Right, right. I wanna say something here I’m kind of groping towards, cut me some slack (excuse me, Bob devotees, Slack) or clear up what I’m saying with sparkling revisions.
There are certain - shows, Broadway and not, certain movies, certain books - that go right to the heart of the simplest fantasies I’ve got, wrap their fingers round my guts, and tug me right into another world. They are usually strong simple fantasies. I may be a sophisticated person, but deep in my heart I’m pure groundling, the folks who used to stand up in the cheap spaces for Shakespeare’s plays the year they were written. The folks who not only laugh at the clowns and throw food at the boriing actors and applaud the quick wit of the show-offs, but also mourn for the heroine and sigh for the hero, and shiver at the villain. I have a hard time watching many movies because they’re made with heavy emotional slams for people in the audience who have seen so much TV they know the plot already, and don’t get involved with the characters. I can’t take violent explosions with deaths in movies that are passed off as mere entertainment; the deaths hit me. I cry when the witch takes Toto away, for God’s sake.
You can tell when a master hand has pitched a fantasy straight at my groundling heart. There’s a, I don’t know, feel to it. Rogers and Hammerstein, sure. Spider-man. Wizard of Oz. The first Interview with the Vampire. Lots of the early Disney animation classics - I’m thinking Bambi. Simple stories, heartstrings, masterfully told, get to me on a level deep below where my conscious mind operates; tug.
The thing is, those stories hit me harder and stay with me longer than much more sophisticated ones. I’ve had the whole Assassins track by Sondheim stuck in my head for days. But do I have dreams about it? No, I have dreams about the Japanese-looking forest with the silent falling snow, with Bambi hunting helplessly through it, “Mother! Mother!”
In the same way: I was a huge Phantom fan when it was new; I saw it not long after it came out. The tremendous staging by Hal Prince gets a lot of credit - when it was new, when nobody knew that broken and dead chandelier was going to fly up backwards into its own past to fill with light and life, it was a huge wallop to my groundling guts. And the story hit me in the guts the same way Bambi hit me, and probably for the same reason. Sampiro is completely right about there being no likeable characters; looking back now, eighteen years later, he is so right I wonder it never hit me before. But I think, back then, I didn’t want to see it. I wanted to feel with the heroine and shudder at the villain. When she kisses the villain, when Good crosses over to sympathize with Evil, and Evil changes as a result, God that hit me in the nads.
Now if you are not a simple groundling, or if you are but THIS IS NOT YOUR FANTASY, then of course it won’t amuse you. As everyone has pointed out, it’s a dumb story, and despite magic moments, is often very badly told. But I have a feeling, if I were sitting around a cave fire with Andrew Lloyd Ugg, and he had no Hal Prince and no actors, but he was a good storyteller, and he told this story about the bad guy poling the beautiful captive across the subterranean river, I’d be on my knees with my eyes starting out of my head, totally caught up in the fantasy. “What next? What next?”
For the record, Superman fantasies leave me half cold. Just don’t hit me in that spot that makes me want to soar and live along with the hero and heroine, ignore the weaknesses of the movie or play, glory in their lives. Why not? Who the hell knows? Likely an effect of my nature plus nurture. The next Spider-man movie? I don’t care if I have to miss a Sondheim opening. I’m there.
So I don’t think you have to apologize because this particular fantasy did not bowl itself down the lines of your soul and body to get to your nads. Hey, some people it doesn’t. My husband it doesn’t. Just tell them which fantasy stories do get to you, and appreciate that it isn’t always the worth or the excellence of the fantasy story that causes it to get to other people. Like the rest of your family. It’s just that it’s a shuriken through the chest straight to their hearts. Or nads.
