Note: This piece contains spoilers.
My wife and I arrived late to Andres Muschietti’s Mama, but not late enough. A series of trailers even more inane and noisy than usual reached its nadir with one for a film called Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, which endows the brother and sister of fairy tale fame with a vast armory of swords and gatling guns and sends them out on a loud and gory witch hunt filled with blood, explosions, and general mayhem. Nothing could have been further in tone and style from the film we were about to see, and yet Mama shares a number of key elements with the Grimms’ story from which Hansel and Gretel takes its name. Mama begins with the fairy tale formula, “Once upon a time…,” and then it tells the story of a pair of children abandoned in the woods and fed by a monstrous mother figure. From this premise the film diverges from the fairy tale’s plot, but not from its spirit, as the children go on to contend with the horrors of growing up in a world haunted by adults.
Though Mama does not ultimately succeed as a film, it does offer a set of rich possibilities for the creation of a modern fairy tale, one that, like those told once upon a time, faces the horrors of everyday life head on, also recognizing the power of fantasy to make imaginative sense of those horrors. In the Grimm Brothers' tale, Hansel and Gretel are abandoned by their parents because they can’t afford to feed them. Muschietti’s story begins with an overheard radio broadcast announcing a killing spree launched by a man whose fortunes were devastated by a stock market plunge. The man turns out to be the children’s father. After he flees with his two girls, Victoria (Megan Charpentier) and Lilly (Isabelle Nelisse), the family hides out in an abandoned, snow-covered cabin. There, a surrogate mother—who is as much a grotesque parody of the clinging bourgeois parent as she is a perverse childhood fantasy made flesh—adopts the children. Mama announces her adoption in classic fairy-tale fashion, by rolling a ripe, red cherry to the children. This symbolic offering is as red as blood, yet sweet, tempting, like the apple offered to Snow White by the Witch.
Philip Pullman has said “your life begins when you are born” but that “your life story begins at that moment when you discover that you are in the wrong family.” This is the premise of all good children’s stories: once the parents are out of the way, fantasy begins. What makes Mama so rich in potential is its complex understanding of how inescapable the parental presence is, and how fantasies often end up giving more substantial form to the anxieties we had thought to escape. Once the girls are found and adopted by their uncle and his reluctant girlfriend (played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Jessica Chastain), they are exposed to parental forces more messy and complicated than the ghostly figure they’ve grown up with. Mama continues to assert her presence in their new home, and she seems to be a lot more fun than the adoptive parents: the children are heard laughing and singing behind closed doors, and the younger girl, Lilly, often giggles when she catches a glimpse of Mama's ghostly movements. This mother has conformed to the desires of her children, rather than the other way around, though the children will soon find that, in fantasy as in reality, love is haunted by possession.
The children’s early development is brilliantly portrayed in the film’s title sequence through a series of pictures drawn by the girls. In them, we see the children learning to survive, becoming more animal-like as they age. One striking image shows them attempting to eat a rat: the younger girl throws it up, and the older girl cries. Later, the girls themselves become four-legged creatures, as they gradually stop walking upright. This sequence shows the evolution of humans in reverse, and offers a rich commentary on the strange world of children. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who goes down a rabbit hole to discover herself, these children are of the earth, driven by primal needs and desires. When they are found by humans, they scuttle around like four-limbed spiders, hiding in corners and under beds. Although the film is largely about childhood fears concerning parents, it is also about parental fears regarding children, and asks the question pondered by many parents at one point or another: who are these strange creatures living in my house?
Like other folklorists, the Grimms collected their tales from families in small villages. Their work was spurred by concerns that urbanization would destroy the rural culture from which such stories sprang. The best fairy tales retain the presence of the wild woods that separated such families from modernity and change. Forests are depicted as a source of danger in the tales, but also as places of mystery and magic. Though most of the forests that fostered the original fairy tales have been cut down and sold for timber, their spirit survives in the tales themselves. In a sense, they are a metaphor for the imagination itself: wild, untamed, and haunted.
Mama is at its best when it lets the story brood on such elements. The most effective visual effects are those half-seen, barely glimpsed, and shadowy. Mama’s presence is signaled by moths, sometimes singly, other times in ominous swarms. She travels by way of mold and mildew, which spreads from dark corners into the center of walls. These dark spots congeal and darken to become wound-like holes from which slimy claws emerge. The domestic becomes wild, and the children are at once the victims and the bearers of this dark forest magic. Their would-be adopted mother jokes at one point that the girls are “outdoorsy.” Their faces are always dirty, marked by the rot and filth of their earthy mother. Mama is real because she is dirty.
Once the character of Mama takes more of a visible, human-like role in the story, she begins to lose her magic, largely due to the besetting sin of modern film: CGI. It may be my age, but I have never been able to suspend my disbelief when digital animation intrudes on live action. Even at its most accomplished, such moments are no more convincing to me than Dick Van Dyke dancing with cartoon penguins in Mary Poppins. This is most glaringly seen in the film’s conclusion, which is unfortunate, as the ending is so daring in other respects. Suffice to say that we do not get an entirely happy ending, and this shows more of the true spirit of the stories of “once upon a time” than of Hollywood. Like a fairy tale, the story acknowledges that death happens, but also like a fairy tale, it offers a rich and strange image to help us make sense of it: the spirit of the departed is movingly transformed into a colorful moth who flies into the night.
Mama was originally due to come out in 2012. If it had, it would have been the third of the year’s most intelligent takes on the fairy tale tradition. The most orthodox of these was Snow White and the Huntsman, a film that exceeded my (admittedly very low) expectations as much as The Hobbit disappointed them. Snow White's success largely derives from its clear respect for the source material. Unlike Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, it endows the Grimms’ story with a fast-paced action narrative that retains the fairy tale’s complex narrative logic, and it doesn’t compromise the traditional moral fabric or the original. It also breaks from Hollywood convention by offering a truly compelling female protagonist, one who is heroic, but not simply because she adopts traditionally masculine attributes. These qualities are also shown by the year’s other compelling update on the fairy tale, Brave. Though marred by extended moments of broad humor entirely out of spirit with its main narrative, this animated epic succeeds when it's at its most Grimm, as in the scene depicting the film’s heroine playing in the woods with her mother, who has been transformed into a bear. When the bear-mother becomes too involved in their play, her animal side suddenly takes over, and she nearly attacks her daughter. Such moments capture the strange and sinister qualities of parent-child relationships. Like Brave, films like Mama are not afraid of exploring these dark places, and they show the enduring power of the fairy tale to give form to the deepest fears shared by children and their parents.
Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.
By the time I actually came to see Jaws, I was well acquainted with all of the film’s main events, told with a series of images that rivaled the most lurid frames of a 1950s horror comic. “Oh, man, how about when the woman’s skinny dipping at night! She’s all naked, right, only you can’t really see much ’cause it’s so dark; but anyway, she’s swimming and she sticks one leg up in the air and then it sinks into the water. Then that music starts, you know, da-duh, da-duh, and they show what it looks like underwater and you’re looking up, you know like you’re the shark looking up at her swimming and then you can see a little bit more of her nakedness but then they show her face, and she, like, disappears for a second, like she’s pulled under. Then it happens again and she starts screamin’. Then, oh man, she starts jerkin’ around, this way and that way, and then she slides way over until she smacks into this buoy, and then you’re like, oh man she made it, but then, no, she gets pulled off again and dragged around and then she’s, like, totally dead.” To an eager audience of children, this is not a spoiler: it’s an appetizer.
My classmates weren’t simply discussing films when they described them at recess: they were engaging in a form of storytelling as old as oral culture itself. Like the folk tales recorded by the Brothers Grimm and others, these narratives were structured around horrifically vivid images. Folklorists have recorded infinite cultural and ethnic variations on the meme we know as “Little Red Riding Hood,” but they all have one element in common: a catechism between a child and a disguised monster that progresses from innocent “big eyes” to suspiciously “big ears” to terribly “big teeth” that threaten to “eat you up.” The protagonist might be a little boy in one version, a girl in another; the victim might be eaten and then cut out of the wolf by a huntsman, or she might outwit the wolf and escape; the moral of the story might be that we shouldn’t stray from the path or talk to strangers, or there might not be any moral at all. Every element of the story can be changed but not the progression from eyes to ears to teeth that can eat you: these words distill what is perhaps the most fundamental experience of horror any of us ever have.
The absurdity of the word nigger, and of the American empire that counted it as currency, inspire Quentin Tarantino nearly as much as Uma Thurman's toes. He marvels at a society that creates, perpetuates and forever fears a nigger class. In Django Unchained, we get to witness the entire nigger creation/perpetuation/demonization assembly line, and it looks like the most jackleg Rube Goldberg contraption you can imagine. It starts by showing slaves dragged along in neck and ankle chains; it proceeds to detail the auctioning, trading, policing and torturing of niggers. Greasy rednecks and pretentious Southern gennuhmen fumble at the levers of this ungainly contraption all the way along, spitting tobacco and ducking its blast of dirty locomotive exhaust.
What Spike had over Quentin, up until Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, was a political passion that made headlines. Tarantino, who had once criticized Oliver Stone for turning his nihilistic crime script Natural Born Killers into a bludgeoningly political "Oliver Stone Film," seems to have emerged as a junior Stone, 
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is not generally considered a family picture, but it is certainly one of the most brutally honest films ever made about the nature of family relationships. I discovered this when seeing the film for the first time with my father when I was fourteen. My father took me to dozens of R-Rated films when I was growing up, which reflected, I think, his trust in my maturity rather than any negligence about what was morally appropriate for children (though there was some of that too). Many of my fondest memories of my father involve going to the movies, and going to R-Rated films was something we usually did together, without my Mom or my sister. For two guys who hated sports, this was our equivalent of playing catch. We’d seen plenty of horror films together, but I never anticipated that a horror film would hit quite so close to home as The Shining.
We learn during Jack’s interview that the Torrances have just moved to Colorado from Vermont, but it is not until a pediatrician is called in to check on Danny after he experiences a blackout that we learn more of the details of their past life. During this interview the camera focuses on Wendy, as she awkwardly describes to the doctor how Jack once dislocated his son’s shoulder in a fit of drunken rage. The violence of the event is masked by Shelley Duvall’s nervous smile and chirpy voice, her forced cheeriness deflecting the viewer’s empathy. The alleged “happy ending” to the story, that Jack quit drinking as a result of this incident and hasn’t had a drink for five months, is further undercut when we shift from Wendy’s face to that of the doctor, who looks frankly horrified. The camera resumes its deep focus, isolating Wendy from the doctor by framing them on either side of a series of bookshelves with the books arranged in a nervous zigzag. While today we might expect a call to Child Protective Services, in the world of The Shining such confessions only serve to further isolate the family.
Several years ago, I was delighted to discover how well The Shining works as a Christmas ghost story, when my wife and I were spending the holiday with her family. After Christmas dinner we got into a conversation about times when we’d been snowbound, and this led us gradually to a discussion of Kubrick’s film. We reminisced on favorite scenes while sipping hot toddies, until we all agreed that watching this would be much more entertaining than our traditional viewing of A Christmas Carol. Just as the cold outside makes the warmth inside more welcoming, so the vision of a family tearing itself apart onscreen makes one feel closer to the family on the couch. Jack Nicholson’s malignly comic performance provides just the right sense of dangerous hilarity, heightening the sense of camaraderie, and the whole family can cheer at the end as Danny ingeniously escapes his father’s pursuit and reunites with his mother. It’s easy to forget, but The Shining actually does have a happy ending.
The film has become a family tradition for us, but underneath the sense of kinship and connection with my in-laws that the film seems to foster, are more disturbing family memories. Like Jack Torrance, my father was an alcoholic, and several scenes in the film capture the experience of being the child of an alcoholic better than any film I know. In particular, I find especially troubling the scene where Danny quietly enters the chamber of his sleeping father to retrieve his toy fire engine and finds his father sitting awake on his bed. In a kind of narcoleptic daze Jack calls Danny over for a little talk. As disturbing as is Jack’s affectless attempt at speaking on a child’s level, what most troubled me about this scene when I first saw it with my father was the benumbed wariness of Danny’s responses to his father’s affection. What is most unsettling about being the child of an alcoholic is the sense of uncertainty: I never knew which version of my father I was dealing with from night to night, and this is what I saw in Danny’s response.
I have always been drawn to visions of the future, but little did I know what brutal images were held on the Beta videocassette of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange I rented at the tender age of ten. Although the film had been banned in Great Britain, it was shelved innocently in the science fiction section of Johnny’s TV, and no one would have thought of suggesting that this might be inappropriate viewing for a child. By the time I reached the infamous scene where Alex and his droogs violently assault and rape a woman while forcing her husband to watch, I knew that I had crossed some indefinable line and that I couldn’t turn back. Later, wondering what had led me to this most disturbing of film experiences, I realized that it had all started with a filmstrip. 
Such primitive media technologies have a distinctive charm that, like Czech animation or natural history dioramas, is indistinguishable from their premature obsolescence. There is something poignant about the notion of watching sequences of still images in an age of television and film. I remember settling into the experience of viewing these slow-moving narratives as into a kind of meditational trance, broken occasionally by the pitch bend and warbling of stretched cassette tape. How fitting, then, that this peculiar medium would be the means of introducing me to the strange world of early electronic music.
Seeing the horrific rape scene in the film left a similarly indelible impression on me, and proved to be as effective an education in the immorality of violence against women as the education the film’s protagonist experiences as part of his aversion therapy. This scene remains the image that comes to mind whenever I hear the word rape, and it gave me an early, brutal understanding of the uniquely sadistic and degrading nature of this act. If prostitution can be glibly referred to as the oldest profession, then surely rape is the oldest crime. Ironic, then, that the film I had hoped would take me into an imagined future ended up exposing me to the primitive and the barbaric. 
As a teenager I would return to the film, drawn to the stark images of a retrogressive future that seemed closer than ever. I later learned that most of the film was shot, not on sets, but in actual London settings, including Thamesmead, one of many planned urban communities of the 1960s and 1970s that produced scenarios not unlike that presented in Kubrick’s film, when families experienced traumatic feelings of disorientation as they relocated to blocks of buildings that had little in common with the neighborhoods they’d grown up in. What was an unpleasant reality for many Londoners became for me a kind of stark fantasy image, one on which I gazed obsessively in its various permutations, as seen on album covers and music videos produced by a new wave of electronic artists, like Gary Numan, John Foxx, and The Human League, composing pop music for a dark future.
Though I still deplored the violent acts of Alex and his mates, A Clockwork Orange resumed its earlier place among my obsessions. As with Alex, the film’s earlier aversion therapy didn’t take. Perhaps that’s because none of us experience only one form of social conditioning. While Alex is given nausea-inducing drugs meant to establish negative associations with the violent images on screen, his therapists clearly underestimate the staying power of his previous conditioning.
Alan has chronicled that heady era in his new book 
Matt: Yes. But unfortunately, those people tended to end up dead.
Alan: I talked to a lot of writers for this book, and not one of them could think of a case in which that was done before. The thinking was, “This is a show with a lot of characters and a very complex plot, people always react better to a series at the end of its run than at the beginning, let’s send the whole season out at once and see what happens.” Season Four of The Wire was the perfect season of a show to do that with, because of the whole story involving the kids. It’s probably my favorite season of the show.
Alan: I would say that Breaking Bad is a show in that vein. It took me till season three to fall in love with it in the way that I’m in love with it now, because—in much the same way as The Wire—it’s paced very slowly early on, it’s a different kind of tone than you’re used to, and you really need to see each piece built on top of every piece that came before for it to make sense, and for it to have the power that is has once you get to seasons two and three and beyond.
Alan: A couple of things drove that. One, I’ll admit that, in the arc of my career, Milch has been present so much that it was hard to resist putting him at the center of the Deadwood chapter. But the other is, I wanted every chapter to feel not quite like every other chapter—to find a different way into each of the shows—and Milch is his shows, and his shows are Milch, in the same way that The Sopranos is David Chase and The Wire is David Simon, but on a more elemental level, I guess.
Matt: My first insight into the controlled chaos of David Milch was when I spoke to Ian McShane, aka Al Swearengen, after the Television Critics Awards ceremony in the summer of 2004, after he’d been given an award for outstanding individual achievement in drama for his performance on Deadwood. I went up to him at the bar, made some small talk, then asked, “So, what’s it like delivering those long monologues? Did your experience in legitimate theater help with that?”
Alan: When I originally thought of the concept for this book, the subtitle was going to be, “How Tony, Buffy and Stringer Made TV Better than the Movies.” Then I thought about it and realized, no—I can name so many great movies I’ve seen over the last 10 or 15 years. They weren’t the big hits. They weren’t playing on fifteen hundred screens. But they were the equivalent of a lot of the shows in this book.
Alan: True. A major difference between Treme and The Wire is that Treme doesn’t have a murder investigation every season pulling everything together. Well, there’s a little bit of that, in the scenes involving David Morse. But you might have expected them to go whole-hog on that, and they didn’t, really. Morse’s policeman is no more important on Treme than anybody else.
Matt: You see this kind of response to Breaking Bad today.
Buffy was really an outlier. I had to contort myself this way and that to figure out how to include it in the book, which is so much about the effect of The Sopranos. My rationale was, it was on the air during roughly the same period, and the idea of what was happening on the WB at the time, and to a lesser extent UPN, later, in some ways paralleled what was going on at HBO, namely: Here we have an under-watched channel that wants to make a splash and is thinking, “Let’s do that by finding a creator that wants to something different. Let’s give him more rope than he’d get if he were doing this at NBC or ABC, and encourage him to do something that’s a lot more ambitious or a lot more complicated.” And again, in a genre piece.
Alan: Mr. Eko, played by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, was one of the most popular new characters on that show, and the actor just didn’t want to live in Hawaii anymore. He said, “I want to go back to England, and please kill me off.” And then they did! And the producers told everyone that’s why they did it. And because of that, it becomes part of the whole “ah, they’re just making this up as they go along, there’s no plan” thing.
Midway through the season they decided, “The cousins need to die. They’re more trouble than they’re worth. We’ll make Gus Fring the big bad.” Season Three is everyone’s favorite season of the show.
Matt: I thought it was very telling that you had this anecdote about the Russian in the “Pine Barrens” episode of The Sopranos, that Terence Winter, now the creator and executive producer of Boardwalk Empire, advocated for a scene where we would see what happened to the Russian.
You know, I forgot one other: Louie. If I were writing this book a year or two from now, there would probably be a Louie chapter in it.
And the documentary makes it very clear. We did this. Our beknighted city did this. We who represent the best, the most enlightened, the most tolerant place in our country, maybe in the world. We ruined these young lives and we have been affected by it, too, even if we don't realize or acknowledge it. It's not too late to learn from this, though. It's possible that I sound like a self-serious blowhard, but I don't really give a shit. I urge you to see this film. Support justice and restitution for these men. I resolve to examine and challenge the assumptions I make about other people every day in this great city.
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