Labyrinth Watch A Long
Added 2024-10-05 21:03:17 +0000 UTCHey Peaches! The counter programming movie you voted for, and a movie that's been thrown around since we did The Neverending Story. Neither Jay nor I have seen this movie, so we didn't know much going in. We were NOT prepared for this movie. It has some really great special effects and cool camera shots, but also some crude humor and terrifying muppets. Can we survive the Labyrinth?
Comments
I was about 10 when this first came out and today was the first time I’ve watched it. The look of disdain on my face matched both of yours. I really did not like this either, at all. And that’s okay, it’s not for everyone. I was glad to at least have suffered through it with y’all.
Bee-Tea
2024-12-17 00:02:03 +0000 UTCFinally got to this one it was my first time watching Labyrinth since I was a kid and yeah it did not hold up I was kind of disappointed.
Keevee Venegas
2024-10-22 00:51:20 +0000 UTCYeah, I had a sense that y'all were not vibing lol. Just want to say this movie is intensely formative and deeply important for me. It's totally okay you didn't like it! Not sure I'd have latched onto it as an adult either. Art's a subjective experience; that's what makes it fun. I'm still grateful for the reaction, because I got to remember why I'm so damn emotional about this film. Pre-apologies for the vaguely personal lengthy ramble that may not totally coalesce. Believe it or not, I did edit this down. I love Labyrinth for many reasons, but when you're a young girl, this movie? HITS. My experience is not universal, but Labyrinth is very much an archetypal teen girl power fantasy, and as a former teen girl, I ate it up. Though obviously, anyone can love any piece of art regardless of genre or protagonist. I very much identified with Sarah my whole adolescence: weird, loner kid with a big imagination, who did not behave the way teenage girls were "supposed" to behave. She's 16 and she's basically playing pretend alone at the park. That's not right; she should be too old for that. Her stepmom outright tells her that she should be dating. And I've always found it telling that that's also the only possible way out of babysitting duty for her. Not a school play, not friends, not a part time job - a date. Sarah can be a caregiver or she can be a partner. Those are her choices, which are decidedly adult and decidedly gendered. What Sarah wants doesn't figure. True, you can't always get what you want ("life's not fair"), but the movie implies Sarah's actual mother died pretty recently (I'd say within 2 or 3 years), and her brand new stepmom's fast tracking her way to conflict by taking the lead in parenting. A role her dad should be taking on, but instead he's not giving either of the women in his family adequate support. Meanwhile, she has to take care of a kid she'd understandably have complicated feelings about (I know Jay had a big reaction to this, but I think Adam's right on the money with the replacement family comment - at least from Sarah's perspective), and to top it all off, it's 1986. No one believes in family therapy yet. Of course Sarah's sullen and resentful and dramatic. Of course Sarah doesn't particularly want to grow up. And when the stepmom says something like, "I'd be so happy for you to go on a date!" ooof, that really got me this time. That's not supportive and encouraging. That's why can't you be like other girls? Why won't you grow up? Why can't you just be normal? Anyway, yeah, the plot's pretty thin, but daydreams don't really follow a tight "save the cat" structure. Like when Jareth says "everything I've done I've done for you," it sounds like something your toxic ex would say, but he means it literally. He assumes the role of villain because she wants to be the hero. He exists only in relation to her. It's why I find the ballroom scene so integral to the film, and your reaction to it really interesting. I was initially surprised, but then I remembered I've seen this movie upwards of 20 times, so if it ever did feel weird to me, I've become immune to it. Nothing actually happens but like... you don't know that going in. I believe it was actually rewritten to be more appropriate after they cast her so young, but I wonder if you can feel the weight of the drafts that came before? Moreover, I do actually think you're supposed to feel uneasy in the finished product, but it's tough to gauge what's 'boy those dancers are unsettling!' versus 'boy I hope everyone felt comfortable and safe on set!' I'm not sure how you'd fix it short of recasting, because the movie doesn't work without it. Again, archetypal teen girl power fantasy, so of course the Goblin King falls in love with her. That's how fairy tales work. But it's not real on like... at least three levels. The movie is not real, the fantasy within the movie is not real, and the fruit-induced dream within a dream is not real. Set this movie a decade later and Sarah's on fanfiction.net writing this movie like an art nouveau "My Immortal" or something. It's good and correct all things considered to be worried about Jennifer, but for what it's worth, she's said that David Bowie made sure she felt comfortable in all their scenes together, and I'm sure the ballroom scene was of pretty major concern. This is far less important, but I'm also never worried about Sarah in the scene. She doesn't know it until the end (because yeah, this is absolutely Henson's Wizard of Oz), but she has the ultimate agency. From a genre perspective, the fairy tale monster can either love you or it can hurt you; it cannot do both. And from the metatextual perspective, this is a story Sarah's writing, and she's not going to write a story where she loses. Sarah is stronger than the Goblin King because he's her creation. He has no power over her. I don't know; I just think it's neat. Anyway, I promise I'm almost ready to stop having feelings about art in public, but one last thing: I guarantee nobody intended this parallel to happen, but it is really significant to me that the first "adult" thing Sarah does in the movie is put on lipstick. It's not presented as a good or bad thing; it's just a signifier that Sarah's growing up, but she's anxious about it (she wipes it off her mouth almost immediately), plus it gives her a tool to try and help her navigate the maze later on. Not so with Susan Pevensie, another female character a lot of Millennial women have Big Feelings about, from Chronicles of Narnia. Lipstick for Susan also represents female adulthood, but in the negative. Because in those books, when you grow up, you can never go back to Narnia. The lipstick is emblematic of her adulthood, which in these books, is not something to be embraced. It's the death of her belief in magic, the death of whimsy, the death of childhood. Susan is treated with contempt by her siblings in dialogue and the author in narration, and CS Lewis gives her the worst ending he could think of: she has to live a long, normal life in London. Her entire family on the other hand gets to go back to Narnia. By way of a train crash that kills them all instantly. I'm not kidding. That's literally what happens in The Last Battle, and it's one of those things that seems fine when you're 8 and then you revisit as a teen and have to stare at a wall for a bit. Peter seals the doors, Susan is shut out forever, and Lewis makes a very clear, binary statement. You have to choose. You can't visit sometimes when you're lonely or craving adventure. You can hold on to youthful fantasy, or you can embrace the reality of adulthood. You cannot do both. And that's a really sad message for an adolescent who loves fantasy and genre art, who lives right on that edge, to hear. Doubly so for an adolescent girl, especially someone (like me and the bulk of my social circle) who grew up on Narnia and Labyrinth. Yes, I wanted to walk through a hidden door and ride unicorns into battle carrying a kick ass scythe, obviously, but I also wanted my frosty white eyeshadow and lime-scented roll-on body glitter, god damn it. So Labyrinth doesn't have a clearly articulated lesson or a moral in the way that a lot of kid's movies do, but I think it has a pretty cool message for people like me and Sarah and anyone who likes to get lost in fantasy worlds sometimes. Growing up doesn't mean that you can never go back to the things you loved when you were a kid. Sarah gets both. We can get both too. But yeah I get that this is not stuff you're picking up on with a first time watch when you're trying to make jokes, and maybe that's not something you'd get from it at all. And if you made it this far, go get a cookie or whatever your snacky equivalent is, because I know that was A Lot.
commas-and-ampersands
2024-10-06 14:23:46 +0000 UTCi just saw it, seen it before and still like it, ya its a little weird. More of a Kids movie than just for adults. Maybe Best David Bowie RIP
Freeman25 4ever
2024-10-06 09:15:23 +0000 UTCi have not watched it yet but i can tellyou i will see it on amazon prime, and i know its on Hulu...my vpn did not work..moving on..
Freeman25 4ever
2024-10-06 07:30:16 +0000 UTCI also didn’t watch it for the first time until a couple of years ago. No childhood affection for it. It’s a surreal fable, and the story is a bit weak. What I think people grab onto are David Bowie and the fact that there’s this weird, dark charm to it.
fivefingers_through_fire
2024-10-06 02:34:04 +0000 UTCMy understanding is that they had a double cleverly placed/hidden to do David’s spinning glass orbs trick
fivefingers_through_fire
2024-10-06 01:58:58 +0000 UTCoh my god please watch Legend
Austin Arminio
2024-10-06 01:43:58 +0000 UTCSo reading Wheel of Tome for the first time Ludo was what I pictured for Loyal and the Ogier
Austin Arminio
2024-10-06 00:55:04 +0000 UTC
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