Fairy tales, the Old Testament and Napoleon Dynamite

  • I’ve been read­ing through the Apoc­rypha — the extra books of the Old Tes­ta­ment that didn’t make the cut — and so far it’s been kind of unusual.

    In the Book of Tobit, we have a man liv­ing after the cap­tiv­ity in Baby­lon who has a fam­ily, suf­fers blind­ness by curi­ous means, sends his son off to col­lect money from a rel­a­tive, receives a vis­i­ta­tion from the angel Raphael, and … well, I assume all will end hap­pily, though I haven’t made it there yet.

    Read­ing it today, I was both­ered to find my thoughts inter­rupted by thoughts about “Napoleon Dyna­mite,” which we had seen for the sec­ond time last night.

    For those who haven’t seen it, I won’t really try to describe it other than to say that it’s a thor­oughly inde­pen­dent film that gets an enor­mous amount of cre­ative energy from an atti­tude that’s very hard to describe. The main guy — named Napoleon, of course — is so bereft of any of the qual­i­ties of a movie pro­tag­o­nist (or antag­o­nist), and the whole movie is so lack­ing in any of the usual trap­pings that make sto­ry­telling attrac­tive and under­stand­able that you find your­self think­ing it’s all very funny and very engag­ing, with­out know­ing why.

    It’s really incred­i­bly pared down. The writ­ing is sparse since the dia­log con­sists mostly of short, mono­syl­labic sen­tences and the act­ing is more non-acting. The story is very basic, some­thing like this: a teenage boy who lives with his older brother and his grand­mother (who has a llama) goes through dif­fer­ent inter­ac­tions at school and at home. He meets a girl he likes, suc­cess­fully pro­motes a friend to school pres­i­dent, deals with a sleazy uncle, learns to dance, sees his brother go off with his soul­mate, eats a lot of meat and tater tots, and at the end is shown play­ing teth­erball with the girl he likes … as good a metaphor as any for liv­ing hap­pily ever after.

    It’s a strange movie, for sure, and I wouldn’t be sur­prised to hear peo­ple say they thought it was too dumb or odd to be enjoy­able. But I did find it enjoy­able, and although I wasn’t pleased to note that my mind was recall­ing the feel of it as I read a kind of Bible story (albeit an apoc­ryphal one, which means I don’t get points removed if I don’t find it rel­e­vant), I sup­pose I don’t feel alarmed by the irrever­ance either.

    The sim­i­lar­ity wasn’t in the atti­tude, since the movie gets a kind of kick out of being inten­tion­ally mean­ing­less and absurd, but in the feel of it, the odd­ness cou­pled with a per­cept­able lack of con­text and analy­sis from the author. So much so, in fact, that you didn’t get a feel­ing of who the author was. That’s a com­mon ele­ment, it seems, in mythic sto­ries, because I read a Russ­ian fairy tale later on this morn­ing that had that going on as well:

    Once upon a time there lived a tsar and tsar­itsa and they had a son and a daugh­ter named Ivanushka and Alionushka. After the tsar’s and tsaritsa’s death, they remained alone and went ram­bling all over the world. …
    They walked and saw a herd of goats graz­ing near water.

    “Ah, sis­ter, … I must drink.”

    “Don’t drink, brother, or you will turn into a kid.”

    But of course, he doesn’t lis­ten and he turns into a goat. Why? No rea­son, really. Is it a judg­ment? Did he do some­thing wrong? Is it a bless­ing in dis­guise? Is it a cul­tural reference?

    Who knows? You could write another book inter­pret­ing this one, and inter­pret­ing Napoleon Dyna­mite and the Book of Tobit for that mat­ter. And there prob­a­bly are some, because that’s the way we are. But there is some­thing com­pelling about the fact that you can’t judge the char­ac­ters. The author (or authors) just don’t give you enough infor­ma­tion for that. Lives are reduced to sim­ple lines, to changes that occur with­out expla­na­tion or sub­text, but which never alter the basic line from “Once upon a time …” to “… hap­pily ever after.”

    To make it even more inter­est­ing, I don’t even know that I’m try­ing to make any kind of spe­cific point here. It’s just an obser­va­tion really. Which seems appro­pri­ate for now.

    Let’s hope that the next book of the Apoc­rypha doesn’t make me think of a movie. I think that would start to indi­cate a need my spir­i­tual father should be aware of.


    No related posts.


    January 12th, 2006 | Grace | 14 Comments |

14 Responses and Counting...

  • Mimi 01.12.2006

    Tobit is one of my absolute favorite Books of the Bible.

    Thanks for the com­par­i­son to ND ;)

  • Grace

    Hope­fully that’s not a com­par­i­son that’s going to throw any­one too badly. I’m cer­tainly not try­ing to ele­vate a (rather silly) movie or den­i­grate a book that almost made it into the Bible.

    As I said, read­ing the Apoc­rypha has been inter­est­ing, because unlike the OT sto­ries I encounter (I’m re-reading that as well), I don’t have any pre­con­ceived notions. I remem­ber a ref­er­ence or two in the NT to these books, but other than that, I don’t have any idea where they go or what hap­pens in them. I’m sort of inter­ested to read Mac­cabees, because that’s his­tory closer to Christ’s time that seems like it’s an impor­tant part of the puzzle.

    Any other favorites?

  • her­man

    “Fairy tales, the Old Tes­ta­ment and Napoleon Dyna­mite” love the title of this post. Sounds like it could be a topic from Jeop­ardy… “i’ll take Fairy tales, the Old Tes­ta­ment and Napoleon Dyna­mite for 400 Alex”

    the answer: “Fairy princesses rub it on their skin for a beauty treat­ment, the peo­ple of Israel won’t use it for con­cern it was made using pork fat, and Tina is a fat one.”

    “what is lard?”

    ding ding ding

  • Grace

    All right. Major points on find­ing a tie-in between those three.

    I just wish I could’ve thought of clever alle­gories like this when I was in school and any­body gave a rip.

  • s-p

    Vote for Pablo!

  • s-p

    BTW…Pablo is “Paul” in Span­ish.
    Pedro is Peter.
    esta­ban pablo

  • Grace

    Gra­cias (… which might be Grace in Span­ish, but actu­ally isn’t. Oh well.)

    On the sec­ond watch, my favorite line was prob­a­bly the under­stated “Pedro offers you his protection.”

  • Mimi

    Judith is another favorite.

    I started read­ing the Old Tes­ta­ment in order a few months ago, and I just fin­ished the Psalms. So, I reread Judith, Tobit, Macabees and am look­ing for­ward to the Prophetic books com­ing up.

  • BJohnD

    I just stum­bled across your very enjoy­able site. But (there’s always a “but,” isn’t there?), I’m a lit­tle sur­prised no one has posted to say that, to us Ortho­dox, the books you’re read­ing are not “the Apoc­rypha — the extra books of the Old Tes­ta­ment that didn’t make the cut,” but part of the Old Tes­ta­ment itself. They are, it is true, included in either the Hebrew Scrip­tures or the Protes­tant Bible, but they have always been part of the canon for both the Ortho­dox and Roman Catholic churches.

    Just sayin’.

  • Grace

    I didn’t know that. Okay, so I was look­ing out the win­dow dur­ing that part of my cat­e­chism. Bad girl!

  • BJohnD

    Not a prob­lem, as they say out here on the Left Coast.

    Oh, and of course I meant to say “They are NOT, it is true.…” D’oh!

  • Grace

    “Oh, and of course I meant to say “They are NOT, it is true….” D’oh!” — y’know, I went through that sen­tence a cou­ple times and then just decided I needed more caf­feine to read it and then once I was caf­feinated for­got what I was doing. I love when I do that.

    But any­way, I get it now. But I may use my mag­i­cal admin pow­ers to edit the ‘not’ in where it belongs, so that this exchange makes no sense whatsoever.

  • Grace

    Where on the Left Coast? I’m a SoCal expatriate.

  • BJohnD

    Your idea is bril­liant. Per­haps you should sow well-placed “nots” through­out your site, just for fun.

    Nor­Cal, quite near Ahnold’s new digs. I’ve gone the other direc­tion: Ex-pat from the Land of Belt­way, and very happy about it.

Leave a Reply

* Name, Email, and Comment are Required