I was utterly amused by endless discussion threads that mushroomed following Tim’s Burton most recent take on Alice. There is a hotchpotch of it out there and I particularly like the soccer Mom, the feminist and the Lutheran interpretations, to name a few. The over-the-counter motivational lines on ‘why finding/re-gaining muchness matters’ and ‘why the best ones are mad’ are terrific!
Indeed there were also some actually intelligent thoughts on ‘blurring the fine line between (so uniquely) Carroll’s intellectual nonsense and true madness’, induced with a much exploited father-daughter interaction at the outset, and the famous: ‘You're mad, bonkers, off your head ‘ line.
Just a few months before I had a pleasure of meeting Burton’s Alice I distinctly remember referring to one of my own intense experiences as belonging to two opposite, yet not mutually exclusive levels of experience – non-sense and sense-free. Thank you, Burton, for introducing the mad line regardless of all the possible abuse and misinterpretation, and for reminding me on the difference between the two.
It dawned on me that throughout the journey Alice actually bounces on that very edge between the non-sense and sense-free, till she finds herself on the other side of both. The same experience I just mentioned was described by the other side as ‘on the edge of…don’t-know-what’. And that precisely is what Alice reminded me of: the edge of reason, sense, self and reality, the divider and the connector is actually the possibility line – and the best place to be.
The amount of symbolism condensed in Alice’s interactions with the Mad Hatter is mind -boggling for anyone who hasn’t joined Alice’s Facebook fun club 3 months ago. The Platonic thread of questions on nature of reality ( ‘ I am real as much as you want me to be’ and ‘ THIS is real as much as you want it to be’), and importantly – the notion of muchness. Disappointed with her laissiez-faire approach to the state of affairs in the Wonderland, the Mad Hatter introduces the famous "You were much more muchier (then)...You've lost your muchness" line. And as soon as I heard it, I smiled to myself, and to my companions on each side that were far too busy trying to salvage whatever was left of the melted ice-cream smuggled into the theater, and I though: I can’t wait to read the blogs! And can’t wait to see the numerous interpretations of the tagline, the sound bites, the ‘ finding yourself’ discussion with a new age and especially the feminist twist – how convenient it was to have a corseted Victorian society as a backdrop to the whole thing!
But that exactly is – not – the point in my view. Loosing muchness is not about ‘ loosing the true self’ or whatever loosey goosey umbrella term was coined. 'Muchness' has very little to do with the 'true self' - it is simply about curiosity, and about what we do with it: neglect, smoother, or embrace it. And that brings me back to the fortune cookie commentary on curiosity being the greatest divider of people –as well as the greatest tissue. Which is precisely why Alice can’t appeal to everyone, or even to most, nor could she ever be a symbol of universal human pursuit of ‘self’. If it wasn’t for her actionable curiosity she would have never landed amongst the random and the bizarre dynamics of the wonderwild! You must be able to notice the white rabbit first, and that precisely is the point.
