{"id":1384378,"date":"2016-01-19T14:00:26","date_gmt":"2016-01-19T19:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/community.sparknotes.com\/?p=1384378"},"modified":"2016-01-19T14:45:15","modified_gmt":"2016-01-19T19:45:15","slug":"into-the-labyrinth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/blog\/into-the-labyrinth\/","title":{"rendered":"Into the Labyrinth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Part 1: What Happened in Sarah’s Past? What Happened In Mine?<\/em><\/p>\n

We are all obsessive about something. It could be Harry Potter, or our cat, or that guy in the house across the street who always looks like he’s up to something suspicious. But how does an obsession begin? What turns a preference into a passion?<\/p>\n

I was an only child. My mother was an airline pilot. I spent a lot of time on my own, watching movies and playing video games. But that still doesn’t explain it, because I could have become obsessed with anything. So why this? Was there something pathological in it\u2014a Linus and his blanket<\/a> situation\u2014or do certain things just stick to us at certain times in our lives, like bugs smashing on a windshield? Do our passions choose us as much as we choose them?<\/p>\n

Enough beating around the bush. My name is Tommy Wallach, and I am well and truly o b s e s s e d with a commercially unsuccessful fantasy film from the 1980s called Labyrinth<\/em>.<\/p>\n

No, not Pan’s Labyrinth<\/em>, the Academy-Award-winning film about the aftereffects of the Spanish Civil War. I’m talking about Labyrinth<\/em>, the movie featuring David Bowie* in a highly suggestive codpiece. Labyrinth<\/em>, in which a young girl, played by Jennifer Connelly, gives her baby brother to the Goblin King (Bowie), then has to make her way through a maze of physical challenges and psychosexual dream sequences in order to get him back. Labyrinth<\/em>, which gave us the karaoke favorite \u201cMagic Dance.\u201d That movie is my obsession.<\/p>\n

Shut up.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A couple years ago, I was traveling around Europe by train, and happened to see a Blockbuster across the street from the station. Going inside was like being transported back into my childhood. The same Blockbuster smell. The same blue and yellow signage. The same racks: new releases, drama, foreign, horror. A lone employee stood behind the desk in her dinky Blockbuster uniform like something out of a theme park or a Civil War reenactment; it was as if she were stationed there solely to inspire nostalgia in me.<\/p>\n

\"\"Outside of Tinder, we as a culture don’t really browse anymore, which removes any element of serendipity from our consumption. But I can still remember the days when \u201crenting a movie\u201d meant scanning every rack in the fantasy\/sci-fi section of my local Blockbuster, seeing the same boxes I’d seen a million times before (that was part of the fun, the familiarity engendered by the slow-to-non-existent turnover of films outside of the new releases): Cocoon, Willow, Mad Max<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 and what’s this? A smug, androgynous man with glam-rock eyes and a Tina Turner bouffant. A spectral brunette in a ballgown that is somehow simultaneously shoulderless and shoulderfull. Around the edge of the frame, a profusion of goblins, trolls, and gloriously uncategorizable Hensonia. The names in the credits wouldn’t have meant anything to me then, but they mean oh-so-much now: starring David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly; produced by George Lucas; directed by Jim Henson; designed by Brian Froud; written by Terry Jones (of Monty Python); and featuring puppeteers Kevin Clash (Elmo) and Frank Oz (Yoda).<\/p>\n

So my childhood self picked the box up and brought it home\u2014actually not the box itself, but, in a particularly juicy bit of Labyrinthine symbolism (which also happened to be how things were done at Blockbuster), the box behind the box.<\/p>\n

Some part of my imagination would never be the same.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Let’s begin at the beginning, with Sarah. The backstory of Labyrinth<\/em>‘s hero is overwhelmingly lost on the audience. Maybe that’s because most people only remember the film for its most popular song (\u201cYou remind me of the babe. What babe? The babe with the power. What power? The power of voodoo. Who do? You do. Do what? Remind me of the babe.<\/a>\u201d) or else for how badly it traumatized them as children (the combination of Bowie’s codpiece and Henson’s monsters remains potent)<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Very few people know Labyrinth<\/em> for the dark parable of grief and eroticism that it is.<\/p>\n

The movie begins with Sarah standing in a park in a Renaissance-Fair style dress, practicing a monologue from a cheesy fantasy play called <\/span>The Labyrinth<\/span><\/i>. She forgets a line and is angry with herself. It begins to rain, so Sarah runs home. When she gets there, she has a brief fight with her father and his new wife. (We know he’s recently remarried because the woman in question complains, \u201c[Sarah] treats me like a wicked stepmother in a fairy story no matter what I do.\u201d Then she disappears forever, as parents always must in fairy stories.)<\/span><\/p>\n

After Sarah retreats to her room, we get a breadcrumb trail of clues. A leisurely tracking shot through Sarah’s room establishes the visual touchstones of the film: a Labyrinth game (the one where you roll the ball around a maze and try not to drop it into the holes\u2014Sarah will fall down a number of literal and figurative holes in the next ninety minutes), an M.C. Escher print of impossible stairways (directly purloined for the final confrontation scene between Sarah and a very freaky Goblin King), and a bunch of books that will be referenced later (<\/span>The Wizard of Oz, Where the Wild Things Are<\/span><\/i>, the stories of the Brothers Grimm, and even a little Hoggle statue).<\/span><\/p>\n

But the most important part comes just afterwards. As we move past the bookshelf, we catch sight of an open scrapbook showing pictures of a woman labeled \u201cMom.\u201d More pictures, along with theater programs and press clippings, are taped to the mirror. Those who are paying attention now know that Sarah’s mom is\/was an actress, and also that she’s out of the picture, family-wise. Also, Sarah seems to have spent an inordinate amount of her time organizing scrapbooks dedicated to said mother. It’s all very creepy, and about to get even creepier. If we look closely at the press clippings on the mirror, we can see an older brunette woman\u2014Sarah’s mom, obviously\u2014posing with David Bowie, who will show up as the Goblin King in just a few short minutes. [The relevant portion runs from the 30-second mark to the 40-second mark of \u00a0<\/span>this clip<\/a> \u00a0(do your best to ignore the world-shatteringly terrible music).] But how can David Bowie be both a character in Sarah’s \u201creal\u201d world and also the king of the Sarah’s \u201cfantasy\u201d world? <\/span><\/p>\n

I’m glad you asked. It turns out that Sarah’s mom ran off a couple years back (long enough for her father to remarry and have a new kid, at any rate) with her lover: the actor we see in the press clippings, played by none other than David Bowie. So when Sarah, still deeply traumatized by mom’s amorous abandonment of her, has to imagine someone to play the dark and brooding villain in her magical anti-motherhood fantasia, her choice is as obvious as it is unsettling. She creates a Goblin King in the image of her mother’s lover, and then makes him fall in love with <\/span>her<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

And it only gets weirder from there…<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

*This piece was written before the world lost David Bowie.<\/em><\/p>\n

Next Up: The Love Between a 38-Year-Old Singing Kidnapper and an Extremely Badly Dressed 15-Year-Old Girl Is The Greatest Love of All<\/em><\/p>\n

Have you read Tommy’s amazing novel “We All Looked Up”-SLASH-do you have a thing for Labyrinth<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Part 1: What Happened in Sarah’s Past? What Happened In Mine? We are all obsessive about something. It could be Harry Potter, or our cat, or that guy in the house across the street who continue reading<\/span>\n <\/path>\n <\/svg><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":432,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,278,9],"tags":[9758,20902,2758,20901,20899,6746,4,20904,20903,20900,4992],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1384378"}],"collection":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/432"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1384378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1384378\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1384378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1384378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1384378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}