swatkat

So, HG Wells is actually a woman – she provided the ideas, her brother provided the moustache, but who wrote the books? Each of them bears Helena’s name, but we know that she was bronzed before all of HG Wells’ books were published. Her exact status – author or muse – is ultimately an ambiguous one, and I know that this is a plothole which some fans like to criticise the writers for, but I honestly think it works. Helena isn’t quite a muse, she isn’t quite an author, and she isn’t quite a character: her presence queers the narrative (many of her lovers were men; many of her characters were men; many of her authors were men) but it also deconstructs the act of narration itself. She’s introduced before she’s ever introduced – Myka read HG Wells’s novels, Pete’s seen the movies, and Myka spots ‘Edward Prendick’ in the guestbook. Pete’s Genre Savvy, he knows how this works, but he’s still thinking in terms of actors and performance and guesses; Helena can’t quite stay away and the pseudonym she uses is her real name. When she introduces herself as Helena, that’s an implicit admission of her identity as HG Wells as well as a denial. They’re looking for Charles, the one with the moustache, but they’re calling him HG – she is HG, but she isn’t, too. Identity is never that simple for her.

I think that she works brilliantly within the narrative as a sort of ghostly presence, lurking in all of the dark places and threatening to huff and puff and bring down the narrative around them – and, through that haunting, serves to shore up the narrative itself. Helena is the act of deconstruction and she is constantly deconstructed – what else is left, when the story tears itself apart, begins again, and rips that one up too?

zorana

Far be it from me to say that the film is perfect, or that there aren’t real critiques to be made of it. The pacing is sometimes off and there are stretches that are less compelling than others. But there are three things Brave absolutely isn’t, and there’s something pernicious about the fact that reviews repeatedly refer to it as precisely those three things. Whatever Brave is, it’s not predictable, it’s not Just Another Princess Movie, and it’s not — my God! — lacking for deeper layers.

Insofar as Pixar is a teenager fighting its ancestor, this story needed to be written. They needed this story in order to be able to write a different kind of story. Having fought through the strangling thicket of princesses, it’ll be easier to fill the space on the other side with many more female characters, most of them commoners. We need them, badly, and it’ll be interesting to see what they do now that they can start work on a less exhaustively populated canvas.