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aion-rsa · 3 years ago

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Labyrinth: the Unsettling Second Character Played by David Bowie

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Not everything we enjoy is good for us. A chocolate-filled doughnut, for instance, can be delicious even while it crams our arteries with trans fat. The simple fact of knowing that something is unhealthy doesn’t stop it from being fun, which is to say that it’s still okay to love Jim Henson’s 1986 cult kids’ film Labyrinth while acknowledging that its sexual subtext is creepier than a drunk uncle on a camping trip.

It’s not as if nobody noticed the vibe between lead characters Sarah and Jareth at the time, or in repeated viewings since. Like Bowie’s codpiece, it stares you in the face all the way through the film. Jareth’s a 300-year-old Goblin King (played by a 38-year-old pop star) who wants to live within 15-year-old Sarah. Jareth spies on Sarah, comes into her bedroom, drugs her, dances with her, and promises to be her slave if she’ll love him, fear him and do as he says. Their dynamic is wrong in every size and colour, and – depending on whether you’ve spotted the other character Bowie plays in the film – could be about to get a little bit more wrong.

Sarah’s scrapbook in Labyrinth (1986)

The events of Labyrinth are a fantasy that takes place in Sarah’s mind. Using the childhood dolls, stories and ornaments spotted around her bedroom in the early scenes (Hoggle and Ludo toys, a Goblin King statue, a wooden labyrinth game, storybooks from Snow White to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland…), Sarah invents a scenario in which she’s a put-upon fairy tale hero who saves her baby brother. It’s a coming-of-age fantasy that teaches Sarah to leave her childhood behind, recognise her inner power and step into the adult world. The film starts with her dressed as a princess and play-acting, and ends with her literally clearing her room of toys and games, and symbolically passing on her beloved teddy bear Lancelot to her little brother Toby.

If Labyrinth were a ‘real’ fairy tale, then Sarah’s absent mother (the girl lives with her father, stepmother and new stepbrother) would be dead. She isn’t, as we can see from recent photos around Sarah’s mirror and the scrapbook of press clippings Sarah keeps about her, decorated with hearts, the word “mom”. Sarah’s mother Linda Williams is a theatre actor who’s famous enough for her love life to be written about in the papers. Several of the newspaper articles in the scrapbook show her mother pictured with another actor, topped by a headline about their on-again-off-again romance. The other actor in those photos is played by David Bowie. That means that when Sarah was dream-casting the much older lead in her personal coming-of-age fantasy, she gave that role to… her mother’s boyfriend. Therapists of the world, start your engines.

A.C.H. Smith’s 1986 novelisation of Labyrinth was written with input from Jim Henson and screenwriter Terry Jones. In this 2018 podcast interview, Smith explains that Henson gave him over 20 pages of feedback about the draft manuscript and invited him to visit the set and watch several days’ filming. Jones also spent an afternoon with Smith and gave him permission to use an abandoned boneyard scene in the novelisation which had been originally written for the film. The novelisation is canon, is the point. It bears the official stamp. And the novelisation gives us more on the characters of Linda Williams and her actor boyfriend Jeremy. Here, it describes Sarah’s bedroom press clippings:

Sarah’s mother and her co-star, Jeremy, were cheek to cheek, their arms around each other, smiling confidently. The photographer had lit the pair beautifully, showing her to be so pretty, he so handsome, with his blond hair and a golden chain around his neck.

Novelisation-Sarah clearly has a thing for Jeremy, who comes over in the book as louche and flirtatious. Smith describes Sarah as being thrilled by Jeremy’s French-speaking sophistication. She’s impressed by his language and mockery of others, and keeps repeating an actorly phrase she’s heard him say about “finding a way into the part.”

Sarah’s bedroom mirror in Labyrinth (1986)

In one scene from the book, Sarah remembers celebrating her 15th birthday with Jeremy and her mother. The novelisation describes them giggling poolside at Jeremy’s members’ club before receiving his gift of “an evening gown in pale blue” (her mother gets her a music box, so the evening gown is a Jeremy-only deal). Sarah wears the dress that night to a musical, after which Jeremy takes them all to a dimly lit restaurant:

Jeremy had danced with Sarah, smiling down at her. He kidded her that a flashbulb meant that they’d be all over the gossip columns next morning, and all the way home he drove fast, to shake off the photographers, he claimed, grinning.

That’s not the only time Sarah dances with Jeremy/Jareth. Film audiences will remember the masked ball part of Sarah’s labyrinth fantasy, a hallucinatory scene that plays out in the feature as romantic yet sinister, but which is made explicitly sexual in the book. In this Sam Downie interview, Smith says of the novelisation’s dance scene, “It gets quite sexy when she is in the bubble and dancing with Jareth and so forth. I made a little more of that in the book because I felt the book needed that, it needed that extra little emotional kick at that point.”

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The book scene has Sarah being perved at by a stranger who “relished her face, then her white shoulders, her breasts, hips, and legs,” and sidled up to tell her that she was remarkably beautiful. Dancing with Jareth, the 15-year-old is described as feeling like “the loveliest woman at the ball” and finding “the touch of his hands on her body thrilling.”

When he told her that she was beautiful, she felt confused.

“I feel … I feel like … I — don’t know what I feel.”

He was amused. “Don’t you?”

“I feel like … I’m in a dream, but I don’t remember ever dreaming anything like this!”

He pulled back to look at her and laughed, but fondly. “You’ll have to find your way into the part,” he said, and whirled her on around the room.

Jeremy’s catchphrase, there. In the book, fantasy-Jeremy/Jareth then tries to kiss Sarah, when she realises that the whole room is watching them and laughing:

“Jareth seemed to be unperturbed, but she turned her face sharply away from his, horrified. He held her more tightly, and insistently sought her lips with his. Suffused with disgust, she wrenched herself free of him.”

This is supposedly Sarah’s fantasy. She’s the one in whose imagination all this is happening. In 2016, the film’s conceptual designer Brian Froud explained the thinking to Empire. Sarah, says Froud, is approaching the age of sexual awakening, and so has created Jareth as a composite image of the kind of men who turn her on. “We’re not looking at reality, we’re inside this girl’s head.” Jareth’s costumes were designed to reference “a leather boy”, the armour of a German knight, Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, and male ballet dancers. “He’s an amalgam of the inner fantasies of this girl. Everyone always talks about Bowie’s perv pants, but there was a reason for it all! It has a surface that’s fairly light, but then every so often you go, ‘Oh, my God! How did we get away with that?!’”

Telling a children’s story about a girl’s veiled sexualised fantasies of her mother’s boyfriend is getting away with a fair bit. There’s more to the film of course, and ultimately, Sarah vanquishes Jareth by rejecting his sinister allure and asserting her own power. Her attraction to him though, especially in the novelisation, is undeniable. What makes this uncomfortable isn’t the fact that Labyrinth is in part a story about adolescent female sexual awakening, but that its vision of that awakening was dreamt up by grown men and shows an underage girl drawn to a man of their age. Thought of that way and it’s less sure that Sarah’s is the fantasy we’re watching.

It was a different time, though, the 1980s. All this stuff was much more mainstream back then. 16-year-old Samantha Fox could be photographed topless for Page Three of national newspaper The Sun. Bill Wyman of The Rolling Stones could openly ‘date’ a child. The charts regularly featured songs about adult men heroically wrestling with their sexual attraction to schoolgirls. And the 83-year-old writer of a children’s film novelisation could reminisce about how thrilling it was to have danced with the film’s young star at the wrap party, and laugh at how much more thrilling it might have been if only her mother hadn’t insisted on staying so close to her “very beautiful 14-year-old daughter” all night. A different time. (Except, that last anecdote was recounted in 2018. Perhaps the time isn’t quite as different as it should be.)

Don’t let any of this put you off though. Like a chocolate-filled doughnut, Labyrinth remains a sweet childhood treat… with a slightly sickening centre.

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Labyrinth celebrates its 35th anniversary in the US on June 27th.

The post Labyrinth: the Unsettling Second Character Played by David Bowie appeared first on Den of Geek.

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kaibutsushidousha · 7 years ago

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I am curious, do you mind explaining what happened in hoshi's last Free time event?

I can but I honestly don’t think I should because it was a very weirdly heartwarming moment and I’m not sure if my narration can do it justice. I’m afraid this will come off as more silly than as emotionally impactful scene it was. It’s my favorite individual V3 FTE, so it feels like a huge responsibility to present it.

But anyway, here it is. Chapter 1 spoilers.

This event is the end of a continuation of Hoshi’s entire line of Saihara Events, so here’s how all of them went:

1 (or 3 in my usual counting method): Saihara tries to talk to Hoshi, but he keeps his usual “I’m a criminal, don’t get close to me” attitude. Saihara insists on trying to talk but Hoshi answers he understands that a detective would want to interrogate him about his past murders, but Saihara’s needs to fuck off. Saihara then responds that this was not what he was going to ask about and he would rather hear about Hoshi’s stories as a tennis player instead. Hoshi says it’s fine if it’s just tennis and Saihara asks about his old tennis team in school. Hoshi answers and from his description, his teammates were blatantly Tezuka and Inui from Prince of Tennis. After talking a bit, Hoshi suddenly stops and apologizes, saying he doesn’t feel like talking because he has nothing to do with tennis anymore.

2: Saihara comes to talk to Hoshi again. From the previous talk, he could feel Hoshi was still very passionate about tennis deep inside, so he wants to try to make it surface again. This time he asks Hoshi about his tennis rivals. He references Atobe and Yukimura. Saihara is immensely impressed by how shounen manga techniques Hoshi just described are. Hoshi casually ends the talk saying that speaking more will make him remember stuff he doesn’t to and leaves.

3: Saihara approaches, but before he says anything Hoshi already say “Our tennis talk is over already”. He can easily tell Saihara was planning to make him go back to playing tennis, but Hoshi is having none of that and tells Saihara to stop, saying he abandoned his past already. Saihara answer with one of his uncle’s detective catchphrase “People can’t abandon their pasts that easily, it always stays on them and won’t leave, like a coffee stain on the back of their shirt”. He tries to say something about how tennis is still a coffee stain in Hoshi, but Hoshi interrupts saying he is wrong, his metaphorical shirt is clean, no attachments to the past whatsoever, because Hoshi was fully aware of what he was doing when he decided to abandon everything and that the only thing he ever regret abandoning was his fiancée. Saihara reacts surprised that Hoshi had a girlfriend and he starts telling the story. She was his opponent in one tournament they competed in the USA, they fell in love and eventually promised to get married whenever they were old enough to do that. Saihara asks why did she die and Hoshi answers “Obviously because I abandoned her”. Saihara questions why would he abandon someone who he already had planned his entire future with, and Hoshi just answer with a basic “People who get close meet horrible fates, so don’t get close to me” and leaves.

Event 4: At this point Hoshi is already completely done with Saihara’s shit, so the dialogue already starts with:

Hoshi: “Hey Saihara, do you know what I want to say right now?“

Saihara: “You want me to get away from you.”

Saihara doesn’t obey and Hoshi starts asking why would he want to talk to someone insensitive enough to abandon his own future wife. Saihara’s answer: “Because I can’t picture you as insensitive. All this stuff you say about abandoning your past has probably something to do with you wrecking the mafia, right? Why did you do that?”. Here Hoshi finally quits and decides telling the whole story.

A mafia boss who loved tennis invited Hoshi to a tournament in his personal cruise, a tennis tournament with gambling. Hoshi wanted nothing to do with this because he knows it’s all fixed games when there’s gambling involved, but the invitations were insistent and Hoshi was, in his own words, “young and dumb”, so he decided to go there and teach them a lesson. He pretended to go along with the fixed games and then crushed his opponent at the last second. He would never have imagined that they would kill his entire family in retaliation. Only his fiancée was not attacked, but he knew she would be eventually, so he made her get away, only for her to be killed before being able to escape. He regrets making her travel alone and not staying by her side in the last moments or protecting her and that’s what he meant by abandoning her. You already know what comes next: Hoshi kills the mafia as revenge and goes to jail. Hoshi completely blames his own stupidity for this whole ordeal.

Now the big moment.

Event 5: Hoshi is completely unable to understand why Saihara keeps talking to him. Saihara knows the fate of everyone who ever came close to Hoshi and how he it all happened because Hoshi was dumb, so he really thinks Saihara should not be approaching him ever again. Saihara has a firm and resolute answer: “I don’t intent on abandoning our relationship, Hoshi-kun. Nor letting you abandon it. Hoshi-kun, you stuck to your principles and did what thought it was right. I would never say you were wrong in doing what you did. I don’t want a person like you saying you don’t have anything. That’s why… I want to remain close to you. As a classmate… and if possible, as a friend too.”. Hearing that, Hoshi smiles and replies “Wow, you’re even dumber than I am.” and takes Saihara to his lab. Hoshi says that he can’t let Saihara be his friend without knowing if he was ready for it, so he wants to test Saihara’s determination. Hoshi gives Saihara a racket and a ball and tells him to serve the ball into his face. As fellow idiots, they are going to resolve this the idiot way. Hoshi is hit by Saihara’s serve, gives a heartfelt smile and says he could feel some pretty nice determination coming from it. Then he picks up the ball and serves into Saihara’s face. Now it’s Saihara’s turn again and the two keep hitting each other with tennis balls until they are the best of friends. It was a really emotional scene, I swear.

After the determination test is over, the two sit down on the tennis court and have a long talk. Once they leave this place Hoshi is going back to jail, but he says that once his sentence is over, he wants to take back what he abandoned. He knows he’s already too late for most of it, but whatever he can still reach, he would like to retrieve. Saihara realizes he was right about how Hoshi didn’t lose his passion for tennis and feels glad he could be the catalyst for him to accept his feelings again.

#ryouma hoshi

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lovemesomesurveys · 5 years ago

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If someone’s laughing, do you instantly think they’re laughing at you? I don’t assume that anytime someone is laughing that they’re laughing at me. It depends on the situation. What is the strangest thing you’ve been asked? Some random lady came up to me once and asked if I had polio because I’m in a wheelchair. What’s the weirdest thing about life that people just accept as normal? There’s a lot of things.

What was your favorite game as a child? I played house and school all the time with my cousins. What’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard? Oh, where to begin.

What’s the most random thing you’ve done out of boredom? *shrug* Sleep?

What show did your parents not let you watch as a kid? Lol I remember my dad used to watch Beavis and Butthead and my mom didn’t want me to. What is your personal catchphrase? ”I don’t know.” Ha. I sure say it a lot. What is the most pleasurable feeling that doesn’t involve anything sexual? Being at the beach. What was your ‘Oops, wrong person’ moment? I’ve waved to the wrong people and have walked up to the wrong car. What do you find attractive that isn’t considered 'normal’ attraction? I don’t know. What’s the dumbest thing you’ve done drunk? Said stupid shit to Joseph that I shouldn’t have said. What’s your proudest moment in the bathroom? ...What. What’s something you own that gets you lots of compliments? My Star Wars purse has gotten a lot of compliments. If money was no object, where would you want to live? Somewhere near a beach. Who is your favourite mythological character? I don’t have one. Not my thing. What’s something that’s happened which couldn’t happen at a worse time? I’ve felt that way countless times. Things like a new health thing springing up on top of the other crap I’m already dealing with to name an example. What is the best pickup line you’ve ever heard? I don’t do pickup lines. What did aging ruin for you? Life. What is the most hilarious thing you’ve ever heard? I can’t choose 1 thing out of the countless things throughout my life. What is the darkest thing you have seen on the internet? Uhh. What Wikipedia article have you recently read? I’m not sure, it’s been awhile. What’s a book you were made to read in school that you really liked? A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. What objective did you fail to complete this week? I didn’t have anything in particular that needed to be done this week.

What subject should be taught at schools, but isn’t? Adulting. Like being taught about taxes, social security, insurance, documents they ask when you apply for a job, etc. I’m 21 and I know nothing about these. I didn’t even know what insurance meant until I was 20. <<<< That would be highly useful. I will say that at my high school we did do something my junior and senior year where we were taught how to make a resume and we had to make one that we then used in these mock interviews the school setup with real places of employment. Some people actually were offered a job through that. What is the best thing about having a Significant Other? I wouldn’t know firsthand, but I imagine it’s nice having a partner in life that you can experience life. Sounds nice. What makes you unusually uncomfortable? I can’t stand eating sounds or ice hitting against a glass. What is an upcoming purchase you’re excited about? I don’t have any planned upcoming purchases. What is the worst game you’ve ever played? Hm. I don’t know. What’s the oddest thing you like to do? I don’t find it odd at all, but I know people that don’t understand ASMR tend to find it weird. I don’t care, though. What’s the funniest news story you’ve seen in the past few weeks? I can’t think of a funny one. What do you really really want right now? The sandwich I’m about to make. What do you hide from people? I tend to keep to myself a lot about my feelings and what really goes on in my head. What I do share, I downplay and leave out things. What was the first sign you knew you had a crush on someone? I looked forward to seeing them all the time. What’s the best lemonade you’ve made from the lemons life gave you? I used to be someone who didn’t let my health or disability hinder me. I overcame obstacles. What a change from the weak person who completely succumbed to her health that I’ve become these past few years. Motivation, ambition, and drive? Don’t know them. Who was your cartoon crush while growing up? I don’t find cartoons attractive. What’s the best way to deal with religious door knockers? Don’t open the door if you don’t want to. What’s the most hypocritical thing you’ve ever seen or heard? A lot of things. And we’re all guilty of it. Who’s the most interesting person you’ve ever met? Ty.

What just doesn’t impress you? ”Okay, so you’re Brad Pitt. That don’t impress me much. You got the looks, but do you got the touch? Now- don’t get me wrong, yeah I think you’re alright, but that won’t keep me warm in the middle of the night.” lol. Anyway, yeah bouncing off that like I can’t say looks don’t matter at all, but they’re not definitely not most important or what really matters when it comes to being in a relationship and in love with someone for me. It’s much deeper than that. Looks only get you so far. You can look like Brad Pitt or whoever, but if you have a shitty personality then forget it. Also, fancy cars or bragging about your name brand clothes, shoes, bags, etc doesn’t impress me.

What’s the worst possible way to introduce yourself? If you’re arrogant and cocky. What makes you wish that you were born in the past or the future? I’m fine with when I was born, I just wish I could go back and change some things. What tragic event was coincidentally beneficial to you? I don’t know. What’s something people are proud of, but it doesn’t impress you? Hmm. What’s the worst possible moment to go and play on a bouncy castle? Maybe after you’ve just eaten? I don’t know. Who is the greatest ever comedian? I don’t have a favorite comedian. What’s your irrational fear? Holes/clusters is one of them. What’s your oldest memory? I have some from preschool. What can you not wake up without? Being alive? What did you think was cool when you were younger that you now think isn’t? Probably a few things. What are your favourite or most memorable lines from any movie/show? I have too many. What’s something people love to hate? Anything and everything it seems. Some just go looking for stuff to hate on and criticize. What’s something that is underrated but extremely useful? *shrug*

#personal #text #survey #surveys

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