Battle for the Planet of the nerd psyche
Excalibur was on this evening and I watched it all the way through for the first time since I was little. Every now and then I run across a song, comedy, or piece of art that I recognize as small but significant work that informed some of the basic schemas floating around my head as a child. The mere suggestion of the movie Excalibur might lead one to believe that I'm talking about the biblical themes and while I recognized the thick layer of God subtext at that time, it wasn't what piqued my interest and stuck with me through the years. There was a particular scene where Lancelot is in a moment of turmoil due to his guilt over a lapse of loyalty. He pleads for the impurity to be cut out and sure enough another Lancelot appears in full armor and sticks him in the gut with a sword. There were several other abstract narrative devices used in the film but this was probably the most overtly surreal sequence. I couldn't have been more than seven when I saw it but the subversive nature of the scene in context of a movie that could otherwise be written off as played straight or explained away as magical gobbledygook really made an impact.
After seeing the scene again tonight it occurred to me that there were several other cinematic moments I could point to that had similar effect. There is a scene in The Empire Strikes Back that stands as stylistic nonsequitur to the rest of the franchise where Luke enters a cave and confronts Vader himself in a brief encounter that ends in decapitation and a reveal of no other than Luke himself under the mask. This was some provocative right brain stuff for a six year old regardless of how Yoda talked you down.
The last act in Battle for the Planet of the Apes wasn't as much a portayal of exercising personal demons as the aforementioned but it wasn't any less a headtrip. <1970's spoiler alert> Humans of the future were revealed to be hideously deformed telepaths that worshipped a golden doomsday bomb. Charlton Heston decides to pull the plug on humanity by pressing the big red button and where once I might have hoped for a swift escape from the monkeypaw of oppression at the movie's end, I find existential questions in a very french accent.
2001: A Space Odyssey. Yeah, that.
There are probably oodles more that warped my mind for the better in the same way before I was ten but that influence isn't so easy to identify when some of these stories never really left a public conciousness that ends up rendering other associations. With all due respect Mr. Lucas, my favorite surreal impalings and beheadings don't go over as well re-enacted with action figures (Of course, I wanted them just the same). I can draw a direct line from my appreciation of things like the boat scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to my effortless understanding of the symmetry in the dream logic of movies like Mulholland Drive. About a year ago I saw Zardoz for the first time. This movie was directed by John Boorman, the same guy that did Excalibur. It's all kinds of batshit crazy and I wish I saw it when I was a kid. That might have been a sharp spike in advanced reality bending thought technology.
After seeing the scene again tonight it occurred to me that there were several other cinematic moments I could point to that had similar effect. There is a scene in The Empire Strikes Back that stands as stylistic nonsequitur to the rest of the franchise where Luke enters a cave and confronts Vader himself in a brief encounter that ends in decapitation and a reveal of no other than Luke himself under the mask. This was some provocative right brain stuff for a six year old regardless of how Yoda talked you down.
The last act in Battle for the Planet of the Apes wasn't as much a portayal of exercising personal demons as the aforementioned but it wasn't any less a headtrip. <1970's spoiler alert> Humans of the future were revealed to be hideously deformed telepaths that worshipped a golden doomsday bomb. Charlton Heston decides to pull the plug on humanity by pressing the big red button and where once I might have hoped for a swift escape from the monkeypaw of oppression at the movie's end, I find existential questions in a very french accent.
2001: A Space Odyssey. Yeah, that.
There are probably oodles more that warped my mind for the better in the same way before I was ten but that influence isn't so easy to identify when some of these stories never really left a public conciousness that ends up rendering other associations. With all due respect Mr. Lucas, my favorite surreal impalings and beheadings don't go over as well re-enacted with action figures (Of course, I wanted them just the same). I can draw a direct line from my appreciation of things like the boat scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to my effortless understanding of the symmetry in the dream logic of movies like Mulholland Drive. About a year ago I saw Zardoz for the first time. This movie was directed by John Boorman, the same guy that did Excalibur. It's all kinds of batshit crazy and I wish I saw it when I was a kid. That might have been a sharp spike in advanced reality bending thought technology.