1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 67: The secret of Roan Inish

This gentle movie is the closest I’ve seen to a live-action My Neighbor Totoro or Ponyo. Set and filmed in Ireland with Irish actors, it’s not just Irish. It’s based on a book set in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland; the book’s Canadian-born author, Rosalie K. Fry, lived in Wales. The movie’s director, John Sayles, is from the United States. His movies explore social issues. This one is more primal. Its protagonists are citizens of the sea.

They dwell on a sparsely-peopled coast. They aren’t outcasts or recluses or separatists; they’re pulled spiritually – or naturally (the distinction is blurred) – toward the water. Their numbers have dwindled, and they’ve moved to the mainland, deserting their native Roan Inish (“seal island”). They pine for their old home. They occasionally paddle their fishing boats over to Roan Inish, where the abandoned huts still stand, disheveled but sturdy.

Seals have long frequented this island and communed with the people. Legends say that some of the islanders were born of Selkies (seal-women). Selkie traits have been passed down. Some of the people are fair, some, dark; the dark ones are especially seal-like.

A golden-haired little girl, Fiona, whose family has moved away from the community, returns to live with her grandparents. (Her mother has died and her father is drowning his sorrows in the taverns.) The movie is especially Totoro-like when it observes the child exploring beaches and meadows, gathering mussels, and stirring liquid boat-tar for her grandfather. She listens to the locals’ wondrous tales: Seals save a youth from drowning. A man captures a Selkie and makes her his wife. A baby – Jamie, Fiona’s brother – is pulled out to the sea, by the tide, in a wooden ark-cradle; from time to time, the islanders glimpse a cherubic little boy bobbing on the waves in his cradle or running along the beaches.

These stories are told as if they might be true. Fiona accepts them as true.

The tellings are haunting, as achingly beautiful as any scenes in any movie. The movie is visually beautiful: It was filmed by the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler. The land and sky and sea are beautiful. So is Fiona, the serene little girl.

There is a tradition of literary criticism that says that stories fall into patterns of universal archetypes, and that these patterns can be arranged by season: romance (summer), tragedy (autumn), satire and irony (winter), and comedy (spring). (Never mind that not every culture recognizes the same seasons.) One season leads to the next. Children begin with romance. Romance fixes its gaze on a world apart from ours, idealized and inaccessible (at least right now). Edenic literature is romantic literature.

People outgrow Eden; or, rather, their injuries and sins bar them from it. They move on to sadness, then to cynicism. If they’re fortunate, they’ll achieve comic rebirth. To this end, it may help them to retain some picture of Eden, to acknowledge rather than disavow the imaginative role that romance plays in the cycle.

This is the kind of picture that The Secret of Roan Inish gives us: a picture of innocence, of the most absorbing and hopeful moments of childhood, of natural beauty, of a lost home worth seeking. A romance for adults.

A funeral; autumn; Dames Daphne and Agatha; who should have played Ariadne Oliver?

R.I.P. Carolyn (1934–2023), a kindly woman in our church who took a shine to our family. Karin & I attended her funeral – or Karin did; I remained in a Sunday School room with our offspring.

(Samuel and Daniel took turns gently pushing a doll in a pram, in circles, in the Sunday School room. By “took turns,” I mean they fought each other for the privilege.)

(Daniel sits on my shoulder as I type this and whacks me on the head. Will the violence ever cease?)

As the weather changes, my thoughts direct themselves toward pleasantly gloomy, autumnal things. Karin already has put our mermaid-skeleton on display. Indeed, she did so before the equinox. … Like my mother, who has gone to Minnesota to look at the leaves, I plan to take a short journey, within a month’s time; I have been thinking of what to read on the airplane. The current frontrunner is a volume of stories by Daphne Du Maurier: “Don’t Look Now,” “The Birds,” etc.

Kenneth Branagh has made a new Poirot movie, A Haunting in Venice, which evokes Du Maurier more than its ostensive source material, Agatha Christie’s novel Hallowe’en Party – which is set, not along the canals of Venice, but in the gardens and lanes of England. Ariadne Oliver is played by Tina Fey, which is another heresy. I should have preferred Nicola Walker.

I’ve almost finished reading the much-funnier-than-expected King John and have decided that instead of choosing my next play by lot, I’ll just reread Macbeth.

Some ex-residences

Forgive me for raking up old history, some of which I’ve surely blogged about before, but I have little else to discuss tonight. I must be getting on in years because I’m keen to list buildings I’ve lived in that have been torn down.

(1, 2) Mission houses, Las Palmas, Esmeraldas, Ecuador.

My boyhood home was the eastern house. As a baby, I briefly lived in the western house.

(3) Cottage on the property of Lakeview Church, Zion, Illinois.

My family lived in Zion from 1990 to 1991 (my third-grade year).

(4) Missionary Church Dorm, Quito, Ecuador.

My home during boarding-school years.

If I were asked to choose one former residence to live in forever, this would be it. My own Hogwarts.

It was torn down a few weeks ago.

(5) The Music Machine, River Park, South Bend, Indiana.

I lived in the tiny apartment above the office of the Music Machine, a DJ-ing business. I moved in when I married Karin. Less than a year later, the city forced us out and built a fire station on the land.

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I used Google Maps to try to find the house in Seattle’s U-District in which I rented a room for four months, in 2004 and 2005.

Ultimately, I can’t be sure of the address. It was a grungy building surrounded by gaudy fraternity houses. I leeched wireless Internet from one of those fraternities; the network was called “Sex Gods.” So, if I’m ever back in that neighborhood, I’ll know how to pinpoint my old location.

I did find this lovely 2013 article in the University of Washington’s student newspaper about my landlady, who rented to ex-cons, sex offenders, and others who needed a break. I was in neither of the first two categories, but she rented to me after she called my friends and they confirmed that I didn’t drink alcohol. (And it was good that she rented to me, because it was about the only room in Seattle I could have afforded.)

I lent her my mom’s parents’ missionary memoirs, and she read them.

That year and the next, when I moved back and forth across the continent, alone, to pursue fruitless but necessary studies, the Lord put me in touch with some remarkable people.

I finish reading Harry Potter

Well, this afternoon, I became, at the age of forty-one – almost forty-two – the latest person to have read all of the Harry Potter series, excluding Fantastic Beasts, Beedle the Bard, Quidditch through the Ages, The Cursed Child, and whatever other appendices, spinoffs, and fanfictions there may be. That is, I read nos. 1–7, Sorcerer’s Stone through Deathly Hallows.

The series took hold of me as I read, and by the end I knew it was a profound thing.

My advice to serious readers disinclined to invest in Harry Potter, who’d dismiss it out of hand:

Just slog through book 1. It isn’t a great book. But it’s short, and it does some necessary scene-setting. If it seems lightweight, that’s because it’s supposed to be. The series is clever that way. At first, the characters concern themselves mostly with ephemera, with froth. This changes. Gradually, inevitably, things get weightier, starker, huger, until whatever trivia came before drops out of view.

Meanwhile, enjoy the satire. There’s a lot of it, and it gets cleverer and more pungent. Enjoy the gentle mockery of ordinary human foolishness. Enjoy it in good conscience. Ultimately, the series is on the side of these sinners, it’s about saving sinners, it doesn’t shirk from paying redemptive costs.

That’s a good rule of thumb for finding profundity in popular art (not that all art must be profound). If a work is to have depth, it’ll soon acknowledge discord: perhaps, evil. If so, as a popular work, it might handle its topic lightly. It might satirize. Ride this wave first. It might take you farther than you expected, to more sobering shores, especially if the piece is long: a book exceeding, oh, five hundred pages; a movie exceeding, oh, two hours; a daily comic strip or radio show or blog lasting, oh, two decades. Lo and behold, the thing might not just offer criticisms; it might offer a positive vision, a hopeful possibility worth considering. It might not only diagnose sin, not only prescribe a personalized cure, but gesture toward or detail a renovated world in which temptation and envy and fear need not have purchase, need not sting at all.

Disasters, pt. 2; body-text fonts, pt. 19: Linux Libertine

Samuel is fine; he seems not to have been harmed at all by the toxic berries that he put into his mouth on Friday.

Thank you, readers, for your prayers and your concern.

Today, my children have been dumping their grits and eggs onto the floor, sometimes accidentally, sometimes not.

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This month’s typeface is Linux Libertine, which is free to download and use, and which supplies glyphs for virtually all characters of today’s Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Hebrew scripts (and some others). You’ve seen it in Wikipedia’s logo (which employs an alternate “W”).

I especially like the top serifs of Libertine’s “C” and “G” and the long-tailed “Q” of the “Qu” ligature. The “O” too is pleasingly not-quite-symmetrical.

On the other hand, I think the “Th” ligature is distracting and pointless. Disabling it while leaving other ligatures intact isn’t an option, but these letters can be pulled apart using a zero-point kern.

Libertine has a companion humanist sans-serif typeface: Linux Biolinum.

I don’t often see Libertine used as non-electronic body text, although linguists seem to like it because it prints such a wide range of letters, punctuation marks, etc. I own a couple of philosophic volumes from Princeton University Press that are set in Libertine.