Oysters, Inactivity, and the Coraline mini-review

Today, we went to S.S.Lobster and picked up two pounds of steamer clams, a huge salmon fillet, and three oysters for seventeen dollars. I pried the oysters open as soon as I got home and downed them plain, without horseradish, hotsauce, or even a pinch of salt. Perfect, cold, and clean. One of the world's most perfect foods. And three of them for about the cost of a bag of chips.

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Much done this weekend, nothing literary: jiu-jitsu seminar, cooking, shopping, watching the fights. I'm savoring the last few pages of the Portis novel but will probably finish it before dinner.

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And here's my brief review of Coraline.

SPOILER ALERT.

There is much to recommend the film. Once I put my prescription glasses on underneath the 3D'ers, the effect was striking. The young, female protagonist is likeable, the puppetry headscratchingingly creative, and the themes strange and unsettling, as are the themes of children's entertainment in anything but a debased and sterilized culture.

The problem comes as the film begins to confuse the symbolic undertones of the story with the story itself. Why does Coraline turn away from her alter-universe Mother? The one who offers the best food and lively, child-tailored spectacles with mice and unexpected transformations? The house garden becomes a botanical Wonka's Chocolate Factory, filled with glowing, growing things and cuteness and enough menace to keep it interesting. Ah, life in the permanent unexpected!

Well, she turns away because she'd have to sew buttons over her eyes: and the tools are thrust at her menacingly. She hasn't come to any understanding: she isn't turning away from her consumer dreams: she doesn't want to take a long, nasty looking needle and scoop her eyes out with it. And I doubt any child would make the trade. The only way to make sense of this is: 1. to read on a merely symbolic level or 2. to imagine that the creators were more concerned with the visual than narrative coherence. Eventually, the narrative takes head-scratchingly bad turns. A game with the Mother is solved not with wit or insight but with help from ghosts and magic stones and magic cats and Mother's resentful puppets. All Coraline has to do is make the appropriate leaps and grabs, video game platform style. So, aside from being lucky and slightly unusual -- in a year or two she will no doubt start listening to Death Cab for Cutie -- we are left to wonder what makes her heroic. We are supposed to see her as brave, but she does what the rest of us would have done under the same circumstances. So how is this commendable? Is it brave to run away from giant spiders? Is the notion of bravery so cheapened? At what point does she actually make a hard decision?

Peter Keogh, over at the Phoenix, makes the point this way: "Perhaps Gaimon and Selick [the author and director -- Goo Goo] are trying to warn children against this movie and others like it . . . ." And that hits at something. Warn the tykes against the seduction of spectacle in a 3-D, effects heavy movie and you're incoherent at the outset.

Compare this film and those it draws from, from Starewicz to Svankmajer, and it seems particularly insipid. At the same time, I couldn't help but to like the film, despite its limitations. Even if it doesn't work, it's heart is in the right place: it's hard not to sense good, even great, intentions. And if it mangles its own morality, at least it tries to address it without sentiment or wishful thinking.