movie: Finding Nemo
Sep. 8th, 2003 09:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyWent to see Finding Nemo this afternoon with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
heres_luck and Mirrorthaw.
My thoughts behind the cut tag, for spoilers.
I loved everything about this movie except the protagonist. I loved the backgrounds, the details, the sea turtles, the sharks (voiced by Dame Edna, the Mouth of Sauron, and the Hulk), the tank fish and Nigel ... the horrifying perspective on human beings ... the homage to Wallace & Gromit in both the dentist's address and those wonderful, ghastly seagulls. I liked Dory and the whale and those creepy jellyfish and the horrible monster with all the teeth down in the dark. I even liked Nemo.
But I hated Marlin.
I hated him.
I wanted the gulls to eat him.
Partly this is because the movie sentimentalizes him relentlessly; partly this is because he needs a good swift kick in the tail-fins. He doesn't treat Dory like a friend, even after she's saved his bacon more than once; he doesn't recognize her value, her skills. She talks about trust a lot, but Marlin never listens, and sadly, she's an idiot for trusting him. It's Nemo, who's met her like two minutes previously, who insists on saving her from the net; Marlin's so fixated on his fatherhood that he can't see anything else, and the movie lets him get away with this waaaaaaay more than it ought. It sort of tells us that he's wrong, but it itself is so fixated on the father-child relationship, that it never distances itself enough to let Marlin be funny as an overprotective father. He's always pathetic, and because he's always pathetic, the periodic attempts to crank up the pathos fall completely flat.
One of the things I love about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other Mutant Enemy shows is that biological family is not an exclusive definition. Biological family is important, as Buffy's relationship with Dawn, Angel's relationship with Connor, and especially Simon's relationship with River show us, but the biological tie does not give any of the characters the right to walk all over the other members of their family, the people they've chosen to build community with. The tank fish, interestingly enough, have that kind of community, although it's played almost exclusively for laughs; ditto for the sharks. And the sea turtles have this huge, almost communal family, where it clearly doesn't matter which turtle-child belongs to which adult; although there is still a special bond between father and son, it's part of a much larger bond between the turtles as a collective. Marlin is offered that kind of community, that chance to regroup from catastrophic loss not by developing an obsessive and frankly slightly creepy fixation on Nemo, but he never takes it.
Except at the end, where they reverse his polarity. But that's a fairly flagrant Happy Ending Device, tacked on for closure.
I guess what I'm objecting to is that Marlin doesn't learn or grow through the course of the movie. Nemo does; Dory does; but our central character, the fish we're supposed to care about, remains completely static, and thus unsympathetic. At least to me.
Like I said, the rest of the movie was fabulous. I wanted to see more of all the secondary characters (well, except the dentist and his niece--although I loved the way that the most horrifying word in the tank fishes' lexicon was "DARLA!"), which in a movie with that many secondary characters is a good sign.
I just wanted to see less of Marlin.
heres_luck and Mirrorthaw.My thoughts behind the cut tag, for spoilers.
I loved everything about this movie except the protagonist. I loved the backgrounds, the details, the sea turtles, the sharks (voiced by Dame Edna, the Mouth of Sauron, and the Hulk), the tank fish and Nigel ... the horrifying perspective on human beings ... the homage to Wallace & Gromit in both the dentist's address and those wonderful, ghastly seagulls. I liked Dory and the whale and those creepy jellyfish and the horrible monster with all the teeth down in the dark. I even liked Nemo.
But I hated Marlin.
I hated him.
I wanted the gulls to eat him.
Partly this is because the movie sentimentalizes him relentlessly; partly this is because he needs a good swift kick in the tail-fins. He doesn't treat Dory like a friend, even after she's saved his bacon more than once; he doesn't recognize her value, her skills. She talks about trust a lot, but Marlin never listens, and sadly, she's an idiot for trusting him. It's Nemo, who's met her like two minutes previously, who insists on saving her from the net; Marlin's so fixated on his fatherhood that he can't see anything else, and the movie lets him get away with this waaaaaaay more than it ought. It sort of tells us that he's wrong, but it itself is so fixated on the father-child relationship, that it never distances itself enough to let Marlin be funny as an overprotective father. He's always pathetic, and because he's always pathetic, the periodic attempts to crank up the pathos fall completely flat.
One of the things I love about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other Mutant Enemy shows is that biological family is not an exclusive definition. Biological family is important, as Buffy's relationship with Dawn, Angel's relationship with Connor, and especially Simon's relationship with River show us, but the biological tie does not give any of the characters the right to walk all over the other members of their family, the people they've chosen to build community with. The tank fish, interestingly enough, have that kind of community, although it's played almost exclusively for laughs; ditto for the sharks. And the sea turtles have this huge, almost communal family, where it clearly doesn't matter which turtle-child belongs to which adult; although there is still a special bond between father and son, it's part of a much larger bond between the turtles as a collective. Marlin is offered that kind of community, that chance to regroup from catastrophic loss not by developing an obsessive and frankly slightly creepy fixation on Nemo, but he never takes it.
Except at the end, where they reverse his polarity. But that's a fairly flagrant Happy Ending Device, tacked on for closure.
I guess what I'm objecting to is that Marlin doesn't learn or grow through the course of the movie. Nemo does; Dory does; but our central character, the fish we're supposed to care about, remains completely static, and thus unsympathetic. At least to me.
Like I said, the rest of the movie was fabulous. I wanted to see more of all the secondary characters (well, except the dentist and his niece--although I loved the way that the most horrifying word in the tank fishes' lexicon was "DARLA!"), which in a movie with that many secondary characters is a good sign.
I just wanted to see less of Marlin.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 06:07 am (UTC)Sorry, evil childfree moment du jour. Sorry, sorry. Will go crawl back under rocks now.
But, damn it, you're right about Marlin. And there's lotsa lotsa parents just like him.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 08:28 am (UTC)Another way to put it is that Marlin was a one-note character, which is super for secondary characters, but VERY VERY BAD for one's protagonist. And it doesn't help that that one note is always the world's smallest violin playing, "My heart bleeds for myself."
Or. There's another way to frame my objection. It's not that Marlin is obsessed about Nemo's safety; it's that he's obsessed about Nemo's safety solely on his own behalf. It's not ABOUT Nemo; it's about Coral and the other 399 eggs. He's not sheltering his son; he's sheltering himself, and that way lies Munchausen's by proxy and all kinds of badness.
Now, this is a strikingly realistic bit of characterization, and in another kind of movie, I wouldn't object a bit. It's that the movie never really seems to take the time to distinguish between that and love until the end--that Marlin's problem is one with a lot of psychological depth and heft, completely unsuited to a funny movie about talking fish. He could be caricatured successfully, but they don't do that, either, because he's the main character. There isn't room for him to be a real, three-dimensional character, and the movie won't relinquish the idea that he's the hero. And so he fails as a character.
That's my problem.