Today, we Brothers Grimm class students were treated to a little movie about a little tyke named "Little Otik." It's a Czechoslovakian film based on a fairy tale, filmed by Jan Svankmajer. Jan Svankmajer is a surrealist.

Just knowing that made me a little nervous off the bat.

But, hey - the DVD title looked kind of funny and odd, and it was a fairy tale, so I thought it should be fun.

TODAY'S LESSON: Just because it's a fairy tale doesn't mean it's going to be light and frolicky fun. Apparently, even though I've read over and over and over again in my essays from class that "fairy tales were not originally written specifically for children," somehow it still didn't really settle into my brain. All of that Disney in my subconscious takes time to uproot, apparently.

It was set in modern day Czechoslovakia, which means it's grey and full of narrow streets and dingy apartments and pasty-looking people and food that looks like colorless applesauce with unidentifiable weedy bits swimming in it. We were treated to many, many, many shots of these things, as easily half the film is done in extreme close-ups. When you watch the husband looking out the window and seeing a fishmonger fishing babies out of a tank and wrapping them in newspaper for eagerly-waiting women, you know you're deep into David Lynch country. At this point, you know that literally anything can happen...or, more correctly, nothing is safe or reliable.

The husband and the wife can't have children, and the wife is absolutely distraught. Obsessed, even, with the longing to have a baby. As the husband is digging tree stumps out of his back yard, he pulls one up that looks oddly humanoid. As a bit of puckish fun, he cuts off a few limbs here and there, carves it up a little, and presents it to his unstable, miserable, sobbing wife. "Look, honey," he says with his expression, "it looks kind of like a baby? Isn't that funny, especially considering that it's the one thing you want the most but can't have? Ha, ha, ha!" She looks rightfully horrified at first - and then seems to believe that it's actually a baby.

Follow up with several moments of let's-disturb-the-audience, bashing the log on the table to prove it's fake while the wife screams, and I'm sitting in my seat just waiting to see it become a real baby in time to get dashed against the table. Fortunately, that doesn't happen.

Ultimately, they decide to pretend that she's pregnant, and then, once nine months have passed, she can keep the "baby" and take care of it in front of other human beings. Since they live in an apartment complex (this all happened in a cabin they have out in the countryside), this is a difficult proposition. The husband seems to be the sane one - seems , as this is a surrealist film and it's eastern European so it's all disorienting and gives you that vaguely nauseous feeling - and realizes that his wife is mad, but he carries on, because what are you going to do?

By the end of the nine months, the wife has managed to attract the suspicion of a local little girl who is, like 8 to 10, who has her own problems with an old pedophile who lives on the top floor (who, um, has a magical fly that unbuttons itself when she's around and has a grasping hand for a phallus. Look, I'm not going to go into it). The wife couldn't bear to leave the "baby" - which she names Otik - at the cabin, and so she takes care of it like a real baby when no one's around. Finally, she lets on to the other residents that she's given birth prematurely - she just couldn't wait any longer.

Okay, now the film begins pouring on the nightmare fuel. The husband comes home and finds his wife nursing "Otik" at her breast...and Otik is actually nursing. AAAAAGHHHH!

Yes, boys and girls, Otik is alive - a misshapen stumpy golem with twiggy-branchy fingers and no eyes and a big open knot-like mouth, from which it occasionally displays a tongue, huge teeth, and at one moment in the film, an eyeball. Oh, and if that wasn't enough to keep you awake at night, it makes baby sounds, mostly crying. And it's animated in a kind of stop-motion animation that isn't jerky-Ray-Harryhausen-Sinbad animation, but jerky as if it was filmed in every alternating frame of the film in a way that defies my description except to say that it screams Eastern Europe.

We learn that Little Otik has a ravenous appetite, and when Mommy lets Otik grasp and play with her hair and then starts to eat it, that it has nasty teeth and it's as strong as you might imagine a stump of wood to be. Daddy has to cut off a lock with a pocketknife before she can get away. Meanwhile, the curious little girl - still evading the geriatric pedophile - reads the story of Otesanek, who shares the same origin story as Little Otik; he then grows and grows, and eats his mother, his father, and several townspeople who cross his path. This is illustrated with some more traditional paper-cutout animation that's actually a relaxing break from the rest of the surrealist filming.

I'm going to skip ahead. Basically, the real-life Little Otik does pretty much everything his fairy tale counterpart does. People die; in the case of a child protection services agent, graphically and messily (though fortunately behind a frosted glass door, so we only get to see her organs when they squelch against the glass in a spray of blood). The little girl - who we were imagining was going to be our heroine - decides to take in Little Otik and keep him safe and fed in the basement after Mommy and Daddy are eaten. She warns him not to eat the cabbages that the building's resident Old Woman has been growing in the garden. The Old Woman is the only other person who seems to know what's going on, because she reads the Little Girl's book of fairy tales.

But, what do you know, the girl gets stuck inside her apartment (because her mother goes nuts and decides not to let anyone in or out until the police catches whoever is making everyone disappear), Little Otik gets hungry and reaches out the windows of the basement with his long vine-like arms, eating up all of the cabbages. Well, human beings can be torn asunder and devoured by the animate abomination, but Old Woman has been growing these cabbages ALL SEASON! She decides that enough is enough, and, despite the desperate protests of the Little Girl, fulfills her destined role as Buffiznecek the Slayer (as foreshadowed by her fairy tale equivalent) and takes a hoe to the squalling beast. Thankfully offscreen.

You know, if I knew it was going to be a horror story, I would have been better prepared.

We've been given handouts with some questions about the movie to answer. One question asks what the message of the movie is.

My answer is, "Those who don't make a study of fairy tales are doomed to repeat them." Also, "Eastern European filmmakers are never to be trusted."

(Okay, for all my complaining about Eastern Europeans, "No Man's Land" was quite good. It was also, I will pointedly add, not a surrealist film.)

So. Mercifully, after class I went to my Branches meeting. I may not have mentioned Branches - it's a Christian group on campus who gather once a week to pray for each other and encourage each other. I've started getting to know these people better, and I really like them. They also passed my sketchbook around and gave me compliments, so, you know, how could I not like them? We had a great meeting - someone I knew from last semester came in and asked for prayer, as her beloved uncle had died, and it was difficult for her entire family. We prayed. It was good.

One of the guys - a sculpture major who, incidentally, is carving a piece based on a fairy tale about a husband and wife who want a child so badly that they joke about being willing to raise a hedgehog, and thus end up with a half-hedgehog, half-human (so my tale of horror amused and delighted him), pointed out that one of the main Comics department teachers on staff is Vincent Stalls. I hadn't seen his work, or met him personally, yet I knew his name. I looked at his website in order to spark a memory...and realized I recognized him from the pages of The Replacement God: he was Zander Cannon's roommate downtown.

Neat.

Work was work. We built cardboard Christmas displays today, which I ended up dodging the last part of since I had to dash off for a dentist's appointment. When I returned, one of the girls at work was asking us married men (there were three of us there) about misconceptions and hurdles that arise because of them in a marriage. We had PLENTY to tell her about, and she seemed genuinely interested, so we kept on telling her about them. It was nice to pass on what little I've learned in the last two years, because I think they're rather important lessons. Things like the importance of communicating (a guy will assume that everything is fine unless told otherwise), the way guys function sexually (emotional attraction really doesn't play a part in arousal), and the societal programming guys have to undo in their brains about sex, not just in the physical realm, but (more importantly) in the psychological, emotional, and spiritual realm. What the purpose of sex is, etc.

When I got home tonight, Marilyn and I happened to watch a piece on PBS about the gay marriage issue, put together by a gay advocacy group. To their credit, they presented the opposition's arguments. To their criticism, they punctuated it with goofy cartoonishness that the pro-gay side of the argument didn't get saddled with. Actually, there was quite a bit more I criticized, but perhaps the most glaring was a five minute rant from Harvey Fierstein at the end of it, demonstrating a complete lack of logical argumentation, respect for one's audience, or ability to refrain from insult and profanity. Less subtle were the many points argued to promote legal gay marriage, most of which were either a distortion of existing statistics, omission of important information to make the situation sound more dire, or just outright fabrications.

Well, I guess what I'm trying to say was that, aside from being infuriating, it was tragic all around. These people are hurting, but it's not going to improve their situation to play at being married and trying to make other people give them their blessings. When the birdseed has been thrown, the cake eaten, and the well-wishers gone home, the hurt will still be there.