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From
The Mummy: “No one
ever got in trouble reading a book.” Then five minutes after reading
from the book, unholy heck breaks out. When Evelyn made that utterly
stupid statement, she was either lying through her teeth, or naïve. And
considering the stupid things scholars are portrayed doing in movies,
I’d say naïve! (TSTL syndrome: Too Stupid to Live.)
Supposedly you can raise the
dead to life by reading from the Book of the Dead,
and kill people by reading from the Book of Life.
Huh? Don’t ask me—the Egyptians made up that particular moronic rule
(which explains all that bizarre tomb art).
Actually, it wasn’t that she
read from the book, but that she read aloud, which
is how the hero of Inkheart gets into
trouble—reading aloud to his little girl. Mo preserves and
rehabilitates battered old books, and he’s basically living on the run
from a cold-hearted, fictional villain he brought into the real world
by reading aloud.
Is it just me, or are we getting
a lot of messages lately that books and reading are BAD FOR YOU?
In Harry Potter and
the Chamber of Secrets, what causes trouble for Harry? A
little book that Ginny reads, that brainwashes her and activates an
evil spell stored in the book.
Remember in The
Twilight Zone when Burgess Meredith, with the bottle-bottom
glasses, is tormented by everyone because he likes to read? He’s
portrayed as unrealistic, while everyone else has common sense. The
good fortune of surviving a bomb blast and finally having time to read
becomes misfortune when he drops his glasses and can’t read. The subtle
message was not to hide in the bank vault to read on your lunch break
because you’ll survive the destruction of civilization, but you won’t
enjoy it.
Movies, TV, and even books
nowadays are telling us that books are dangerous.
Well, DUH! Books are about as
close to the Vulcan mind meld as we’ll get for a long time (and quite
frankly, I’m relieved because I don’t want to know what most of you are
thinking, thanks very much). Books share and preserve for eternity
what’s in our hearts and minds,—or for as long as paper lasts and
there’s power for my Palm or Kindle or whatever your favorite e-reader
format might be. Books encourage thinking and dreaming, and teach us by
letting us live through others’ lives vicariously. What’s the first
thing tyrants do when they take over a country? They censor books, ban
books, burn books to control free thinking because people who read and
think eventually act on what they’re thinking.
In Inkheart,
fictional characters come to life. What irks me (besides that this book
is translated from German—excuse me? Don’t we have enough writers in
the U.S. struggling to get
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published? You have to go to another dang
country and import one of their books? Don’t we have protection for the
arts in this country?) is that the writer of the book the villains
escaped from is a moron! He’s delighted that his fictional villains
have come out of the book. He wants to meet them! He’s fascinated with
the idea of seeing them in action.
Talk about TSTL to the max.
He created them. He knows just
how vicious and diabolical they are, and instead of being afraid, he’s
a proud papa. Until he has to do some fast thinking to save his
miserable neck. The warning that “Hey, if you kill your author, you
might cease to exist” doesn’t slow the villains much. (Think about it:
How many books do we have that are still being read decades, even
centuries, after their authors died?)
Of course, the heroine of the
day is the kid. (Shades of Wesley saves the Enterprise
and Harry saves the wizarding world yet again.) Meggie inherited Mo’s
ability to bring fictional characters to life by reading aloud from
books, and she’s willing to experiment and try to do something to fight
back. Without her encouragement, the silly old writer wouldn’t have had
the courage to do what he should have done years ago—revise!
This movie starring Brendan
Fraser (Mummy movies, George of the Jungle) is
drastically changed from the book. I don’t know if I want to see the
movie—after viewing the video trailer—because it enlarges on the
message of Reading Is Dangerous for Your Health!
(Think about those commercials for Internet TV in which Alec Baldwin is
a space alien who wants your brain to turn to mush to make it easier
for him to slurp it up.)
Two more books follow Inkheart,
and I’m not certain I want to read the further misadventures of Meggie
and Mo and their ability to make fiction into fact. Don’t we have
politicians for that? Massive logic hole: Why not use this power to
read good things into the world? Isn’t there a hero
in the book who can beat Capricorn? Why not bring him out to fight? Mo
is a wimp, keeping his gift a secret, and doesn’t do
anything defensively except keep moving.
In all the years since Capricorn
came into our world, why didn’t Mo do something? You know, the old “the
best defense is a good offense” gambit? (Okay, there’s the problematic
caveat that every time you read someone out of a
book, something from our world goes into the book . . . but practice
would have led to control, right?) Heroes who don’t do anything except
run away aren’t heroic.
That bothers me even more than
the “Reading Is Dangerous” message: The only one who is truly heroic is
the kid, because she at least tries to save the day.
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