lewis carroll

Dreamchild (1985)

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Just one year after the classic fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood” got a post-modern feminist reexamination in The Company of Wolves, the classic children’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland got the same treatment in the less-seen, less-discussed Dreamchild. Both films juxtapose real-life sexual predation against its warped fantasy-realm mirror reflections, picking at the gender politics of their selected works to find surprising, uncomfortable nuance. For its part, The Company of Wolves asks how much tales like “Little Red Riding Hood” were meant to protect young women from the sexual predation of older men vs. how much they were meant to scare them off from participating in their own sexual development & pleasure. Likewise, Dreamchild revisits the sexual predation behind the writing of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass to question just how diabolical Lewis Carroll’s relationship with his young muse was, or if there’s room to find his fixation on her empathetically tragic. The main difference between these two literary autopsies is that “Little Red Riding Hood” is a stand-in for all young women everywhere, while “Alice” was a real-life victim with her own name and her own internal life, which makes for a much more delicate, dangerous balancing act.

Carol Browne stars as the real-life Alice Hargreaves in her twilight years, summoned to a Depression Era NYC to commemorate the 100th birthday of the deceased author who made her famous as a child. American journalists hound the prim & elderly English woman the second she hits the shore, desperate for whimsical pull-quotes from The Real Alice to fluff up their human-interest columns. The barrage of questions about her childhood family acquaintance Reverend Charles L. Dodgson (pen name Lewis Carroll) sends her into a tailspin of repressed memories & demented hallucinations, effectively re-traumatizing the poor woman for the sake of a disposable puff piece. Preparing for an upcoming Columbia University speech to celebrate Dodgson’s birthday, she becomes unmoored in time, reliving both traumatic moments as her childhood self and fantastic moments as her famous literary avatar. It quickly becomes apparent in flashback that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was written as an elaborate grooming tactic, with the middle-aged Dodgson hoping to woo the 10-year-old Hargreaves into being his eventual bride. That toxic dynamic has soured her lifelong relationship with the Wonderland books in a way that the American press is entirely uninterested in interrogating, so she has to work through it isolated in her own dreams & memories. The nuance of that discomfort arises in recalling her own active participation & manipulation of the author-muse dynamic as a child, something she does not care to remember.

A less thoughtful version of this story might’ve characterized Alice Hargreaves as a victim first and a victim only, but Dreamchild puts a lot of work into fleshing her out as a thorny, complicated human being. She’s a hard-ass social tyrant in both her 80s & her adolescence, and she was too sharp as a child not to notice the unseemly power she had over Dodgson as her much-older admirer. Ian Holm does an incredible job invoking both menace and pity as the lonely, nerdy Dodgson, pining after a child in a way even he knows is wrong. The young Alice pretends not to catch on, but plays games with the older man’s heart in a way that recalls the cruelty of a school-age bully. Meanwhile, the 1930s NYC segments draw a parallel between their delicate power imbalance and the normal, socially accepted rhythms of heterosexual courtship, with a fuckboy reporter (played by Peter Gallagher) hounding the elderly Hargreaves’s teenage assistant for romantic connection so he can exploit her access for personal profit. The fully grown men are fully aware how vulnerable the younger women they pursue are to their gendered power & privilege, and they choose to cross the line anyway. What seems to haunt Hargreaves in her final days is how aware she was of that one-sided romantic dynamic as a child, and the ways in which manipulated it for her own amusement. It’s a difficult topic to discuss without slipping into blaming victims or excusing abuse, but the movie pulls it off.

Dreamchild was the brainchild of screenwriter Dennis Potter, whose name is all over the credits as a producer who self-funded the project. All of the visual panache of the fantasy sequences arrive courtesy of the Jim Henson Creature Shop, who illustrate several key characters from the Wonderland & Looking Glass canon as nightmarish ghouls who haunt Alice Hargreaves in her old age. Those sequences are relatively sparse, though, and most of the runtime reflects Potter’s background as a journalist and television writer, staging lengthy exchanges of dialogue in hotel rooms & press offices. In those conversations, Potter pokes at the differences between American & British cultures’ respective relationships with money and, more bravely, the differences between 19th & 20th Century cultures’ respective relationships with age-gap courtship. As depicted in the film, Alice Hargreaves suffered self-conflicted feelings on both subjects and her own personal participation in them. She is, undoubtedly, Lewis Carroll’s victim, in that her entire life is unfairly shaped by his immoral yearning for her as a child. However, Potter finds enough grey-area nuance in her victimhood to allow her to appear onscreen as a fully realized human being instead of a historic symbol of trauma and abuse. Lewis Carroll himself is even extended that grace, regardless of whether he deserves it.

-Brandon Ledet

Black Moon (1975) was the Most Honest Surrealist Take on Lewis Carroll’s Alice . . . Until Alice (1988)

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We were having a hard time in our initial conversation about August’s Movie of the Month, the fantasy realm art piece Black Moon, in pinpointing an exact interpretation of the film’s basic plot or intent. It’s highly likely, of course, that director Louis Malle didn’t want his exact intent or a definitive plot to be discernible at all in the film. Black Moon feels very much committed to a certain mode of surrealism that points to the coldness & seemingly random cruelty of existence by being, you guessed it, cold & randomly cruel. The interpretation we more or less settled on as a crew was that Black Moon was best understood as a down-the-rabbit-hole story that aped the structure of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland series as a means of capturing his young protagonist’s unsettling journey into womanhood. Whatever that journey means or what it even is largely falls under the umbrella of personal interpretation but the Wonderland influence was undeniable as an overarching aesthetic in its basic structure. Black Moon is by no means a strict adaptation of that source material, but it does wear the influence on it sleeve, as openly admitted by Malle himself in interviews. I’d also argue that the film was the best surrealist take on Wonderland’s cold, random cruelty depicted on film for well over a decade, capturing that aspect of Carroll’s work better than any of its many peers that were straightforward adaptations of the novel. That is, until it was upstaged by 1988’s stop-motion animation classic Alice.

Czech director Jan Švankmajer had been producing short films all the way back to the same art scene in his home country that produced 1967’s Daisies before making his feature film debut in Alice. To be honest, Alice’s structure & pacing reflect his short film past in a lot of ways, recalling modern filmmakers like Guy Maddin & Roy Andersson who are remarkably adept at constructing individual images & vignettes, but struggle a little when it comes to piecing those moments together to achieve a digestible feature length work. Alice is a stunning visual achievement, a tactile work of stop-motion animation that values the specificity of curio cabinet oddities, Joseph Cornell shadowboxes, and taxidermy animals over the clay figurines we’re used to seeing in titles like Coraline & Kubo. What makes Alice interesting as an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s source material, however, is not in the visual achievement, but in a tone that matches the cold surrealism of Louis Malle’s Black Moon. As Švankmajer put it himself, he wanted to reinvent the interpretation of Alice in Wonderland in other adaptations that posed it as a fairy tale with a moral center and instead present it as a cold, amoral dream with no point to be made outside its own absurdism, a reading that captures the essence of Black Moon just as much as it hints at the power & intent of Carroll’s source material. Švankmajer explained, “While a fairy tale has got an educational aspect – it works with the moral of the lifted finger (good overcomes evil), dream, as an expression of our unconscious, uncompromisingly pursues the realization of our most secret wishes without considering rational and moral inhibitions, because it is driven by the principle of pleasure. My Alice is a realized dream.” Considered in that context, Black Moon also functions best as a dream & not as a fairy tale, despite what you’d expect based on its talking unicorn.

The difference between the dream structures of Alice & Black Moon, however, is that the latter often functions as a nightmare. Both films’ plots survive on the surreality of minute to minute obstinate confusion, but there’s a lighter tone to Alice that isn’t quite matched in Black Moon. Black Moon can be funny at times, but it often veers into uncomfortable imagery like hawk murder & interspecies breastfeeding, while Alice finds its individual vignettes in moments like a cute rat cooking a can of beans on its young protagonist’s head. Most of the film’s creepiness lies in its old world imagery, a curio cabinet specificity that recalls a similar immersion in Nature, strange animals, and odd domesticity to what we see in Black Moon’s languid sleepwalk through an earth tone dreamscape, but with noticeably less malice. Black Moon pulled a lot of its surrealist influence from Carroll’s creation in Alice in Wonderland, an uncaring, dreamlike tone that recalls the structure of a fairy tale, but without the lesson to be learned. 1988’s Alice picks up that torch & runs with it, applying that same amoral interpretation of Carroll’s intent to a straightforward adaptation of his novel. Together they have a lot to say about the potency of dream logic, the philosophical implications of surrealism, and the meaninglessness of meaning. I highly recommend them as a double feature next time you’re feeling particularly existential & loopy.

For more on August’s Movie of the Month, Louis Malle’s surrealist fantasy art piece Black Moon, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film & last week’s comparison of its lame duck unicorn with the divine unicorns of Legend (1985).

-Brandon Ledet