I didn't grow up with Monkey. Whatever. My cultures have their own heritages of stories, and I doubt one of them has not been worked over for at least one recent major motion picture within the last several years. Protectiveness bores me, and I think it ought to bore everyone who participates in a community that's all about re-approaching works.
A quick Wikipedia check tells me a little about Journey to the West - that it is itself, at least in part, a sort of appropriation/retelling of a collection of older Chinese folktales. As far as I can come up with, there's only one close comparison in the West, Le Morte D'Arthur, and the Robin Hood story fails to match up because it drifts in and out of publication without any telling ever becoming really authoritative.
A major film was just published, called Robin Hood, in which Robin is a commoner who takes on the identity of Robert Loxley, who is active not during King Richard's reign but during King John's subsequent one, in which the Merry Men meet while fighting in the Crusades... et cetera, et cetera. It filmed in Wales, around London, and in Sherwood.
Another major film was put out in 2004, called King Arthur, in which Arthur is a Roman officer trying to preserve Hadrian's Wall against the Picts. It bore little resemblance to the Arthur myth, and yet claimed to be the most accurate telling yet. It was shot in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
If you assert that the British government would have had the right to create review boards that would prevent filming in the United Kingdom for stories which do not get script approval, you then have to demonstrate two things: first, that the British people have a right to dictate who and how people get to tell 'their' story, and second that a small review board is qualified to and capable of deciding on their behalf. I'm skeptical on both counts.
Ultimately, I'm very skeptical of what you apparently take for granted - that Chinese "culture effectively 'owns' a large chunk of the legend". I don't know what 'effectively' nor 'owns' means here, nor, in fact, 'a large chunk'. Demonstrating that some subgroup any smaller than the human race 'owns' a story will prove to be as difficult, I think, as demonstrating that an individual owns a story.
The only way a person can keep his grip on a story is not to tell it to anyone, ever. Is the only way a culture can keep its grip on a story to never tell it to anyone outside the group? Well, it's a bit late for that. The story's out, and now it's going to get told and told again. Whether or not it qualifies in the strictest sense as 'censorship', attempting to exert creative influence over someone else's telling of that story isn't just pointless - it's likely to do a lot more harm than good.
It annoys me that people routinely expect the things Gaiman says in casual conversation to meet the standards of minutia-nitpick that the online fan community loves to bring to the table with respect to pretty much everything. The bottom line is that if I trust anyone to bring me a version of this story which I am capable of accessing, it's Gaiman a lot more than either any film review board I could think of or any group of people who grew up with this story indigenously. (Maybe not James Cameron, though.)
Woah, screed. If I spent half so many words on my actual writing...
no subject
Date: 19 Mar 2011 09:37 pm (UTC)A quick Wikipedia check tells me a little about Journey to the West - that it is itself, at least in part, a sort of appropriation/retelling of a collection of older Chinese folktales. As far as I can come up with, there's only one close comparison in the West, Le Morte D'Arthur, and the Robin Hood story fails to match up because it drifts in and out of publication without any telling ever becoming really authoritative.
A major film was just published, called Robin Hood, in which Robin is a commoner who takes on the identity of Robert Loxley, who is active not during King Richard's reign but during King John's subsequent one, in which the Merry Men meet while fighting in the Crusades... et cetera, et cetera. It filmed in Wales, around London, and in Sherwood.
Another major film was put out in 2004, called King Arthur, in which Arthur is a Roman officer trying to preserve Hadrian's Wall against the Picts. It bore little resemblance to the Arthur myth, and yet claimed to be the most accurate telling yet. It was shot in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
If you assert that the British government would have had the right to create review boards that would prevent filming in the United Kingdom for stories which do not get script approval, you then have to demonstrate two things: first, that the British people have a right to dictate who and how people get to tell 'their' story, and second that a small review board is qualified to and capable of deciding on their behalf. I'm skeptical on both counts.
Ultimately, I'm very skeptical of what you apparently take for granted - that Chinese "culture effectively 'owns' a large chunk of the legend". I don't know what 'effectively' nor 'owns' means here, nor, in fact, 'a large chunk'. Demonstrating that some subgroup any smaller than the human race 'owns' a story will prove to be as difficult, I think, as demonstrating that an individual owns a story.
The only way a person can keep his grip on a story is not to tell it to anyone, ever. Is the only way a culture can keep its grip on a story to never tell it to anyone outside the group? Well, it's a bit late for that. The story's out, and now it's going to get told and told again. Whether or not it qualifies in the strictest sense as 'censorship', attempting to exert creative influence over someone else's telling of that story isn't just pointless - it's likely to do a lot more harm than good.
It annoys me that people routinely expect the things Gaiman says in casual conversation to meet the standards of minutia-nitpick that the online fan community loves to bring to the table with respect to pretty much everything. The bottom line is that if I trust anyone to bring me a version of this story which I am capable of accessing, it's Gaiman a lot more than either any film review board I could think of or any group of people who grew up with this story indigenously. (Maybe not James Cameron, though.)
Woah, screed. If I spent half so many words on my actual writing...