Labyrinth as a male story
A few days ago, I chanced to mention Labyrinth to a lady of my acquaintance, and asked why it was that most Labyrinth fanfic writers are women. She answered that it was the quintessential female coming-of-age story, of a young woman's sexual awakening. The nuances and details were so perfectly tailored to that subject that it took someone with two X chromosomes to fully appreciate it.
She was shocked when I suggested that it was also a male coming-of-age story, and was only partially mollified when I presented a few of my feminist credentials.
A woman's life is often pictured as a cycle having much in common with the phases of the moon - a progression from maiden, to lover, to mother, to crone. (Wiccans often omit the 'lover' bit, but as a male I find it highly puzzling that there's no intermediate stage between 'maiden' and 'mother'.)
The largest manifestation of this cycle is lifelong. A woman's body undergoes drastic changes - her figure at 28 is very different than her figure at 8 or 58, for reasons quite apart from diet and exercise. There is a smaller, typically nine-month cycle that leads to birth. The smallest cycle is monthly, and itself is only manifest from the end of maidenhood to the beginning of the crone's years.
What about men?
Men have their own cycle - that of the dying god.
Our bodies change little during our lives. At 18, we are in many ways miniatures of what we will be at 58. We don't grow breasts, our hips don't round, and we lack the nine-month cycle and many aspects of the monthly one (my own emotional hormones, at least, are definitely on a predictable solar cycle).
The lack of the underlying body-change life-cycle gives a fractal nature to the cycle we DO have. Without nature acting as metronome, its scale is uncertain. The cycle can take months, or years, or decades... but it is nearly as well-known as the lunar metaphor.
Ours is the journey from son, to seducer, to consort, to memory. It is a cycle regulated by love and passion. With each new love we are born again. With each abandonment we die.
Consider, then, Jareth's version of the story of Sarah's Labyrinth.
Before Sarah's appearance, Jareth is nothing, or nothing that we know of. It is her love, her notice that sparks him into life, that gives him purpose and a context for his meaning.
This notice, this life, this falling in love, the attention of the owl looking through a bedroom window at a girl he has not truly met, is the beginning.
Then the stage of the Son. As the Son, we are shaped by the one we love. This is the time for friendship, connection and learning. We absorb their tastes, gain new ways of looking at the world, are added to and raised and to some extent shaped (if not necessarily enriched) by them.
This is the creation of the Labyrinth. Jareth's kingdom, shaped by Sarah's mind as he sees it. This is the moulding of our world by the one we love, an extension of herself into our private being. This is not to say that Jareth's world is ONLY Sarah's - there is much of him, and others, in it. Each past love adds to the substance and fabric of the Son's internal world, but it is the current love that has greatest effect.
And yet... the Son is on a different level than the woman he loves. A level that one may interact with fondly, but never truly contemplate joining. Here live complaints of 'let's be friends' and frustrated platonics.
Here are Hoggle, and Sir Didymus and the rest. Shaped by Sarah, loved to an extent, but often left behind - 'Should you need us...'
With strong loves there comes a yearning, a desire to share and revel in *all* of the loved one. Very often, the loved woman walls off parts of her being, making them inaccessible to the Son. Sarah goes into her bedroom, closing the door, while we wait patiently outside until we're called.
Or perhaps, we dare to knock.
Still, there are areas where the Son may not go. To gain access, to fulfill our need, we become the Seducer.
The Seducer uses his knowledge of the woman he loves to tempt her into breaking down her walls. He must convince her that his humanity, his maturity, is on a level with hers. He must calm fears of exposure and vulnerability. The loved one, being cautious, will not do this without reason. The Seducer must build pictures of a brighter, better life, once all has been shared. A life that fulfills the woman's wishes and fantasies in ways she cannot or dare not on her own.
Despite the connotation to seduction, there need be nothing false or ill about this. It can be honest, and true. For every wolf knocking at a pig's door, there is Zeus on Anfitrion's porch. It is pain at being separated from an important part of one's love that drives this request - for that is what it is. Some Christians believe that Hell is separation from God. Separation from the loved one can be hellish.
Then, there is the matter of permission.
The Seducer must wait and watch for an opening, for an invitation, for signals. Jareth's goblins cannot take Toby (or Sarah!) on their own. They must wait not just for her words, but for completely unambiguous words that leave nothing to chance or the imagination. Similarly, vampires must be invited into their victim's room. Danny Elfman, a composer, once wrote a song to his love of how "here I stand / with my d--- in my hand / waiting for an invitation to the Promised Land".
Those who invent or misinterpret signals are among the most reviled in our society - but even true cads, criminals and blackguards will, when questioned, find SOME invitation or signal. Even one as obviously false as "She was wearing a red hat."
And why? Physical strength aside (I've lost an arm wrestle to a sixty-year-old woman)... our kingdom is vast, but we have no power over you.
Jareth is the Seducer through most of the movie. He offers glimpses of possible futures, pleasant ones, while explicitly peopling the Labyrinth with dangers and obstacles that Sarah desires and needs to face and overcome... though she would never consciously admit to it. "Everything I do, I do for you."
If all goes well... and it didn't, for Jareth... we become the Consort. Many of the walls around our love's core are broken down, and we share our inner world with hers more fully. Experiencing this love sustains him. Seeing her walk in his world, and he in hers, grants him strength.
Then comes Memory. In the end, the woman we love may drift away, from lack of interest, satiation, or of change. A woman's cycle is measured by nature, and ours is measured by love. We tend to stay constant while that which sustains us changes before our eyes. Eventually, we must either change with her... or die. She is eased into her change by her nature, doing it gradually at nature's bidding. We must do it sharply, if at all. At once. This is traumatic, and difficult.
Gaiman's Dream of the Endless chose to die, and be reborn with a new love.
Jareth... did not choose. Not having reached the stage of Consort, Sarah was not sufficiently open to him for him to be able to anticipate her withdrawal.
It was she who made the choice for him, removing herself from his world, and emphasizing that she was not a part of it and would not be influenced by it. The world which she had partly shaped lost its corner-stone, and was shattered.
Jareth, who had been sustained by Sarah's self, turned ghostly.
And then came death, and the transition to memory - he lost the shape and stature he had gained by building on her attention and sharing. He became again the white owl, who must fly outside the house now strange and closed to him, and into the night.
What remains of the world that had been, remains as memory - as something safe and controlled that Sarah may call on when she wishes to, with no other conditions or risks attached. Previously painful or difficult adversaries are de-clawed and become things that may, as memories, be invited into her bedroom and feted, safe in the knowledge that they have no independent will and may be dismissed at any time. This is the party that ends the movie.
Jacqueline Carey wrote a novel with a male protagonist after years of writing only from the viewpoint of a woman. Among the first advice she gave the young man on the cusp of adulthood, with her author's voice? "You are doomed to find love and to lose it, many times."
That is our cycle - the cycle of the dying god.
The story of the Labyrinth is the story of a male's coming-of-age exactly because it is the essential story of a woman's coming-of-age. It shows us the beauty that is to be found in love, the complexity, the dance, and that it is worthwhile even if we do not gain that which we think we seek.
Does anyone think that the owl at the end of the movie, given the choice, would see it all undone?
Neither do I.
She was shocked when I suggested that it was also a male coming-of-age story, and was only partially mollified when I presented a few of my feminist credentials.
A woman's life is often pictured as a cycle having much in common with the phases of the moon - a progression from maiden, to lover, to mother, to crone. (Wiccans often omit the 'lover' bit, but as a male I find it highly puzzling that there's no intermediate stage between 'maiden' and 'mother'.)
The largest manifestation of this cycle is lifelong. A woman's body undergoes drastic changes - her figure at 28 is very different than her figure at 8 or 58, for reasons quite apart from diet and exercise. There is a smaller, typically nine-month cycle that leads to birth. The smallest cycle is monthly, and itself is only manifest from the end of maidenhood to the beginning of the crone's years.
What about men?
Men have their own cycle - that of the dying god.
Our bodies change little during our lives. At 18, we are in many ways miniatures of what we will be at 58. We don't grow breasts, our hips don't round, and we lack the nine-month cycle and many aspects of the monthly one (my own emotional hormones, at least, are definitely on a predictable solar cycle).
The lack of the underlying body-change life-cycle gives a fractal nature to the cycle we DO have. Without nature acting as metronome, its scale is uncertain. The cycle can take months, or years, or decades... but it is nearly as well-known as the lunar metaphor.
Ours is the journey from son, to seducer, to consort, to memory. It is a cycle regulated by love and passion. With each new love we are born again. With each abandonment we die.
Consider, then, Jareth's version of the story of Sarah's Labyrinth.
Before Sarah's appearance, Jareth is nothing, or nothing that we know of. It is her love, her notice that sparks him into life, that gives him purpose and a context for his meaning.
This notice, this life, this falling in love, the attention of the owl looking through a bedroom window at a girl he has not truly met, is the beginning.
Then the stage of the Son. As the Son, we are shaped by the one we love. This is the time for friendship, connection and learning. We absorb their tastes, gain new ways of looking at the world, are added to and raised and to some extent shaped (if not necessarily enriched) by them.
This is the creation of the Labyrinth. Jareth's kingdom, shaped by Sarah's mind as he sees it. This is the moulding of our world by the one we love, an extension of herself into our private being. This is not to say that Jareth's world is ONLY Sarah's - there is much of him, and others, in it. Each past love adds to the substance and fabric of the Son's internal world, but it is the current love that has greatest effect.
And yet... the Son is on a different level than the woman he loves. A level that one may interact with fondly, but never truly contemplate joining. Here live complaints of 'let's be friends' and frustrated platonics.
Here are Hoggle, and Sir Didymus and the rest. Shaped by Sarah, loved to an extent, but often left behind - 'Should you need us...'
With strong loves there comes a yearning, a desire to share and revel in *all* of the loved one. Very often, the loved woman walls off parts of her being, making them inaccessible to the Son. Sarah goes into her bedroom, closing the door, while we wait patiently outside until we're called.
Or perhaps, we dare to knock.
Still, there are areas where the Son may not go. To gain access, to fulfill our need, we become the Seducer.
The Seducer uses his knowledge of the woman he loves to tempt her into breaking down her walls. He must convince her that his humanity, his maturity, is on a level with hers. He must calm fears of exposure and vulnerability. The loved one, being cautious, will not do this without reason. The Seducer must build pictures of a brighter, better life, once all has been shared. A life that fulfills the woman's wishes and fantasies in ways she cannot or dare not on her own.
Despite the connotation to seduction, there need be nothing false or ill about this. It can be honest, and true. For every wolf knocking at a pig's door, there is Zeus on Anfitrion's porch. It is pain at being separated from an important part of one's love that drives this request - for that is what it is. Some Christians believe that Hell is separation from God. Separation from the loved one can be hellish.
Then, there is the matter of permission.
The Seducer must wait and watch for an opening, for an invitation, for signals. Jareth's goblins cannot take Toby (or Sarah!) on their own. They must wait not just for her words, but for completely unambiguous words that leave nothing to chance or the imagination. Similarly, vampires must be invited into their victim's room. Danny Elfman, a composer, once wrote a song to his love of how "here I stand / with my d--- in my hand / waiting for an invitation to the Promised Land".
Those who invent or misinterpret signals are among the most reviled in our society - but even true cads, criminals and blackguards will, when questioned, find SOME invitation or signal. Even one as obviously false as "She was wearing a red hat."
And why? Physical strength aside (I've lost an arm wrestle to a sixty-year-old woman)... our kingdom is vast, but we have no power over you.
Jareth is the Seducer through most of the movie. He offers glimpses of possible futures, pleasant ones, while explicitly peopling the Labyrinth with dangers and obstacles that Sarah desires and needs to face and overcome... though she would never consciously admit to it. "Everything I do, I do for you."
If all goes well... and it didn't, for Jareth... we become the Consort. Many of the walls around our love's core are broken down, and we share our inner world with hers more fully. Experiencing this love sustains him. Seeing her walk in his world, and he in hers, grants him strength.
Then comes Memory. In the end, the woman we love may drift away, from lack of interest, satiation, or of change. A woman's cycle is measured by nature, and ours is measured by love. We tend to stay constant while that which sustains us changes before our eyes. Eventually, we must either change with her... or die. She is eased into her change by her nature, doing it gradually at nature's bidding. We must do it sharply, if at all. At once. This is traumatic, and difficult.
Gaiman's Dream of the Endless chose to die, and be reborn with a new love.
Jareth... did not choose. Not having reached the stage of Consort, Sarah was not sufficiently open to him for him to be able to anticipate her withdrawal.
It was she who made the choice for him, removing herself from his world, and emphasizing that she was not a part of it and would not be influenced by it. The world which she had partly shaped lost its corner-stone, and was shattered.
Jareth, who had been sustained by Sarah's self, turned ghostly.
And then came death, and the transition to memory - he lost the shape and stature he had gained by building on her attention and sharing. He became again the white owl, who must fly outside the house now strange and closed to him, and into the night.
What remains of the world that had been, remains as memory - as something safe and controlled that Sarah may call on when she wishes to, with no other conditions or risks attached. Previously painful or difficult adversaries are de-clawed and become things that may, as memories, be invited into her bedroom and feted, safe in the knowledge that they have no independent will and may be dismissed at any time. This is the party that ends the movie.
Jacqueline Carey wrote a novel with a male protagonist after years of writing only from the viewpoint of a woman. Among the first advice she gave the young man on the cusp of adulthood, with her author's voice? "You are doomed to find love and to lose it, many times."
That is our cycle - the cycle of the dying god.
The story of the Labyrinth is the story of a male's coming-of-age exactly because it is the essential story of a woman's coming-of-age. It shows us the beauty that is to be found in love, the complexity, the dance, and that it is worthwhile even if we do not gain that which we think we seek.
Does anyone think that the owl at the end of the movie, given the choice, would see it all undone?
Neither do I.