Merlin

It's adorable! Mean King Giles is fabulous--thank you, whoever is responsible for putting Anthony Head into medieval garb and short hair with a crown. He is so very very awesome. And Merlin is a skinny boy, all cheekbones and big eyes and downtrodden heroics, with a fairly useless mentor person named Gaius. Imagine! I know it's the most common Roman name, and even Julius Caesar had it as a first name, but Gaius to me is always and forever Baltar. Do you suppose the name Guy came from Gaius? Except it's pronounced gee, but that doesn't matter. French pronunciation has been all around the block and back in two thousand years.

Where was I?

Merlin! Right. It's adorable indeed. I like Merlin and of course Arthur is an excellent sort of football player golden boy who's loyal to his father and does all the right things. I can't think when I've ever seen a pairing like that before. Well, I mean, Apollo. Come to think of it. Golden boys who are good boys seem to be a kind of 1950s thing that I would be so happy to see come back into existence. You can be good and still be awesome! You do not have to be some kind of lame rebellious youth!

There is actually a Norman Rockwell calendar at work, from the disabled veterans, of course. Unironic self-referentiality is something you'd better enjoy if you live around here.

I was trying to explain decadence in art one day. When was that? How it's not a judgment but an actual phenomenon, a way of representing one thing as another instead of making the thing itself beautiful or functional or letting it be itself. Love of artifice for the sake of artifice.

Well anyway. Merlin was also kind of aimed at eight year olds, which made it a little hard to manage. Though at least they got the concept that the story must be clear, unlike A Certain Show that has lost its way story-wise. But the two I saw were all gross-out humor and really broad strokes and fart jokes. But then at the end there was an awesome moment where Arthur goes to pat Merlin on the shoulder, and Merlin thinks he's going for a hug, and there's an excellent awkward thing and I just wondered, how on earth do you write that? And how brilliant to write such a thing into a show, because it perfectly encapsulates their relationship.

So there's that.

Mostly there's this whole giant monster weight of all of Arthurian legend on top of everything. How can you watch this and not think about it? Granted I taught Arthurian legend as a class, and I've read pretty much every medieval text there is from the tradition. But still!

You have Arthur, who's going to be king and unite the various warring kingdoms under one banner to fight a common enemy. You have Merlin, who's going to be a mighty wizard who saves Arthur's bacon half the time.

I love seeing remakes. Do you know why they're the best thing ever? Because that's how literature always used to be, for all of recorded time, until about the 1800-1900s, and now it is again. I can't explain why we stopped for a while. I mean, I could try, but I'd be guessing at best, and I don't know enough about it. Probably Romanticism and the cult of the individual. Or else industrialization which brought cheap duplication and copyright law. Maybe a combination of the two.

But remakes! Or maybe I mean retreads, like Battlestar was a completely different version of a previous story. Or the way everyone remakes A Christmas Carol eighteen million different ways. Plays that can be put on over and over with different actors in all crazy different ways.

That's ALIVE, that's what that is. That's a story that's alive. We want more! We want it again!

So I'm very happy to see the Arthur/Merlin story getting told again. Why do we love it so much? Is it because of destiny? We do love a good destiny story, it's true.

And Michelle Ryan only had to sit there looking pretty most of the time in Merlin, which she does very well--she's very pretty--but then she totally came through with expressions and reactions and who knows, maybe she got a whole lot better, yay! I would love that. Remember watching Grace Park learn to act infinitely better on Battlestar? Remember how awful Boreanaz used to be before he got better? I love that because people can grow and learn and change. Like the stories, no?

I suddenly came up with a Little Red Riding Hood story yesterday after showing my sister the place where the coyote dug into the snowbank to get at the mice. You know mice make all these tunnels in the grass under the snow, so that when it melts, there are runways and nests clearly marked. Well, something about that gave me an idea, at long last. Or maybe it was being around my sister. If a wolf came to eat her, she would scratch its ears and give it a steak and have it sleeping on the foot of her bed and defending the house in no time flat.

Isn't that also what you do with a story? You find a way that it fits into your own world and tell it again. Battlestar was half about 9/11 and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it was also about hatred and racism and survivalism and militarism and making our lives the way you know they should be. It was about despair and hope and religion and impossible things.

Which all makes me wonder what I would do if I were going to tell the Battlestar story my own way. What a mind-bender! But it's not like it was new in the 70s. It's the Exodus. It's one of the oldest stories we have around. Though not as old as Gilgamesh. Boy, I'd love to see Gilgamesh retold in a brilliant way. Maybe I'll think about doing that myself.