Labyrinth

We’re going to start with a film I’ll forever associate with Kathryn. She’s three years younger than me, third of four kids. I don’t recall when exactly Labyrinth first appeared on British TV, or how Kathryn even knew about it – probably from birthday parties when you’d rent a movie or a movie and the chunky yellow rental VCR – but she taped it and watched it pretty damn frequently.

As you might expect, back in the 1980s, pre-teen me was dismissive of the movies my sisters preferred to watch. And, as you might expect, pre-teen me was wrong about quite a few of them. Kathryn would put Labyrinth on and I’d leave the living room, or watch for a few moments and totally not appreciate what was going on. Puppets and teenage girls and some weirdo with big hair and stupid songs. It seemed like a load of old malarkey to me.

One day, I stayed in the living room and watched it through with my sisters and realized it was, in fact, really very good. Some of the songs were catchy! The guy with big hair also had a huge…thing in his tights! The puppets had been designed and operated with great artistry and imagination! Against all my expectations, Labyrinth was a good movie and I was happy to watch it.

Suffice it to say, Labyrinth had a huge impact on Kathryn. Here are some of her thoughts:

“I wanted to be Sarah so bad. I knew all the words, just about still do. But if I could have been anyone in any film it would have been her.  

It was down to earth yet completely otherworldly fantasy. The interactions from Sarah with the characters and vice versa felt so real. She was girly yet brave and strong. Kind and thoughtful but also stood up for herself and others. 

All the characters were cool and full of surprises. Biting fairies / variety of puppet goblins with their individual ugly/cute faces and voices (Wilf [her son]watched it once and said the chickens that stole the baby), the helping hands (sorry just doing my job), the weird chicken head mystic (what a load of crap), loved the talking knockers bickering (mumble mumble mumble / that’s rich all you do is moan), the rubbish lady (here’s your lipstick honey - go awn make yourself uup), the cleaners being a terrifying machine of death that end up powered by a couple of small and weird workers on the back, the worm (come inside and meet the missus), the bog with the farty stepping stones and a real fear of falling in and stinking forever). Ludo being the most adorable huge beast. The fiery head folks. All amazing. And no doubt I loved many many more. Sir Didymus.”

You have to bear in mind, I haven’t watched this movie in decades, but I recognise everything Kathryn mentioned. I’m quite sure Sarah appealed to her because Kathryn and Sarah share some physical characteristics, most notably long, black hair. I have never strongly identified with any movie characters, but I understand why a strong heroic female lead, played by a teen girl, who uses her wits to succeed, who looks even a little like you, would be very easy to form a bond with.

Ah yes, Sir Didymus and his sheepdog mount. I can hear his voice in my head. The bog of eternal stench. Huge, kind-hearted Ludo. Hoggle, even if I have seen what happened to the Hoggle puppet over the years. The bizarre, disassociative sequence with the rubbish lady. There’s a lot going on in this movie.

What makes children’s media fascinating is to what extent the creators factored in references for adults. After all, adults typically watch movies with their kids, or read stories to them or with them. The very, very best media for children is aware of this and won’t pander – it’ll just layer things in under the surface, full of subtextual stuff to catch at the parent. The bad stuff will just have smirky, snarky asides and hope for the cheap laugh. I reckon Labyrinth will count as the former.

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Labyrinth tells the story of 16-year-old Sarah (Jennifer Connelly), who likes to live in a world of childish fantasy stories, toys and playing dress-up. She has no particular interest in dating and resents her step-mother for asking her to babysit her half-brother, Toby. After her parents go out for the night, Sarah gets mad at Toby and wishes for the Goblin King to come and take him away. Jareth, said Goblin King (David Bowie in a big wig and alarming codpiece), obliges. When Sarah experiences immediate buyer’s remorse, Jareth challenges her to penetrate the labyrinth and reach his castle before the clock strikes thirteen.

And so to adventure. Sarah faces many challenges on her journey through the maze. She befriends a dwarf named Hoggle, rescues a giant fuzzy monster named Ludo, solves some puzzles and escapes some traps, parties with some eccentric fire creatures, fails to fall into the Bog of Eternal Stench, befriends noble fox knight Sir Didymus, experiences some wild peach-delivered LSD, parties with David Bowie at a costume ball, remembers who she is and what she wants, defeats an entire Goblin army with the help of Ludo’s Ultimate – Summon Rocks – and only after solving Jareth’s MC Escher maze does she face down Jareth and win back her brother and their freedom.

I must be honest here. I thought this was enormous fun.

Where to begin? Let’s start with the story. There is a story, yes, although there really isn’t much to it. Immature girl wishes baby brother would disappear, wicked Goblin King obliges, girl feels bad, girl takes responsibility, rescues brother and grows up in the process. Fairy tales are built out of such things. What I didn’t know back in the Eighties was that the screenplay for Labyrinth was credited to a writer of fairy tales. Terry Jones. Yes, that Terry Jones, one of the Monty Python gang. Jones had published a collection of alternative fairy tales in 1981, and we had a copy at home. Suffice it to say, Jones’ collection of stories was…bizarre. I don’t recall too much about them, but while they worked along the lines you might expect from classic fairy tales, they didn’t really land for me.

Still, when Jim Henson was working up the production for Labyrinth, he handed a pile of concept art and an unfinished ‘poetic novella’ to Jones and told him to assemble a screenplay. Jones threw out the novella, focused on the concept art and wrote the screenplay. Henson wasn’t entirely convinced by the direction Jones took and the script bounced around various writers, including George Lucas, until Henson gave it back to Jones and told him to ‘make it funny’ again. In the end, Jones was dissatisfied with how the script turned out – he had bigger designs on theme than simply a coming-of-age story – but Henson was directing and…we got what we got.

Watching it now, what strikes me is how much Labyrinth feels like a series of Monty Python sketches which all feature Sarah as the main character, not unlike Holy Grail. Labyrinth is often very funny, in part down to how Henson and his puppeteers created the setting and work the puppets, but also the very physical kind of comedy the Pythons specialised in. The humour in Labyrinth is never ever cruel – it relies on being absurd and silly, rather than by taking pot-shots at the characters. Such generosity of spirit makes Labyrinth a safe movie for kids to watch. Weird, but clean and quite wholesome. Henson made this for children only, not children and adults, and the film shines as a result.

However, this does make Sarah’s journey less arduous and scary than you might expect from a modern kids’ fantasy adventure. Jareth is quite an odd character. He has immense magical powers, and is played with great charisma and charm by Bowie – I cannot imagine a better fit for Bowie than Jareth – and for all that he tries to stymie Sarah, there is rarely any deep sense of danger from him. I suspect it is deliberate. Designer Brian Froud explained that Jareth is intended to be a kind of masculine mirror image to Sarah – showy and immature, a chimaera built out of Sarah’s interests: magic and costumes and rock stars as potential boyfriends, and this is why Jareth has that codpiece. Part of Sarah’s journey to maturity is a form of sexual awakening, and this is reflected in the ball sequence after Sarah eats the drugged peach.

Sarah’s journey, then, is one of entering womanhood by rejecting her childish ways and accepting responsibility. Her immaturity – childishness, rather – at the film’s opening is shown by her obsession with toys being her toys only, time being her time only. She plays dress-up and is obsessed with fairy tales. We can question whether or not her adventure takes place at all, or is merely in her mind, and the answer to this doesn’t matter in the slightest. The outcome of her adventure is that she realises she has to give up the childish things – there are other people in the world who matter too, and she has responsibilities towards them. But it’s up to her to cling on to them or not. The climactic line in the film is “you have no power over me” but the resolution is that she doesn’t have to abandon her childhood loves. She can go back and revisit them at will, but not live among them or be defined by them. She has power over her own life, which is quite a strong message for such a dreamlike movie.

Make no mistake, this is a very odd movie. Even by the standards of fantasy movies, cause and effect, and consistent rules and logic, are often strikingly absent in how Labyrinth is structured. There are moments when the story operates very conventionally. At other times, notably the battle against the goblins, Labyrinth resembles a Scooby-Doo chase sequence. And much of the time, the film follows dream logic, which is to say no logic at all – walls form where no walls existed before, creatures exist whose anatomy can be rearranged on the fly.

But none of it would work at all without Henson and his workshop being on top of their game, and they were. From set design to character design to puppeteering, Labyrinth still looks amazing, for the most part. All of the goblins differ from one another visually, making them a characterful bunch. Hoggle looks quite off-putting to my modern eyes, although his animatronic head is wonderfully realised. Sadly, it is less able to emote than I recalled. Ludo, the friendly monster, wouldn’t be too out of place on Sesame Street, and Sir Didymus is as eccentric, heroic and iconic as I recall him.

All of the minor characters are beautifully realised, too. From the friendly worm, to the door knockers, to the rock heads who try to discourage our heroes, to the wise old man with the bird hat, and especially the suspicious crone who tries to distract Sarah with toys and baubles, everything looks great. Any attempt to remake Labyrinth with digital technology would, without doubt, sand off all of the rough edges and enable the film to feature sequences of dizzying complexity. It would also rob the movie of all of what makes it charming and original. The jankiness of the puppets is a big part of Labyrinth’s magic, and I pray Robert Eggers shoots the planned sequel entirely in camera, to honour the miracles Henson achieved with the original.

The performances are good throughout, from humans to voice actors. Bowie is in his element completely and has a lot of fun as Jareth. Connelly is excellent in the lead, as she had to be. The little people in the suits do sterling work, and this includes Kenny Baker and Warwick Davis and many of the actors who starred in Time Bandits.

And the music. All of the original songs in the movie were written by Bowie and he’s on the soundtrack performing four of them. As musical interludes in movies go, they’re at least as good as anything from a big-budget Disney movie. Magic Dance is good, clean fun. Within You is strangely stately and elegant. The best song in the movie, for me, is by far the weirdest. Chilly Down appears in the sequence with the Fierys, a group of very odd creatures, and…you need to hear it to understand. I like it a lot, from its unconventional lyrical approach to its catchiness. While Bowie doesn’t sing it in the movie, Danny John-Jules (who played a Fiery and sung on the movie) did post the demo version where Bowie does perform it. Very strange, very cool.

Yeah, Kathryn was right to like this movie back in the day. Although it didn’t go crazy at the box office, like many other under-appreciated films, it went off on home video and thoroughly deserves its cult status. It’s bizarre, it’s a little disjointed, it has a farting swamp. This 48-year-old man enjoyed his journey back into the Labyrinth.