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I concur with Mordant Carnival over The Dark Crystal, in fact to me this is probably the film that feels most like being under a spell.
It's the long, slow, elegant ponderousness of the thing, the questiness and the way everything throbs with glaring originality and alien-ness. And it's the only film with a prophecy in that I can take seriously because it takes the concept of prophecy seriously itself. The sand painting at the beginning is a representation of the history of the whole of the world. This isn't revealed in the films, it's in the Dark Crystal coffee-table book. There are nodes along a great spiral that represents time and each node is associated with an event, the shattering of the crystal, the creation of the Garthim, things like that, until the end of the spiral is reached, which is the Reunion of Skekses and Mystics. The whole film feels like a huge, quivering, rusty piece of clockwork just like Aughra's orrery, powered by vast invisible forces beyond the sight of the protagonists, building energy slowly and inevitably towards the climax, which is probably my favourite ending of any movie.
Yes, the ending, where good does not triumph over evil but disappears with it and we realise that all along they weren't good and evil but activity and passivity. The Skekses are *active*, doing, forever doing, never sitting still, never accepting anything, terrified of death, grabbing for anything affirming their living status, eating, fighting, scheming, perpetually frustrated and twisted, acting without reflection. The book says that at the beginning they weren't evil, but were like "sunlight glinting on a blade" but eventually turned evil through their inability to consider the consequences of their actions.
The Mystics are passive, trudging despairingly through the film with no power over its events at all, only *considering* them endlessly, numbly, sadly. They have the power to stop the Garthim but don't end the Garthim's rule over the land essentially because they haven't the gumption. They are called to the Castle an simply plod on towards it without a second thought, they barely notice when one of their number is consumed by fire. They're practically sleepwalking.
The ending results in the union of Yin and Yang, active and passive. All very unusual and a bit Jungian, this is the only film I can think of that signals such a relationship between "good" and "evil" so directly, and so beautifully.
So, yeah. I think about this sort of thing waaay too much... |
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