I was hyped to see Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland in 3D since seeing the trailer to in Avatar. I’m a big fan of Burton’s and the 3D looked great. I go to the theater, Imax 3D, and when the trailers start – Wow the 3D looks awful! It continued like that. The 3D in Avatar, or more correctly, the cinema where I saw Avatar, was so much better. I don’t think it was how the movie Avatar was made, because I remember the trailer to Alice also looked amazing, while here I barely noticed the 3D. I mean, I noticed it, but it wasn’t at all impressive. Why am I saying all this – the technological interpreter. (For those who simply want a film review you can jump the next two paragraphs).

I’m lately obsessed with the question of how are relation to the world is mediated by technology. I posted recently about stereos. If it used to be that we couldn’t hear Chopin’s works directly but needed a pianist or an orchestra, that we needed the actors to play a theater piece, we now have so many interpreters on the way. The CD player is an interpreter, so is the amplifier, so are the speakers, so is the electrical cable leading to your wall, so is the cable leading to the speaker, and so on. Each element has some part of the interpretation and sadly none of them have an insignificant part. I think it’s the advance of stereos that you start hearing all these differences, while it used to be that you wouldn’t expect any kind of good reproduction at home (or I’m listening to better systems where the difference is starting to show). We look at computer screens, and though we know that the color is not correct (on most screens), we judge by it, as how else are we to judge.

Still, people refuse to believe that the technology matters. If you read many of the posts in Avatar, even people who saw it in 2D (most of them, “surprisingly” didn’t like it as much) were sure that it had nothing to do with their thoughts of the movie. I can say that even 2 different Imax 3D theatres make a huge difference. I was shocked to find out recently that burning a CD on 2 different computers produced a completely different experience. It’s hard to believe, but we are separated from everything , or many things, by a technological interpreter. It is similar to reading a text after it has been translated and retranslated several times. Sometimes something remains, sometimes it is even improved, it all depends on the translator/interpreter, and there is no such thing as a “true” translation. This is now our world, and it is strange. We are dependent on good technological-interpreters, and we need to understand and acknowledge that any judgment we give has to do with our particular interpreters, and try to choose the best ones. (There are some people who don't even accept that regular interpreters (musicians, actors) matter at all).

So as described above, I didn’t get much of the 3D experience, mostly a headache and back ache trying to position myself in a way to get some 3D. (I was sitting exactly in the middle of the hall, which is supposed to be the best seat, mind you). In a different cinema it could have been much more impressive.

The film is only mildly based on Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland. They throw in the Cheshire cat and the rabbit, etc. but it’s mostly unrelated. It is a story of a girl needing to grow up. It gives a nice reading of the eat-me-drink-me which makes her bigger and smaller. A girl who doesn’t know whether she wants to become smaller or grow up. A girl who doesn’t know what size is she.  Growing up, for a girl, means accepting to grab the sword. As Alice runs into the rabbit hole deliberating whether to accept an offer of marriage, it is not hard to guess what is grabbing the sword a metaphor for. Of course, Lewis Caroll being a pedophile, might have come up with a somewhat similar story, but here they made Alice several years older. (In case you’re wondering why I’m calling Caroll, you should see for example some photography series he did with kids).

It’s also a story of a girl who does not want to take her prescribed place in the world. She does not want to behave “properly.” The white queen can’t kill the dragon, she is a beautiful woman and cannot hurt a fly. Alice in picking up the sword is not only touching a guy’s sword, she also gets to have a sword, to take man’s place in the world, rather than a woman who has to marry to give her life meaning. She wants to be a figure that can give the world order again, from the destruction left (after the death of her father). Like the caterpillar, she turned herself into a butterfly, but unlike the usual image of a woman turning into a butterfly, she is not only beauty, but also strength.

There have been many discussions on beauty here and its significance: What do we want from beauty , and Does Objective beauty exist and its link to Truth). Here again beauty and goodness meet. Like Dave beautifully describes, post,  beauty here is the beginning of horror; it is wounding, – it takes your eye out.