"Into the Movie"

When a good friend told me they were making a modern cinematic version of my favorite musical “Into the woods”, I was super-stoked.  When I learned that it was a Walt Disney production I was super-skeptical, and after I discovered it had a “pg” rating and cast Johnny Depp as the wolf and Maryl Streep as the witch, I was really super-sad.  I knew what I was in for, but I went to see it anyway.  Like love in any committed relationship, when things get hard, you can chose to stay through the struggle and changes.  I will always love that musical, no matter who it is played with.

Our love began when I was in middle school.  I was a blossoming delinquent of 13, expelled from a public school and relocated in the “alternative learning environment” of a refurbished mansion from the 1800’s in Chestnut Hill Philadelphia filled with other insane children that preferred art over socializing.  I didn’t do enough drugs, so I involved myself in the theather program.  The “school” itself contained only about 200 students, a combination of grades 8 through 12, so the plays produced were a polarity collective of upper and lower classmen in a ratio of about 20 to 2. I was one of the lucky few eighth graders to get cast in a part in “Into the woods”, a musical at the time I had never heard of or knew nothing about.  They cast me as “Rapunzel”, a seraphic soprano role.   Despite being a cigarette smoker I had a high range, and it was a smaller part with limited room for me to fuck it up.  I made my own wig out of yellow yarn and helped paint the 12-ft industrial card-stock tube that was to be my royal tower.  There were three nights we performed the musical.  The first night went fine.  The second night someone in the stage crew forgot to open the ladder inside of my tower, which I discovered only after I was inside and had climbed all the way up it.  Holding onto the sides for balance, I managed to get through the singing parts, until that damn bakers wife had to pull out a piece of my hair in the script.  So when that scene happened, the tower fell, and I reactively jumped-down and belly-slid against the ladder to avoid crashing at the top.  The side of the tower was ripped almost entirely.  It was fixed by the next night.  My bruising was only external.  The final the night I decided to be dangerous.  The character of Rapunzel has terrible post traumatic stress disorder in the second act and runs around violently screaming until she commits suicide by leaping under a giant’s foot.  My stage directions had been to walk off stage screaming.  Didn’t seem like a believable enough suicide.   So I put yoga mats on the steps that were the stage exits and decided to do a flying screaming leap off the stage.  There must have been an evil phantom, or a really dumbass stage-crew member, because when I actually did the leap the mats were gone and I went tumbling down four steps tinting over bruises from the ladder the night before.  In the musical Rapunzel bears twins, wanders around the dessert, then falls into her prince’s arms weeping.  My only consistency in all of the performances was throwing two baby dolls off the stage at the audience.  I thought that was a nice touch even more than the superman suicide.  It was a fun fantasy roll to play.

I came down with post traumatic stress disorder at age 21 after surgeons disfigured my head from my cranio-cervical fusion.  Although I could barely open my mouth, I would scream violently every time I looked in the mirror, and I lost my mind to the grief of permanent physical disability and chronic illness.   Because of the emotional pain I was in, my family could not handle the situation so I had to be institutionalized in a mental health facility until I could control it enough to be quiet.  The noise stopped, but the screaming never did.  I just hear it in my head now when I have episodes, and keep to myself alone in the room until they are over.  I tried to kill myself, but it wasn’t successful.  I then got involved in caretaker situations, shutting myself inside and living entirely in other people’s worlds.  It wasn’t by choice, I just didn’t have the system set up.  It was my tower, until years later when I got public housing and a power-wheelchair and got to see the world of Philadelphia.  I met some handsome princes.  Charming, but not sincere people.  There was one in particular who I felt very deeply for and when he left without even saying goodbye I listened to the song “Moments in the woods” to mentally get a grip on what had happened.  Songs are spiritual when they can apply to life and give guidance.  I can put trust and love into them, and I think that’s why I am a songwriter. 

Since so much of myself I see and take from this stupid musical; I had to see it. I hate it when people say they go to “see” a musical or a concert.  It’s about the music.  You are hearing it.  A movie however, is something meant to be “seen”, and with modern day CGI animation, that’s all people go to theaters for anyway.  I did not go to see the movie “Into the woods”, I went to hear it.  I was happy to hear the original writer of the music, Stephen Sondheim, had creative overview of the music.  Not even Disney could ruin that element, except for leaving a bunch of the songs out, and using them in the wrong places, and letting Johnny Depp sing.

Although the 21^st century cinema optic-alchemy had been added, so much of the beauty was missing from Into the Woods.  The theme of the musical is that reality is complex, and that magic and love come from hard lessons and struggles, not from fairytales and instant emotions.  When you have to shrink the story to fit the big screen, things get lost.  I won’t go through them all, but I’ll describe a few to explicate the masterpiece jenga tower that was this movie.      

-Rapunzel doesn’t commit suicide.

I understand taking this element out.  The movie is for children, and explaining post traumatic stress disorder and suicide to kids verses all of the other natural fairytale deaths in the musical is a bit more complicated.  In the musical, the witch begs Rapunzel to come with her to be safe from the giant, and instead of obeying Rapunzel tells her that it is because of her she will never be happy and runs right under the giants foot.  Rapunzel’s Prince has left her for Snow White after not being able to deal with her PTSD issues, which is put forth in the “Agony” song reprise, which was also kept out of the movie.  The witch then sings “No matter what you say, children won’t listen.  Children will only turn from something you love to something you lose.”  It is the witch’s grief at Rapunzel’s death that gives her character the full dimension of a heart.  In the movie the song is still sung but as Rapunzel is riding away happily with her prince ignoring the witch.  Not nearly the same level of a profound character. Just jealous, angry, witchy stuff.   Meryl Streep  already had a hard enough challenge following Bernadette Peter’s quintessence and legacy of the role, Disney cut down the character before she could even try it.  Also no offense to Meryl Streep, but the witch is supposed to change to a state of youth and beauty.  Streep is beautiful, but not in a way that portrays the vanity and striking macabre femme-sexuality that is the witch.  Where was Helena Bonham Carter for this one? 

-Johnny Depp didn’t look like a wolf at all. 

We know in the Grimm story of little red riding hood metaphorically the wolf represents a pedophile. But in this asswords society where figuratively now means literally in the dictionary, Johnny Depp looks like a sex offender in a casino outfit and a strange moustache, acting straight forwardly sexual to a child, and we just have to imagine that he’s a wolf eating the characters.  Not what actually is going on.  I guess that drives the point to kids better.  Don’t ever go near Johnny Depp.

-The narrator isn’t his own character.  A big epistemological WOAH in the play is when the narrator himself is killed off, and the characters are confused as to “Who will tell the story now?”  It seems like just a silly little comedic fourth-wall break, but really it’s a big Berlin tear down.  Make your own story, control your own life. You write it by the decisions you make, no one is writing it for you.  Leaving that out is what toppled the tower for me (and this is coming from someone who played Rapunzel and was like wtf I lived???)

As much as this movie robbed and raped me of my rhetoric rutabagas, my friend reminded me, “This is a musical made for adults with children…made into a movie for children.”  So I stopped being childish with my complaints about it, and I totally cried my eyes out during the ending songs.  Just remember “No one is alone.”  Including people that like this film.