fantasy, page 72 of 92

For me, one of the joys of watching Dragonslayer is rediscovering what a great fantasy film it is. I’m not quite sure why I manage to forget, each time, how much I like it. Perhaps it’s down to the lack of extras on the DVD — something which always makes me feel a favourite’s going underappreciated — or perhaps it’s because it got a mixed critical reaction on its release, or that, being released in 1981, it lost out to Raiders of the Lost Ark for both a visual effects Oscar and a Hugo. To my mind, though, it’s as good a film as Raiders, it’s just that the way it tempers the straight-ahead heroism of its George-and-the-Dragon storyline with less purely archetypal, more humanly-believable characters — the very thing I like it for — may have weakened it in the public’s eye, particular when compared to the very obvious heroism of Indiana Jones.

Set in an authentic-feeling Dark Ages kingdom called Urland, Dragonslayer begins with a group of villagers, led by the young Valerian, setting out to ask the ageing sorcerer Ulrich (played by Ralph Richardson) for help against the best-named dragon in movies, Vermithrax Pejorative. (Latin is the language of magic in Dragonslayer.) Ulrich dies before he can help, but his young apprentice, Galen Gradwarden, decides to earn a reputation as a great sorcerer by fulfilling his master’s task. And he makes a good go of it, too, using his magic not to face the dragon directly, but to bury its cave in a massive rockfall. Everyone goes home to the village to celebrate, and Valerian reveals himself to be Valeria, a girl raised as a boy by her blacksmith father so as to avoid the lottery by which King Casiodorus picks maidens to sacrifice to Vermithrax. Then greedy Casiodorus confiscates Galen’s magical amulet (wanting to see if he can use it to turn lead into gold), and Vermithrax bursts free, meaning another lottery has to be held, another sacrifice made. Meanwhile, we’ve learned that, despite his protestations of the lottery’s fairness, King Casiodorus’s daughter’s name has been conspicuously absent from the drawings.

One of the most striking surprises of Dragonslayer is that, despite having the Disney name attached (it was a joint Disney-Paramount production), it’s very far from the traditional Disney style of fairy tale/fantasy — a point underlined by the scene where Galen enters the dragon’s lair intent on saving the sacrificial princess, only to find her dead and being eaten by baby dragons. Galen underlines the un-Disneyishness of the scene by sticking the baby dragons with his spear.

Vermithrax itself is one of the best pre-CGI dragons in movies, at least in those scenes where we get to see the whole of it. When it (or parts of it) interacts with humans, it’s less convincing (obviously being played by a large, robotic head, for instance), but when it wing-hobbles, bat-like, through its cave — a scene produced by a variant on stop-motion called go-motion, where rather than being animated a frame at a time, the dragon model was designed to perform a small motion each exposure, thus leading to a more fluid motion — is excellent, as are the scenes where it soars through the sky.

Quite often, it’s the little details that make the film. One of the best comes near the end where, with Vermithrax lying not just dead but partly exploded on the ground, King Cariodorus turns up to stab it with a sword, and thus be proclaimed dragonslayer. This is a world, you can’t help feeling, where although the most obvious evil (the dragon itself) has been dealt with, the background of petty human evils will remain. Our heroes have to set off for another land in search of their happily-ever-after.

And it’s one of the film’s plus points that Valeria and Galen share the hero’s role. Galen may be the one who wields the spear “Dragonslayer”, but Valeria is just as heroic, venturing into the monster’s lair to gather scales to make a fireproof shield, and, most surprising of all, not ending up having to be saved by her male counterpart at any point.

In contrast to the film’s dragons and sorcery, there’s a more historically authentic-seeming Christianity creeping into this post-Roman world via wandering holy men. Dragons and sorcerers are dying out, and Christianity is taking the place of the villagers’ superstitions. This actually seems to put the film’s Christianity in a rather odd light. Just as Casiodorus is going to make sure he goes down in history (which is written not by the heroes, but those in power) as the slayer of Vermithrax, Christianity is, rather by default, going to assume the same role in the eyes of the peasantry. They seem happier to believe it was God who slew the dragon, despite the earlier scene where a holy man (played by Ian McDiarmid, looking surprisingly young considering he would soon be the aged Emperor in Return of the Jedi), taking Vermithrax for Satan, tries the usual “get thee behind me” lines, and ends up being roasted alive. But by the end, the magic has left this world — not with the feeling of poetic loss you get from the departure of Tolkien’s elves, but, rather, like the exhaustion of an old-world magic the new world has no room for.

It’s the departures from what you’d expect of a heroic fantasy film that make Dragonslayer what it is. But it could well be these very departures that mean it’s not as appreciated as it ought to be. People no doubt expect a film called Dragonslayer to be a heroic tale in which some guy slays dragons. It is that. But it’s also so much more.

The latest Doctor Who DVD release, The Sensorites, has got me thinking about my eccentric Doctor Who buying habits. I get all the Tom Baker and Patrick Troughton DVDs on principle, but pick and choose from the William Hartnell and Jon Pertwee stories, perhaps because I like the comic Doctors better than the cranky ones. I’ve only just realised, though, that the First Doctor stories I buy are always the science fiction ones, never the historicals. To me, those early stories are usually too slow-paced to succeed as dramas, so my enjoyment of them has to come from their atmosphere. And when it comes to atmosphere, the old TV shows couldn’t help doing minimalist sci-fi better than they did history.

I love the aesthetic of old sci-fi (the sort of thing that begs to be called sci-fi, rather than SF). Despite Coleridge’s most famous remark on the subject, I think there are two ways to make fantasy work. One is, indeed, through the suspension of disbelief, but the other is what I might call suspension by disbelief — by which I mean the sort of thing that kicks in when you’re presented with something so strange it doesn’t matter whether it’s convincing or not, it conquers by aesthetics alone. Limited by budget and technology as they were, the old Doctor Whos, to be successful, had to rely on artistry as much as craftsmanship. A single fault (a sticking-out zip or a wobbly mask) will puncture the “convince them it’s real” suspension-of-disbelief approach, but the alternative, “convince them it’s alien“, works top-down, not by the evidence of the senses, but through the sense of wonder. Doctor Who’s early aliens work by being so weird you don’t so much believe in them, as bask in their strangeness.

It’s impossible to see the Daleks in this way nowadays, due to overfamiliarity, but their extremely unconventional, not-a-man-in-a-suit design goes to the heart of it. The Dalek design looks like a very alien solution to the problem of how to survive in an overly radioactive environment (encase yourself in a life-support machine and stay indoors, after which you’re bound to get a bit cabin feverish and want to conquer the universe). A more obvious example is the Alice in Wonderland sensibility of The Web Planet, with its stagey, almost balletic make-believe world of man-sized moths and giant ants, as well as those crawling things that were a cross between The Magic Roundabout‘s Dougal and a hairbrush. It would take a billion dollar budget to convince you the Web Planet was real, and perhaps another billion to make sure you didn’t laugh, so why not just convince you it’s so strange it’s worth doing away with your disbelief altogether? With this approach, it’s the surprising details that convince, not the realistic ones, so the Sensorites’ circular feet — the first detail of theirs you see, after that spooky scene where one peeks into the spaceship from the outside — as much as their long, wispy-bearded, old-man faces, that goes towards making you believe in these alien creatures.

Most of all, I love the original Cybermen, from William Hartnell’s final story, The Tenth Planet. I would probably have first seen them on the wonderfully Art Nouveau-ish cover (by Chris Achilleos) to the Target novelisation, where their peculiarly feminine looks make them all the more spooky, like futuristic mummies in white bandages. Watching them in action (via YouTube, though I long for them on DVD), the awkwardness of their design only makes them all the more alien. Those huge chest units they lumber around with are exactly the sort of thing a Cyberman would design — all function, no ergonomics — as are the chillingly minimal childlike doodles of their faces. In fact, watching them waddle about with all that front-loaded weight, and their head-mounted guns, I can’t help feeling they look like robotised pregnant women in beehive hairdos, which makes their ultra-modernist emotionlessness all the more scary. And a world apart from the tramping little-boy militarism of their latest incarnation. In this way, it’s the rough edges, the feeling of those early Cybermen’s make-do approach to self-design, that convinces.

Perhaps this is why William Hartnell’s alien stories were always set away from contemporary Earth. Except for the Daleks (who had already invaded everyday life by the time they hit the Earth on TV), the First Doctor’s encounters with alien life took place on other planets, or on spaceships, or in the future, and I’m sure it was only this happening-in-another-place feel that made the aliens work. Were a Menoptera or a Sensorite to appear in contemporary London — except for Carnaby Street, where it might get invited to a Love-in — it would undoubtedly wither before the glare of reality. But out in space, where no-one can hear you say “It’s got a zip up the back!”, they’re in their own weird, modernist, minimalist, unnatural environment, where it’s not belief, but sheer strangeness, that wins the day.

Malory’s world in Le Morte Darthur is one where “Right lends Might”, where “God will have a stroke in every battle”. Sir Lancelot is the hero of Malory’s book, a super-knight whose prowess at combat means he can never be defeated, whatever the odds:

“With that came in Sir Lancelot, and he thrust in with his spear in the thickest of the press; and there he smote down with one spear five knights, and of four of them he broke their backs. And in that throng he smote down the King of Northgales, and broke his thigh in that fall.”

So great is Malory’s love of Lancelot, he paints himself into a corner, as in each new combat Lancelot must top his previous performance, fighting that many more knights in one go, or, if really forced to fight only the one (such as the wicked Sir Meliagaunt) offering to do so partly armoured and with one hand tied behind his back:

“‘Well, I shall proffer you a large proffer,’ said Sir Lancelot, ‘that is for to say I shall unarm my head and my left quarter of my body, all that may be unarmed as for that quarter, and I will let bind my left hand behind me where it shall not help me, and right so I shall do battle with you.'”

But with the final battle, Le Morte Darthur suffers a change of style that, while it ought never to work after such near-ridiculous heroic heights, is profoundly moving. The fatal wounding of Arthur forces a shift from superhero romp to tragic, gritty realism, and suddenly it’s as if all the nobility and chivalry have gone out of the world, leaving a grim place of grievous, messy injuries and (far worse, to Malory) death by ignoble hands:

“So Sir Lucan departed, for he was grievously wounded in many places. And so as he rode, he saw and hearkened by the moonlight how that pillagers and robbers were come into the field to pillage and to rob many a full noble knight of brooches and bees [arm or neck rings], and of many a good ring and many a rich jewel. And who that were not dead all out, there they slew them for their harness and their riches.”

and:

“Then Sir Lucan took up the King in one part, and Sir Bedivere the other part, and in the lifting up the King swooned; and in the lifting Sir Lucan fell in a swoon, that part of his guts fell out of his body, and therewith the noble knight’s heart brast [burst]. And when the King awoke, he beheld Sir Lucan how he lay foaming at the mouth, and part of his guts lay at his feet.”

It’s the mythic picture of a dilemma that’s still with us. Ideals are illusions, but they’re all the magic we’ve got in this world. Messy realities, though they’re the sort of truth you can verify, can’t be all we live by. Human beings are half animal and half imagination, and the tussle between the two creates a similar tussle between fantasy and realism in great works of art. And Le Morte Darthur is certainly one of them.

(Quotes from Le Morte Darthur: The Winchester Manuscript, Oxford World’s Classics, ed. Helen Cooper.)