Fairy Tales
By Sable Jak
Sable Jak is on hiatus for the next few weeks; she'll be back soon!
The other night I watched the 1997 film "Snow White, A Tale of Terror" starring Sigourney Weaver and Sam Neill. If you haven't seen it, and you're willing to watch a much darker tale than what you've been used to, rent it. I rather liked it.
That's as far as I'll go with a review. What I really want to talk about is the fact that fairy tales (as many of us already know) provide excellent fodder for new story ideas. How many incarnations has "Cinderella" gone through? I think that little tale is the girl's version of
"Hamlet"-- just about every young starlet seems to want to play her, whether it's the musical version or a twisted version.
Now, in this telling of "Snow White," the dwarves weren't dwarves (with the exception of one token little
person). They were, instead, misfits, outcasts, outlaws, and people existing on the edges of society. In the PC versions of Snow White, one never really wonders too much about the dwarves. They're usually a merry little band of fellows who mine diamonds (or something worth a lot) and walk through the woods singing all day, or they squabble amongst themselves providing comic relief for the other actors. Oh, and let's not forget, they're messy. Until I saw this particular take on the story, I'd never thought much about the dwarves as individual characters.
In the film the backgrounds of the men were hinted at, and a more concrete back-story was provided for the fellow Snow White falls in love with. (Yup, now you have to see it, right?) Obviously too much exposition slows a movie down, so you really can't go into great detail about every one of the lesser characters. Little nuances here and there did the trick in this case, with certain pieces of costume providing more information. One wore a monk's robes so I assumed he had: 1. been defrocked, or 2. he'd robbed and killed a monk for the nice, warm robe. Another man was rather simple. Considering the time frame for the story, it wouldn't be unusual that the "simple" fellow would be an outcast, given how people with diminished mental capabilities were treated in those times.
It's been a couple of days, but I can't seem to let go of the different characters. Here, all my life, have been some wonderful fictional fellows and I have, for the most part, ignored them all that time. I now have a mission to start looking up all the different versions of the story and see what everyone else's take on it is. I'm also curious to see if and how the story was changed to reflect the moral/political/societal environments of the time. The 1997 version was dark and not very PC. PCism was still pretty darned rampant in the late
90s, but there was, if I recall correctly, the beginnings of a backlash.
How many of you have gotten so used to the fairy tales we've known all our lives that there are characters in them you don't even think about as being anything more than someone to add a little color to the story? Why do you suppose the writers added these characters in the first place? What do you suppose their back-stories might be? And just how do all their stories relate to us in this modern day? We all know that fairy tales were originally morality tales. Do they still hold that same power? Do they still serve as good teachers on how to be good people? But mostly, why is it that these stories never really
disappear, but keep being done over and over again?
Until next column, if any of you happen to hear of a version of "Snow White" from a dwarf's perspective, be sure to let me know. I think it would be more than a little interesting.
Remember: writing is a solitary activity shared by many.
Sable
Jak is writing Writing the Fantasy Film for Michael Wiese
Productions, which will be released in 2004. She loves Celtic art and finds a correlation between its
mesmerizing intertwining lines to both the craft of screenwriting and the business of filmmaking. If you'd like to reach her, do so at sablecat at email.com. (Replace
'at' with @ sign.)
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