I knew was that it was exactly what the title suggested. "A Series of Unfortunate Events". No resolution was ever offered. No lessons learned. No rescue. No saving the day in any form. Only one horrible thing after another without end. And it all happened to these 3 children. Children! Why in God's Name?... And these books were popular. I couldn't comprehend. To a large extent, I still can't.
How I identify.
I cannot identify with these characters at all and I didn't understand why until the other day after finally winning a long battle with writer's block. I wish now that I could see it one more time before typing this up to see if I'm right about this, but it's long gone out of the theaters now. I couldn't find my feelings about the situation these characters were in no matter how hard I tried. The children seemed to be sad and afraid and angry - all very reasonable - but they seemed worlds away from me. I began to think it was because the acting was poor, I suspected the Director, the Casting Personnel... etc. It couldn't be my problem because I was really skilled at finding valuable and interesting things hidden in tragedy and loss. I began this review at least 4 times and couldn't go much further than two paragraphs.
The story.
After a strange little opening sequence depicting the happy singing of elves and animals in the forest comes to an abrupt end, the Narrator tells us that this is not a happy movie about elves. He tells us that he is going to faithfully report what happened to 3 unfortunate people, that it's not going to be cute or pretty and that if we want to get up and leave now there's still time to catch the happy films in other parts of the theater. For those who remain, the real story begins by showing us 3 eccentric children living with their happy, eccentric (and wealthy) family somewhere sort of English and sort of not, and sort of in the past and sort of not. The look of the film is period bending/blending and rather amusing. It reminds me that children have no idea that the objects and words we live with day in and day out have not always existed. Why wouldn't there be fax machines in Victorian England? Funny.
Anyway, you get to see how each child has their unique talent and personality. The oldest, Violet, is mature, stable, calm and could invent things. Klaus, the middle child, is inquisitive and can remember everything he ever reads. Sunny, the young toddler, is still pre-verbal but her siblings seem to understand what she's saying. Her unique talent is that she is a very good judge of character - and she bites stuff. You see them interacting and applying their skills to all sorts of things around the home and their parents, whom you only see from the neck down, love and encourage them. How sweet and wonderful.
One day, the children are dilly-dallying around some shoreline near their home and a car pulls up and a man steps out. He approaches them and tells them there's been a terrible accident. Their Parents were killed in a fire which burnt their house to the ground. The Narrator drops in to add that the fire started under mysterious circumstances, by some strange manipulation of light.
Mr. Poe drives the children back to their now charred home and allows them to take one last walk-thru. They look at all their little inventions and other familiar things they grew accustomed to seeing every day around them blackened, twisted and melted. Klaus ventures into his Father's study where he apparently wasn't normally allowed to go and in his Father's desk he sees a curious object. A nifty brass spyglass. He tries to pick it up but it is still hot from the fire and he drops it back down on the desk. They gather themselves and say goodbye to the house and get back in the car.
Mr. Poe, apparently a lawyer or court appointed official of some sort, informs them that they will be taken to live with their "nearest relative", Count Olaf. As Mr. Poe parks the car, the children see a happy woman standing in a yard and they talk to her about Count Olaf. They assume she lives with him, but she does not. In fact, she makes a face at the thought. She invites them to come visit at any time and then goes inside her cheerful little house. Aparently the Count's house is the unkempt and dismal looking place next door.
Mr. Poe brings the children to the home of the Count and knocks on the door. The peephole in the door opens and closes and a voice bids them to enter.
[I have trouble giving a good description here because of how I feel about this character. Please stand by while I struggle with this...]
The Count is an actor. When Mr. Poe and the children come into the house, he is standing on the balcony in the entryway and delivering a performance for them of a caring relative. Even after showing his frustration and disappointment at not having immediate access to their Parent's money, his performance convinces the oblivious Mr. Poe that he genuinely cares about the children. But the children become uneasy. Sunny picks up on his problem right away and the Count responds by alienating her. After dispatching the bumbling Mr. Poe, Count Olaf takes them on a tour of the house. It is a dump. After the tour he takes them to their room and quickly locks them in. The world closes in on them. Violet rigs up a small shelter for them to comfort one another in as they grieve the loss of their life of safety and love and bed down for the night.
The Count has given the children a list of chores and it becomes clear that he is using them for slave labor. Arriving home one afternoon after carousing with his acting friends, he finds the children scrubbing the floor in the entryway and asks about dinner. They don't know what he's talking about. They've never cooked before and they didn't see any line on the list about dinner. Count Olaf turns the list over to reveal the one thing on the back about dinner and tells them to have it ready for him and his guests in a matter of minutes. The children hurry into the kitchen and look for anything that could be made into food and all they can find is loose noodles in the filthy bottom of a utensil drawer. They begin to prepare some sort of food as best they can.
All this time Violet is just trying to encourage Klaus to make it through and survive while Klaus is constantly reporting the real evil of the situation. Sunny is just cheerfully doing what her sister asks. In a few minutes dinner is served and Olaf and guests are called in to dine. He sees the "food" and asks where the meat is. The children didn't find any meat and didn't know he wanted meat. The Count's friends gasp at the children's obvious mistake of not being able to read his mind and create meat out of thin air and he puts on his best intimidating and put-out performance. Klaus finally has enough and shouts at him. Olaf, after hitting Klaus, grabs the baby with malicious intent and Violet takes her from him and scolds him. After more dressing down, he guides them to their room and locks them in again.
Klaus despairs and blames his Parents for not providing a plan for the children should something happen to them. This is a reasonable complaint, especially against people who supposedly could easily afford such provision. Violet reminds him of an incident in the past when they didn't come home right away from a trip and didn't write and he thought they were dead. But they did write and the letter got lost in the mail, so Klaus was wrong about them. But he sees through this rouse by reminding her that they are not coming home this time.
Later, Count Olaf is driving the children through the countryside and stops at a small convenience store in the middle of nowhere. He parks the car and locks them inside promising to return with two sodas and a banana for Sunny whom he calls "a monkey". He goes inside the store and takes his time talking to the shop-keep and dilly-dallying around. He looks at his watch. The children meanwhile are aware that something is up and they find a piece of paper with a list of times on it. Next to the car, a loud bell starts sounding and they realize that he has parked the car ON railroad tracks. They see that he has arrived at this place in time for the train to come and parked the car to intercept. They are awaiting assassination. Quickly Violet thinks of ways to get out of the situation and since they cannot get out of the car, they rig up a rope to pull the track switch lever and direct the train onto the other track. Just in time they train goes by, Mr. Poe, who happens to be driving through, witnesses the "accident" and the panic-stricken Count Olaf is told that he has left the children in danger and they will be taken away from him. At this announcement, he feigns sorrow and anguish about losing them but quietly vows to kill them eventually. [Carrey's performance is brilliant, but I'm left wondering why I should be appreciating this performance... of a performance... I feel sick.]
Mr. Poe, who merely believes that the Count is guilty of nothing more than allowing children to drive a car and didn't see that he had parked them in front of an oncoming freight train, assures them that they will be well taken care of in their next home. The children are shaken and frustrated that he doesn't get it. That's as much as I can stand to tell of this story. Mr. Poe delivers the children to two more homes and then back again to Count Olaf before the movie is over and the horror just goes on and on. Worse and worse. I guess I just don't have Lemony Snicket's stomach for such things. Maybe I should have taken his advice and left to find another movie about happy little elves... but I had made a commitment to do this.
[I am grateful for Jude Law's voice here. Since his performances in Gatica and AI, I feel great trust and reassurance when I listen to his voice...]
Character development.
This is where I get totally bogged down. I share Klaus' bewilderment at his Parents' neglecting to secure a safe place to land should the family plane crash to the ground. Violet's solutions and attempts to reason her way out of despair are crushingly inadequate. Sunny is watching wide-eyed as adults behave in cartoonishly stupid ways. Her beautiful and real little child face is a doorway through which evil gains entrance to the human soul and begins to twist and mutilate and bend to it's will - but this is not a cartoon. I wish it was a cartoon. In fact, I squirm in my seat as the portrayal of this situation as live action tightens some kind of screw in my gut.
Violet, Violet...
Hide your heart away...
Deep behind curtains of reason and intellect...
Behind walls of fantasy and dreams of being rescued and saved from your victimization...
And from your shame of not being good enough to make it stop...
Protect yourself from the doubt and the question, in whatever form it comes to you...
Never let on that you're helpless and alone and powerless to stop the overwhelming tidalwave of evil that engulfs you...
Evil without conscience or pity...
Machine like in it's skill and freedom from remorse...
Unblinking willingness to harm...
Until maybe someday, in the distant and hidden future...
When you've found a safe place at last...
When you have the courage to lift this little shred of a girl up through the years and into the light again...
to heal...
...then go and help the others.
Klaus, raw and exposed...
Floating on the surface of the world...
Bathing in all its tears...
Tossed back and forth between pain and anger, pain and anger...
Sunny, open and absorbing..
Sponging up violence and soaking up hate...
Filling up on all the weapons that people can invent...
Feeding and growing until someday she is strong enough...
..for what?
I could try to come up with words for Olaf. But I don't think I would be able to correctly translate his essence. I cannot do it. It is my weakness. My blind spot. My vulnerability. My deepest darkness. It is too close to me... I simply do not understand it.
And with the exceptions of the Narrator and Uncle Monty, all the other adults in this story - what they simply amount to is empty space. Or rather the outline of a figure with a gaping, hope-sucking black hole in the center. Beyond stupid. Beyond hapless. Beyond bad. Negligence is the worst crime of all. It believes itself to be good and to intend goodness, but its inability to act only makes the journey to healing that much longer and the path more difficult to find.
Connection to Faith.
I'm not sure what to say except that it seems so obvious. My blindness isn't really blindness. It's just that this is often all I see and I see little else. Especially when I am faced with this kind of thing in such a forceful manner.
I've very recently been reminded that Christianity deals very directly with evil. It is very explicit about what will happen to those who intend and/or commit to cause harm and those who will not act to prevent others from intending and/or committing to cause harm. So much so that when a victim becomes inspired to exact vengeance themselves (inevitable), they are restrained by fear of what God would do to them should they cause harm to another - even a mindless villain with no conscience. Christianity to many, seems to merely promise to punish evil eventually, leaving the victim untouched and unhelped with their tumultuous feelings of hurt, rage and fear. "Forgive!" they are told, and that's that. If their feelings of rage overwhelm them, they are told that they are now worthy of the same punishment as regular evildoers. Hell, it seems is the lot of the victim as well as the offender. "How is that just?", they ask. And our answers are lame.
I know that the issue of suffering and victimization is dealt with in Christianity, but it is done very differently and very indirectly - or perhaps too directly for it to be particularly useful. It seems Jesus has been assigned the job of Chief Sufferer and Head Victim. In a way, our doctrines of propitiation have supported the idea that the worst of suffering is done by Him so that we won't have to endure it. [So what is this thing that makes me feel like crap then?] Then our doctrines of forgiveness and emulation support the idea of enduring the other kinds of suffering (a very limited and simplistic list, indeed), but not much beyond that. We've got long lists of verses that tell us why to endure but not much help in how or what kind of fruit endurance will actually bear. It gets really vague. Certainly it is not as explicit as some of the Eastern religions and disciplines are about suffering.
I am going to offend many Buddhists now by attempting to explain something about their religion. I'm sorry. I really do not mean to offend. I'm really trying to get it right. If I'm not getting it right, please help me, don't just criticize me. I know how I feel when I hear/read non-Christians trying to explain Christianity. Okay? Okay.
Buddhism sort of begins, not with a story as Christianity does, but with ideas. I've attempted to find the official story of the Buddha, asking of both learned non-Buddhists as well as Buddhist monks, and they tell me that there really isn't one. They, it seems, are not "People of The Book". The opening ideas are thus:
1) Life is suffering (deep word meaning unsatisfactoriness), from beginning to end, everything is unsatisfying in some way.
2) We are unsatisfied because we desire satisfaction and are ignorant of it's lack of existence or impermanence.
3) The solution to desire is to cause desire to not exist or to detach, and to educate ourselves of the non-existence of satisfaction. Attaining this state of being is called "Nirvana". We've all heard that word. That's what it is.
4) Attaining Nirvana is done by a series of 8 disciplines called "The Eight-Fold Path".
This 4-part form comes from the ancient Indian culture where doctors cured patients by:
1) acknowledging and identifying the problem
2) finding the source of the problem
3) stating that there is a cure
4) prescribing the cure
Those 8 disciplines can be gathered into 3 groups:
Morality:
Perfect Thoughts
Perfect Actions
Perfect Speech
Perfect Livelihood
Concentration:
Perfect Effort
Perfect Concentration
Insight:
Perfect Mindfulness
Perfect Understanding
It isn't necessary to go further to make my point, although it's worth your time to learn and understand.
I have observed the human being for quite a while and while I wouldn't claim to know everything, there is something that seems obvious to me that for some reason, isn't to many others. If someone is avoiding a painful or frightening feeling or memory, they can easily find some sort of religious/philosophical/psychological construct that will support their avoidance. The original purposes of such constructs are usually quite the opposite of allowing people to hide from bad things, but ironically we find ways to circumvent the intent of these things and warp them to suit our needs. It's weird. As a result churches, temples, synagogues and doctor's offices are filled to capacity with people who are using these constructs to avoid dealing with their own character problems and frightening issues. I've seen evil people hiding in Churches and using punitive doctrines to disguise their hate and rage. I've seen emotionally stuck people hiding in the Eastern ideas of detachment to disguise their numbness and denial. If both Jesus and the Buddha were alive today, I'm sure they would be giving one another a knowing look of disappointment right now.
In order to use Christianity to cure my character faults and resolve my emotional issues, I must commit to letting it expose me, and refuse to hide within it. If I were using Christianity, that's how I'd say that. But since I'm not USING Christianity, I say the same thing in a very different way. Instead of a statement, I would utter a prayer, because I am not saying something about ideas and other abstractions. I am saying something about me, and I'm saying it to God. Person to Person. I would say,
Jesus,
What is the black hole in me? I am so deeply hurt that I do not even understand how deep it is. Do You understand it? Will You help me to face it and feel all the hurt and rage and fear and then eventually help me grow big enough to handle it in an Adult way? As You did? Will You help me rescue this child trapped inside a labyrinth of memory and chaos? Will You honor her suffering? Will You respect her helplessness and forgive her rage? Will You be the Solution to all this instead of more of the Problem - which so many people have been by making her feel guilty for being hurt, afraid and angry? Only after You brought up every one of Your human needs for connection, love and reciprocation before the Father holding nothing back, then were fully grown enough with strength from His Love to let them go, did You walk forward into annihilation. Is there a Work important enough for me to do that will be worthy of such an incredible feat? Will the abundant power that is released when I spend everything that I am, after You have empowered me to my fullest, be enough to change the world and make it a better place? Will You watch as I reveal my insides, so that I cannot hide any longer? So that my worst cannot be denied any more and my best will finally be commissioned?
...because I do not wish to hold on to my faults and insecurities and weaknesses and denial and so be impotent in this world and a perpetual victim of its evil.
Help me.
~Amen.
Social Commentary.
Buddhism is much older than Christianity, and itself is a sect of Hinduism as Christianity is a sect of Judaism. Both the Jewish and Hindu religions go back far enough to predate comparable historical dating methods. They are both primal. My guess is that they both developed around the same time as evil and suffering. Just a guess. The human experience has been frightening and painful since very early on and we lost no time trying to devise ways to deal with it. But one thing seems common to them all. The ability to see beyond simple "Kill Bill" vengeance into something more important. All the disciplines call it something different, Honor, Virtue, Goodness, Health, Intelligence, Enlightenment, Awakening, etc. It seems they all feel the need to maintain a state of improving the character of humanity, and wish to discourage the destruction of it. Many of the coping mechanisms of our human ancestors ended up encouraging the further destruction of our character. Use of raw power to acquire safety for self and kin could easily have bred as finely tuned a viciousness into us as a pug nose in a Boston Terrier. What's to stop this? Indeed, why haven't we anihilated ourselves already?
[unfinished]
Scripture.
The other day, I got an email in my inbox from Jamie Caliri thanking me for a comment I made on another website about the titles at the end of this film. I believe I said something like, "They alone were worth the price of the ticket." And it's true. After all the horror, there began a wash of beautiful, strong, sad music that held me still while I was shown some interesting pictures. Simple black-ink or cut out characters moving around on a deeply dark hued background. They were not truly animated, but merely moved around like one would move a doll when one is imagining it to talk and do things. The eyes moved. Eyes were a very strong theme in this film. And maybe a limb or two, but that's about it. They were not alive, but merely handles for us to move the elements of the story around again without getting hurt.
The little characters of the children were repeating the look of the film with the charming little paper doll-like Victorian clothes, but the character of Olaf was different. He was not represented by a single figure like them, but instead his shape showed up in the scenery or the landscape. The trees became claws that echoed his greedy clutches, buildings became prisons with his face or eyes watching the children as they barely escaped again and again. His eyes were everywhere and they always saw them. In the car, on a bicycle, in a boat or running. It was a controled repetition of the unfortunate events which Lemony had been so careful to warn us about and then showed us anyway. Like an abused child in therapy, we were given dolls to act out our trauma with, so as to keep it in a manageable place while we think about all of these things. The images were sweet, cute, scary-but-not-too-scary, and simple. The music was like a strong adult presence which assured us that we were safe right now and that it was okay to look. After watching that, I felt safer and my personal gothy aesthetic became stronger as I recognised it's role in my life of dealing with trauma. I was grateful.
The title sequence was one of the most important parts of the movie. I don't know if the filmmakers even recognise that, or if many in the audience do either. Certainly too many of them left the theater before they were finished. It made me think about what film really is. About whether we are witnesses to crimes and horrors through that huge window and then left on our own to bring it into a manageable place in our lives. About what filmmakers are really doing... whether or not they actually care as much as "Lemony Snicket" does.
Jamie Caliri worked magic here. He deserves alot of attention.
[I originally posted this thinking that Jaime was a woman. I feel honored to have been corrected by him personally.]
I'm not sure if I've spelled this out before or not, so I'll just do it. The interpretations that I have about things is at least as much about me as it is about the things I'm commenting upon. It's that way with all of us, but I'm just going to be really honest about it. Art brings out what's inside of the artist and the observer. So in my attempt to tell you about these artists, I'm also going to tell you alot about me.
How many times have I seen it?
I've seen this movie two times and I wanted to see it again but didn't get the chance.
What I’d heard about the movie before I went.
I first heard about this story from my kids who read the books years ago. When my daughter first told me about it, I thought it sounded like the fruit of a twisted and sick mind and wondered if there were any standards at all about what kinds of books to allow in elementary school libraries. All I knew was that it was exactly what the title suggested. "A Series of Unfortunate Events". No resolution was ever offered. No lessons learned. No rescue. No saving the day in any form. Only one horrible thing after another without end. And it all happened to these 3 children. Children! Why in God's Name?... And these books were popular. I couldn't comprehend. To a large extent, I still can't.
How I identify.
I cannot identify with these characters at all and I didn't understand why until the other day after finally winning a long battle with writer's block. I wish now that I could see it one more time before typing this up to see if I'm right about this, but it's long gone out of the theaters now. I couldn't find my feelings about the situation these characters were in no matter how hard I tried. The children seemed to be sad and afraid and angry - all very reasonable - but they seemed worlds away from me. I began to think it was because the acting was poor, I suspected the Director, the Casting Personnel... etc. It couldn't be my problem because I was really skilled at finding valuable and interesting things hidden in tragedy and loss. I began this review at least 4 times and couldn't go much further than two paragraphs.
The story.
After a strange little opening sequence depicting the happy singing of elves and animals in the forest comes to an abrupt end, the Narrator tells us that this is not a happy movie about elves. He tells us that he is going to faithfully report what happened to 3 unfortunate people, that it's not going to be cute or pretty and that if we want to get up and leave now there's still time to catch the happy films in other parts of the theater. For those who remain, the real story begins by showing us 3 eccentric children living with their happy, eccentric (and wealthy) family somewhere sort of English and sort of not, and sort of in the past and sort of not. The look of the film is period bending/blending and rather amusing. It reminds me that children have no idea that the objects and words we live with day in and day out have not always existed. Why wouldn't there be fax machines in Victorian England? Funny.
Anyway, you get to see how each child has their unique talent and personality. The oldest, Violet, is mature, stable, calm and could invent things. Klaus, the middle child, is inquisitive and can remember everything he ever reads. Sunny, the young toddler, is still pre-verbal but her siblings seem to understand what she's saying. Her unique talent is that she is a very good judge of character - and she bites stuff. You see them interacting and applying their skills to all sorts of things around the home and their parents, whom you only see from the neck down, love and encourage them. How sweet and wonderful.
One day, the children are dilly-dallying around some shoreline near their home and a car pulls up and a man steps out. He approaches them and tells them there's been a terrible accident. Their Parents were killed in a fire which burnt their house to the ground. The Narrator drops in to add that the fire started under mysterious circumstances, by some strange manipulation of light.
Mr. Poe drives the children back to their now charred home and allows them to take one last walk-thru. They look at all their little inventions and other familiar things they grew accustomed to seeing every day around them blackened, twisted and melted. Klaus ventures into his Father's study where he apparently wasn't normally allowed to go and in his Father's desk he sees a curious object. A nifty brass spyglass. He tries to pick it up but it is still hot from the fire and he drops it back down on the desk. They gather themselves and say goodbye to the house and get back in the car.
Mr. Poe, apparently a lawyer or court appointed official of some sort, informs them that they will be taken to live with their "nearest relative", Count Olaf. As Mr. Poe parks the car, the children see a happy woman standing in a yard and they talk to her about Count Olaf. They assume she lives with him, but she does not. In fact, she makes a face at the thought. She invites them to come visit at any time and then goes inside her cheerful little house. Aparently the Count's house is the unkempt and dismal looking place next door.
Mr. Poe brings the children to the home of the Count and knocks on the door. The peephole in the door opens and closes and a voice bids them to enter.
[I have trouble giving a good description here because of how I feel about this character. Please stand by while I struggle with this...]
The Count is an actor. When Mr. Poe and the children come into the house, he is standing on the balcony in the entryway and delivering a performance for them of a caring relative. Even after showing his frustration and disappointment at not having immediate access to their Parent's money, his performance convinces the oblivious Mr. Poe that he genuinely cares about the children. But the children become uneasy. Sunny picks up on his problem right away and the Count responds by alienating her. After dispatching the bumbling Mr. Poe, Count Olaf takes them on a tour of the house. It is a dump. After the tour he takes them to their room and quickly locks them in. The world closes in on them. Violet rigs up a small shelter for them to comfort one another in as they grieve the loss of their life of safety and love and bed down for the night.
The Count has given the children a list of chores and it becomes clear that he is using them for slave labor. Arriving home one afternoon after carousing with his acting friends, he finds the children scrubbing the floor in the entryway and asks about dinner. They don't know what he's talking about. They've never cooked before and they didn't see any line on the list about dinner. Count Olaf turns the list over to reveal the one thing on the back about dinner and tells them to have it ready for him and his guests in a matter of minutes. The children hurry into the kitchen and look for anything that could be made into food and all they can find is loose noodles in the filthy bottom of a utensil drawer. They begin to prepare some sort of food as best they can.
All this time Violet is just trying to encourage Klaus to make it through and survive while Klaus is constantly reporting the real evil of the situation. Sunny is just cheerfully doing what her sister asks. In a few minutes dinner is served and Olaf and guests are called in to dine. He sees the "food" and asks where the meat is. The children didn't find any meat and didn't know he wanted meat. The Count's friends gasp at the children's obvious mistake of not being able to read his mind and create meat out of thin air and he puts on his best intimidating and put-out performance. Klaus finally has enough and shouts at him. Olaf, after hitting Klaus, grabs the baby with malicious intent and Violet takes her from him and scolds him. After more dressing down, he guides them to their room and locks them in again.
Klaus despairs and blames his Parents for not providing a plan for the children should something happen to them. This is a reasonable complaint, especially against people who supposedly could easily afford such provision. Violet reminds him of an incident in the past when they didn't come home right away from a trip and didn't write and he thought they were dead. But they did write and the letter got lost in the mail, so Klaus was wrong about them. But he sees through this rouse by reminding her that they are not coming home this time.
Later, Count Olaf is driving the children through the countryside and stops at a small convenience store in the middle of nowhere. He parks the car and locks them inside promising to return with two sodas and a banana for Sunny whom he calls "a monkey". He goes inside the store and takes his time talking to the shop-keep and dilly-dallying around. He looks at his watch. The children meanwhile are aware that something is up and they find a piece of paper with a list of times on it. Next to the car, a loud bell starts sounding and they realize that he has parked the car ON railroad tracks. They see that he has arrived at this place in time for the train to come and parked the car to intercept. They are awaiting assassination. Quickly Violet thinks of ways to get out of the situation and since they cannot get out of the car, they rig up a rope to pull the track switch lever and direct the train onto the other track. Just in time they train goes by, Mr. Poe, who happens to be driving through, witnesses the "accident" and the panic-stricken Count Olaf is told that he has left the children in danger and they will be taken away from him. At this announcement, he feigns sorrow and anguish about losing them but quietly vows to kill them eventually. [Carrey's performance is brilliant, but I'm left wondering why I should be appreciating this performance... of a performance... I feel sick.]
Mr. Poe, who merely believes that the Count is guilty of nothing more than allowing children to drive a car and didn't see that he had parked them in front of an oncoming freight train, assures them that they will be well taken care of in their next home. The children are shaken and frustrated that he doesn't get it. That's as much as I can stand to tell of this story. Mr. Poe delivers the children to two more homes and then back again to Count Olaf before the movie is over and the horror just goes on and on. Worse and worse. I guess I just don't have Lemony Snicket's stomach for such things. Maybe I should have taken his advice and left to find another movie about happy little elves... but I had made a commitment to do this.
[I am grateful for Jude Law's voice here. Since his performances in Gatica and AI, I feel great trust and reassurance when I listen to his voice...]
Character development.
This is where I get totally bogged down. I share Klaus' bewilderment at his Parents' neglecting to secure a safe place to land should the family plane crash to the ground. Violet's solutions and attempts to reason her way out of despair are crushingly inadequate. Sunny is watching wide-eyed as adults behave in cartoonishly stupid ways. Her beautiful and real little child face is a doorway through which evil gains entrance to the human soul and begins to twist and mutilate and bend to it's will - but this is not a cartoon. I wish it was a cartoon. In fact, I squirm in my seat as the portrayal of this situation as live action tightens some kind of screw in my gut.
Violet, Violet...
Hide your heart away...
Deep behind curtains of reason and intellect...
Behind walls of fantasy and dreams of being rescued and saved from your victimization...
And from your shame of not being good enough to make it stop...
Protect yourself from the doubt and the question, in whatever form it comes to you...
Never let on that you're helpless and alone and powerless to stop the overwhelming tidalwave of evil that engulfs you...
Evil without conscience or pity...
Machine like in it's skill and freedom from remorse...
Unblinking willingness to harm...
Until maybe someday, in the distant and hidden future...
When you've found a safe place at last...
When you have the courage to lift this little shred of a girl up through the years and into the light again...
to heal...
...then go and help the others.
Klaus, raw and exposed...
Floating on the surface of the world...
Bathing in all its tears...
Tossed back and forth between pain and anger, pain and anger...
Sunny, open and absorbing..
Sponging up violence and soaking up hate...
Filling up on all the weapons that people can invent...
Feeding and growing until someday she is strong enough...
..for what?
I could try to come up with words for Olaf. But I don't think I would be able to correctly translate his essence. I cannot do it. It is my weakness. My blind spot. My vulnerability. My deepest darkness. It is too close to me... I simply do not understand it.
And with the exceptions of the Narrator and Uncle Monty, all the other adults in this story - what they simply amount to is empty space. Or rather the outline of a figure with a gaping, hope-sucking black hole in the center. Beyond stupid. Beyond hapless. Beyond bad. Negligence is the worst crime of all. It believes itself to be good and to intend goodness, but its inability to act only makes the journey to healing that much longer and the path more difficult to find.
Connection to Faith.
I'm not sure what to say except that it seems so obvious. My blindness isn't really blindness. It's just that this is often all I see and I see little else. Especially when I am faced with this kind of thing in such a forceful manner.
I've very recently been reminded that Christianity deals very directly with evil. It is very explicit about what will happen to those who intend and/or commit to cause harm and those who will not act to prevent others from intending and/or committing to cause harm. So much so that when a victim becomes inspired to exact vengeance themselves (inevitable), they are restrained by fear of what God would do to them should they cause harm to another - even a mindless villain with no conscience. Christianity to many, seems to merely promise to punish evil eventually, leaving the victim untouched and unhelped with their tumultuous feelings of hurt, rage and fear. "Forgive!" they are told, and that's that. If their feelings of rage overwhelm them, they are told that they are now worthy of the same punishment as regular evildoers. Hell, it seems is the lot of the victim as well as the offender. "How is that just?", they ask. And our answers are lame.
I know that the issue of suffering and victimization is dealt with in Christianity, but it is done very differently and very indirectly - or perhaps too directly for it to be particularly useful. It seems Jesus has been assigned the job of Chief Sufferer and Head Victim. In a way, our doctrines of propitiation have supported the idea that the worst of suffering is done by Him so that we won't have to endure it. [So what is this thing that makes me feel like crap then?] Then our doctrines of forgiveness and emulation support the idea of enduring the other kinds of suffering (a very limited and simplistic list, indeed), but not much beyond that. We've got long lists of verses that tell us why to endure but not much help in how or what kind of fruit endurance will actually bear. It gets really vague. Certainly it is not as explicit as some of the Eastern religions and disciplines are about suffering.
I am going to offend many Buddhists now by attempting to explain something about their religion. I'm sorry. I really do not mean to offend. I'm really trying to get it right. If I'm not getting it right, please help me, don't just criticize me. I know how I feel when I hear/read non-Christians trying to explain Christianity. Okay? Okay.
Buddhism sort of begins, not with a story as Christianity does, but with ideas. I've attempted to find the official story of the Buddha, asking of both learned non-Buddhists as well as Buddhist monks, and they tell me that there really isn't one. They, it seems, are not "People of The Book". The opening ideas are thus:
1) Life is suffering (deep word meaning unsatisfactoriness), from beginning to end, everything is unsatisfying in some way.
2) We are unsatisfied because we desire satisfaction and are ignorant of it's lack of existence or impermanence.
3) The solution to desire is to cause desire to not exist or to detach, and to educate ourselves of the non-existence of satisfaction. Attaining this state of being is called "Nirvana". We've all heard that word. That's what it is.
4) Attaining Nirvana is done by a series of 8 disciplines called "The Eight-Fold Path".
This 4-part form comes from the ancient Indian culture where doctors cured patients by:
1) acknowledging and identifying the problem
2) finding the source of the problem
3) stating that there is a cure
4) prescribing the cure
Those 8 disciplines can be gathered into 3 groups:
Morality:
Perfect Thoughts
Perfect Actions
Perfect Speech
Perfect Livelihood
Concentration:
Perfect Effort
Perfect Concentration
Insight:
Perfect Mindfulness
Perfect Understanding
It isn't necessary to go further to make my point, although it's worth your time to learn and understand.
I have observed the human being for quite a while and while I wouldn't claim to know everything, there is something that seems obvious to me that for some reason, isn't to many others. If someone is avoiding a painful or frightening feeling or memory, they can easily find some sort of religious/philosophical/psychological construct that will support their avoidance. The original purposes of such constructs are usually quite the opposite of allowing people to hide from bad things, but ironically we find ways to circumvent the intent of these things and warp them to suit our needs. It's weird. As a result churches, temples, synagogues and doctor's offices are filled to capacity with people who are using these constructs to avoid dealing with their own character problems and frightening issues. I've seen evil people hiding in Churches and using punitive doctrines to disguise their hate and rage. I've seen emotionally stuck people hiding in the Eastern ideas of detachment to disguise their numbness and denial. If both Jesus and the Buddha were alive today, I'm sure they would be giving one another a knowing look of disappointment right now.
In order to use Christianity to cure my character faults and resolve my emotional issues, I must commit to letting it expose me, and refuse to hide within it. If I were using Christianity, that's how I'd say that. But since I'm not USING Christianity, I say the same thing in a very different way. Instead of a statement, I would utter a prayer, because I am not saying something about ideas and other abstractions. I am saying something about me, and I'm saying it to God. Person to Person. I would say,
Jesus,
What is the black hole in me? I am so deeply hurt that I do not even understand how deep it is. Do You understand it? Will You help me to face it and feel all the hurt and rage and fear and then eventually help me grow big enough to handle it in an Adult way? As You did? Will You help me rescue this child trapped inside a labyrinth of memory and chaos? Will You honor her suffering? Will You respect her helplessness and forgive her rage? Will You be the Solution to all this instead of more of the Problem - which so many people have been by making her feel guilty for being hurt, afraid and angry? Only after You brought up every one of Your human needs for connection, love and reciprocation before the Father holding nothing back, then were fully grown enough with strength from His Love to let them go, did You walk forward into annihilation. Is there a Work important enough for me to do that will be worthy of such an incredible feat? Will the abundant power that is released when I spend everything that I am, after You have empowered me to my fullest, be enough to change the world and make it a better place? Will You watch as I reveal my insides, so that I cannot hide any longer? So that my worst cannot be denied any more and my best will finally be commissioned?
...because I do not wish to hold on to my faults and insecurities and weaknesses and denial and so be impotent in this world and a perpetual victim of its evil.
Help me.
~Amen.
Social Commentary.
Buddhism is much older than Christianity, and itself is a sect of Hinduism as Christianity is a sect of Judaism. Both the Jewish and Hindu religions go back far enough to predate comparable historical dating methods. They are both primal. My guess is that they both developed around the same time as evil and suffering. Just a guess. The human experience has been frightening and painful since very early on and we lost no time trying to devise ways to deal with it. But one thing seems common to them all. The ability to see beyond simple "Kill Bill" vengeance into something more important. All the disciplines call it something different, Honor, Virtue, Goodness, Health, Intelligence, Enlightenment, Awakening, etc. It seems they all feel the need to maintain a state of improving the character of humanity, and wish to discourage the destruction of it. Many of the coping mechanisms of our human ancestors ended up encouraging the further destruction of our character. Use of raw power to acquire safety for self and kin could easily have bred as finely tuned a viciousness into us as a pug nose in a Boston Terrier. What's to stop this? Indeed, why haven't we anihilated ourselves already?
[unfinished]
Scripture.
[unfinished]
Score Comments.
The other day, I got an email in my inbox from Jamie Caliri thanking me for a comment I made on another website about the titles at the end of this film. I believe I said something like, "They alone were worth the price of the ticket." And it's true. After all the horror, there began a wash of beautiful, strong, sad music that held me still while I was shown some interesting pictures. Simple black-ink or cut out characters moving around on a deeply dark hued background. They were not truly animated, but merely moved around like one would move a doll when one is imagining it to talk and do things. The eyes moved. Eyes were a very strong theme in this film. And maybe a limb or two, but that's about it. They were not alive, but merely handles for us to move the elements of the story around again without getting hurt.
The little characters of the children were repeating the look of the film with the charming little paper doll-like Victorian clothes, but the character of Olaf was different. He was not represented by a single figure like them, but instead his shape showed up in the scenery or the landscape. The trees became claws that echoed his greedy clutches, buildings became prisons with his face or eyes watching the children as they barely escaped again and again. His eyes were everywhere and they always saw them. In the car, on a bicycle, in a boat or running. It was a controled repetition of the unfortunate events which Lemony had been so careful to warn us about and then showed us anyway. Like an abused child in therapy, we were given dolls to act out our trauma with, so as to keep it in a manageable place while we think about all of these things. The images were sweet, cute, scary-but-not-too-scary, and simple. The music was like a strong adult presence which assured us that we were safe right now and that it was okay to look. After watching that, I felt safer and my personal gothy aesthetic became stronger as I recognised it's role in my life of dealing with trauma. I was grateful.
The title sequence was one of the most important parts of the movie. I don't know if the filmmakers even recognise that, or if many in the audience do either. Certainly too many of them left the theater before they were finished. It made me think about what film really is. About whether we are witnesses to crimes and horrors through that huge window and then left on our own to bring it into a manageable place in our lives. About what filmmakers are really doing... whether or not they actually care as much as "Lemony Snicket" does.
Jamie Caliri worked magic here. He deserves alot of attention.
[I originally posted this thinking that Jaime was a woman. I feel honored to have been corrected by him personally.]
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