The actual title is longer: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a possessive possessive. This is the one wherein we find Peter Sellers and Dudley Moore, to name two big future stars, in heavy makeup. The movie is pre CGI and uses old school special effects to produce Alice’s adventure, in color, with sound (she even sings and dances; it’s a big part for Fiona Fullerton).
My topic these days is “fairy tales” and, sure, we can argue what constitutes same. Alice’s universe has no entities called “fairies” unless we count the Tweedle Brothers who might be gay, but that’s an entirely unrelated etymology. What’s important is to discount the narrative itself as purely fiction, so we don’t get hung up wondering “how much of this is true?” (answer: none of it is, and she wakes up in the end).
Another confluence was Dr. D, over at Blue House for post dog-walk dining (we were a five-some: three humans and two dogs); he’s been immersed in the Alice lore in past chapters, involving a commercial publishing enterprise and book launch just down the street from Wanderers (Linus Pauling House) on Hawthorne, at Fernie Brae, which no longer exists (Third Eye still does though, across the street).
What struck me, and Dave reassured me this was a main point of the novel, is how blasé and go-with-the-flow Alice was. Her reality was turned upside-down and yet she preserves her even, good temper and optimism, yet not without some exercise of judgement. She draws on her priors and updates quickly. She’s your quintessential Bayesian.
I’m reminded of a quote buried in the Wittgenstein corpus somewhere, maybe in the Investigations, maybe in On Certainty, where he says (paraphrase): “what if I woke up one morning and everything had changed? …Maybe I’d just join in.” I want to add “like Alice”.
Once we identified Peter and Dudley through all that makeup it was easy to project forward and picture them in future movies. I love Dudley in Bedazzled (with Raquel Welch as Lust) and Sellers in so many, but especially Being There.
Backstory: I entered Movie Madness (MMU) with the intent to rent I’m OK Jack, on Rosalie’s recommendation, but to my surprise I couldn’t even find it in the database. However that search did lead me to the Sellers shelf in the Foreign Films section (UK/British) and from there I selected this Alice movie, and a small anthology of early (1930s) British comedies. I haven’t watched those yet.
At this point I realize the movie is actually I’m All Right Jack and that may well be in the collection. I’ll check next time I’m there.
