May 2018 – Page 19 – Memphis Flyer

Robert Bly first came to fame as a poet and activist, slightly on the fringe of the beats, publishing an early book, The Teeth Mother Naked at Last, with City Lights Books. He won the National Book Award for his poetry collection, The Light Around the Body. If you’ve seen Robert Bly read (perform) his poetry, you know that it’s like witnessing a conjureman or shamanistic scop perform. He’s the Wise Man of the Forest, part Joseph Campbell, part Allen Ginsberg.

Then, in 1990, he published his book, Iron John: A Book About Men, an often misunderstood work because of its association with the mythopoetic men’s movement. This movement became notorious for its sweat lodges and men’s retreats, but more to the point, the book seems to me to be an enchanting employment of Jungian archetype psychology, and the analysis of fairy tales and other mythic reverberations that follow from that.

This new book, More Than True: The Wisdom of Fairy Tales (Henry Holt, $26), is in that vein. It is similar to the work of Robert A. Johnson and Marie-Louise von Franz, whose 1974 book, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, parallels many of Bly’s themes, though Bly is still more interested in the masculine leitmotifs of folklore. I was in Jungian therapy for a dozen years — I know I should be more mentally sound — and Iron John was a key text to me, a real gift from my therapist. Taking an oft-used image from fairy tales, in that book Bly said, “I think we can regard therapy, when it is good, as a waiting by the pond. Each time we dip our wound into the water, we get nourishment, and the strength to go on further in the process.”

There is a pond, a well, a key, and a magic tablecloth in the six fairy tales Bly has chosen to explicate in his new book; there are talking animals, mysterious dark men, enchanted creatures, witches, and serpents. “Sometimes fairy tales are stories of incidents, supernatural or otherwise,” he says, “told and retold, in which the psyche is trying to communicate what it knows, trying to slip something past the guards of the dictator ego …” Each of these tales is emblematic of something the author wants to delineate about the human psyche or soul. In ancient stories — myths, folklore — there are deeper truths that may explain us to us. In other words, these fairy tales are more than true.

Bly calls on Freud, Jung, Rilke, Yeats, Vallejo, Ibsen, D.H. Lawrence, and other earthly gods to illustrate the interpenetration of myth into our literature and into our lives. He quotes Antonio Machado: “When heaven and earth have passed away/my word will remain./What was your word, Jesus?/Love? Affection? Forgiveness?/All your words were/one word: Wakeup!” He speaks of the shadow: “We used to say that the proper study of mankind is man … But now we don’t bother with the chthonic, the under-worldly energy as it lives in us.” And he speaks of “inner work,” the process we are honing or ignoring, the part that can be reached through the plumbing of the unconscious. “Now, with social media and worldwide conversations on every imaginable topic, more people are likely to recognize other people’s shadows and failures. Whether we can recognize our own is still in question.”

Fairy tales are one connection to the shared unconscious. Dreams are another, and perhaps poetry, ritual, and religion. Toward the end, Bly says, “Possibly fairy tales themselves are ways to keep the early joys of our life concealed and yet not lost.” I love that: And yet not lost. And further: “We mustn’t assume from the jokey tone tellers of fairy tales use that there is little at stake here. Everything is at stake.”

While this book doesn’t have the clarity or unity of purpose of Iron John, it is still an enthralling and welcome addition to Bly’s remarkable oeuvre and to the ongoing study of fairy tales and myths and what they say about us today. It is a book full of marvels and timeless insight.

Actors Emily Blunt and John Krasinski are both expert at little looks. Their microexpressions often betray a tome’s worth of worry, regret or disdain, Krasinski’s most famously into the camera in the American version of The Office.

Their marriage has produced, besides two children, A Quiet Place, directed by Krasinski and starring the couple. It is a horror film which concerns a family in the country terrorized (as is their entire post-apocalyptic world) by blind monsters who echo-locate and horribly maul anyone who makes a loud noise.

This leads to the family and film being artfully silent. There is little dialogue, and most of it is in American Sign Language. The sound design is highly detailed, emphasizing every tiny movement and scrape as the family goes about its farm life sometimes on literal tiptoes.

John Krasinski

Creaky boards are navigated with care, everyday objects put down like ticking bombs. Every task on the the Abbott family farm is an endless font of worry for both the family and the viewer, who is kept successfully in suspense throughout every simple chore. It’s a literalization of the way in which movies use quiet to soften viewers up before a jump scare, of which there are plenty here.

As in other ambitious modern horror films, like The Babadook and It Follows, fighting the monsters also doubles as a need to heal, in this case guilt and anger over the loss of a previous family member who made a sound. The Abbotts’ daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) feels she is left out, not only because of her negligence in the previous death and her youth, but because she is deaf.

The film’s carefully constructed ambient sound drops out for her scenes, muting them. It’s a nice touch, and one that highlights not only her perspective but mirrors the estrangement nonfictional deaf people feel when they are similarly mistreated, in non-post-apocalyptic situations.

The healing, when it comes, is a little too neat, and eventually the movie is less about metaphorical fears of letting go and more about the logistics of running and hiding from giant monsters. The monsters themselves look like a slightly more tasteful version of Resident Evil Lickers (the film also shares a composer and a final image with the 2002 film), and suffer a little for being familiarly CGI mutants. But they are scary, by simple dint of appearing from nowhere and killing any noisemaker, and work as a serious threat. No explanation is given for their presence, and none needed, as it would just get in the way. An old newspaper hints at humanity’s finding out how they work: “It’s Sound!” screams The New York Post.

Krasinski does good directorial work, and gives Blunt, whose character is pregnant, many opportunities to panic, cry, and stoically work up the resolve to deal with nearby monsters, sounds and children. The family again and again must take great pains to repress themselves, and the work of self-repression builds and builds, until it becomes an unnavigable burden. Their movements cry out.

Emily Blunt

Blunt’s great, almost as excellent at registering horror and shock with thoughtful composure as she was in the scarier cartel drama Sicario. Krasinski’s bearded dad wears a look of exasperation, continually pulled in different directions by the exigencies of monster prevention and the emotional needs of family members. (As with many onscreen dads, proper care of the family unit is a spiritual calling and almost an impossible task: if we did not know he was also the director, his cross would seem just a bit too burdensome.) When the two finally have spoken, whispered dialogue, it feels unusual and focuses entirely on their unresolved emotions.

Horror films are really tragedies. When they’re not concerned with gore or sex they’re about tension, the fear and buildup to the horrible outcome, be it murder or worse. They’re an openly acceptable way for a light entertainment to discuss feelings of despair and helplessness.

They focus on the inevitable lead up to ruin, and the faces of people who see it coming, paralyzed in its sway. Their doom is often unavoidable, their hard work rewarded with bright fake blood and the loss of worry forever. But the discussion of their fate, although it’s fictional and with less critical or popular respect than other art, is enormously cathartic to anyone who feels that doom, in any way, in their day-to-day.