Alice in Horrorland - revisited

I was going to play the lead in a stage play about Alice in Wonderland.

I don’t think I was me in this dream. I was much younger than my present age, and in fact, much younger than I have ever been. I was some sort of innocent, almost a waif. I was running around with long blonde hair flying behind me. Other people from the play were kind of milling around in various settings, mostly in a high school (I think this was an amateur performance), but I had no idea who they were, even though we had apparently been rehearsing this play together for months.

Though I remembered the rehearsals and I seemed to remember knowing the play very well, I suddenly realized I had no idea how the play started, what the first couple of pages of dialogue were. It was simply blank. Since I was playing the lead, I had to know. I knew I was in it somehow and wondered if it was kind of like the scene where the White Rabbit (always late) rushes past her before she falls into the rabbit hole. Or did she step through the mirror?

There was a director of the play somewhere but I couldn’t find him. No one seemed to know where he was, but I could picture him, what he was like. None of the other players seemed to recognize or acknowledge me and brushed off all my anxious questions. At one point I (who at this point looked like a little girl living in the 1960s) went on a sort of strange computer that reminded me of the Wizard of Oz's contraption behind the curtain, and tried to find out something about the play on the internet. I thought I could download the script so I could at least read it onstage and not be a total fool. I pictured myself just improvising my lines but realized it would throw the other actors completely off and infuriate them and bring the play to a grinding halt.

I saw a sort of glass plate with lettering embossed on it and wondered if I could make one with my name on it, if it would somehow help. The glass was sort of amber-colored and it was plate-sized but irregular, like a blob of sealing wax. I think it had some sort of emblem or crest on it. As I became more bewildered and frantic about what was going on, I suddenly realized I had no idea of the content of this play. I could not remember a single line in it, though I still remembered rehearsing for months. I started running around desperately asking people if they had a copy of the script. All of them shrugged and went on talking to whoever they were talking to. (All these people were young adults, maybe 20s or early 30s, much older than me.) They acted as if I had no connection to the play whatsoever and should just go away.

Then I found a plastic bag and it had some sort of report written on it, printed on it. It said something along the lines of: when she first arrived here, she looked very unkempt and dishevelled. Now she has improved her appearance greatly and is obviously much more attractive. I realized I was reading a psychiatric report and that it was about me.

  

I kept trying to figure out who the director was. He had an unusual voice and it seemed English. I kept thinking of the movie/book 1984 and George Orwell. Though I never saw him, I kept thinking I heard his voice. I thought that if I asked HIM if he had a copy of the script, I could at least get the first page. I knew he didn’t have one however, because nobody did. Then I decided he must be that guy on Mad Men, the Englishman they called Moneypenny, Lane Pryce. Lane Pryce committed suicide by hanging himself in his office during the last season. He tried to commit suicide with carbon monoxide in a new Jaguar his wife had just given him (Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce had just landed the prestigious Jaguar acoount), but it wouldn’t start, one of the drawbacks to effectively marketing it. 

Just now I realize I only saw this Lane Pryce actor in one other thing, the movie about Sylvia Plath with Gwyneth Paltrow. It was a very poorly-done thing and Paltrow was pallid and uninteresting as Plath, but in one scene, this Moneypenny was talking to her about suicide and how he had tried it once, “but you’ve got to keep going!”. This seemed ironic in light of the Lane Pryce character’s suicide.

But maybe it wasn’t Moneypenny at all: it seemed more like Oliver Sacks, the bizarre genius who studies people with mental disorders like so many insects impaled on pins.

The whole dream was a vague nightmare of pointlessly bustling around, realizing that the play was about to begin, that I was playing the lead, and that I had absolutely no idea of what was in the script. I was trying to scrape together some sort of knowledge of Alice in Wonderland and kept coming up with a rabbit. At one point all the cast members were supposed to produce a picture of what their spouses looked like, and I tried to find a picture of a rabbit, just the face, a brown one. 

It wasn’t until I woke up and grogged out of bed that I made another connection, with the Marina Bychkova Enchanted Dolls. My current favourite is a doll named Alice, who represents Bychkova’s “reimagining” of Alice in Wonderland. The doll has enormous blue eyes brimming with tears, elaborate costumes and long blonde hair. She both enchants and scares me because along with abandonment and terror, I see anger in her eyes, even a hint of rage.

Unlike Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Alice does not have comrades or companions, just a series of encounters with grotesque figures like the hookah-smoking caterpillar, the Queen of Hearts and the Cheshire Cat whose smile hangs disembodied in the air. She fell into this twilight nightmare down a hole, or, in another story, was sucked into a reverse world behind the mirror. In neither case did she choose the journey.

And then, the final realization.  My mother's name is Alice. 

It's also my middle name.

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%2520glass%2520character%2520margaret%2520gunning&ikwsec=Home

WARNING: graphic violence, may offend some viewers

(I was going to write dialogue for these repeating vignettes - some sort of art doll Kibuki theatre - but I just couldn't do it. These dolls got their mojo workin' and are full of such palpable juju that I don't think I could touch one of them. Yesterday I snapped a Barbie's knees - they cracked audibly, like knuckles - and that was freaky enough.)

Embalmed Beauty, Part 2: fan art

Quite a while ago I went through a doll phase - all right, an obsessive doll phase - all right,  a completely obsessive doll phase that took me down some very dark corridors in my mind.

I think the first significant genre I found was on a web site called Enchanted Doll (http://www.enchanteddoll.com/) which features a collection of exquisite and disturbing dolls by Russian-Canadian artist Marina Bychkova. Barely 30 years old (and living in my hometown of Vancouver), she has been creating these shockingly original alabaster dream-figures since her early 20s. It has certainly paid off: one of her dolls commanded the headspinning price of $27,000.00 on eBay, and the waiting list for purchase is now several years long.

What exactly is happening here? How to analyze this strange and spooky magic? You can't, and I won't try or I'll be here all morning. Most of Bychkova's dolls are in a category called BJD (and it doesn't mean what you think it does, so shut up or I'll smack your filthy mouth). It means ball-jointed dolls, whose arms and legs have the capability of moving in practically any direction. (Please don't count those Monster High monstrosities, whose arms, legs and hands have an alarming habit of falling off.)

The bodies seem identical, slim and virginal, sometimes elaborately tattooed, with realistic genitalia that freak a lot of people out. Some even have pubic hair and a visible clitoris, which is strange because the average woman's clitoris isn't visible. The slender figures and spookily lifelike skin of these dolls contrasts startlingly with their blatantly visible, marionette-like joints. The nudes pose innocently or provocatively, faces sad and sometimes frightened, eyes brimming with tears. Costumes can be incredibly intricate, and there is even some furniture, velvet sofas and the like. But this is hardly Barbie's House of Dreams (from which the name of this blog is derived, by the way. Some people don't get the satire at all and just think I'm stupid.) 

There are recurring themes in the world of the Enchanted Doll. One seems to be subjugation and even a kind of captivity. Many of the dolls wear costumes that would feel something like a suit of armor, with enormous headgear (one even has a cathedral on top of her head!). Even the Scheherezade-like figures look like creatures kept under glass (which, during the many exhibits that draw wildly enthusiastic crowds, they actually are).

I had a Bychkova fit a year or so ago - or was it two? - then decided I had had enough and had better leave it alone before I crossed some sort of disturbing threshhold. Enchanted doesn't mean what people think it does. It means living under a powerful and often unbreakable spell, a spell cast through words or even song (the "chant" part). Abricadabra, bibbidy-bobbidy-boo, and you're captivated (captured?) for life.

But when I got triggered off again recently, God knows how, I found a trove of a couple hundred images I had previously hoarded (most of which I ruthlessly weeded down to just 66 or so - not 666! - figuring the rest of them  are already accessible on the internet, and will be for the forseeable future). I found only a few that were really new to me, including the heartbreaking one at the start of this post. If you really want to freak yourself out, pretend you can hear what this doll is saying. And there is the really disturbing one, the battered doll, which seems to cross the line even for a dollmaker who likes to push the envelope.

So do these dolls "make a statement" about female subjugation? I doubt if it's done consciously. If they do, it's in the sense of holding up a mirror, both to society and to ourselves. We prize the waxen beauty of girls kept under glass, and even find them sexually irresistable.

SOOOOOOOOO. . . we come to my Daily Special. Those few years back when I first became obsessed, I produced a bit of fan art. There is fan art on Bychkova's Enchanted Doll site, but it's done by actual amateur artists, not people like me who can't paint or draw. I play with my Enchanted Doll images like Colorforms, that primitive form of magnetic paper dolls from the '60s, which I was startled to see my granddaughters playing with the other day.

This is photoshop art, placing the dolls in settings that worked for me, stolen from the internet. The backgrounds are  meant to be standard wallpaper, but there is nothing standard about these dolls. They call up disturbing feelings in people, from "Ewwwwwwww! Cree-py!", to "Who made these?" to "Where can I get one?"

In case you think these dolls represent harmless social satire, just look on Bychkova's site and watch some of her videos. They feature "playing with" the various nude dolls, placing them in postures that often seem frankly lesbian. In one, a doll has died and is being buried. 

It all makes the mummified Barbie in the shoebox sarcophagus of my childhood seem much less strange.

CODA. I kept getting a funny feeling when I looked at this one:

It was perhaps the simplest one to compose, with only one figure in the extreme foreground. But it looked funny, kept changing somehow.

It was like one of those "can you see two faces in this picture?" things that I can never figure out.

With a few magical photoshop changes, I was seeing a giant goose or duck or some other strange bird, a malevolent-looking one that seemed to be dominating the entire picture. It's what fairy tale enchantment can do to you.