I've been watching the new post-apocalyptic-dark Wizard of Oz on the Sci-Fi channel, Tin Man, the now teentwenty heroine reduced to her initials, very much a grown-up version with firm fairy tale roots. It's probaby not as bleak as Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which I have been avoiding reading because he, superb writer that he is, traumatized me enough with No Country for Old Men, now apparently a brilliantly savage movie, but you can tell when a culture is depressed from its books and movies, the gritty look of Dark Angel from Blade Runner days/daze, Torchwood trying to save the world, Will Smith's new I Am Legend. Well, you can list your own ruined-city movie, whether it's Peter in Heroes saving New York or New York frozen in The Day After or 28 Days Later in London or Children of Men or TV's Jericho, on and on. Tin Man must've had some strange effect on my psyche, for I dreamt of tornadoes erupting around me, an awesome dream with one rising spectacularly out of a tower, four weaving around whatever town I was in, my outrunning a very angry one pursuing me. (I have to say that one of the apparent benefits of accumulated old-age knowledge is wonderful, wonderful dreams, so engrossing I hate to wake up, though sometimes a shock or a shout from me breaks my intentness.)
It reminds me again why I think Joseph Campbell and mythology should be required reading in our schools and why I have an enduring interest in comparative literature/movies. Certain stories are so good that we keep retelling them, seeing what newness we can uncover or what oldness we can polish up like fine silver. That has to partially explain why there's a spate of Beowulf versions from Elliot Goldenthal's 2006 opera Grendel based on John Gardner's 1971 short novel taking the monster's side to the splashy new digital Zemeckis movie doing well currently. It is the oldest piece of literature Anglo-American culture has, and I'd recommend the new side-by-side translation of the alliterature Old English by Nobel Prize-winner, the Irish poet, Seamus Heaney. The oldest literary work is usually considered to be the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, which includes the very earliest version of the Great Flood, a story so profoundly important to the Near East that several later cultures, including the Hebrews, adapted it. Anyway, it is why I keep watching old and new versions of Greek and Shakespearean plays, Japanese samurai movies remade into American westerns.
Tin Man has the ancient duality prototype, the good twin-bad twin (adopted by cops, of course), Cain-Abel, Cinderella and Cordelia picked on by elder sisters, step and real, Odile/Odette in Swan Lake, and this is a major change, to make our Kansas Sunflower part of a family affair. But then the Greeks knew the family was really the best home for stories anyway, certainly for wrenching tragedies, Oedipus and Antigone and Agamemnon and Orestes, and American soap operas continue to agree. So we have D.G., the waitress, and Azkadellia, the sorceress, in sibling rivalry for the O.Z., the Outer Zone, though it wasn't always that way. Daddy doesn't count, though Mommy's still around but imprisoned by her daughter with the magic-spells name, as the younger sister goes through her apprenticeship in witchcraft on the job, so to speak, aided by her still-damaged entourage, very severely damaged in very modern ways but the whole still needing all the parts. The scarecrow, Glitch, is a former courier to the Queen Lavender Eyes (all I could think of was Elizabeth Taylor in The Last Time I Saw Paris, the most beautiful lavender eyes I'll ever see), an engineer with a giant zipper as a hair part because half his brain was removed. The cowardly lion is Raw, with ESP, specifically psychic abilities to peer inside others' brains, one of a hairy species tortured to force them to use their ESP. The tin man, Tin Man, the O.Z. nickname for a cop with a tin badge, was imprisoned in a kind of Iron Maiden/robot case torture device without spikes but a hologram loop of his wife and son being brutalized and taken, the loop repeated enough to damage his psyche. (He's revived from "death" by D.G.'s kiss, a Snow White/Sleeping Beauty reversal of roles.) Can't get much more modern than this trio in their old-fashioned garb. So far, this lavish new version works in entirely new directions.
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