Reading/Watching Log #72

Much like a child stuffing their face at Christmas dinner, this month was all about cramming in as many of the things I’ve been meaning to watch/read as I could before the New Year. This led to a concentrated effort in staggering my viewing options, racing through several books and averaging at least two movies per week.

I naturally had to watch The Fellowship of the Ring for its twentieth anniversary, The Matrix in preparation for Resurrections, and another Robin Hood movie to finish things off, an ongoing project that just sort of happened this year.

Along the way, two distinct themes emerged: science-fiction and Christmas – that is, a specific type of Christmas: the cosy, cluttered, roasted chestnuts and sugarplum visions type of Christmas, in which magical adventures take place in the ordinary world.

For that reason, I also ended up reading some picture books featuring my favourite illustrators; I won’t cover them in this log, but they tapped into this particular type of Christmas aesthetic: Jan Brett’s The Nutcracker, Ruth Sanderson’s The Nativity, and Jane Ray’s Grace and the Christmas Angel.

And of course, two seminal touchstones from my childhood: Walter Wick’s I Spy Christmas and Do You See What I See: Night Before Christmas (the former more than the latter, as they were published over ten years apart). Just disappearing into these incredible photographs was a trip down memory lane, and I was surprised to find that I remembered where most of the stuff was – or maybe not so surprising even the hours I spent poring over these pages. And I finally found the stick of gum!

So I managed to get through a lot of material these last four weeks, and if it hadn’t been for me deliberately taking a break from these types of projects, I also would have had to contend with The Witcher, The Book of Boba Fett, Spider Man: No Way Home and the Hawkeye limited series. Whew. There is just too much stuff out there right now, though I still plan to get to The Wheel of Time and the new season of Star Trek Discovery in January.

I hope all your Christmases went well, and are sufficiently braced for the New Year...

The Legend of the Seeker: Fever

The one with the convenient amnesia...

The first writer to learn that amnesia was a thing that sometimes happened must have been over the moon at the possibilities it afforded, as Easy Amnesia has been a staple part of storytelling for centuries at this point. You can see why: a person who has no idea who they are is at their most vulnerable, is subject to effortless manipulation, and provides an opportunity to delve into who they are without that which defines them: their memories.

That said, the penultimate episode of season one isn’t providing a case study on Jennsen, who returns for her second appearance, but rather uses her as a plot-point to endanger her brother and get the location of the Boxes of Orden.

As was established when we saw her last, she’s living under the radar with a Resistance family, only for D’Haran soldiers to start house-by-house raids in search of her. The questionable fact that our protagonists have left two of the three Boxes of Orden with an adolescent girl (given the sheer power of these things, they needed to be in three separate locations, and kept in a better hiding place than under a loose stone in the fireplace) is mitigated somewhat by Jennsen being given a stone (or nut...?) that amounts to a suicide pill, just in case they try to take her alive.

Links and Updates

This is going to be the last Links and Updates of the year, so let’s also make it a brief retrospective of 2021. It sucked quite a lot. Covid-19 is still among us, and unfortunately my prior smugness over how well New Zealand was handling it over the rest of the world went down in smoke once the anti-vaxxers got their hooks in the general populace.

Thankfully there hasn’t been any violence yet, but plenty of protests against lockdowns, vaccines and special passes (those who haven’t been vaxxed don’t get a vaccine passport, and therefore are restricted from certain public buildings) led by various on-line nutters who believe in anything from microchips to communist takeovers to undercover lizard people. I’d feel sorry for them if they weren’t so painfully stupid.

I have to keep reminding myself that they’re the minority. 86% of the population have been vaccinated, and support the safety measures put in place to protect the vulnerable from those that aren’t. They’re the people I have to focus on.

On a personal level, this is the year that I became both a homeowner and an auntie, even though I still can’t afford to actually move into my new house, and my nephew is currently living in England. Ah well, good things take time.

I’ve also been thinking about a lot of films that celebrated their twentieth anniversaries this year, and wow – I didn’t realize at the time just how prolific 2001 was in giving us so many stories that are still significant (in terms of sequels and remakes and cultural relevance) all these years later: The Fellowship of the Ring, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Legally Blonde, Shrek, Spirited Away, A Knight’s Tale, Spy Kids, The Fast and the Furious, Monsters INC, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Moulin Rouge! – not all of them are good by any means, but these franchises – or at least their influence – are all still with us to one extent or another. What a year!

It was also the release of some of my personal favourites, such as The Others starring Nicole Kidman, and Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, which very much served as the spiritual precursor to Downton Abbey.

And Zoolander. Can’t forget that one.

Woman of the Month: The Sugar Plum Fairy

Woman of the Month: The Sugar Plum Fairy from The Nutcracker

I usually try to pick someone particularly iconic for the end of each year, and I’ve also decided to go a little festive this time around. But would you say that the Sugar Plum Fairy is really iconic? I think so.

Most people would be able to pick her out of a line-up, associating her with The Nutcracker (or at least with ballet) and her tinkling music-box melody is surely recognizable to everyone, even if they can’t place the context.

But as a character she’s essentially a non-entity. She’s given no name (only a title made up of a combination of the three most delectable words in the English language) and naturally doesn't speak a word of dialogue. She's not the main character of Tchaikovsky’s ballet, not showing up until the second act, and doesn't even exist in E.T.A. Hoffman's original story. 

Yet to me, it’s what the Sugar Plum Fairy embodies that makes her so memorable. Like Father Christmas or Glinda the Good Witch or Yoda, she’s a character that we intrinsically associate with goodness and benevolence. She's the pinnacle of elegance and beauty and sweetness; she doesn’t have to be anything more than that; her very name conjures up everything we need to know about her.

(That’s why I disliked The Nutcracker and the Four Realms so much, as that movie turns her into one of Disney’s patented Hidden Villains. It was awful).

Antonietta Dell’Era first danced the Sugar Plum Fairy at the Marinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in the December of 1892, with the role having been deliberately created in order to showcase a prima ballerina in the performance (considering the leads Clara and the Nutcracker Prince have always been played by children).

Her performance is also notable due to the use of the celesta (or bell piano) in her solo, an instrument which uses felt hammers to hit its bells (its inventor called it a celesta after its heavenly or “celestial” sound, and the ballet’s original choreographer Marius Petipa wanted the Sugar Plum Fairy’s music to sound like “drops of water shooting from a fountain”).

Tchaikovsky wasn’t the first composer to use the instrument in an orchestral piece, but was the first to give it a prolonged solo – and it’s been a favourite ever since, perhaps most recognizable to modern audiences as the instrument used for Hedwig’s Theme in the Harry Potter films. But everyone knows those delicate first few notes of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.

There have been plenty of variations on her character over the years: she was originally the ruler of the Land of Sweets, but some productions have Clara herself transform into the Fairy for the third act, and about ten years ago the New Zealand Royal Ballet reimagined her as the night-nurse of the children’s ward, where Clara was convalescing after an illness.

Since then she’s also become a symbol of Christmas itself – specifically a child’s view of Christmas: think sweets and presents and toyshop windows and trips to the pantomime (there’s a reason Clement Clarke Moore used the phrase: “visions of sugarplums danced in their heads” in The Night Before Christmas).

I was going to make this December a science-fiction month, but now I’m leaning more towards... folksy Christmas fantasy? There’s not really a recognized term for what I’m talking about, only a vibe: think talking dolls, clockwork toys, warm clutter, candlelit Victorian Christmas trees, delicate ornaments, stop-motion animation, I Spy books, Shirley Hughes’s illustrations, paper stars, gingerbread men, television holiday specials from the eighties... the Sugar Plum Fairy fits right into this aesthetic.

She’s not like any female character I’ve showcased on this blog before, simply because she’s not a character but a symbol. For those who celebrate Christmas, she embodies our collective childhood understanding of the holiday – Christmas not as it was, but as it existed in our imaginations. As ephemeral as a snowflake or candy floss, she’s nevertheless still as immortal and eternal as the man in red.

(What IS a sugar plum anyway? A plum infused with sugar? Coated with it? How can I get one? Will it turn out to be a disappointment like Turkish Delight, or is it as incredible as it sounds?)