The Impossible Things She Believes Before Breakfast – Alice In Wonderland

“To Achieve The Impossible, First Believe That It Is Possible.” – Alice, Through The Looking Glass 2016

Now, I’ve always loved the story of Alice, the precocious 7yr old girl who follows a rabbit with a pocket watch down a rabbit hole, gets over her initial fright quickly for all the strange, wonderful and seemingly illogical things she sees on her way down.

“What if I should fall right through the centre of the earth, and come out the other side, where people walk upside down?”

Surprise, surprise, the original 1851 novel was written by Charles Dodgson, Oxford Maths Professor, under the pen name Lewis Carroll.  “Alice” got her name from the 10yr old middle daughter of the then-Oxford Vice-Chancellor.

(Way to curry favour with the boss, you think? Hold that thought… 😉 ).

The 2010 Tim Burton movie portrays an 18yr old Alice who has grown up over the last decade believing her first trip down the rabbit hole was all a dream (thereby picking up where the old Disney cartoon left off, where she woke up in her own land, from being chased by the Red Queen). Right beside the impossibilities of snobby talking caterpillars with bad smoking habits and rabbits who dress up for tea, are that of a girl coming of age only to eschew the security of marriage into a good family, instead seeking her own fortune as the captain of her bereaved father’s ship.

 

Wait, what? Yes! Along with the “nonsense world” of Wonderland is written into the storyline how strange it is to everyone else in her own world that she should have ambition beyond that of simply finding a good husband (or well, going along with her arranged marriage*), and in the sequel she has to also fight the obstacles her offended, spurned ex places in her path to derail her career as ship captain – at one point he even commits her to a mental institution and she narrowly escapes forcible sedation, the “cure” for “a classic female disease” of the time.

*I’m not saying “arranged marriages” are completely wrong (no one wants their kid to make their own choice and then marry a fool or fruitcake either 😀 I had an ex-colleague who used to say all the time that his greatest parenting fear was that his 16 year old daughter would come home with a 30 year old banker she met in Lan Kwai Fong.. and he himself was a banker haha we would rib him about it all the time and he would absolutely NOT see the humour in that at all) – Alice’s betrothal is obviously “wrong” because the potential husband her mother has selected for her is so bent on not letting her be who she is – and the who she is, that everyone in her world has a problem with, is someone capable of slaying the Jabberwocky, taming the Bandersnatch and fine, serving as one of the best captains her would-be husband would have had on his fleet. 

(NOT say, fighting him for the reins of his entire business. Why do people infinitely fear sheer ability/ capability, particularly in women, without regard for inherent personality? The big unseen risk I think when you do that, is you create more bright young women who are monsters. Because they think they need to be, in order to succeed. Some societies don’t have a particularly good record of being otherwise.. I don’t think we realise how much “ripple effect” damage we could cause by allowing mean-ness to be what gets things done, because we’re just teaching everyone that being mean is more effective than being kind or having integrity.. (Uh, we liked and supported you before you put on the whole dog and pony show of erm, staged walking direction 😀 So you need to ask yourself whether the person who put you up to it has your best interests at heart to begin with… I’m just sayin’ .. The Red Queen will turn out to be someone who grew up ridiculed and bullied (read below), thereby personifying a monster of Wonderland’s own making..)

Alice is so freaking cool, WHY do people think there is no storyline, the movie is ill thought out, ODs on CGI (Computer Generated Imagery – and how come no one said that about the Transformers franchise?)

Anyway. Alice, the girl who once “believed in as many as 6 impossible things before breakfast” is called upon to save Wonderland from the Red Queen’s tyrannical, Jabberwocky-fired reign.

Jabberwocky, Bandersnatch and Vorpal Sword in the 2010 Tim Burton movie are actually pretty consistent with the 1855 ‘Jabberwocky’ poem written by Carroll/ Dodgson:

‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!’

It goes on, dubbed “glorious nonsense” that the author wrote to entertain his family (how many awesome things get created simply because people were looking to entertain their own kids? Some say this is how Lord of the Rings began too)..

You might think the impossible is well, impossible, but then one of the most important nonsense-genre books of all time, translated into 200 different languages, perpetually in print, inspiring countless adaptations and sequels, literary papers and well, the imagination of innocents all over the world, is really outliving its creator, proving the popularity of believing in impossibilities.

Think the Oxford Math Prof and Alice author Carroll/Dodgson was an alpha person? Maybe not quite – the “Dodo” character in the 1851 novel is inspired by the fact his stutter was sometimes so bad he introduced himself as “Do-Do-Dodgson.” He also had a psychological disorder whereby he misperceived body parts and objects as changing in size and distance in real life – thereby inspiring the “Eat Me,” “Drink Me” size-changing biscuits and potions in virtually all Alice storylines.  

Talk about making the most of the hand you are dealt in life.

Wait, there’s more, if you want to be a nerd about this ( 😀 ) – Dodgson/Carroll wrote math problems, particularly algebra, into some of Alice’s original adventures – for eg chapter 2’s Pool of Tears where 7yr old Alice appears to be performing “nonsense” multiplications – which actually make sense using base/ exponentiation. You can find modular arithmetic in the Hatter’s tea party when the guests change their seats around. It’s all available on Wiki – y’know, in case you thought it was “impossible” for math to be “wonder-full,” or for that matter that academics and bookworms were boring conformists – there are literary scholars who believe Dodgson wrote Alice in its final form as a scathing satire on new modern mathematics that were emerging in the then mid-19th century. 

Basically he was Being Sarcastic. Ridiculing. Portraying With Irony, because this Oxford Maths Prof had a problem with how he thought the study of maths was evolving. And did anyone remember his boss’ daughter is the freaking title character. (Beat that reality side show, Kardashians.) And I’m willing to bet, given the lack of erm, barb in the general Alice storylines, that this was meant as a compliment for a supportive boss, rather than anything negative. (But no, it’s not a straight-out curry favour, is it? It’s better 🙂 )

Then we finally caught the sequel (to be exact, one of my former colleagues was playing Alice Through The Looking Glass on DVD in her car for the kids haha) and so I went searching for a copy…

It’s spectacular. Ties wonderfully with the first, the costumes and effects are amazing, WHY did it get flayed by some popular movie critics and ratings sites?

A: Because they ain’t mummy blogging Mums 😀

You get the most mileage from watching the two movies in sequence, because the sequel picks up on a few key threads….. and then irrevocably changes how you view some of the characters in the first movie. The shift in equilibrium is….. really trippy. I’d watch it just to see how they change everything just by adding a few key details in a kid-friendly setting. (Ever read Sense of an Ending, British author Julian Barnes’ Man Booker Prize-winning 2011 novel? Ok, maybe not little kid-friendly, how about the simple Blind Mice “See” Elephant In Parts, But Not Whole? Like that, but with the element of time  we all draw conclusions from… depending how far back in history we go…)

Spoiler alerts (any cares; these have been out for over a year now)…

A tale of two sisters, and a joke that goes too far…

As a “mad” Hatter, succeeding in the very area his very proper hatter father disapproved of – impossibly flamboyant, unconventional millinery creations – a then-adolescent Tarrant Hightop watches his court hatter father create a piece for the budding Red Queen, then-Crown Princess preparing to inherit her father’s kingdom.

The headpiece turns out too small for the Red Queen’s large head, and at the very public ceremony, it breaks. Ever the joker, Hatter leads the entire court in laughing at the Red Queen and her large head. (Could there be a worse timing for that laugh? One careless gesture, that even the best of us are not immune to making…!)

Humiliated at the crown breaking, expectedly upset at being then ridiculed for her physical appearance, the adolescent Red Queen melts down, prompting her father the King to publicly discipline her by stripping her of her rightful inheritance.

Her younger sister, beloved sweet tempered White Queen, is then named the new Crown Princess.

Flashback to when Red and White Queen were little girls, and how the Red Queen got her large head to begin with:

After their mother has told them not to eat any more tarts, little White Queen sneaks that last tart into the bedroom the two girls share…… and promptly eats it, then hiding the tart crusts under her sister’s bed. (OMG)

…because the tart crusts are under her bed, little Red Queen gets the blame for everything – stealing the tart, and trying to hang it on her younger sister. Little White Queen is way too scared to come clean. (Is there no better time to be brave and have the integrity to speak up?) She watches in silence as her older sister rails at the injustice, then runs out the door as their mother moves to punish her….. thereby falling and hitting her head hard. One little lie, or omission of truth any of us could have made, by little White Queen..

Almost at once, her head starts growing… this is the cause of the Red Queen’s large head that eventually breaks the crown that causes the Hatter to start laughing at her, that causes her to be stripped of everything.

And so the two princesses grow up.

 

Iracebeth, the Red Queen, ever the butt of “bloody big head” jokes even as her head gets ever bigger, believing their parents, taking her younger sister’s side, love her younger sister more than she.

Mirana, the White Queen, beloved of all, beautiful, even tempered and never being the one who gets into any trouble. If you look back at the first movie, Mirana flits back and forth gently, reminds her court to speak kindly to the trees, is infinitely soft spoken.

Even as her sister all but says outright, “You of all people should understand,” thereby entreating White Queen again to tell their parents the truth about what really happened with the tarts. She. Still. DOESN’T.

Go back and look at the initial portrayal of the Red Queen. You might now see one of her favourite quotes, “It is better to be feared than loved”, imbued with pathos…

Do you now see the Wonderland crises as begun by Red Queen……. or, amazingly, by White?