posted by
azdak at 05:04pm on 12/02/2008 under life on mars
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The Wizard of Oz motifs run through Life on Mars like a red thread, or, um, a yellow brick road. Most obvious is the use of the song "Somewhere over the rainbow" to accompany the extended 2006 sequence in the final ep, but the series is also book-ended by two rainbows - when Sam first arrives in 1973, and when the team drive off in the car at the end. Not only is there a rainbow in ep 1, but Sam talks about "following the yellow brick road" until his mind runs out of details. In ep 2, when Gene is asked whether Sam can transfer back to Hyde, he replies "The Wizard'll sort it out. It's because of the wonderful things he does." He also repeatedly refers to Sam as Dorothy (not because he's consciously thinking of the Wizard of Oz - he's more likely to be thinking Sam is a Friend of Dorothy - but we pick up on the association, especially since ep 4, where he uses the epithet, ends with Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road"). Then there's Frank Morgan, the surgeon who brings Sam back home, and who's named after the actor who played the Wizard. And, as in The Wizard of Oz, "reality" is colourless compared with the fantasy world. Not completely, in LoM's case, but the 2006 sequence is cold and sterile, shot largely using blues, whites and greys, in contrast to the warm greens and yellows of 1973.
But whereas Oz privileges reality - for all its black-and-white dreariness - over colourful fantasy, LoM takes the rather unusual step of privileging the fantasy. Just as the plural of anecdote isn't data, so I know that "all I can think of off the top of my head" does not constitute a representative literary sample. Nonetheless, off the top of my head, I'm hard-pressed to think of any other examples of a character's choice to remain in fantasy land being positively presented. Even when the fantasy land ostensibly isn't a fantasy, but another real world, don't characters usually have to come home? Even in Narnia, though you get to stay once you're dead, you can't force that wardrobe door to open by killing yourself. Normally, you're expected to learn something from fantasy land that helps you live better in the real world; I think it's rather cool that LoM so thoroughly inverts that trope.
But whereas Oz privileges reality - for all its black-and-white dreariness - over colourful fantasy, LoM takes the rather unusual step of privileging the fantasy. Just as the plural of anecdote isn't data, so I know that "all I can think of off the top of my head" does not constitute a representative literary sample. Nonetheless, off the top of my head, I'm hard-pressed to think of any other examples of a character's choice to remain in fantasy land being positively presented. Even when the fantasy land ostensibly isn't a fantasy, but another real world, don't characters usually have to come home? Even in Narnia, though you get to stay once you're dead, you can't force that wardrobe door to open by killing yourself. Normally, you're expected to learn something from fantasy land that helps you live better in the real world; I think it's rather cool that LoM so thoroughly inverts that trope.
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