Recovering from a fun weekend of all Alice activities – will need more time next year if we’re going to make it through even part of every Alice film I own now, which is upwards of 20 – and thought I’d share a few photos here. Click on the image below of the tea party (with my doll Thornapple as guest of honor) to see the slideshow.
“It’s amazing how you can be who you are even without your proper body! How could I be me without my own whiskers? Without my own tail? And yet here you are, you’re a fox, but you’re still Gisella. It’s a mystery.”
The Old Country by Mordicai Gerstein is a slim novel that reads like an expanded fairytale, and tells a unique and beautiful story. It is really more of an Honorable Mention as far as the GU archetype goes, but it touches on the plot point of “losing herself” (and then finding herself) so well I wanted to give it its own entry.
Gisella lives with her family in an unspecified Old World country on the brink of its first modern war. With her brother conscripted by the army, she volunteers to go into the woods and hunt the fox that has been stealing the family’s chickens. Once there, she finds herself in the midst of a strange trial, with animals as judge, jury and lawyers, to decide if the fox is indeed guilty enough to be killed for her crimes. Gisella ends up staring too long into the eyes of this fox, against her great-aunt’s many previous warnings, and they switch bodies.
[SPOILERS] Gisella returns home, as a fox, only to find it abandoned. Her family has all been arrested as spies and brought to a prison camp. With the help of a magical creature named Quick (who helps her, in true fairytale fashion, because she had previously helped him), and her cat Nubia, she sets off on a quest to rescue her family and get her own body back from the fox, Flame. Along the way they also pick up a grumpy bear as a companion. (Gisella also does spend some time literally underground, sleeping and hiding, since she is after all a fox.)
The animals get into the prison camp by pretending to be a circus act, which the emperor is fond of. They arrive just as he is meeting with the leader of the opposing side in the war, and suddenly all the other animals return for yet another trial – that of the emperor and queen, for the destruction they have caused with their war. Their power is overthrown (though not exactly in favor of anything better), and Gisella’s family escapes to the New World.
Before they leave, Gisella and Flame meet once more, face to face (Flame, I think, is the adversary here, having stolen her body and taunted her along the way, even though it’s not as clear-cut as many GU stories). Flame relents and offers to switch them back, but in a surprising turn (especially given the narrative set-up at the beginning of the book), Gisella chooses to remain in fox form.
“I forgive you, and wish you well, Flame. I am a fox of the Old Country.”
She realizes that she has changed so much on her adventure that she no longer wants the thing she’s been fighting for. And in fact, truly knows who she is now. Which is a very fitting end for a Girl Underground.
Alice Day is almost here again! To celebrate the day Alice went down the rabbit hole, I always set aside a few days to watch Alice movies, dress up, make Alice-related culinary concoctions, and live in a state of non-stop intoxication. The association between Alice and altered states of consciousness is pretty old, for obvious reasons (DRINK ME). Many people associate the fly agaric mushroom with the stories, but it was never actually depicted specifically in the original illustrations of the caterpillar. In any case, here are a few animated gifs which mash up Disney Alice frames with popular intoxicants (attribution unknown).
Neil Jordan’s masterful thriller In Dreams takes the Girl Underground a step further than most. [Caution: SPOILERS. No way to discuss this one here without them.]
Claire, an adult woman with a husband and child, has always been a bit psychic. She starts being tormented by dreams that appear to show the fate of a young girl who has recently gone missing in her town. But in fact, they are predicting her own daughter’s kidnapping and murder by the same unknown killer. As the dreams intensify, Claire acts quite mad, but in fact she is seeing the truth. What she doesn’t know is that the killer dreams of her too – they are linked somehow, and he can even manipulate her dreams to lead her to him. When yet another girl disappears, Claire decides to surrender her mind to him, so that she may find and ultimately defeat him (following the normal pattern that an adult GU protagonist is usually fighting to save a child).
Claire doesn’t have many companions – her husband is only concerned for her sanity, but her psychiatrist does end up believing her, although he doesn’t help much. Her dog is sometimes by her side. Primarily, she is led through the labyrinth by the adversary himself, the mysterious killer who invades her mind.
Her “final showdown” with the adversary is an extended mind game, with the killer (brilliantly played by Robert Downey Jr.) trying to bring her over to his side, creating a little family with the kidnapped girl, and Claire playing along until she can get them both to safety. She does rescue the girl, but dies during the final confrontation on a bridge.
And that’s where it gets interesting. Because their mysterious mental link still exists, and now it is Claire’s turn, from beyond death, to torment the imprisoned killer with waking nightmares. In a case of Girl Becomes Adversary, she haunts him violently.
I’m noticing a new theme starting to emerge here – that when the Girl is an adult, her fate is often much worse than normal, either becoming something scary herself (as in this movie and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark), or at the very least being stuck in a horrible netherworld, such as in The Dark and Silent Hill).
One of the plot points of the Girls Underground archetype is:
She interacts with people or things that are somehow connected to her ‘normal’ life at home, or briefly returns home in the middle of the journey.
While this is found in many GU stories, it is exemplified best, perhaps, by the original inspiration for the whole idea: Labyrinth. Not only does Sarah return to her own bedroom again while still on her quest (via the Junk Lady’s deception), but many of the creatures and things she encounters during her stay in the labyrinth (including the labyrinth itself) are echoes of items she has in her room: dolls, stuffed animals, posters, books, games, toys. This is illustrated wonderfully by this amazing set of animated gifs, juxtaposing the childhood object with its manifestation in the otherworld (courtesy of the awesome blog FuckYeahLabyrinth):
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is Guillermo del Toro’s second appearance on Girls Underground (Pan’s Labyrinth), although this film is a less straightforward example of the archetype. At first it may seem that the child Sally is the obvious Girl going Underground, but it evolves into a familiar story of an older protagonist rescuing her child and succumbing in the process (much like The Dark and Silent Hill).
8-year-old Sally is a troubled child rejected by her distant mother, and sent to live with her distracted father and his girlfriend as they restore an old mansion in New England. The mansion, of course, has a dark past, and terrible secrets – hiding in the basement, underground. There are tiny, vicious creatures living in the darkness there, and Sally (after finding the hidden basement in the first place) frees them by opening the gate to the fireplace. They whisper to her at night, at first enticingly, but quickly becoming menacing.
Simultaneously, the father’s girlfriend Kim is beginning to suspect something strange is going on with Sally and with the house, especially after the groundskeeper is violently injured. He directs her to the journals of the mansion’s original owner, where she discovers more information about the creatures. She finally convinces Sally’s father to take them all away from there, but the creatures will not let them leave (this is definitely an example of one of those GU stories that takes place entirely within a house). In the end, to save the girl, Kim must sacrifice herself.
There aren’t really any companions here, and no singular adversary, but it’s still a pretty solid GU story, at least worthy of an honorable mention. I also enjoyed del Toro’s usual flair for interweaving real and invented folklore, and the visual style and creepy whisperings of the creatures.
Sometimes I wonder about the female adversaries that exist in some Girls Underground stories – the wicked stepmothers, nasty witches, evil queens… were they once themselves the girl on the quest, only to stay too long down there in the dark and become something for other girls to fear?
We can actually see this process happen in the continuation of one of the bloodier GU stories, Hellraiser. The Comics Alliance blog reports that a new graphic novel series based on the original story and movie has provided the ultimate twist:
Last year BOOM! Studios launched a new Hellraiser series by Clive Barker that marked the influential horror writer’s return to his most famous creation after decades away. Co-written with Christopher Monfette and drawn by Leonardo Manco, the book’s first arc was a hit with fans of the storied franchise, concluding with original Hellraiser heroine Kristy Cotton replacing the iconic Pinhead character as the demonic Cenobites’ head of human soul-harvesting.
This makes sense to me, after years and years of reading these stories, and living my own strange version. The otherworld is not always a gentle place, and the Girl is always changed by her time there, after all.
Meridian, a Charles Band film from 1990 starring Sherilyn Fenn, is essentially a Beauty & the Beast tale, so it makes sense it would also be a Girls Underground story.
A beautiful young artist comes to Italy to take possession of the castle she has just inherited, and her art-restorer friend joins her for the night. They agree to shelter a troupe of carnival performers, and at dinner the leader drugs them in order to have his way with them (but passes the artist off to his lookalike brother, who becomes a beast). The friend leaves the next day, and the artist starts exploring the labyrinthine castle (this being one of those GU stories that takes place entirely within a house). She begins seeing the apparition of a ghostly girl, who (it turns out) was long ago killed by a curse that is on her family, a curse which involves the performers.
The artist, Catherine, starts to fall in love with the beastly brother, still thinking he is the same person as the wicked, cruel man, when in fact he is his kinder brother. She is helped a little by her housekeeper, a mysterious old woman who mostly tells her she must figure things out for herself. Catherine must break the curse by confronting the evil brother (wearing the clothes of the ghost girl, apparently), which will also save the gentle brother from turning into a beast all the time.
Leading up to the final confrontation, Catherine goes underground within the castle, and then is temporarily tricked by a cruel fraud. Once the adversary is defeated, she decides to follow the good brother back through the portal from which he came, into his own world.
If nothing else, this movie should be watched simply for the opening scene, of fire jugglers and other performers slowly emerging in the fog from the mouth of a giant stone ogre (this and other scenes were filmed in the Park of the Monsters, a 16th century garden full of monumental sculptures in Italy).
Elissa’s Quest by Erica Verrillo hit most of the major Girls Underground tropes and was an enjoyable enough read, but failed to really stand out for me; it is the first book of a trilogy, but I doubt I’ll be reading the rest of them.
Elissa believes she is an orphan, having been raised by an old healer, with no knowledge of her real family. She keeps a potent secret: she can talk with animals, and they are her only companions in an otherwise lonely life. One day, her father shows up and takes her away, hoping to use her in his plan to win a war. It turns out she is next in line to be royalty, a shock for the peasant girl. Elissa takes along her best friend, a donkey, who rescues her when she is captured by the enemy. Back with her father, Elissa chooses her own fate this time, electing to go to the palace of the Khan instead of back to her old life. There she makes a new friend and companion, a young slave girl named Maya.
Maya takes Elissa underground to a secret lake for a coming-of-age ritual that ends with the discovery of a small, insignificant-looking item that will prove important. Then she takes her to a wise woman, who speaks cryptically of things that hint at Elissa’s true power. The Khan is planning to wed Elissa and kill Maya, but they are rescued (and captured, and then escape into the desert and are rescued again – there is a lot of this type of action), and then Elissa is enlisted by a group of ancient healers to defeat the Khan. She uses her latent magic to destroy him, one on one.
I think this is the first Girls Underground example I’ve covered where the girl is (originally) an animal. Sometimes Girls Underground get transformed (like in The Cat Returns) but they usually start as humans (or, anthropomorphic at least).
The Last Unicorn is a classic 80′s fantasy animated film based on a novel by Peter S. Beagle (but this post just refers to the film version). One day the unicorn learns she is the last of her kind, which basically fits the “orphan” archetype. Initiated on her quest by a rambling butterfly, she sets off to find out what happened to all the other unicorns. The story is that an evil creature called the Red Bull has driven them to the edge of the world.
She is soon captured by a witch, but in captivity makes friends with her first companion, a mediocre wizard named Schmendrick. When they escape together, they encounter bandits in the forest and acquire another companion, Molly. They travel to the castle of King Haggard, who controls the vicious Red Bull. But when the unicorn is directly threatened by the bull, Schmendrick tries to save her and instead turns her into a human – the bull leaves, but the unicorn quickly loses her magic and starts forgetting who she is.
The companions all stay for awhile in the castle. The unicorn, thinking herself a mortal woman, falls in love with the King’s adopted son, and gets distracted from her mission of finding her own kind. But after going through a magical portal, all is revealed to the prince, and the unicorn is returned to her original form. When the Red Bull kills the prince, the unicorn finds the strength to confront it, and in turn frees the other unicorns who had been trapped in the sea. The castle crumbles, the king is killed, but the unicorn revives her prince, although she can no longer make a life with him.
