Control Nathan Rabin #85 The Dark Crystal (1982)
There are not many people about whom it can confidently be asserted that the world as a whole is richer for their lives. The Beatles certainly qualify, as does Billy Shakespeare, who wrote a whole bunch of sonnets. The world is better a place because John Waters and David Byrne and “Weird Al” Yankovic were all born and it is most assuredly a more enchanted realm because for fifty-three magical years a genius named Jim Henson lived and worked and called this lucky planet home.
I’m lucky that I did not really get into Jim Henson, whether through Sesame Street or the Muppet Babies or films like The Muppet Movie and Labyrinth until I was an adult, and had consequently developed a sense of awe child-like enough to do justice to staggeringly ambitious masterworks like 1982’s The Dark Crystal.
In a recent Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 I tried to do justice to the miraculous world-building of 1986’s astonishing and audacious Labyrinth but that wildly ambitious fantasy classic is practically Wacky Wally’s Puppet Parade compared to The Dark Crystal, which essentially sets out to do Star Wars with puppets, with a whole lot of Lord of the Rings and Joseph Campbell thrown in.
Up until The Dark Crystal, Henson’s extraordinary and enduring empire was essentially built on the sturdy foundation of lovable, light-hearted puppets interacting with human beings, often celebrities, in a light-hearted, music-filled, family and child-friendly setting. That certainly describes Sesame Street as well as The Muppet Show and all of the Muppet movies.
So it took extraordinary guts and courage for Henson to follow up The Great Muppet Caper with a big-budget fantasy movie with no actors, no human characters, almost nothing in the way of humor except some extraordinarily bleak comedy involving the evil, grasping ways of the film’s grotesque, vulture-like monsters and a tone that’s unrelentingly grim and obsessed with death.
In that respect The Dark Crystal follows in the footsteps of other Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 selections like Labyrinth and Rock & Rule and The Peanut Butter Solution in being far too dark and nightmarish and traumatic to be remotely appropriate for children or family audiences yet irresistible to generations of grim little weirdoes all the same.
I love the sub-genre of kid’s movies too bleak and fucked up for kids. Judging by your choices for this column you do as well. I’m talking about movies like Return to Oz, which The Dark Crystal certainly resembles in the trauma-inducing nature of its character design and seeming eagerness to fuck mercilessly with the fragile psyches of small children with imagery seeming better suited to A Clockwork Orange than a movie that set out to be a felt Star Wars.
The Dark Crystal opens on a bleak, characteristic note of funereal gloom, with a narrator introducing us to a world beyond our imagination, a wonderland of good and evil, great beauty and hideous ugliness. In this world live a horrible, cruel race of evil tyrants who look like dinosaur-sized birds of prey called the Skeksis. The Skeksis have died in such great quantities that they are now almost completely dead, with a mere ten survivors remaining.
The Skeksis have hunted and terrorized a gentle, wizard-like race known as “The Mystics.” The Mystics, in sharp contrast, have died in such great quantities that they are now almost completely dead, with a mere ten survivors remaining.
Finally, there are the peaceful and music-loving Gelflings, elf-like humanoid creatures who have died in such great quantities that they are almost all dead. At the beginning of the film, Gelfing protagonist/hero Jen thinks he’s the least of his kind in existence and is very pleasantly surprised to discover otherwise.
Into this deep, deep bath of apocalyptic death and doom Henson, who co-directed with Frank Oz and wrote the story, and screenwriter David Odell add a bracing element of EVEN MORE DEATH in the form of the death of Jen’s beloved Mystic master, who dispatches the earnest young man on a quest to find a crystal shard with the power to ward off the apocalypse AND the death of the demented, evil emperor of the Skeksis.
This sets off a power struggle within the emperor’s court among his evil minions that results in the hypnotically whimpering schemer Chamberlain getting exiled. Meanwhile, Jen embarks on a quest of destiny on some serious, straight-up Joseph Campbell type shit, proving his valor and worth by overcoming a series of obstacles and challenges in a fantastical world where everything seems to be alive and sentient and bursting with radiant life.
This being The Dark Crystal, the world is overflowing with death, genocide, enslavement and a looming, inevitable unavoidable apocalypse known as The Great Conjunction that occurs when three planets are aligned as well. As viscerally disturbing as the Skeksis are, they’re as cuddly as Baby Yoda compared to their enforcers the Garthim, giant, clattering lobster-like monsters every bit as unnerving as the Wheelers from Return to Oz.
The Gelfings are codified as Native Americans living in harmony with the natural world. To put things in Avatar terms, they’re the Na’vi to the Skeksis’ evil, grasping colonialists out to take everything they possibly can, even if it means leaving their planet a desolate, unlivable hellhole.
The kindly Podlings are similarly depicted as a benevolent indigenous race full of compassion for the people, creatures and trees around them, which is why it is so profoundly unnerving watching them hooked up to machines that drain them of their life essence, reducing them to dead-eyed husks, lifeless automatons enslaved en masse by their sadistic Skeksis masters.
The brainwashing and enslavement of the Podlings by the Skeksis, a sequence that calls to mind, perhaps deliberately, both the famous socialization-through-film sequence in A Clockwork Orange and the sinister experimentation of Nazi “doctors”, is one of many elements of the film that feel way too dark and disturbing for a blockbuster with a family audience.
That unrelenting darkness extends to the Great Conjunction essentially functioning as an apocalypse, a fantasy version of The Snap that single-handedly and dramatically re-orders pretty much the entire universe. The only question is whether Jen will achieve his goal in time and put in place a positive apocalypse/genocide, killing off all of the bad people in a purifying orgy of death and destruction but also re-birth and spiritual and ecological renewal.
The Dark Crystal finds paradoxical beauty in ugliness, grace through devastation, great humanity in fantastical worlds devoid of so much as a single human being. The Dark Crystal is a staggering technical and technological achievement. Like Labyrinth, it is a genuinely miraculous endeavor from some of the greatest puppeteers in human history working feverishly at the very apex of their extraordinary ability to create something the world of film had never seen before and would never see again, in part because the cost and work involved make it impossible to recapture or reproduce.
If The Dark Crystal were made thirty years later they’d undoubtedly Shrekify the shit out of it, adding Smash Mouth songs, fart jokes and at least one sassy talking animal sidekick to make it more palatable to an audience of dim-witted, easily amused dullards. They’d pander relentlessly to what they imagine a family audience wants, or at least try to replicate what has proven successful in the past.
The Dark Crystal doesn’t do that. It does not dumb anything down. It does not feel the need to interject comic relief to undercut the often unrelenting bleakness of its universe. It trusts the attention spans of children. It trusts the intelligence of children. It trusts in children’s ability to handle violence and brutality and silence and wonder.
For a movie about a quest The Dark Crystal is in no hurry to get to its destination because it knows how much awe and wonder and staggering beauty there is along the way. This is world-building on a level seldom even attempted, let alone realized, and with felt and rubber and animatronics and unparalleled artistry rather than CGI or computer graphics.
The Dark Crystal is some seriously fucked up shit, a head film for kiddies that’s intoxicatingly dream-like and pure nightmare fuel in equal measure. I mean that as high praise. Henson and Oz really were wizards and, like Labyrinth, this is movie magic in its purest form from a late, lamented genius almost too brilliant and pure for this degraded world.
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