A Hunger for Fantasy, an Empire to Feed It

[Dave Monroe]

>From A.O. Scott, "A Hunger for Fantasy, an Empire to
Feed It," NY Times, Sunday, June 16th, 2002 ...

So far, this year's two most lucrative summer movies
concern the perilous adventures of male teenagers, one
in contemporary New York and the other long ago in a
galaxy far away, struggling with the moral and
physical burdens of their special powers....
 
[...]

Perhaps more than ever before, Hollywood is an empire
of fantasy. But despite the popularity of these movies
[...] Hollywood is not the center of this empire. It
is, rather, a colonial outpost whose conquest has been
recent and remains incomplete.

The rapid evolution of digital technology has made it
possible for filmmakers like Peter Jackson and George
Lucas to summon up ever more plausible and richly
imagined counterfeit worlds, free of clunky mechanical
props and stagy costumes. But the origins of these
worlds is, for the most part, to be found not on the
screen but on the page. Of the four films mentioned,
only "Star Wars" belongs solely to the world of
movies. The rest are adapted from comic books and
novels.

Twenty-five years ago, the first "Star Wars" helped to
transform moviemaking and moviegoing. It gave birth to
the current era of blockbuster serials, intensive
special effects and wide-release, critic-resistant
summer popcorn extravaganzas. But the true genius of
that picture was the way it opened mainstream cinema
to a vital strain in American popular culture that
Hollywood had until then largely ignored or treated
with condescension. "Star Wars" tapped into an impulse
that had been flourishing at least since the end of
the Second World War in the pages of comic books and
pulp novels, on television and in the nascent
subculture of role-playing games like Dungeons and
Dragons....

[...]

The juggernaut grows with each generation. Unlike
virtually everything else in the irony-saturated,
ready-to-recycle cosmos of postmodern pop culture,
stories of this kind don't seem to date....

[...]
 
The appeal is perennial because it fulfills the
widespread and ever-renewing desire for a restoration
of innocence. The major texts of modern fantasy have
all been pointedly, even deliberately regressive.
Tolkien, in inventing Middle Earth, was motivated by
an extreme nostalgia, a desire to restore, at least in
imagination, the language and folkways of an England
uncorrupted by modernity. (Modernity, for him, began
with the Norman conquest of 1066, which ruined
everything.)

"Star Wars" arrived not only in the midst of the
malaise that followed Vietnam and Watergate, but also
at a time when the stalwart heroic movie genres, the
war movie and the western, could no longer in good
faith sustain narratives of simple virtue. The moral
universe of "Star Wars" was and remains, despite the
growing political complications of the last two
episodes, reassuringly simple because it is
fundamentally allegorical. Turning his back on the
dark, dystopian visions of the era's science fiction,
which extrapolated a stark future from the confusion
of the present, Mr. Lucas situated his epic in an
ancient, distant world intended to recapture the gee
whiz spirit of Buck Rogers and the 1939 World's Fair.

Fantasy literature, which in the broadest sense
includes modes of storytelling from novels to movies
to video games, depends on patterns, motifs and
archetypes. It is therefore hardly surprising that the
most visible modern variants of the ancient genres of
saga, romance and quest narrative are so richly
crosspollinated and resemble one another. The central
characters show an especially close kinship. They are,
following a convention so deep it seems to be encoded
in the human storytelling gene, orphans, summoned out
of obscurity to undertake a journey into the heart of
evil that will also be a voyage of self-discovery....

[...]

All of these young men — and fantasy heroes are,
overwhelmingly, men — discover themselves to be in
possession of extraordinary gifts, and become,
unexpectedly and sometimes reluctantly, the central
figures in a struggle against absolute evil. Destiny
has selected them for great things. Their episodic
adventures lead them forward, toward a climactic
confrontation with the enemy (foreshadowed in a series
of battles with subsidiary forms of evil) and also
backward into the mysteries of their own past and
parentage. 

For all their ancient and futuristic trappings,
fantasy stories speak directly to the condition of
contemporary male adolescence, and they offer a
Utopian solution to the anxiety and dislocation that
are part of the pyschic landscape of youth. Freaks
become heroes. The confusing issue of sex is kept at a
safe distance; romantic considerations are ancillary
to the fight against evil, and to the cameraderie of
warriors. But ultimately, whatever fellowship he may
have found along the way, the hero's quest is
solitary, his triumph an allegory of the personal
fulfillment that is, in the real world, both a
birthright and a mirage.

The structure of fantasy calls for episodes of
increasingly perilous action connected by passages of
exposition, in which the necessary facts of history,
geography and genealogy are revealed to the hero and,
over his shoulder, to the audience.

These moments, which often feature secondary
characters in outlandish costumes delivering earnest,
learned speeches [...] are routinely mocked by critics
(not excluding this one) for their tedium and
portentousness. Such derision, however, is precisely
what separates the casual fan from the true adept (the
latter being one who uses his esoteric powers to
vanquish the former by means of angry e-mail).

.... true wizardry lies in the mastery of arcane
detail. It is obvious that much of the appeal of these
chronicles lies in the possibility of vicarious
heroism, of identifying with the unprepossessing,
marginal, nerdy guys who turn out to be indispensable
to the survival of the universe. The way that
identification is sealed is not through imitation of
their feats of cunning or physical courage, but by
mimicking their progress from innocence to mastery, by
acquiring a body of esoteric knowledge for which the
books and movies themselves provide the raw material.

In the United States today there are hundred of
thousands, perhaps millions of people whose grasp of
the history, politics and mythological traditions of
entirely imaginary places could surely qualify them
for an advanced degree. This learning is fed by
quasi-official concordances, encyclopedias and other
reference works, but these exist mainly to exploit a
spontaneous process that takes place in classrooms and
chat rooms around the world....

[...]

Like all knowledge, fantasy lore is acquired partly
for its own sake and partly for the social privilege
it confers, which in this case is membership in a
select order, like the Wizards or the Jedi or the
Fellowship of the Ring, of which the rest of the world
is only dimly aware and whose codes and protocols it
will never know. 

The history of postwar American popular culture is to
some degree a history of subcultures — communities of
enthusiasts walking the fine line between ardor and
obsession. [...] But the fantasy genres have been
especially fertile breeding grounds for such
communities of enthusiasm, from Trekkies to D&D
players to the intrepid souls who camp out in front of
the cineplexes where the next "Star Wars" movie will
be showing. These fans see themselves not only as
consumers of popular culture, but as participants in
its making, which may be why the exemplary form of
fantasy culture is not reading or movie-going but
gaming, in which each player can be the hero of his
own saga.

[...]

The appeal of fantasy has been especially powerful
among those who find themselves marginalized by the
brutal social universe of American secondary education
— geeks, losers, nerds. You remember them from high
school — or you remember being one of them [...] Their
devotion to sci-fi and sword-and-sorcery arcana
invited ridicule, but was also a defense against it.
But such mockery is, by now, obsolete. The triumph of
fantasy culture, like the transformation of the cult
of the computer into mainstream religion, is their
revenge. We are all nerds now. And we had better do
our homework. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/16/movies/16SCOT.html



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