Two stories about books and movies

[firecat]

I've never liked Vonnegut's story "Harrison Bergeron." This essay by Mike Perschon, about the story and a movie called 2081 that's based on it, convincingly argues that I've been misunderstanding it.
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/04/harrison-bergeron

Websites such as Suite 101, mistakenly overemphasize Harrison’s defiant action, painting him a revolutionary hero. This error stems from missing Vonnegut’s winks, his ironic tone, and ignoring the excessive exaggeration of the handicaps.
...
What many studies of “Harrison Bergeron” miss in their goal to make the story into Braveheart by Vonnegut, with a clown-nosed Harrison shouting “Freedom!” at the top of his lungs, is the simultaneous satire of television.
...
Despite a few narrative differences, Vonnegut and Tuttle deliver an indictment of our propensity to “forget sad things,” as Hazel and George respectively are encouraged to on the page, and onscreen, respectively.
...
After all, it’s only television. It’s only the internet. You’ll have forgotten all about this by the time the next commercial comes on, or ... hey, I gotta go. Something’s trending on Twitter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ha9ZL0PlOo
Here's a 10 minute making-of/preview of Peter Jackson's movie of The Hobbit. I had issues with the way the Lord of the Rings movies were different from the book in so many ways. I mostly dealt with the issues by pretending that the book was the history of the events as told by Hobbits, and the movie was the history of the events as told by the Race of Men. In the video are various scenes of crew and actors-not-in-makeup standing around inside Bag End. This visually matches my story about the origins of the books vs. the movies.

Also, gratuitous Ian McKellan!

There was something about much of Peter Jackson's narrative that seemed mocking to me. But the last bit with the Powhiri Welcoming Ceremony was kind of cool.

Comments

[trouble]

There is no such thing as gratuitous Ian McKellan. Ian McKellan would not be gratuitous if he were in my sock drawer.

[firecat]

Oh, you're so right.

[laughingrat]

I've always hated "Harrison Bergeron," too, even as I sensed that I was supposed to like it. I mean, I was a geek, I was made fun of for being weird and bright, I was kept down. It should really appeal to an angry middle-school kid, right? But something about it just stunk to me, and I never could explain it. Maybe I should read the essay and see if I think differently about it afterwards.

[firecat]

Let me know. I doubt I will actually like it now, but maybe I'll dislike it for different reasons.

[chaos_by_design]

I think what always bugged me about Harrison Bergeron was that it framed inequality as being all about intrinsic ability and paid no attention to how it can be created by social conditions. So it makes equality looks ridiculous because it frames absolute equality as being based on not allowing people to express their natural abilities, but that's not what anyone's trying to do when they're doing work that's trying to make society more equal. They're actually trying to correct socially created inequality.

[firecat]

it framed inequality as being all about intrinsic ability and paid no attention to how it can be created by social conditions.

VERY good point, and when I read it my eyes had not been opened to such things.

I guess I mainly saw it as saying "How dare untalented, unbeautiful people suppress TWUE GENIUS!!"

[mswyrr]

So well said, thank you!

I remember absolutely hating that story, without being able to say why.

[opalmirror]

Thanks for the link to The Hobbit production blog video... loved it!

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

Whoa, this is like a classic example of WordPress comment spam -- I didn't know people were doing that on LiveJournal too.

[firecat]

It seemed like some kind of spam but I didn't know how or why because there's no link and the user's journal doesn't have any entries that I can see.

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

Maybe an aspiring spammer doing a dry run of their spam software.