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Nestharken posted:Spoilers for The VVitch, just in case anyone hasn't seen it yet (you should!)... Those flawed subjective aspects of Eggers' stories are some of my favorite components. I think a lot about how isolated people were until recent human history, how common in human experience it was to be alone or nearly alone, or to live your entire life interacting with a super small number of people with a very limited worldview. Of course, the barrier between the subjective and the divine would feel razor thin...all you could possibly know of the nature of reality was what you and a few dozen others have experienced. And if you couldn't reconcile something, there was no scientific authority to appeal to, so who's to say it wasn't magic? Or a god? Or a demon? [VVitch and Northman stuff]Especially as psychoactives go. I fully believe that theory of the Salem witch trials...if I was a scientifically-illiterate Puritan raised in mortal fear of Satan, and one day I started seeing eyes pop out of the wall or people's faces melting, "witchcraft" seems like a pretty reasonable explanation. Likewise, if my father fed me some crazy potion that made me hallucinate Yggdrasil or screaming Valkyrie, there's no way I wouldn't see that as hard proof that the Aesir and Valhalla are real. Most period-based fiction tries to reproduce the look and feel of a setting accurately, but the characters typically still act like modern people. Eggers' stories are interesting to me because his characters don't. Their perception and philosophy are of a different time and place, so what's "real" or "possible" for them doesn't preclude the supernatural. There is no contradiction there that these things "actually happened." Belief and reality are not distinct things. Xealot fucked around with this message at 01:18 on May 10, 2022 |
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May 10, 2022 01:15
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Mike N Eich posted:You know I had the reverse reaction - I really wanted to like the Northman more, and I enjoyed it and its a very good piece of art, but I didn't like it as much as the VVitch or the Lighthouse. Once Amleth leaves to go to Iceland I felt less and less interested, and the more I understood it to be a Hamlet, Ur-Hamlet tale, the more wonder I had about the film left. I did appreciate the sole bit of ambiguity in the film - Amleth's mother telling him that his father was actually the monster, that he was a product of rape, that his uncle was (relatively speaking) the 'good' guy, but other than that it is an extremely straightforward film (and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that!) This is exactly how I felt about it. The momentum goes out the window when he gets back to Iceland. I loved the movie up to this point, thought the first third or so was phenomenal. But the plot comes to a screeching halt at that point and doesn't pick up until the very end. I wish the reveal with his mother happened WAY sooner, that it motivated...something else, something completely different in the plot. Maybe he did flee with Olga, had his illusions shattered and gave up on revenge until some later incident re-ignites it. Just, anything to make it feel less like it was spinning its wheels for an hour or so of runtime. Witch and Lighthouse are still all-timers, though. Kept me very invested the whole time. I'm still on board for anything Eggers does.
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Jun 10, 2022 23:04
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Bust Rodd posted:It’s very intriguing to read other perspectives like “oh the most compelling & dramatic part of the film? When his evil and traitorous uncle has been demoted to a meaningless feif and sheepherd? And the fabric of the vengeance fantasy begins to fray and Amleth begins to see the truth of things? Yeah, that’s the boring part that lost me!” To clarify, my point isn’t that the vengeance fantasy shouldn’t fray. Deconstructing the hyper-masculine mythology of this kind of story is good and valuable, I just wish the pacing didn’t suffer in the process. I’m totally on board with the story painting Amleth’s mission as fundamentally hollow and childish. That part is great.
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Jun 12, 2022 06:23
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