What I Love About Legend

A beautiful movie in all respects, Legend left an impression on me years ago when I saw it as a kid, and now that I’m past thirty, I’m more appreciative of the artistic achievments of the film.  But I’m a bitter person at heart, so I’m going to explain what modern fairy tale storys lack.

“No fate, no destiny. You caused the problem; you fix it.” That’s right, a movie about good versus evil  that doesn’t play the protagonist as a hero destined to save the day. Destiny is always kind of a gyp to me. The course of events are already set, so does it really matter what the hero chooses to do? Oh, right, the hero chooses to ‘do the right thing’ or not, but he doesn’t have to grapple with difficult desicions, because the right path will always present itself for those with faith. Blah. I want heroes that worry thing like “I hope this works,” or “Which way do I go? I’m running out of time.” I want to feel that the hero has to work at saving the day, bust his ass to pull out a victory, not just shrug his shoulders and choose between right and wrong. In Legend, we have Jack who is sent on a quest with the words “you’ll do.” He isn’t special at all, not in a cosmic sense. He has heroic qualities, but there wouldn’t be a movie at all if he hadn’t let his personal desires get in the way of what he knew was right in the first place.

Speaking of personal desires, that brings me to my second point. Why do we have such a focus on the inner workings of protagonists lately? Their desires almost always tie in with the fate/destiny problem and somehow if they ‘do the right thing’ that actually involves merely justifying their shitty actions. Give me a movie hero that acts like a hero for a change. I won’t watch The Dark Knight because the Batman in Batman Begins was a selfish ass who was only interested in justifying his own selfish actions. A hero isn’t someone who is driven by personal ‘issues’ or finds a way to cope with them while saving the day.  No, no, no. A hero overcomes his personal issues, puts them to the side, because they get in the way. A hero realizes that he is the Few (or the One, as Captain Kirk said in Star Trek II) whose needs are outweighed by the needs of the Many.  “My shit,” the hero says, “doesn’t mean anything compared to the world.” Jack, in Legend, would rather not save the world, because he’s not prepared for it, and the idea is damned frightening.  But he goes along with it because it’s his responsibility. He doesn’t do it to save Lily; she isn’t kidnapped until he’s made the decision to save the world.

Last, this is my favorite thing about Legend: Good versus Evil is not the point. It’s a metaphor for something else. Sometimes, just sometimes, good and evil don’t make a difference in the real world. It’s movie magic, pixie dust, just a fairy glamour.  Let’s pretend that Legend isn’t a story about unicorns, but about someone in the real world, translating that story into these goblin/unicorn images.  What’s really going on? It’s about the loss of innocence and struggling with how jaded someone can be when they’ve experienced something terrible. Or even wonderful! Like sex! The wole world in Legend breaks down because these two kids had a tryst out in the woods. Maybe it was a fantastic thing, maybe the sex was terrible, but it doesn’t really matter. They’ve crossed a threshold, moving from innocence to experience (go read your fucking Blake – also why Ridley Scott used the imagery in Legend that he did). And in the end, what happens? The girl is broken out of the spell put on her by Jack’s pledge of marriage.  Now, I’m not no naive to believe that marriage is an answer to all sexual problems, I’m just pointing out the major themes of this film: youth, growth, dealing with seemingly innocent actions that lead to disasterous results, inner darkness that never goes away, the ring, the passage of time, the change of seasons, love, sex, seduction. The movie isn’t about light struggling against darkness, but how the innocent must tredge through dark periods of experience to reach the light of knowledge, or enLIGHTenment. Changed and made better, wiser, but no longer stupid kids. And in the end, the fairies leave Jack for good. He isn’t a product of the pure nature/forest anymore. He’s taken up the trappings of soldiers, the products of experienced men. And Lily learns that women have to be decietful bitches sometimes, to give in to the seduction once in a while to get something better out of it (who was more seductive? Jack or Darkness? One of them scored and the other didn’t.)

While writing this, I realized that there are a few more points I’d like to cover: Literature and God.  These things never used to be mutually exclusive (read some Milton, or Chaucer, or Spenser, or Shakespeare – the Big Four). But, well, so it is with a fundamentalist mentality that doesn’t trust education. Throw out literary references because they get in the way of simplistic understanding of God (unless it’s Tolkien or C. S. Lewis, but that’s another rant entirely). Clearly, Tim Curry’s character looks like the devil, but the only direct reference to Christian mythology is calling the unicorn’s horn ‘an antenna reaching towards Heaven.’ Visually, and thematically, the film has closer ties to Blake than the Bible. Now, we could talk about the Bible’s influences on Blake, but I think Blake’s entire point is that “there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Heratio, than are dreamt of” in the Bible’s philosophy… things such as Innocence and Experience.

(A tangent – the character of Meg Mucklebones was played by Robert Picardo, the holographic Doctor in Star Trek: Voyager. Meg was a much better role and acting job.)