Why "Labyrinth"?

Φιλολoγικά/Philologica: Suppose ONE Single work by GKC had Inspired Lord of the Rings ...? · New blog on the kid: Why "Labyrinth"?

Some flippant guy may pretend David Bowie wanted to cosplay as an actor.

There is something else to it. I saw a video which complained that Labyrinth was basically just yucky, a fifteen year old girl being the object (more than half of the time) of sexual attentions from either David Bowie, sorry, Jareth, or less reputable and delicate males clearly older than herself.

Perhaps there was some point in that. I recall that as the magic spells were spelled out as saying, if she had lost her purity, she would have forgotten about her brother whom she wanted to save, and so, she would have betrayed. I recall rooting for her to keep her purity. In the eighties, this was a time period in which the élite wanted to sensitise people against paedophilia. And perhaps this was the way to do it. Show a peach with a worm in it. Show a fifteen year old pulled between a real duty to care for a brother and a so fake attraction to the lure of sexual maturity in men and sexual pleasures waiting around the corner, never directly imagined, but never quite forgotten.

Make the public squirm at every second when she grows closer to falling for Jareth, make the public cheer when she recalls her purity.

The result of the campaign has ultimately been the opposite of saving brothers. So many fifteen year old girls are now deprived of the right to marry (as happened in France 2006) or to marry next year (as happened in England and Wales following suit after Scotland). Girls are being told it's quite OK to train for motherhood in babysitting, but not OK to actually become mothers. Someone quite as deadly as Jareth is hinted at being, but lots less charming was waiting for babies that were made when mothers that age showed by becoming mothers that they didn't get the memo.

But the film was an actual work of beauty, a real piece of art. Not just because of Jennifer Connelly, but because of the actual story. What inspired it, on the plane of story, as distinct from one very probable message in the context of the age?

We should be startled if we were quietly reading a prosaic modern novel, and somewhere in the middle it turned without warning into a fairy tale. We should be surprised if one of the spinsters in Cranford, after tidily sweeping the room with a broom, were to fly away on a broomstick. Our attention would be arrested if one of Jane Austen's young ladies who had just met a dragoon were to walk a little further and meet a dragon. Yet something very like this extraordinary transition takes place in British history at the end of the purely Roman period. We have to do with rational and almost mechanical accounts of encampment and engineering, of a busy bureaucracy and occasional frontier wars, quite modern in their efficiency and inefficiency; and then all of a sudden we are reading of wandering bells and wizard lances, of wars against men as tall as trees or as short as toadstools. The soldier of civilization is no longer fighting with Goths but with goblins; the land becomes a labyrinth of faërie towns unknown to history; and scholars can suggest but cannot explain how a Roman ruler or a Welsh chieftain towers up in the twilight as the awful and unbegotten Arthur.

This could have been to Labyrinth what the following may have been to The Lord of the Rings:

As we crossed a tilt of the torn heath I saw suddenly between myself and the moon a black shapeless pile higher than a house. The atmosphere was so intense that I really thought of a pile of dead Danes, with some phantom conqueror on the top of it. Fortunately I was crossing these wastes with a friend who knew more history than I; and he told me that this was a barrow older than Alfred, older than the Romans, older perhaps than the Britons; and no man knew whether it was a wall or a trophy or a tomb. Ethandune is still a drifting name; but it gave me a queer emotion to think that, sword in hand, as the Danes poured with the torrents of their blood down to Chippenham, the great king may have lifted up his head and looked at that oppressive shape, suggestive of something and yet suggestive of nothing; may have looked at it as we did, and understood it as little as we.

This also was by Chesterton, it was from the essay Ethandune.

Borrowing from Chesterton is no shame. He made a rich production and he was also able to live off it. But it would perhaps have been better if Sarah had been able to marry someone when returning to the human world, it is a little bleak to imagine the soldier of civilisation who fights goblins (and not goth chicks!) basically fighting to prolong celibacy while already by nature of marriageable age.

And it is perhaps not the utterly best taste to get her exposed to guys she absolutely couldn't marry, since that was not their game, even if it was only for the imagination. On the other hand, for Hollywood, this may have been a very healthy cautionary tale. But that may say more of Hollywood than of the ultimate impact of the film. Can it be redeemed? Perhaps yes.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Vigil of St. Matthew
20.IX.2024

Vigilia sancti Matthaei, Apostoli et Evangelistae.