They're both several years old, but I got a chance to watch Pan's Labyrinth and The Movie Hero for the first time this past weekend. On the surface, they're very different. Pan's Labyrinth is a very dark fairy-tale/fantasy almost verging on horror. It's slickly-produced with great special effects. The Movie Hero is a fairly light romantic adventure with plenty of comedy. It's a low-budget indie film with negligible special effects. But what they have in common is that they both examine the role of fantasy, both in our stories and in our lives.
Pan's Labyrinth shows us the fantasy world of a little girl living through the horrors of Franco's regime in post Civil War Spain. The twist is that this fantasy world she keeps escaping to is quite possibly even more horrible than the real world she's escaping from. I think it makes sense to some degree. The horror she's living through is necessarily coloring her thoughts, and shaping her fantasy world as well. If, indeed, it's fantasy. It may well be just as real as the "real" world. You can watch the whole movie and still not really be sure, and that's part of its power. I had some serious trouble sleeping the night I watched this movie. I definitely recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it though. It's really beautiful for all its horror, both visually and emotionally.
I had watched The Movie Hero just beforehand. In some ways I wish I'd watched it second, because after I'd seen Pan's Labyrinth it was hard to think about anything else. But I think if I'd watched it after Pan's Labyrinth, I'm not sure I'd even be able to pay attention to it, so it's probably better that I watched it first. It's about a guy who thinks he's the star of a movie. Which, of course, he is. But to all the other characters in the movie, he's just some crazy guy who thinks his life is a movie. The movie plays around a lot with movie conventions. As soon as he meets the girl who we can all tell is going to be his love interest, he starts addressing her as "Love Interest." Lots of funny little things like that. But what really got to me about the movie is, again, the way it addresses fantasy. This guy's fantasy of being the star of a movie, from our perspective, is reality. From the perspective of the movie world though, it's delusion. What's real and what's not? Same question I had in my mind at the end of Pan's Labyrinth.
It's a question I ask myself a lot. It's a question I've addressed in a lot of the fiction I've written, because I think it's one of the most important questions fiction can address. I was talking about Grant Morrison's meta stuff earlier, and saying it's what he's probably best at, and that may be true, but it's definitely true that that's what interests me the most about his work. It may be why Animal Man is still my favorite thing he's written, because that's the book where he spent the most time exploring that question.
Anyway, all this is mainly to say that I think I finally have a direction for my screenplay now. It's been giving me so much trouble. I just haven't gotten into the characters or the story or anything, and I realized that what I really want to address with my movie is this question of fantasy vs. reality. That's what I'm the most interested in as a writer. And I think, knowing that, that I'm finally ready to write this thing. And it's about time, because I've got less than three weeks left to do it.
I just hope it doesn't turn out looking too much like a bad Charlie Kaufman ripoff.
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