Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 102

by Naim Kabir

  Mimic (1997)

  In the filmography of almost any visionary director, there is bound to be at least one film that represents a compromise between the director’s vision and the demands of the filmmaking machine. For Guillermo del Toro, that film was Mimic, his second feature and his first studio film. For years it was available only in a theatrical cut that lacked del Toro’s seal of approval, but recently a director’s cut, fully color-corrected by del Toro himself, was released onto Blu-ray. The director’s cut did more than just remove jump scares and action beats shot by the second unit; it returned the picture to something more closely resembling the director’s original vision, and brought the film’s symbolic elements more to the foreground.

  “I wanted to make them God’s favorite creatures, angels,” del Toro says of the film’s giant Judas Breed insects in Cabinet of Curiosities. “I wanted very much to indicate that God favored our downfall as a species.”6 On the opposite page is an image from one of del Toro’s ubiquitous notebooks, in which a man is “prostrating himself before the godlike figure of the man-shaped insect, a shaft of sunlight sweeping diagonally across them from on high, as if God were passing judgment.” 7

  In the original screenplay, one of the characters was meant to take up de la Guardia’s chorus from Cronos, with lines like, “What if God is fed up with us? What if insects are now God’s favorite creatures?”8 Unfortunately, none of this dialogue made it into the final screenplay, leaving the heavy lifting of the film’s thematic concerns almost entirely in the hands of the visuals. The director’s cut does restore a scene of a woman calling the Judas Breed what del Toro called them in early treatments for the film, “dark angels.”9

  The first time we see the Judas Breed is in and around a run-down inner city church. The film’s first on-screen fatality is a priest who falls to his death in front of a huge neon cross that reads, “Jesus Saves.” Inside the decaying church, the Judas Breed blend in with the plastic-wrapped figures of saints, familiar imagery for viewers of Cronos with its hanging gallery of archangels wrapped in plastic sheeting. In his commentary for Mimic, del Toro says that he wrapped the saints in plastic to make them “obsolete, out-of-order holy figures.” 10

  “We created the church and the despoiled figures again in the idea that the natural order of the sanctity of the world and our place in creation was being subverted, and that the new fathers and mothers of the world were insects,”11 del Toro continues in his commentary track. As the film progresses, this subversion is driven home again and again through careful visual choices. From the color coding, which makes it feel as if the “humans are insects trapped in amber,”12 to a dramatic change of scale in the film’s final acts, in which the humans find themselves in a massive underground subway station, effectively reduced to the size of insects, scurrying around, desperately trying to accomplish menial tasks, while the “dark angels” can climb the walls with ease or effortlessly fly around them.

  Among the many struggles that del Toro describes when talking about the making of Mimic are his efforts to ensure that the character of Dr. Peter Mann wears glasses. “I like the idea of showing how imperfect mankind is,” del Toro says in Cabinet of Curiosities. “The insects in Mimic were all organic, but mankind needed glasses, artificial limbs. The mimics are the perfect ones, not us.”13 The value of human imperfection is another subject that comes up again and again in Guillermo del Toro’s filmography, and the dichotomy of the mechanistic perfection of the insect is one that he also brings up in the commentary track for Cronos, where he says, “I do happen to believe that insects, as far as form and function, are the most perfect—albeit soulless—creatures of creation.”14

  Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

  If asked to identify the single most recurrent theme in Guillermo del Toro’s body of work, “the value of human imperfection and the choices that we make because of it” would probably be a pretty good start. While del Toro’s sixth feature and his third—and most widely celebrated—Spanish-language film may not seem to have a lot to do with insects at first glance, it does have a lot to do with choice and human imperfection, and it features an insect in a particularly key role.

  We are first introduced to the insect in one of the earliest sequences of Pan’s Labyrinth, where we see it crawling out of the statue of a saint, continuing del Toro’s habit of equating insects with Catholic imagery. It’s also the last time it will happen in the film, though, breaking the insect free of its previous Catholic trappings in Cronos and Mimic and eventually equating it with a more pagan conception of eternal life. During this sequence, as the human protagonists arrive at the mill where most of the rest of the film will take place, our focus stays on the insect as it flits between the trees. In his commentary track, del Toro says, “I wanted to emphasize with the camera how important the insect was.”15

  Freed from the Catholic imagery of Cronos or Mimic, the insect in Pan’s Labyrinth is also distinct from the more oppressive or ominous themes of the insects in those films. No longer a “dark angel” passing divine judgment, the insect instead acts as a psychopomp, not only literally leading Ofelia into the labyrinth, but also serving as a visual transition device that signals to the viewer a shift from the “real world” of fascist-occupied Spain to the film’s fairytale underworld.

  In most traditions, the psychopomp’s job is not to pass judgment on the dead, but merely to provide them safe passage into the underworld. In this way, the insect in Pan’s Labyrinth is very different from the Cronos Device or the “dark angels” of Mimic, acting as a bridge to eternal life, rather than a means of obtaining it, or an alternative to it.

  Over the years since the film’s release, much has been made about whether the magical elements of Pan’s Labyrinth are intended to be objectively “real” within the film, and del Toro himself has called the film a “litmus test” for audiences.16 By any reading, though, there are obvious parallels between the fairytale world of the film and the afterlife of many religious traditions. Del Toro has pointed to Ofelia’s choices at the end of the movie as her “giving birth to herself,”17 a theme that recurs in many of his projects. It’s telling that the last image of Pan’s Labyrinth is not of Ofelia in the fairy world, but of a flower blooming on the formerly dead tree that she saved from the toad in the “real world.” Here we see a purer kind of eternal life than the one offered by the Cronos Device, an immortality in which our choices today promote new life in the future.

  FOOTNOTES:

  1 Del Toro, Guillermo and Marc Scott Zicree. Cabinet of Curiosities. New York: Harper Design, 2013. 84

  2 Del Toro, Guillermo. Audio Commentary: Cronos (1993) Criterion, 2010. DVD

  3 Del Toro, Audio Commentary: Cronos

  4 Del Toro, Audio Commentary: Cronos

  5 Del Toro, Guillermo. Audio Commentary: Mimic (1997) Lionsgate, 2012. Blu-ray

  6 Del Toro, Cabinet of Curiosities, 90

  7 Del Toro, Cabinet of Curiosities, 89-90

  8 Del Toro, Audio Commentary: Mimic

  9 Del Toro, Audio Commentary: Mimic

  10 Del Toro, Audio Commentary: Mimic

  11 Del Toro, Audio Commentary: Mimic

  12 Del Toro, Audio Commentary: Mimic

  13 Del Toro, Cabinet of Curiosities, 97

  14 Del Toro, Audio Commentary: Cronos

  15 Del Toro, Guillermo. Audio Commentary: Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). New Line, 2007. DVD

  16 Del Toro, Audio Commentary: Pan’s Labyrinth

  17 Del Toro, Audio Commentary: Pan’s Labyrinth

  About the Author

  Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, amateur film scholar, and monster expert who was born on the night before Halloween. He’s the author of Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings and of the forthcoming Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts. His favorite Guillermo del Toro movie is probably Pacific Rim, and you can find him online at orringrey.com, where he writes about monsters, movies, and monster movies, among other things.

  Music, Magic, and Memory:
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br />   A Conversation with Randy Henderson

  and Silvia Morena-Garcia

  Jason Heller

  There aren’t that many similarities between Randy Henderson’s Finn Fancy Necromancy and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Signal to Noise. But the elements they share are intriguing. Both are debut novels; both were published on February 10th (by Tor and Solaris, respectively); and both are urban fantasies in which music mingles with magic. In Finn Fancy Necromancy, a fifteen-year-old, music-loving necromancer from the ’80s returns to modern-day Seattle after spending twenty-five years imprisoned in stasis for a magical crime he didn’t commit. In Signal to Noise, a fifteen-year-old girl living in Mexico City in the ’80s discovers a way to cast spells using the popular music of the day that she loves.

  Despite those coincidental parallels, the tones of the two novels are utterly distinct. Where Finn Fancy Necromancy sports a humorous, easygoing tone spiked with slivers of the horrific, Signal to Noise is more atmospheric, somber, and poignant. Which makes sense, seeing as how Henderson’s previous fiction (which has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Escape Pod, and Writers of the Future Vol. 30, the last being the result of his winning Writers of the Future in 2014) tends toward the lighthearted, while Moreno-Garcia is best known as an award-nominated author and editor of dark fiction (as well as the publisher of the revered, Lovecraft-centric Innsmouth Free Press). Henderson and Moreno-Garcia spoke with Clarkesworld about their books, where music and magic meet, and the role of nostalgia in popular culture.

  Finn Fancy Necromancy and Signal to Noise are very different novels, yet they have one big thing in common: Each revolves around the pop culture of decades past, particularly music. What inspired you to make this so central to your books?

  Randy Henderson: Um, because ’80s music is totally awesome? Doy! Basically, I’m a child of the ’80s, it is the decade of my formative youth—the decade of post-punk, new Wave, MTV, and the dawn of rap; the rise of video games, home computers, awesome fantasy and science fiction, movies, and the golden sunset of Saturday morning cartoons. So I created an excuse in Finn Fancy Necromancy to share that by having him be an exile from the ’80s in our time.

  Silvia Morena-Garcia: My parents and my grandfather worked in radio. We had a lot of records around my house. My parents “made” me a radio talent when I was a kid. I must have been younger than six. Probably around three or four. They had a children’s show on the radio, and they’d use me to record little bits of sound or children’s laughter or anything like that. So sound in general was our bread and butter.

  Both books deal with music and magic, but in Signal to Noise, music and magic are closely connected, whereas in Finn Fancy Necromancy, those elements aren’t related at all. What drew you to those respective approaches?

  Silvia Morena-Garcia: I don’t recall a draft of Signal to Noise that did not intertwine magic, but I can’t tell you why I thought it was a good idea to have them together.

  Randy Henderson: For me, I wanted Finn Fancy Necromancy to have a kind of magic he didn’t actually like or want. And who wouldn’t love to cast magic by singing? Well, I guess unless you had to sing [The Beach Boys’] “Kokomo” or [Phil Collins’] “Sussudio” or something. But some Smiths or Clash or New Edition? Heck yeah! Also, I’ve always admired Lyndon Hardy’s Master of the Five Magics for its depiction of magic systems and wanted to use something similar.

  And of course, I like my main character Finn, so didn’t want him facing a bad guy casting Nickleback and Creed tunes at him, or using auto-tuning. That’s just too cruel.

  Why does the music of the past resonates so deeply with you?

  Silvia Morena-Garcia: Well, it wasn’t the music of the past! I was a kid in the ’80s. MTV and I share a birth year. And even when I riffled through my parents ABBA records and their Bee Gees records, I had no idea that belonged to another decade. This did not help my popularity, but I’ve never scored too high in the social convention department.

  Randy Henderson: Similar story, though I never riffled through her parents ABBA records. The ’80s were my early teens, and music so much defines our teen years for all the obvious reasons—emotional expression, establishing identity, and of course looking for fashion tips you certainly won’t regret later. So the music of the ’80s and early ’90s will always resonate most strongly with my nostalgia bone.

  Nostalgia bone. That is a thing right? I think it’s one of those tiny floating bones in your listen-hole? Which makes sense why music would trigger it.

  Mixtapes also pop up in both your books—and LPs figure prominently in Signal to Noise. What kind of appeal or power do these physical, analog forms of recorded music hold, especially now that digital music have become the norm?

  Randy Henderson: A digital playlist can never replace a mixtape/CD. Mixtapes are a physical symbol that you cared enough to spend the time creating it, and decorating/crafting the container is as important as the music. It isn’t just picking a bunch of songs you want to share; it is a carefully crafted message, something that can be held onto for decades.

  But if your intent is to confess love via mix tape/CD, just remember Randy’s Rules for Mixtapes: Friend Mixtape for a friend = Awesome. Love Mixtape for someone to whom you’ve expressed a romantic interest after that interest was returned (and not subsequently rejected or legally restricted) = Bodacious. Mixtape O’ True Love for someone who has never shown interest in you romantically and is unaware of your feelings? = Risky (on many levels) at best, creepy or harassing at worst. And for the love of Cheez Whiz, DO NOT RECORD YOURSELF confessing your love or pretending to be a DJ on a mixtape. Just don’t. Ever.

  Silvia Morena-Garcia: Like Randy said, the mixtape was not just about curating music; it also involved the visual experience. Mixtapes would often be decorated, so it expressed a graphic and a musical message. Similarly, a vinyl record came with liner notes which could include anything from lyrics to images of the band, biographical data, and commentary. CDs had booklets. It’s not the same experience when you have liner notes than just the music in isolation. They are one. One package. Even though some companies now offer you the ability to download the PDF this is also not the same thing. If the medium is the message, then the message is altered without these physical objects. I’m not saying it’s good or bad, just that it’s not the same experience.

  I have an interest in media archeology, and that involves old tech as an object of study. I’ll give you an example: the phonautograph. This is the earliest device known to record sound. It was basically a stylus tracing on paper. But by digitally scanning the tracing we were able to play it back. So essentially a piece of paper is talking to you. And another fun one: There is a project (called Signal to Noise, ha) that repurposes old tech. Here they take old cassettes and a plotter to “play” them. You can’t do that with your MP3, can you?

  In Finn Fancy Necromancy, the protagonist is still, in essence, a fifteen-year-old kid from the ’80s. In Signal to Noise, the protagonist is a fifteen-year-old kid in the ’80s. Are there any traces of your own childhoods in these characters?

  Randy Henderson: Traces? No. Full-on colored illustrations? Yes. Finn is so very much me, with magic and his own issues. I sometimes worry a bit at the reviews that say I did an excellent job of capturing the stunted emotional and intellectual state of a fifteen-year-old thrust suddenly into a forty-year-old body. Er, that is, I’m sure it was all intentional on my part and reflects nothing more than my brilliant skill as a writer.

  Silvia Morena-Garcia: A lot of my stories are autobiographical, and this one falls in that category. I had a really weird time in high school, and I’m still not sure I’m a member of your same species.

  These are your debut novels. Before this, had you injected music—or pop culture at large—into any of your short fiction?

  Silvia Morena-Garcia: Yep. Mostly stuff about movies. I wrote a story about an El Santo-like character called “Iron Justice Against the Fiends of Evil,” and “Stories with Happy Endings” was
inspired by the black and white horror movies I watched as a kid. And then there’s all the Lovecraftiana. A lot of Lovecraftiana. The thing is we exist in a referential society with memes and GIFs, and it is almost impossible not to think pop culture.

  Randy Henderson: I had not, beyond basic worldbuilding/background details.

  What are some of your favorite works of speculative fiction that use music as a theme or motif?

  Randy Henderson: So many! Anne McCaffrey’s Harper Hall trilogy (one of my annual reads). Soul Music by Terry Pratchett. The songs embedded in The Lord of the Rings left a huge impression and obviously made that world truly live. In Piers Anthony’s Apprentice Adept series, the main character’s special flavor of magic was rhyming song, so of course I crafted many a rhyming spell in my daydreams after that. A lot of stories by Mercedes Lackey features music or bards. And of course there’s always The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.

  Silvia Morena-Garcia: *crickets*

  Randy Henderson: Ha! Crickets also make awesome music. And Buddy Holly was pretty cool.

  How about outside of books?

  Randy Henderson: Outside of books, there’s the classic ’80s game The Bard’s Tale. Legend of Zelda incorporated magical tunes as well, for that matter. And of course, who could forget the ’80s movies Heavy Metal, and Rock & Rule (even if you wanted to), both very much speculative fiction operas? But obviously, the most important music-related spec-fic film of all time would have to be Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I mean, their music totally saved the world, dude!

  Music isn’t the only kind of vintage pop culture in Finn Fancy Necromancy and Signal to Noise. Books, films, and television also appear, among others. Do you consider your novels to be nostalgic? Is nostalgia, like magic, something that can be used for both good and evil?