Free Will Stanton!
A book you truly loved as a child is often hard to return to in the same kind of way as an adult. While I loved The Lord of the Rings when I was eight and my parents read it to me for the first time, it was a completely different book for me than when I read it as a teenager and discovered all those warrior characters that I hadn’t noticed before - too engrossed in the hobbits - and different again when I went back as an adult to read it, marveling at the world-building, the depth of Tolkien’s knowledge, seeing the side stories playing themselves out, reading the appendices.
I also don’t think I’ll ever be as wrapped up – literally going hot and cold with the drama of it – as I was when I was twelve and I first read Kidnapped, so transported by the sheer romance of Alan, the wanted man, this time for a crime he actually didn’t commit, hiding from the King’s men in the moors.
And I don’t think I’ll ever read and reread a passage with as much breathlessness as I read, over and over, the first chapters of The Grey King, the fourth book in Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series, when the hero, Will Stanton, is recovering from a violent illness which was laid on him by the Dark. I think I had a sort of preadolescent crush on Will Stanton. Saying his name, when I was a kid, made me short of breath. I wished he could really exist. He was just so damn cool. I loved The Dark Is Rising, the second and most popular book in the series. I could recite all of the central poem, and probably still could, most of it… “When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back / Three from the circle, three from the track…”
Which is what brings me to my outrage when I saw a trailer for a movie called The Seeker, and I thought I recognized an element or two, and then I saw the URL for the movie’s site: www.seekthesigns.com. It couldn’t be, I thought: sure, Harry Potter made millions, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe was a not half bad re-imagination, and Peter Jackson’s overwrought, but still masterful, Lord of the Rings trilogy even got my approval on most counts (don’t get me started on Legolas skateboarding, though.) But wasn’t Eragon, Bridge to Terabithia and The Golden Compass enough for the world? Who said Hollywood could have my Susan Cooper?
I looked at the website, and it was worse than I’d thought. I’d been prepared to cringe on hearing Will speaking with an American accent, acting like a junior-boy-band member. But I have to admit, watching the trailer was like watching a train wreck. It was as though someone had walked into my house, broken something I cared deeply about, shrugged, and left again.
For those of you who don’t know The Dark is Rising: Susan Cooper built her series on the creepy and flinty foundation of British mythology. The founding metaphor is of King Arthur standing as the last defender of the Light against the Dark (which a lot of people argue convincingly is a metaphor for the last Romanized Britons defending their island against the onslaught of uncivilized and terrifying barbarians from the Continent.) Over that metaphor she creates a world in which, among us, there are certain beings born – the Old Ones, who guard and protect humanity against the Dark. But this isn’t benevolent. They don’t do it because they love humanity. They do it because that is their part to play, and the part of the Dark is to bring humanity into a world dominated by avarice, selfishness, and despair. The two sides are balanced, and beyond them is the Wild Magic, which scares both sides with its complete unpredictability and power. The Wild Magic is neutral, and terrifying.
Will Stanton, the seventh son of a seventh son, wakes up on his eleventh birthday to discover that there is a forest outside his house where there wasn’t one before, and he can’t wake anyone in his family. Almost in a dream state, he walks out into the snow-covered wood, and begins to meet this other world which he was born into. He discovers that he is an Old One – the last of the Old Ones to be born, in fact – possibly immortal, if beings that can move at will through time are immortal, with powers he begins to understand slowly. He, as the youngest, has to find and protect six Signs – the Signs are a quartered circle like a Celtic cross without the arms; Signs of wood, bronze, iron, water, fire and stone. His guide and teacher is possibly the oldest of the Old Ones, Merriman (who I always imagined being played by a very skinny Ian McKellen.)
And they aren't comfortable, the things Will learns; he finds out that he will always seem a bit strange in the world, animals will act strangely around him, appliances jump with static, the world of the Light will always insinuate itself into his, asked or unasked. He learns that being an Old One means always thinking about the bigger picture – you can’t let your personal concerns affect you. Will has to learn to see his own family as no more or less important than any other human being. He has to learn to use his powers to erase their memories of things they’ve seen, and to hide what he is from them. He learns that even his beloved mentor can callously use a trusted near-son as a tool to accomplish the Light’s goals. He watches, in The Grey King, his friend lose the dog that he loved more than anything else to the fight between the Light and Dark, and realizes that he can’t say anything to help him, that he has no idea what that human grief is like. Being an Old One means you will never really be human, and you can’t have all those human relationships and cares that other people can. A few times in the books Will gets moments of being able to act like a boy, but they don't last. That was one of the things I found the most tragic about Will, even then, and more so now that I’m an adult.
Part of what I love about these books is that they never talk down to kids. They may have been written from the point of view of children, but they’re hard. Think about the immortality of the Old Ones. They are everywhere, at all times. They can travel through time, and Merriman is the “oldest”, Will the “youngest.” But, it’s never suggested that Will is going to live any longer than an average human. His immortality is bounded by the confines of his life. He was in the Dark Ages, he will be whenever this world flares out: but he’s just an eleven-year-old-boy, whose voice has not yet broken and is a clear, astonishingly beautiful soprano that he knows – because the Old Ones know the future – will deepen into a pleasant, but unremarkable, tenor. (That’s an image that’s stuck with me ever since I read the book the first time – the transience of the boy’s soprano voice.)
Think of Will’s close, loud, raucous, large family, which he can only participate in with the detachment of someone who knows that this moment will not last, and who will never feel included, completely, again. Think of the spooky unexplained threat of the Dark: “The Dark is rising. And this night will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond imagining,” one of the Old Ones says to Will before he even has any idea what’s happening to him. The sign that the Dark is gaining power is a cold snap that just deepens and deepens, locking down the village in England where the story happens into isolated houses of people trying to stay cheerful, losing their will slowly. Will has to defend his family against an enemy who looks completely normal, completely harmless, who walks into their house protected by the laws of hospitality to taunt Will. There are laws beyond even the champions of the Dark and the Light, and they must be learned and obeyed.
The movie sweeps all of that aside. I can tell from the trailer. I haven’t seen the movie, it hasn’t been released yet, but it is clear from the attitude of the trailer that what is going on here is a video-game style chase-quest. Get all six signs before the bad guys do. Put them together at the end and make a very cool swirl of light and wind, á la Raiders of the Lost Ark, that destroys Evil. Boy with “normal life and normal problems” (cue shot of love-interest girl on schoolbus) gets superpowers, gets to “save the world,” and (here I really cringed) gets the girl. The producers took a complex and powerful world and devolved it into “good versus evil” with a well-dressed, iPod-toting American tween as hero.
How can I say how much is wrong with this? Instead of the silent forest, the doors standing at the top of a hill in a clearing, a passage into another world, the wonderful figure of the god/myth Wayland Smith standing by the road mending the shoe of the horse ridden by the champion of the Dark, and Will’s intial encounter with him while he still has no idea what’s going on . . . instead of that we get an unsuspecting Will being accused of shoplifiting in a mall and hauled into a back room by security guards who are not quite human (as evidenced by some neato CGI manipulation of their features in shifting light.) Instead of Merriman, who I always saw as a slightly prickly, white-haired Oxford don type, you get a grizzled but still young, broadshouldered, black-cloaked warrior. Instead of the weird dreamlike ways in which the Old Ones walk effortlessly from one room to another century, you get a tornado of light-sparkles and a spinning camera. Instead of the terrifying experience of the Book of Gremayre, which Will reads to gain the knowledge he will need, (and which is retrieved by exactly the cold using of Merriman’s servant that so disturbs Will) you get an explanatory sequence with our Warrior telling him he can summon fire and make things move with his mind – “Can I fly?” the not-Will asks, “you know – whoosh?”
Help. And to cap it off . . . “I’m supposed to save the world? I can’t even talk to a girl,” the not-Will says, and then by golly, look, you get a shot - toward the end of the trailer - of the kiss.
What was that I just said about the gorgeous tragedy of Will and all the Old Ones? That being the protectors of the Light means that they can never have the kind of normal human relationships that everyone else gets? That they’re always, essentially, alone? Right. Nope, this is all about an adolescent boy getting the confidence – through superpowers – to win the girl. I have the sinking feeling, since I assume that’s her front and centre in the movie poster, that she turns out to have powers too and they can team up to get the baddies.
What really angers me is that it isn’t, the way it has been with other movies in the past, an issue of not having the technology to visually achieve what the writer described. It’s pretty clear from recent movies like Pan’s Labyrinth, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and yes, The Lord of the Rings, and gorgeous visual experiments like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Mirrormask and Sin City, that pretty much anything can be accomplished by the right artists. That’s not the issue. The issue is quite probably that this screenplay was written by committee. Someone pitched an adaptation of The Dark Is Rising. They gave a boardroom full of producers a quick synopsis. “This boy discovers that he’s really…”
The board members put their heads together: they know this storyline, it’s been done a thousand times, always good for a winter release. But movies need romance, especially if they’re movies about adolescents. The main character needs to be an Everyboy, shy around girls, sure that he’s really got hidden depths, and lo and behold, he does. Kind of like that Peter Parker kid. And Old One? Won’t it confuse people if you go calling a child ‘old’? Ditch that. Not cool enough. Call him the Seeker, and let Ian MacShane and the rest play the “Old Ones.” They can be like mystical guides that don’t really do much, but they’ll make good straight men for Will’s cocky banter because they’re all serious. Because we have to write in some cocky banter for him, that way the kids’ll warm to him. But I like that stuff with the Black Rider. Wait, isn’t that already copyrighted? We’ll think of something else to call him so Jackson doesn’t sue. The mythology? Strike that too; who the hell’s this pointless blacksmith character? And drop the King Arthur stuff, that won’t fly with the American public. But the basic idea – that could be good. Six signs, lots of excitement, sort of a race to collect ’em all. Think we could market collectible Signs as a parallel promotion?
It’s the application of movie formula to the formula of myth that drives me crazy. The basic premise is as old as storytelling, yes. But it’s the ambiguousness of Cooper’s book that caused it to live so powerfully for me. There are laws that must be followed, no matter how high the cost of following them. The Light is just as terrible and frightening as the Dark, in the books. Will is bound by painful duty, not because he chooses to be and not because it’s cool, but because it’s the way things have to be. He is set apart. He will never be innocent again. He is already an Old One. It’s a terrible thing. He sees and does wondrous things, but over it all there is the balance, there are the rules of engagement, there are powerful ancient forces at work that are anything but human.
These are complicated and important themes. And kids are capable not only of understanding them, but of finding them beautiful. I’m sorry for all the people who might go to see this movie and have the books poisoned by it, who might go to the books, afterward, looking for the wrong story.
</rant>
Posted by Kathryn Hunt
at 10:09 PM EDT
I just got back in from 
I was saddened today to hear of the passing of local poet and artist Alootook Ipellie. While I can't say I knew him particularly well, I saw him at a lot of events around town, and for a while he was a regular at Dusty Owl, so I knew him to talk to. After meeting him, I started seeing references to him around the Ottawa lit community and the larger Canadian scene, and I started to appreciate how important a voice he was.