The Collegian » Patrick Grode

Cauldron makes for easy, light reading

Patrick Grode — Tue, 26 Nov 2002 05:00:00 +0000

Patrick Grode

As Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets draws crowds of every age to the movie theaters and convinces fans to reread J.K. Rowling’s novels, I decided to reopen another children’s fantasy. Lloyd Alexander’s The Black Cauldron is second in the Chronicles of Prydain, and it was one of my favorite books as a child.

I write about the second book of the series because many people are more familiar with the Disney adaptation of The Black Cauldron than the original novel, and the film version is an animated featherweight that does grave injustice to Alexander’s engaging tale. Disney’s team transformed warrior dwarves into incompetent pixies, enchanted brooches into possessed swords, and insightful sorceresses into bumbling busybodies, as well as eliminating the second most important character from the story. I advise you to avoid the movie.

I encourage you instead to read The Black Cauldron, or rather, all five books in the series.

Exaggerated but interesting characters are part of the style, and Lloyd keeps such extreme characters as Gurgi and Fflewddur ridiculous at times, but still believable.

Like many great children’s stories, The Black Cauldron and its companions are about growing up. Consider The Chronicles of Narnia, A Wrinkle In Time, Johnny Tremain, Peter Pan, The Phantom Tollbooth, Charlotte’s Web, or even arguably Alice in Wonderland.

These books all depict a character or characters in transition between childhood to adulthood in some way.

The converse of these books, of course, is a work like Tom Sawyer, where the ending leaves the reader wondering if Tom ever will grow up–and we find out in Huckleberry Finn that he doesn’t.

In The Black Cauldron, the hero, Taran, makes two painful sacrifices to achieve the goal of his quest.

In doing so, he learns that doing the right thing is often not easy or immediately rewarding. He also learns compassion for those he does not understand. These lessons earn Taran both wisdom and scars, the bittersweet badges of a child who has grown up.

As Gwydion tells Taran, “Manhood may not be all you believe.”

Aside from pure enjoyment, recapturing childhood is a wonderful reason to read children’s books like The Black Cauldron.

The reader views the world from Taran’s eyes and becomes a child yearning to grow up. The Chronicles of Prydain glow with the hopefulness of unexpected possibilities and achievable dreams, which is a way of thinking that jaded ex-children so often discard.

This hopefulness envelopes the reader even during the tense moments of the book, as the Huntsmen chase Taran and his friends or the Cauldron sits in evil hands. One sees the growing potential in Taran and wonders just what his future holds.

Incidentally, The Black Cauldron and its fellows carry an educational side benefit. Alexander based his work on Welsh mythology, so the thoughtful reader will receive a crash course in the old Celtic world. Gwydion, Arawn, and even the Cauldron itself are directly lifted from old Celtic tales.

As finals loom, The Black Cauldron should be a welcome and easily-read escape from the wonderful world of academics, as well as a chance to re-experience the transitions of childhood.

Send comments to Patrick Grode at ink4blood@mail.com

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“Rebecca” entertains despite flaws

Patrick Grode — Tue, 12 Nov 2002 05:00:00 +0000

Patrick Grode

Misty moors, isolated mansions, creepy servants, dark nights, stormy seas, and an innocent young woman? Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca has all the elements of a classic horror movie. It also exhibits the innovative camera angles and plot twists expected of the great director.

Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine star in Hitchcock’s first American venture. They are well-cast as a young former servant and her older, aristocratic husband. The tale is a ghost story, but the ghost is not some ectoplasmic specter. Hitchcock’s spook is the overwhelming psychological echo of Rebecca, Olivier’s dead first wife.

The audince feels Rebecca’s haunting presence in the chatter of the servants, the distance between Fontaine and Olivier, and the omnipresence of Rebecca’s signature-bearing possessions. The viewer constantly expects to see something truly supernatural, but never does. One scene features a close-up of a family portrait as the characters are leaving, and you expect the eyes to follow Joan Fontaine, a la Scooby-Doo. The fact that they do not is unexpectedly eerie.

The last hour of the film contains two radical plot twists that one could scarcely see coming and yet make sense, which is the most difficult breed of plot twist to produce.

In the final analysis, however, Rebecca is not one of Hitchcock’s better films. It was filmed in 1940, early in Hitchcock’s career and during a period of development in American cinema. Film was beginning to become its own medium, rather than simply a recorded version of theater.

Innovative directors like Hitchcock were experimenting with camera angles, close-ups, and pan shots, techniques impossible in live drama. Hitchcock’s early films were a marked departure from the conventional, and Rebecca is an excellent example of his emerging style.

The acting, despite the famous leads, is overdone by modern standards. Fontaine, Olivier, and the rest of the cast look like they are playing parts in a stage or silent film melodrama. This style of acting, though typical of the period, tends to detract from the suspense Hitchcock is trying to conjure.

Hitchcock’s signature suspense, while definitely present throughout most of the film, is more of a background hum than the constant tenseness he achieves in films like Vertigo or Strangers on a Train. Likewise, Hitchcock doesn’t coax his audience into the personal connection one feels with Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief or Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window.

The characters in Rebecca are sketchy and far more underdeveloped than one would expect in a two-hour movie.

One must regard Rebecca as a piece from a developing artist, one who would reach far greater heights later in his career. The echo of genius is there, but it is not yet entirely realized.

Despite that negative commentary, I truly enjoyed Rebecca, not only as a look at Hitchcock’s early work and developing style but also as a good film to relax with.

The plot moves slowly, but it avoids being dull, and the adaptation of the Gothic ghost story format is ingenious.

Rebecca is a movie that held my interest for over two hours and remains in my memory. I bought into the story and characters at some level, and would watch the movie again.

In other words, the film was a success.

Reach Patrick Grode at ink4blood@mail.com.

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Revisiting the classics

Patrick Grode — Wed, 25 Sep 2002 05:00:00 +0000

Patrick Grode

This week is the ALA’s Banned Books Week, so this week I chose reread one of my favorites?a classic almost everyone has heard of.

Most of us first read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in high school. At the time, however, few of us knew that it was the fifth most challenged book in America.

Groups across the nation were struggling to remove Mark Twain’s most famous novel from classrooms and libraries. Some people have difficulty distinguishing a book about racism from a book full of racism.

Huckleberry Finn deals with racism, undoubtedly. It deals with a lot of issues, actually.

Twain paints us a picture of the slaveholding South in the 1830s, as seen through the eyes of an innocent Huck traveling down the Mississippi River with Jim, a runaway slave.

The case for banning Huckleberry Finn generally involves Huck’s use of the word “n*****,” a term which is generally seen as racist.

Literature, however, does not occur in a vacuum.

That term is an anathema today, more offensive than the traditional four letter words, but it is an important thread of the historical tapestry Twain presents for us.

Additionally, some argue that Jim is a bit of a caricature?overlooking the father-figure role Jim plays in the book.

On their journey down the river, Huck grows from a boy to a young man, and Jim becomes the father Huck never had. Jim is gentle, wise, compassionate, and companionable, traits that Huck’s biological father lacked.

We must read past some of the editorial comments made by the narrator, Huck, who was raised in a society that condoned slavery and believed in the superiority of the white race. Instead, one must look at the ironic subtext that Twain presents.

When, after unknowingly losing an argument to Jim, Huck reflects, “it warn’t no use wasting words?you can’t teach a n***** to argue,” Jim’s intelligence isn’t being insulted?Huck’s is.

The reader is allowed to see the irony of a white boy believing in his superiority after being outwitted by a supposedly “inferior” slave.

Over the course of the novel, Huck’s thinking evolves from a belief that Jim is a “pretty good n*****” to a conviction that Jim is a “pretty good man.”

When Huck and Jim are torn from the safety of the raft and thrown back into the outside world, Huck realizes that others haven’t grown as he has.

The very people that treat Jim as a second rate creature are kind and loving to Huck.

This is Twain’s most biting comment about slavery. Its irrationality drives otherwise good people to act in a terribly inhumane manner.

We see too that prejudice is not just harbored in the hearts of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sadistic Simon Legree, but in the gentle, motherly Aunt Polly.

Twain asks us to see evil in good, and good in evil, and it. This can be an incredibly incredibly uncomfortable sight. The uncomfortable feeling is a fairly common trait amoung books that are controversial.

Twain’s novel changed the course of American fiction and helped to change the course of American thought.

In an America of increasingly mixed race, Huckleberry Finn belongs in classrooms more than ever as both a landmark in American fiction and a commentary on racial problems.

Email comments to Patrick Grode at ink4blood@mail.com.

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