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jrf's picture

parody-parody

I think it's interesting that several of the takeoffs on Alice that we've looked at (even the non-creepy ones) have moved towards what seems like a less nonsensical version of the same characters/events. Many of them make a coherent story out of what was a much more dreamlike and nonsensical sequence of events: in particular, American McGee's Alice and the new Tim Burton movie (as well as Hatter M, a graphic-novel adaptation of the Alice stories where the Hatter is a superpowered warrior who has to venture into the real world to rescue Alice) make the Red Queen into an evil totalitarian against whose rule (and evil playing-card soldiers) Alice must fight. Unlike the original books, these stories have (to varying degrees) narrative coherence, villains and heroes, and consequences that progress logically from protagonists' actions. This does seem to be the logical way to make a parody of a parody-- these adaptations do, in fact, take elements of the original Alice and twist them into something very different, by returning the characters in a nonsense story to conventional story-telling methods. I'm not sure how successful any of these attempts are, though (and at what? if parody is intended to point out the inherent absurdity in something, what does a parody of a parody accomplish?). I'm wondering too about why so many people seem "compelled to turn Alice into something that is not for children"-- does that count, too, as a form of parody by making the story more conventional?

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