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Bad Horse


Beneath the microscope, you contain galaxies.

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Jun
27th
2014

The Blues Brothers as magic realism · 7:53pm Jun 27th, 2014

The 1980 movie The Blues Brothers is set in Chicago in the 1970s. You wouldn't call it fantasy, but fantastic elements keep entering.

Any musical has one fantastic premise: that crowds of strangers sometimes suddenly coalesce into synchronized musical dance numbers. This can be irritating if the musical is otherwise realistic (The Sound of Music); this is why few people enjoy realistic movie musicals without prior training on opera, or on comical or fantasy musicals (Gilbert & Sullivan, Mary Poppins).

But crowds breaking out in song never seems implausible in the world of the Blues Brothers. It's a world where nuns levitate and use telekinesis when you're not looking directly at them, where a car that drives off an overpass can suddenly find itself falling down from above the tallest skyscraper in Chicago, where a blind man is a crack pistol shot, and where men on a mission from God are physically indestructible.

I didn't like 100 Years of Solitude as much as most people. Its magic realism shattered my attachment to the story, because there was no point in worrying or wondering about the characters or their plans when at any moment, some deus ex machina could descend and save them.

Magical realism, by definition ( I claim, though its definition is vague), uses inconsistent world building. In epic fantasy, consistency is critical. We can't know when to worry if we don't understand the rules of the world. The rules must be clear and consistent. But magical realism is a world that is 99% realism and 1% magic. The 1% cannot appear in a regular, systematic way. That would be science fiction--say, a universe with faster-than-light travel.

So how can you write magic realism without ruining your story's tension?

One approach is to write a story too meandering and unfocused to have tension, or a story set in the past so that we already know nothing really terrible happened; or if it did, well, it already happened. Gabriel Garcia Marquez uses both techniques in 100 Years of Solitude. I still didn't like it. If the fix to prevent magic realism from ruining the story is to remove the tension, the cure is worse than the disease. [ADDED: For me. If you don't mind that, then the rest of this post is... wrong.]

The Blues Brothers is magic realism done right (by my standards). Here's three reasons why:

1. Magic comes in through the cracks, not the front door

Magic in The Blues Brothers almost never resolves a serious plot problem. It can resolve the problem of the Nazis, because they are comic relief. Other than that, most magical events happen in the background, as flavoring (the Penguin's mysterious way of moving, the impossibly high leaps of the dancers in the church, the blind Ray Charles noticing the would-be shoplifter sixty feet away).

Magic can introduce a plot point. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's very short story "The old man with enormous wings" does this well; it has only two magical incidents, and both happen unexpectedly, creating rather than resolving complications. I like it very much.

2. If magic resolves a plot problem, it is a consistent magic

The Blues Brothers are indestructible. They can survive falls from any height, explosions, and apparently bullets. This does resolve some plot problems--every time Carrie Fisher shows up to kill them, and seems to have succeeded, we find out they're unhurt. The violence inflicted on them in these episodes progresses over time, so we gradually accept it as a rule of the world that the Blues Brothers are indestructible. This, being a consistent rule, operates like fantasy, not like magical realism. It's okay to have plot problems hinge on magic if the reader/viewer understands the rules of that particular magic.

3. The main characters act as if they are in the world of magic realism that they are in

There are 2 ways to mix characters and reality wrong. One is to have characters in a magical world who are inordinately surprised by magic, or neglect to use it where they could. The economics of the Harry Potterverse are an example. Another is to have characters in a non-magical world who act as they expect magical interventions (think Doctor Who, marching into the lair of every evil overlord ever, armed with nothing but a sonic screwdriver). Magic realism, where magic happens infrequently and unpredictably, requires special care about this. The more often magic occurs, the less surprised people should be by it.

Latin American magic realism depicts the world as it would be were Catholicism true, and God were inclined to intervene in everyday events, but rarely, and arbitrarily, in his mysterious ways. The people in it are surprised and curious when magical things happen, but not for long, and don't bother looking for explanations. They simultaneously do and don't believe in magic.

The Blues brothers live in a world where magic happens every day, and so they're even less fazed by it than the inhabitants of a Marquez story. That unflappability is a key part of their character, and a key part of the movie's humor.

Everything in the story--the quiet self-assurance of the Blues brothers, the bursting out into musical numbers, the car chase scene beyond the scope of Michael Bay's imagination--fits with the way magic works in their world, but without ever disrupting the basic storytelling principles of plot and tension. That's why I'd rather re-watch The Blues Brothers than re-read 100 Years of Solitude.

An obvious follow-up question is: In what way is MLP magic realism?

I dunno. :derpytongue2:

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Comments ( 27 )

Enchanted also does the Spontaneous Choreography bit so darned well that I've struggled not to include bits of it in my own stories. I lost, of course, so I subverted the trope instead. :pinkiehappy:

Your terminology threw me off at first; what you called "magic" is not what I see as magic. But the post seems spot on :twilightsmile:

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Enchanted is a great example, certainly. IMHO it works, in a quite hilarious way, by having an observer who likes the highly magical protagonist but doesn't believe in magic at all present. The choreography is spectacular, true, but it's the interactions of the skeptic character with the musical that really makes it shine.

I think you could pull off magical realism where the magic is consistent and systematized and has rules, but the protagonist doesn't know what any of those rules are. Although, that presents its own problems; if the reader doesn't know what the rules are, you're right back where you started, so you have to come up with a way to clue the reader in while leaving the protagonist in the dark.

2239320 I think magic realism is close to Catholicism. It calls for faith, not understanding. There are rules to the magic, but we will never know them in this life, and must learn to accept that.

Comment posted by Super Trampoline deleted Jun 27th, 2014

I LOVED 100 years of solitude when I read it voluntarily my senior year of high school. But maybe some of that was that I simply had never really read anything like it before, and was entranced. I still see loving it as a predecessor to my loving MLP.

I'm gonna show this article to Present Perfect. He absolutely despises this movie.

2239346 Don't let me stop you from liking it. Lots of very smart people love that book. I think your response to it depends on how you want the world to be. I'm odd; I regard science, and the production of the world we know from materialistic rules, as being "magical" and romantic, and magic and miracles as being sterile, uninteresting, and dead. So a world with vague, unpredictable laws isn't romantic to me.

Maybe it can be... I don't need ponies to have a scientific explanation. Are ponies magic realism? Maybe.

When I worked in Houston I had to cross a railway on the drive home, and for months and months there was this locomotive sitting on a siding that always caught my eye.

It was kelly green with yellow chevrons on the front and "MKT" in great yellow block letters on the sides. I never forgot that livery, because it was so garish but also because it was unfamiliar to me.

Years later, in one of my dad's railfan* magazines, I discovered that "MKT" stood for the Missouri-Kansas-Topeka line, colloquially known as "the Katy."

Which is the railroad they're singing about in the opening number: She caught the Katy and left me a mule to ride...



* He likes trains:

2239388 A most wonderful anecdote.

> Magical realism, by definition … uses inconsistent world building
> Magic can introduce a plot point
> The Blues brothers live in a world where magic happens every day, and so they're even less fazed by it than the inhabitants of a Marquez story


For some reason, when you asked "In what way is MLP magic realism?" my first thought was Shining Armor.

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Would you explain why?
I for one remembered Pinkie explaining her Pinkie Sense: "It's only good for vague and immediate events."

2239511
You remember the heady days of Season 2, right, when Twilight Sparkle suddenly remembered out of the blue that she had a brother after 25 episodes with no siblings, and the fandom went a little bit nuts?

What I was (a little too subtly) trying to imply is that pre-Armor Twilight and post-Armor Twilight were both correct in their recollections. That Shining Armor literally did not exist until that episode; that spacetime warped itself to spawn him spontaneously, and everypony just shrugged and went with it. Kind of the same way that Buffy The Vampire Slayer explicitly plotdumped Dawn Summers in out of nowhere, with the audience in on the joke.

That his spontaneous generation, in other words, is an explicit effect of their world's magical realism.

One problem, I think, with a lot of magical realism is that it is written by lit-critters who despise fantasy and science fiction. So they have to re-invent the wheel. And often they invent triangular or square wheels. Science fiction took a while to get the roundness nicely smoothed -- consider the history of proto science fiction from Gulliver's Travels to the novels of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.

If you've read it, what's your opinion on magical realism use (or just the book in general, if you like) in Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold? It's the only story of his that I've read, but I can't recall much of it besides the fact that I didn't much care for it.

2239804 I haven't read it.

2239378 I don't find this odd. Sometimes a mystery is much more jaw-dropping and awe-inspiring when the intricacies are explained, rather than waved away as "We weren't meant to know" because of how it cops out. Even in real life, it feels the same way, but instead of the author copping out, it's the one who says it and those who agree.

I personally believe that Marquez is much better if you interpret all the magic as people misremembering stuff. Then, the metaphor is given life because that is what makes sense for them.

And my point of contention comes with that Doctor Who comment. :twilightsheepish:
Seems a bit odd, to me, since the Doctor never really expects intervention. He IS intervention. But it's not really magical. Or isn't supposed to be. It's all Sufficiently Advanced. He isn't expecting some kind of magic to happen.

After being forced to sit through a course on magical realism, I have come to hate everything associated with it.

2240099 The Doctor is a perfect example of Magical Realism. Magical realism doesn't need ACTUAL magic to work, that's where Clark's Third Law steps in. Any Science Fiction where the rules of science are sufficiently inconsistently applied and used is indistinguishable from magical realism.

2240099

And my point of contention comes with that Doctor Who comment

I knew there'd be somebody. :ajsmug: (I thought it would be Blueshift.)

The Doctor is supposed to be smart, yet he seldom plans ahead, and never plans more than one or two steps ahead. He always rushes immediately towards whatever appears to be the source of a problem, even if that's a castle full of cybermen, a spaceship full of Daleks, or a castle full of giant carnivorous fish. This is what we in the real world would call stupid. But in Doctor Who, something always comes up to make it work. Usually, unimaginable stupidity on the part of his enemies in not just killing him as soon as he steps into their heavily-guarded throne room, unarmed, and declares that he's come to destroy them. Dr Who relies on magical good luck, in a world that isn't supposed to have magic.

Don't get me wrong--I like the Doctor; he's a great character. Sometimes the show is good! But sometimes it's very, very bad.

2240305

Sometimes the show is good! But sometimes it's very, very bad.

Yeah, that is true enough.
The good episodes are usually the ones where he seems legitimately clever. The bad ones usually rely too much on too much lining up rather implausibly. (When they make any sense at all, anyway.)

An obvious follow-up question is: In what way is MLP magic realism?

I dunno. :derpytongue2:

Magical realism explains why the Mane Six can venture into the much-dreaded Everfree Forest on their whimsical quests, yet come away unscathed:

They'll never get caught there on a mission that's odd.

It can resolve the problem of the Nazis, because they are comic relief.

Their existence was also supposed to be unrealistic. The scene doesn't work nearly as well now that we know there are Nazis in Illinois who would march if they thought they could get away with it.

5684518
I can't comment, because now I can't even remember the Nazis in The Blues Brothers.

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