Two Tales in One

Allegory is tricky … and hard, too

Bardelys had to confess he wasn’t the smartest reader in the audience. This he had to admit to himself when he had watched a Japanese move, Battle Royale, and gave it relatively low marks, mostly for its gaping logical holes. The fact was, the subtitles on the DVD that Bardelys watched were not great, and it was perfectly possible that the explanations he lacked were present in the Japanese original. But some of these plot holes were inherent in the basic premise on which the story was built, and that couldn’t be a matter of the subtitles.

The tale of Battle Royale involves a time in the near future, when Japanese society is in chaos. Unemployment is 15%, and what’s worse, the kids are revolting. Really revolting, and the parents just can’t do a thing with them. So the diet passes the Battle Royale legislation, and every year, one class of high school kids is sent to an evacuated island, and forced to fight one another to the death. The last survivor is the ‘winner’ and gets to live. ‘But how,’ Bardelys wondered, ‘would that make the unemployed not want work? And how would that get kids to behave?’ It wasn’t as though the kids all watched the current Battle Royale game and thought to themselves, Holy crap! I better sit quiet or I’ll be sent to Battle Royale! In fact, the kids in this year’s game looked non-plussed when their teacher started telling them about it, as though they had never heard of the game.

So Bardelys was feeling quite smug about this, and better than the guys who made the movie.

Then he watched Battle Royale 2: Requiem.

BR2 was even more implausible. But it was also a lot more obvious — so obvious, indeed, that even a dummy like Bardelys understood what it was all about!

In short (not to spoil any enjoyment of the movies, which are good — watch them!) both the original BR and BR2 are allegories. We are intended to enjoy them as solid actioners, but also to see through the surface into the deeper heart, the message, the broader tales.

Allegories are a strange breed of tale.

They hold, each of them, two tales in one.

The surface tale, which is ordinary and concrete as tales should be.

The underlying tale, which only uses the surface characters, events, and objects as shadows of its true subjects.

Now, there are certain built-in differences between these two tales.

Each tale has its own needs. What to do, then, when the talesman finds those needs in conflict?

A perfect, or ideal, allegory, will be a perfectly plausible, enjoyable tale on its surface as well as being a perfect tale of symbols under the skin. There will be no need to compromise the one for the benefit of the other; both will exist in perfect harmony.

This is the work of a master, a genius, and it is the rarest thing in the world.

Most allegorists deem their deeper tale as more important, and when they find they must make some compromise, they make it in the surface tale. This is what the filmmakers who made the Battle Royale films did. This is the source of those lapses and plot- and premise-holes that had nagged at Bardelys, when he hadn’t understood the film to be an allegory, and concerned himself only with the obvious surface elements.

It was understandable. The deeper message of the films took Bardelys’ breath away, and he was amazed by its boldness, its guts. There was no way on Earth, Bardelys thought, that any Hollywood studio would make a movie with this kind of message!

But the surface action movie (though it had an intriguing premise) was nothing nearly so special. If Bardelys had been telling the tale, he too would have left the surface tale wanting in some plausibility to support the under-tale.

There might even be a theoretical argument, Bardelys thought, in favor of weakening the surface tale, so as to leave the audience questioning it … so that they would be prompted to ‘look beneath’ and maybe even see the more important tale that lay beneath.

Bardelys was ashamed of himself that he had missed it.

He would never rest easy in feeling smug about another talesman’s work again.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday 10 August 2008)