A Little High Within the Low
While preparing his troops for battle in the movie Gladiator, Maximus Arelius makes a statement that pertains immensely to the themes and ideas discussed in Emergent Literature throughout the semester. His revelational statement is this, “What we do in life echoes in eternity.” Admittedly, what he says has the potential to come off as a stereotypical and somewhat insincere attempt to motivate a group of terrified men to charge headstrong into battle. However, it holds more truth than the average person could begin to fathom, especially with respect to literature. No work is entirely original. Even Shakespeare, the Master himself, found inspiration from other sources. Such borrowed elements, although reformed and re-voiced throughout history, are what echoes through eternity in literature. Ever since the invention of writing, similar themes and characters can be discovered throughout the spectrum of highbrow and lowbrow literature.
With the invention of cinema, came a new outlet through which a writer could express himself and tell his story. Because movies and television programs are performed from a written script, the same phenomenon resonates within their depths as well. Tim Burton’s Alice and wonderland is an excellent example of a lowbrow film that incorporates many of the themes found in highbrow writers’, such as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, works. As Alice enters the mythical land of Underland, which she calls “Wonderland,” the viewer is mystified by the complexity of the ideas incorporated into the movie. Examples of the myth of eternal return, the twenty minute lifetime, life as fiction and language, the world as myth and dream, as well as dolce domum all reverberate throughout the film.
Examples of the myth of eternal return are quite possibly the most difficult to glean from the film, and those that are visible are in the most basic forms. From the time Alice is a young child to her nineteenth year, she is cursed by a reoccurring dream/nightmare. Unchanging, the dream continues to disturb and trouble her. Like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day, Alice must incessantly relive the same experience over and over and over again. Another example of the myth of eternal return, and its cyclical nature, can be found in the character of Absolum, an all knowing blue caterpillar that continuously smokes from a hookah. The form of which this theme takes in respect to him involves transformation, death, and rebirth. Towards the end of the movie, Absolum enwraps himself in a cocoon in order to undergo the transformation into a butterfly. When Alice asks him if he is going to die, he insures her that although this this life of his has come to an end, he is not going to die, but simply transform. As the cocoon engulfs him, his last words to Alice are, “Perhaps I will see you in another life.” This ties in with the notion that after death is a rebirth into a different state, which continues on eternally.
Although the twenty minute lifetime plays a very evident role in the film, it does so in an interesting way. Only moments pass in the “real world” from the time Alice falls down the rabbit hole to the time she reappears, yet days pass in Wonderland. From the beginning, it is relatively unclear whether the experience she has in Wonderland is actually real or not. Although her experiences seem to affect her in a very real way, the setting is rather unbelievable. The land is filled with flowers and animals with the ability to speak, dragon flies and horse flies that are actually shaped like dragons and horses, a caterpillar that smokes from a hookah, guards in the form of cards, and numerous other seemingly impossible things. However, it is obvious that Alice endures numerous trials and undergoes immense transformation during her time in Wonderland, and after doing so reemerges as a very different person. This portrayal of the twenty minute lifetime is unique in that it is forces the viewer to consider the idea of reality and what constitutes as “real” or not. It adds a depth to the movie that would not retain as much importance without the addition of the theme of the twenty minute lifetime.
Tying into, and expounding on, the idea of “reality” is the theme of life as fiction and language. Throughout the film, there are a number of instances that suggest that life is in fact a construct of society. Before Alice embarks on her mystical journey, she arrives at a spectacle with many people. Only after her arrival does she discover that the gathering is meant to be an engagement party for her and Haemish. When she realizes this she confides in her sister and tells her that she is not entirely sure that she wants to marry him. Her sister cannot understand why Alice would not, and after describing the social benefits of such a union says, “So, you’ll marry Haemish, you will be as happy as I am with Lowel, and your life will be perfect. It’s already decided.” Alice’s life has been created by society. Her future has been prewritten for her, and she is expected to readily accept that life and her role in it. Another example of prewritten history is evident in the oraculum, a manuscript that is described as “the calindrical compendium of Underland.” It is essentially a scroll that when unraveled, reveals the past, present, and future in the form of pictures. Although a number of characters attempt to alter what is shown on the oraculu, therefore re-writing history, everyone fails. Life according to this depiction is the performance of a script that has been written and finalized in advance. Like Harold in the movie Stranger than Fiction, humans are simply characters in a story that have no control over their actions or destiny.
Another way in which to view life is as a construction of language. One retains the ability to create a life for oneself, at least with respect to how others view it, through the stories which they tell. Alice creates a different persona for herself when she is accidently discovered by the Red Queen. She fabricates a story in order to save herself, and in doing so lives the life of the character she has created. Lowel, Alice’s sister’s husband, hides an aspect of his life through language. When Alice catches him kissing another woman in the garden, Lowel explains away the situation and branches off from” reality” in order to cover up his infidelities. Can such a life based on false pretenses be considered “real?” What if one truly believes that which one tells others? While considering this question, it is important to realize that that which everyone says is to a degree is subjective. Each person’s reality is somewhat different than their peers’, and language is a means through which people are capable of creating one’s own life and influencing others’.
Another way to view and question “reality” is through the scope of the world as myth and dream. As Alice plunges down the rabbit hole, reality and dream seem to become helplessly intertwined. It is unclear whether the land in which she finds herself is “real” or just part of the dream that she has had before. Throughout the majority of the movie this discrepancy is unclear even to Alice. Although it seems so real, she repeatedly makes comments indicating that she does not believe that her surrounding and experiences are real. Alice partakes in a number of activities, such as drinking a mysterious liquid out of a bottle that has “drink me” written on it, with this pretext in mind. Towards the end of the film she and the Hatter have a conversation about how the whole situation, even the Hatter himself, is a construct of her mind in the form of a dream. Yet, through this “dream” Alice transforms into a completely different person. Whether the experiences she goes through is that of a dream or not, they absolutely influence her life. Her past nightmares of the same mysterious world have obviously influenced her life as well. Whether Wonderland is a construct of her mind or not, it does play a significant role in her world and her own personal “reality.”
If life is a dream, and dreams are created by our minds, then do we have control over what occurs in them, and therefore have create our own destiny? The question of whether one has control or not over one’s life is also posed often throughout the film, and ties into both the world and myth and dream and life as fiction and language. At one point Alice says, “From the moment I fell down that rabbit hole I have been told what I must do and who I must be. I’ve been shrunk, stretched, scratched and stuffed into a tea pot. I’ve accused of being Alice and not being Alice, but this is my dream! I’ll decide where it goes from here! […] I make the path!”
This would seem to imply that one does hold power over one’s own destiny, and that through dream and language one can create a world of one’s own.
Finally, the theme of dolce domum is present within Alice in Wonderland as well. After going through trials and tribulations in Wonderland, Alice returns to where she had began. However, she returns to the party and “normal world” as a changed individual. It took leaving her world and experiencing something absolutely different for her to find herself and understand what it was that she wanted out of life. Her views on the world and the life that others wished upon her changed drastically, and she transformed from being a character in a life constructed for her by society into an individual who creates her own reality.
Although the themes are explored much differently, and at a much more basic level, echoes of T.S Eliot’s and other highbrow writer’s ideas pulse throughout Alice in Wonderland. They concepts may not be as deep and revelational, yet they are still thought provoking. Such themes and ideas will not be retained for eternity through these books and films alone. Alice in Wonderland serves as an example that shows that as time goes on, the same themes will be continuously integrated into new literature and media. Perhaps in an innovative way, but nothing is original.
