An Apology of Fantasy

My mother, brother, new sister-in-law and I just finished watching Coraline and I have a little to say. I have seen the film three times now, for my company, it was all their first. Presently, I am struck with the role of fantasy in narrative and the particular creators thereof who are identified at doing it well. Once, in high school, I attempted to haphazardly defend fantasy and its sibling, science and speculative fiction as a legitimate style and/or setting for meaningful storytelling. Then, as I may now, I believe I failed at the task. Here, though, I am not interested in apologizing so much as providing an apology--i.e. an argument--for the role of fantasy.

Film and theatre have been the media most successful in portraying the fantastic to wider audiences. Though some of the best fantastic works remain undisturbed in their literary formats, they do not reach the breadth that film and theatre tend to incorporate. Filmmakers and writers such as Tim Burton, Neil Gaiman, Guillermo Del Toro, Hayao Miyazaki, and Terry Gilliam (among others) all make admirable contributions to fantasy films, but they all succeed in identifying the double-edge of fantasy in the majority of their works. In the works produced by Disney and others, they tend to ignore the creatures in the shadows, the monsters under the bed, the malevolent portents on the horizon, and the witches scheming off-screen. Real fantasy--and I mean that very seriously--is taken for what it is: light and dark, both deep and powerful, and often intertwined.

Coraline does embody this aesthetic and reality rather clearly. We may antagonize the Beldame as the foul witch and the monster in the closet (or, behind the wee door in the wall), but this misses the role the Coraline herself plays as the antagonist. Though she recognizes her own guilt in the plot, the audience is more likely to forgive and pass by how she has given herself over to the dreamworld created by the Beldame. The first instance or two in the dreamworld may be forgiven as indulgence, she very quickly suspects that the dreamworld has some substance to it, a substance in which she would happily indulge as she angrily taunts her mother. Her third visit--a powerful number, it usually is--is voluntary and provides the first pact that allows more power in the "real world" for the Beldame. It is by amending her own antagonism toward her parents--by unwinding the magic of the world and finding its foul, sacrificial core--that she returns properly not only to the land of the "real," but she returns her character to virtue: she has succeeded in overcoming both the evil Beldame but also the evil in herself.

Now, I wish to turn to Del Toro's El Orfanato/The Orphanage, which though generally classify as horror, it is distinctly fantastic in its archetypes and resolution. (It may be read as a psychological "thriller" of sorts, concluding in a strange internal story leading to the narrative's end; but in the context of Del Toro's other work and the kitsch of psychological thrillers in general, I find that unlikely.) The Orphanage is the story of a mother, moving into her childhood home (an orphanage) with her husband and son, only to discover that her childhood playmates have not yet left the building and are--apparently--intruding on her family. The plot moves most dramatically when she plays a game, a game her son discovered, where one finds an object and then uses that object as a clue to find the following object until one discovers the original, missing object. In its conclusion, one might leave dissatisfied and sad; to say the least, it includes a shot of a grave and the abandonment of the orphanage. Preceding this scene is a playing out of the game and a surreal reunification, followed by a second reunification that, though obviously fantastic and otherworldly, if taken allows for a happy, even joyous ending. We can suppose a delusional woman who is haunted by loss and recollections, or we can assume a strained but clearminded woman who understands the sacrifice certain journeys require. We are left understanding that within the realms of the "real world" events transpire that are inescapable, but that underneath that, between the pages and beneath the stones, a greater space allows for painful escape and understanding.

H.P. Lovecraft discusses this in his defence of macabre fiction, stated clearly in his oft quoted opening thesis: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." Though we may e able to explain more of the world than ever before, we are left in awe of ever-increasing depths of uncertainty and unknowability. Even when we know things clearly, as Lovecraft notes, mystery clings to the world around it; and that is often where we find our most terrible fantasies: in the familiar. For Coraline, it is in a doll given as a gift and a key with a button on it; for Laura (of The Orphanage), it is a doorknob; a character in Gilliam's 12 Monkeys finds her life unsettled by a photograph, or in Tideland, a new home brings it about; and Chihiro in Spirited Away stumbles through a gateway to an old themepark. These objects and places are not simply imaginative artifacts and places, they are portals into the familiar and the mysteries for both the characters and ourselves. A doll is a facsimile of a person, a basic simulation (highlighted in Ghost in the Shell II: Innocence); a key opens doors both known and unknown, as does a doorknob (especially one unattached, what doors may it not open?); a photograph mirrors the cinema screen and captures a moment--suddenly unattached--in time and space; new homes are a borderland between the known familiarities of family and the strangeness of the unexplored, of open frontiers; and what else reveals and capitalizes on our attachment to fantasy if not a theme park? (Not to mention the fear of the personifications of clowns, cartoons, or holiday personae within these fantastic locales? I myself was deathly afraid of Mall Santas as a small child.)

What we easily shed from our childhood, we frequently attempt to resume as adults in the form of fantastic fictions: the lived presence of everyday fantasy, which is only made more real when its darkness and its light are revealed together. We show children the bright side because they already know the dark, they already put the pieces together laying quietly in bed or in a room with a wind whispering through it. As adults, we forget what we have been searching for (a trope in itself), only to lose it once the show is over. We can predict the plot and the twists, we know the catharsis and how it will fail to stimulate us when it is intended to; but we yearn for the sense of wonder, the religious belief that the world on screen or stage isn't fiction but documentary, representative, real. Its presence and our grasping for it, for me, only affirms its actuality.