The 80's Own My Soul - Beauty and the Beast

[quarter_to_five]

I'm having a blast working my way through Remington Steele, but I know if I watch an episode I end up watching another one (and then probably another one) and I need to be up early tomorrow. (And I have that sinking feeling of oh-noez-it-will-be-over-soon, so I catch myself deliberately trying to stretch it out.) 

So since I'm on an 80's kick anyway, and this had been at the back of my head for a while, because, hey, it sounds neat. I'm not actually a completionist, but it feels kinda cool to claim that I am (like trying on a monocle. Or something), and I've read a lot of what George R. R. Martin has written. I figured now that i'm immersed in 80's stuff anyway and it maybe doesn't jump out as datedly unwatchable quite as badly, I might as well go and finally watch Beauty and the Beast, 1987. 

Pilot: Once Upon A Time in the City of New York. Very vague, quasi-spoilers for pilot, lots of rambling about GRRM. 
 

 

By the Gods! You can tell this is GRRM. If someone is only familiar with him as the guy behind that TV show with Peter Dinklage being witty and everyone getting naked a lot, that might not make a lot sense*. If you've read the books, and especially if you've read his early (unrelated) stories, it's unmissable. That almost treacly romanticism, fondness for grand emotion and doomed lovers swathed in wafting mists of pearly melancholy and all that. 

In this instance, it's all so sweet and so sad and so fucking purple it makes my teeth ache...and yet.

Catherine  is slightly bored lawyer, working at her dad's firm, with a nice lifestyle and an asshole of a boyfriend. She is assaulted and left for dead in a park, to be saved by Vincent, some sort of scary-yet-gentle lion-y mutant who lives in a secret underground quasi-city of, apparently, motley outcasts. The two form a powerful bond and blah, blah.

The interaction between them is really almost entirely painful Romance cliches (but not quite entirely.) "You will always have me...we are one soul...I can never see you again...", Oh, shut up. On the other hand, the Catherine's-life part of the story is mired in a kind of grimy urban realism (or an attempt at it, at least) - shabby understaffed DA offices, dead hookers, dirty fights. 

That kind of...distrust of the contemporary in favour of a magical and mysterious hidden world of firelit fantasy is pretty trademark GRRM too: 

 

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

Personally, I think that's the worst thing GRRM has ever written, and I include ALL the sex scenes in ASOIAF. Come on, man, grow up, look around you! 

But! But GRRM's books are usually, actually, pretty damned nasty. (whatever he writes in the introductions) In ASOIAF in particular theres a lot of deconstruction and question asked of this kind of floaty, sensual fantasy, and above all, theres a total, unremitting suspicion of the idealization of romantic love and of the idealization of the romantic partner. 

(Some of his short stories in particular are just vicious about it. Read A Song For Lya  if you don't believe me, and Meathouse Man, which I think is Commie enough about labour and sex to make China Mieville's entire output look sort of tamely mild mannered social democrat by comparison. And has zombies.) 

So a lot of GRRM's work always seems to be navigating that tension - the desire to get away, to get lost in fantasy, acknowledging and even indulging in the power of that imagery - against questioning what it is, precisely, we might be looking for there and why. (And why do we think that we'll find it? Don't we realize we're just going to be lonely and miserable forever? Might as well give up and die now, really.)

So, with that lens in mind, the episode kind of becomes more interesting, but it's definitely me bringing in super textual evidence. Knowing GRRM's writing, I just can't believe that this is all that there is going to be to it, this duality of the mundane and the fantastic, and tangled inextricably through that, the idealized lovers.

Other than that nagging central thing, it's really not bad at all. Catherine is well characterized, though Vincent remains a bit of a cypher (albeit a very nice and charismatic one.) She is firmly the center of her own story and her own agent - switching careers, learning to fight, chasing down her assailants - even if she does get rescued by Vincent, and is generally refreshing adult and very much her own woman about everything. 

There's also some striking visuals, despite being, you know, from the 80's. The lingering shots of Catherine's slashed face, entirely bandaged except for her mouth, are scary and sensual at the same time. A lot manages to exist unsaid between Vincent and Catherine, under the cheesy dialogue - the feeling of kinship for her scarred face (It is "Beauty and the Beast") and his disappointment when modern medicine fixes it in about ten minutes, his loneliness. Her isolation, despite supposedly being anything but an outcast. Theres themes in here, y'all.

It also strikes me how very much...Urban Fantasy the set up is. Secret magical world under the city. Independent sort-of-badass female heroine. Mysterious, dangerous (animalistic) man she has a special connection to. It seems to be roughly equal parts Labyrinth (at least, Vincents wig appears to be Jared's, after mouldering in a closet for a few years) Neverwhere and Anita Blake. I do wonder how this plays out, because Vincent appears to be anything but a bad boy thought. 

 

WTF Were You Thinking, 80's, Fashion Watch: right in the first scene, Linda Hamilton wears a massive, shapeless coat the color of a dead pumpkin. Then she takes it off to reveal a blazer that is evidently it's nemesis, in black and white plaid and being the shape and size of a refrigerator. Then someone comments on what a great outfit it is. Poor 80's.

 

*TBH, I don't know. I've only watched a bit of the show, because I've read the books. (So I know what happens. So it's not interesting to me. I'm lame that way. I don't entirely get the point of film adaptations of books.) But my impression is that certain more subtle aspects of GRRM's writing have perhaps been...elided somewhat. 
 

 

 TL;DR - Sometimes clunky but effective and even evocative in places, possibly more interesting than it pretends to be. (Possibly not?) Will keep watching, if only to place in pop-culture context of Urban Fantasy/Romance.

 

Comments

[laurajv]

I have a WIP that will, sadly, probably never be finished, in which Vincent is the biological son of Jareth. It's like my childhood exploded all over some fanfic.

[quarter_to_five]

My brain just exploded. That makes so much sense.

[laurajv]

I posted an excerpt a while ago -- the one where Vincent is the son of King Jareth. It makes more sense than just about any other theory of his origins ever, except for "alien experiment".

[madame_parker]

*waves* Hello there, thank you for adding me. :)

Oh boy, I remember watching Beauty and the Beast when I was younger, it's all very mist like though, I remember liking it though, so that's a good thing.

[quarter_to_five]

Hi! Thanks for adding me too! It's gradually getting less lonely around here...

I have a very, very faint sense of deja-vu watching it, ans maybe I saw it at some point at a very young age, but I can't find any evidence that it was shown in either Israel or the USSR, so that seems unlikely. Maybe it's just osmosis.

[madame_parker]

I watched it when I was about 8 and than it got shown on TV again when I was 15, by then I was old enough to start shipping. But mostly I remember really liking the characters.