Here’s an example of how fast the culture is changing. As regular readers know, I’ve given many talks at New York City’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (www.moccany.org). Two years ago I decided to hold a discussion of Stardust, the novel written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Charles Vess, both luminaries of the comics world. Nobody showed up. A month and a half ago, I was sitting in a local restaurant, gazing out the window, and saw a bus go by, bearing a advertisement for the Stardust movie on its side.

Last month I write about how the makers of the movie Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer so disastrously failed in their attempt to translate classic stories by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, notably their “Galactus trilogy,” to the screen. (See “Comics in Context” #184–185, and Quick Stop contributor Paul Dini makes his own incisive attack on the film in his podcast “Dini Double Feature” #3.) In contrast, the Stardust movie is considerably more faithful to its source material. Neil Gaiman sold the movie rights to a director he trusted with the material, Matthew Vaughn, and persuaded him to hire Jane Goldman, who collaborated with Vaughn on the screenplay (see “Comics in Context”#144). In numerous recent interviews Gaiman, who is one of the movie’s producers, has made clear he is happy with the finished film.

The movie still differs from the book in numerous respects. The changes range from the slight (the hero is named “Tristran Thorn” in the book, but “Tristan,” like the Wagnerian hero, in the movie) to major (a radically revamped final act, in which various characters meet different fates than they do in the book). A short episode in the book, in which Tristran is befriended by Johannes Alberic, captain of a flying “sky-ship,” becomes an extended sequence in the film which metamorphoses Captain Alberic into the pirate Captain Shakespeare, a considerably more flamboyant character.

Sometimes changes were made for budgetary reasons. In the book there is a battle between a lion and a unicorn, but to save on the CGI budget, only the unicorn appears in the film. Some changes were made due to the demands of dramatizing a prose story onscreen. Hence, Stardust the book devotes its opening chapter to the story of Dunstan Thorn, leading up to his son Tristran’s birth; the movie greatly condenses this section in order to introduce Tristan more quickly. And sometimes it seems that Gaiman was simply overruled by Vaughn and Goldman, who wanted to take their own approach to an aspect of the story. (Gaiman entertainingly describes the process of adapting Stardust into film in an August 8, 2007 National Public Radio interview.)

While I can understand the reasons why various changes were made in adapting the book, it is my role as a critic and independent scholar to show how even minor changes to a significant work of fiction can result in the loss of valuable nuances in the book. (And if you haven’t either read the book or seen the film, consider yourselves given spoiler warnings.)

Take the lion and the unicorn episode, for example, from Chapter Five. It serves many purposes. For one thing, as Tristran realizes, the battle between the two creatures is a reenactment of a famous nursery rhyme (“The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown. . . .”). The book has already established that Tristran is journeying through the enchanted realm of Faerie: this episode further suggests that this is the world of fairy tales, in which children’s fantasy stories take on reality. The lion and the unicorn appear on the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom, so their presence in Stardust marks its version of Faerie as a specifically British fantasy world. Moreover, Stardust’s lion and unicorn may serve as an allusion to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, in which a battling lion and unicorn likewise appear. Alice and Tristran each recalls the nursery rhyme when he or she sees the battling lion and unicorn.

Although these subtexts are all worth notice, they are less important than what the episode conveys about the characters of Tristran and the book’s leading lady, Yvaine, the star in human form who has literally fallen to Earth. So far Yvaine has been utterly contemptuous towards Tristran, throwing mud at him and insulting him as soon as they first met in Chapter Four. Tristran doesn’t have Yvaine’s problem with anger management, but he is wrapped up in his quest to find a fallen star and bring it back to Victoria, the young woman whom he believes he loves. He is so obsessed with Victoria and his quest that he is rather lacking in empathy towards other people.

“‘I broke my leg,” said the young lady [Yvaine].
‘I’m sorry, of course,’ said Tristran. ‘But the star.’”
(Stardust, Harper Perennial edition, p. 103)

Tristran isn’t so “sorry” that he offers to do anything to relieve Yvaine’s pain or to comfort her. Moreover, once he realizes that Yvaine is the fallen star he seeks, he takes her prisoner, binding her to himself with a magical chain. He intends to give her to Victoria, as if she were not a person but an animal or object. Although the book never uses the word, this naive, innocent young man is nonetheless treating her as a slave.

But Tristran probably doesn’t realize the import of what he has done to Yvaine. Nor is he cruel: by the start of Chapter Five he makes a splint for her leg, offers to find her a doctor, and worries that she’ll starve. (Actually, according to the book, stars don’t eat.)

When they encounter the battling lion and unicorn, Yvaine demonstrates her own deep capacity for compassion, even for these fearsome beasts. “’Stop them,’ whispered the star. ‘They will kill each other.’” (p. 114). When it becomes clear that the lion will kill the unicorn, Yvaine pleads with Tristran to try to stop the battle. Although Tristran knows that he cannot possibly stop the battling creatures by force, and that they would probably kill him as well, he nonetheless advances till he is only “an arm’s length from the beasts” (p. 115). Recalling the nursery rhyme, Tristran picks up a crown lying in the nearby grass and places it on the lion’s head; with that, the fight is over. Despite her own broken leg, Yvaine makes her way over to the unicorn and comforts it; she insists that they stay with the wounded animal, “and Tristran had not the heart to refuse her” (p. 116).

So through this episode the book first reveals Yvaine’s capacity for great empathy and kindness. It also depicts Tristran’s first important act of bravery in the story. Moreover, although at the end of Chapter Four, Tristran accepted Yvaine’s description of him as “a ninny, a numbskull, a lackwit and a coxcomb,” his solution for taming the lion is rather clever. (As with “The Tale of the Three Brothers” in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, children’s stories and rhymes prove to contain genuine wisdom.) He may be naive, often unthinking and self-deluded, but Tristran can rise above these failings and display true intelligence. Further, why did he risk his life to save the unicorn? Was it simply his emerging capacity to care about other beings than himself and his idealized vision of Victoria? Or was Tristran also acting out of a growing unconscious affection for Yvaine? Tristran embarked on a quest to find the fallen star in order to please Victoria; Yvaine effectively asked him to go on a quest to save the unicorn, and he obeyed, even though his conscious mind warned him against it. Stardust is principally the story of Tristran’s development from callow boy to mature adult, and this episode presents a striking step in that development.

The sequence concludes with Yvaine and Tristran lying on opposite sides of the unicorn, but still joined by the chain, on which Tristran focuses his attention just before falling asleep. Yvaine and Tristran are separate but linked, and his efforts to hear her quiet singing suggest he wishes he were figuratively closer to her. Even though Yvaine had earlier warned Tristran that she would do anything she could to obstruct her quest, in saving the unicorn’s life, they have acted in unison, foreshadowing the emotional bond that will grow between them.

The chain reminds me of the handcuffs in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film The Thirty-Nine Steps, which serve a similar thematic purpose: its hero on a cross-country quest is handcuffed to a woman who resents him and intends to thwart him, but they end up as both allies and lovers.

But a CGI lion was judged to be too expensive for a single scene, and the scene really isn’t essential to the story. So in the film Tristan and Yvaine encounter the unicorn, who is needed for subsequent plot developments, under more peaceful circumstances. And yet look how much the lion-and-unicorn sequence in the book contributes to the careful reader’s understanding of the main characters, the setting in Faerie, and some of the book’s themes. I wonder if the lion’s fascination with the crown might even serve to parody the obsessions of other Stardust characters–the old witch (played by Michelle Pfeiffer in the film) and the murderous Septimus–with power.

In order to find the fallen star for Victoria, Tristan/Tristran had to cross over from normal reality into a world of the supernatural.

In Joseph Campbell’s The Hero of A Thousand Faces, he describes the various phases of the archetypal “hero’s journey” monomyth that underlies adventure stories. Among these is the protagonist’s “crossing of the threshold” which separates the normal, ordinary world from the realm of adventure, which is often enchanted. To get past the threshold, the protagonist must contend against a “threshold guardian.”

Stardust the novel makes its threshold wonderfully explicit. Tristran lives in the British town of Wall, which is named after an actual wall, which separates the town from a literally enchanted realm, that of Faerie. There is only a single gap in the wall, which is guarded by the townspeople of Wall, who are determined not to allow any of Wall’s children or any visitors to the town pass through into Faerie; apparently, the adult townspeople of Wall have no intention of going there. The only exception to the prohibition comes once every nine years on May Day, when the townspeople of Wall cross through the gap to attend a fair that is held in the meadow immediately on the other side.

The nature of the wall raises questions in my mind. Does the wall, which comes out of the woods and reenters them, have end points, enabling someone to walk around it? Is the wall presumably some kind of dimensional barrier, and Faerie actually located in another dimension? That would explain why Captain Alberic/Shakespeare couldn’t just sail his flying ship over the wall.) Probably wisely, Gaiman leaves the answers to these questions as mysteries: fairy tales do not conform to scientific principles. But his narrator does explain in the book that “Faerie is bigger than England, as it is bigger than the world (for, since the dawn of time, each land that has been forced off the map by explorers and the brave going out and proving it wasn’t there has taken refuge in Faerie. . . ) “ (p. 63). This suggests that while Faerie seems on the surface to be part of our world, just over that wall, it is actually an alternate reality, constructed over the ages by the imaginations of storytellers.

The movie avoids referring to the enchanted realm as Faerie. Why? Was the name considered confusing because Tristan does not encounter any actual fairies in the film? Was it thought that movie audiences nowadays cannot separate the word “fairy” from its alternate meaning as a slur against gays? By using the term “Faerie” for the realm beyond the wall, the book suggests that this is a truly magical world which perhaps predates human civilization in Britain. Moreover, Stardust is set in the 19th century, and its use of the term “Faerie” connects the book with the tradition of depicting fairies in Victorian literature and art.

Most importantly, Gaiman’s use of the name “Faerie” in the book makes it immediately clear to the reader that this is indeed an enchanted realm on the other side of the wall. One of my problems with the movie is that the world on the other side of the wall never seems like a truly magical land to me. It looks beautiful, certainly, but it looks and seems real. Referring to it as “Stormhold” makes it sound like another nation, not a supernatural domain.

This may be a difficult distinction to make clear. Certainly the movie’s “Stormhold” has witches and ghosts and even a unicorn. But Macbeth has witches and ghosts, too, yet no one contends that Scotland is a literally enchanted realm comparable to the land of Faerie. The witches in Macbeth seem like anomalies in an otherwise normal world, or they represent supernatural forces that are normally hidden from mortal view. The Stardust movie makes Stormhold look so realistic that its witches and unicorn likewise seem like anomalies to me. At one point in the book (p. 63), Gaiman’s narrator recounts a legend that as mountain range in Faerie is actually the body of a sleeping giant. The reader can then imagine a mountain range with a vaguely humanoid form, adding to his sense of a magical world, but how could a film visually convey that?

Other recent movies successfully make their distinctions between the normal and magical worlds. Take The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: as soon as the kids step through the wardrobe, they are surrounded by snow (at the wrong time of year) and sight a faun and talking beavers. The sheer number of unusual, supernatural phenomena plays a role. It’s always clear in the Harry Potter movies that Hogwarts is a magical place, what with ghosts and paintings with moving, talking figures, and staircases swinging about with minds of their own.

In Stardust the book Gaiman quickly establishes the supernatural feel of Faerie once Tristran crosses over there: he encounters a “hairy little man”–“if man he was,” notes the narrator-, as well as “tiny people” who emit a flickering light, who might be actual fairies. Later, memorably, there is a talking tree (acknowledged by Gaiman to be inspired by Tori Amos) and, much further on, a talking badger. None of them make it into the movie. As early as page 63, the book’s narrator assures us that “Here, truly, there be Dragons. Also gryphons, wyverns, hippogriffs, basilisks, and hydras.” But in the film’s Stormhold, the supernatural still seems to me to be the exception rather than the rule.

In the film, when Tristan and Yvaine first find Captain Shakespeare’s flying pirate ship soaring unto view, it initially seemed out of place to me: I hadn’t seen anything so massively, spectacularly supernatural in the film up to that point. In the book I accepted Captain Alberic’s flying ship right away. Having read about so many other impossible things by that point, I accepted the ship as a reasonable addition.

The most interesting aspect of the wall in the book for me is that the male townspeople of Wall take turns acting as guards–including Tristram himself and his father Dunstan, each of whom ends up violating his duty by crossing over into Faerie. In other words, this is the only case I can think of in which the protagonist is himself one of Campbell’s threshold guardians! In order to become a hero, he has to give up the role of threshold guardian and defy his former fellow threshold guardians.

In the book this also means freeing oneself from the townspeople’s own version of groupthink. The townspeople of Wall are devoted to not letting anyone cross the barrier either way between their world and Faerie. But why? Neither Dunstan nor Tristran seem to know, nor does anyone else in Wall say why.

The townspeople’s guardianship of the wall seems to me to be a metaphor for a mindset that fears and resents the unknown, that insists on conventional thinking and behavior, and that discourages all but the truly insistent on pursuing alternative paths through life. The only people whom the townspeople of Wall allow to pass through the gap have “a look in the eyes, and once seen it cannot be mistaken” (p. 4). Perhaps Tristran too developed this “look.” It’s as if Wall is a fairy tale version of an archetypal small town, whose citizens are crippled by provincial ways of thinking, and the land over the wall represents the archetypal big city, where those willing to embark on the quest can find “miracles and wonders” (p. 13).

In the movie there only seems to be one threshold guardian for the wall: an ancient man who is nevertheless amusingly formidable in preventing people from crossing the gap. (Does he never sleep?) I think that the movie misses something important here. The book has presented us with a powerful image of an entire community that devotes itself to preventing individuals from leaving and making a different kind of life. (Suddenly I find myself thinking of television’s The Prisoner.) In the movie it may well be that the community doesn’t even know that there is an enchanted world on the opposite side of the wall, and there is only this one aged, lone eccentric who shoos (or bears) people away from the threshold.

But what about that exception, on May Day every nine years, when the townspeople cross the threshold just far enough to attend the Faerie fair? This initially puzzled me, but I decided that these May Days are like Mardi Gras and Carnival, or Halloween or Saturnalia. There is a tradition of holidays when the normal rules of order and proper behavior are suspended. It is as if these holidays are outlets for emotions, for sides of our personalities, for activities, which are suppressed during the rest of the year in order that society may function in an orderly fashion. And so in Stardust the book, that outlet for the people of Wall comes once every nine years.

In the movie, though, the enchanted realm’s meadow and its fair are permanently off limits to the people of Wall. Perhaps the filmmakers didn’t want to puzzle the audience as to why there was an exception to the rule about not crossing the threshold.

As noted, Stardust’s leading lady is Yvaine, a star in human form. who has fallen to Earth. The idea of a star in human form is not new. There is even a Marvel character, Cloud, a member of the Defenders in the 1980s, who was an entire nebula who took the form of a teenage girl (and sometimes a teenage boy) on Earth. I dealt with the concept in this column in my discussion of P.L. Travers’ first Mary Poppins book, in which one of the Pleiades appears as a young girl named Maia and even goes Christmas shopping in London (see “Comics in Context” #158).

What I found most intriguing about the Maia episode, and another one in which Mary Poppins hangs paper stars in the sky, is that they imply that in the world of Mary Poppins, science is wrong. Similarly, after meeting Yvaine, Tristran tells her “that he had always supposed stars to be, as Mrs. Cherry had taught them, flaming balls of burning gas many hundreds of miles across, just like the sun only further away” (p. 111). Mary Poppins and Stardust postulate that science is merely illusion, a notion that is appealing although not to be taken seriously. Science tells us that our planet is a miniscule part of a cosmos too vast for us to comprehend, to which we mean nothing. It is a bleak vision of reality. Wouldn’t the universe seem to be more benign if it had a more human scale, if the stars turned out to be people like ourselves, or to be tiny lights that we could reach out and touch just by climbing Mary Poppins’ ladder?

Still, one of the problems that I have with Stardust, both as a book and as a movie, is in accepting Yvaine as actually being a star. I don’t have trouble with Maia, because Mary Poppins is a more whimsical sort of book than Stardust, which takes a more dramatic tone. I feel that I should take Yvaine more seriously as a character than I do Maia. Are we to imagine that Yvaine and her fellow stars exist in humanoid form, albeit with the ability to shine, up in the heavens? Or do they exist in some other sort of form, and Yvaine took on human form when she fell into the realm of Faerie (just as the book and film tell us that she would transform into an unliving piece of rock–a meteorite–if she left Faerie and entered the “real” world)? Even if stars exist in the heavens in humanoid form, wouldn’t their native realm be very different from Earth’s? Yet Yvaine seems to have no trouble adjusting to Earth.

Certainly, Yvaine gives off light, but she does not seem to me to be a different kind of being in essence from Tristran/Tristan and the other humans. I find myself thinking back to Lee and Kirby’s “Galactus trilogy,” in which another celestial being literally falls to Earth–the Silver Surfer–and encounters a human being–Alicia Masters. Lee and Kirby depict the Surfer as initially not comprehending the ways and nature of humanity, until Alicia opens his eyes not just to the value of the human race, but to the potential for humanity–qualities such as nobility and compassion–within himself. The Silver Surfer is metaphorically an angel or god who has fallen into the world of mortals. That’s the metaphorical role that Yvaine too is intended to fill. Yet neither in the movie nor in the book do I get the sense that there is anything truly unearthly about Yvaine. She seems not like a fallen goddess, but like a dethroned princess, forced to put up with someone–Tristran/Tristan–whom she considers her social inferior.

I’ve thought of another parallel as well. In the book when Tristran and Yvaine first kiss, at last acknowledging their love for each other, the narration states, “He opened his eyes as he kissed the star. Her sky-blue eyes stared back into his, and in her eyes he could see no parting from her” (p. 234).

That last clause seems familiar. Charles Dickens wrote two endings for Great Expectations, and the final version of his second ending concludes thus: “I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”

Is the similarity in phrasing only a coincidence? Tristran and Yvaine are like Dickens’ once naive Pip and the formerly disdainful Estella. In the Stardust book the narrator even points out to us in Chapter One that at the time of his story “Mr. Charles Dickens was serializing his novel Oliver Twist (p. 5), as if alerting the readers to be on the lookout for Dickensian parallels.

Dickens’ concluding lines for Great Expectations may suggest a happy ending, with Pip and Estella united in love. But they are actually ambiguous. Just before Dickens’ final paragraph, Estella, who admitted to have been changed by her experiences, told Pip that they “will continue friends apart,” which is hardly an expression of undying love. Just because Pip “saw no shadow of another parting from her” does not mean that they will not part. Indeed, Pip, as narrator recounting his past, may be phrasing it this way to suggest that there was such a “shadow” that he ignored at the time.

Moreover, in fine tuning this ending, Dickens had previously phrased the last line this way: “I saw the shadow of no parting from her but one.” It has been suggested that this “one” shadow would be that of the inevitable parting of lovers by death. (For more about Dickens’ ending, see here and here.)

This interpretation is relevant to Stardust the book, because, in retrospect, Tristran’s failure to see his “parting” from Yvaine is ironic. As we learn in the Epilogue, “Tristran and Yvaine were happy together.” But “Not foreverafter”–as fairy tales traditionally claim at their conclusions–“for Time, the thief, eventually takes all things into his dusty storehouse,” and Tristran inevitably dies.

Death is not such a bad thing in the world of Stardust. It’s instructive to be writing about Stardust so soon after doing a column about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (see “Comics in Context” #187). (Spoiler alert through the end of this paragraph!) J. K. Rowling was insistent on the mystery and finality of death in her Harry Potter series until Harry makes his (apparent) journey to the borderline between the world of the living and the realm of the dead, where he (apparently) encounters Dumbledore’s spirit towards the end of Hallows. In Stardust the sons of the Lord of Stormhold, once they have been killed, immediately reappear as ghosts; in the movie, this is even treated as a running gag. At least for those in the realm of Faerie, death is not oblivion, so Tristran’s death in the book is not the end for him.

But Yvaine is an immortal, and Gaiman ends the book on a bittersweet note, with the description of Yvaine, still alive and still young, but parted from her true love by his death, standing “for hour after hour” at the top of her palace: “She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.” (It’s an image something like the final, enigmatic shot of Rouben Mamoulian’s 1933 film Queen Christina, whose title character has also lost her lover and is staring out into the unknown.) She has been parted both from her true love and from the other stars. Possibly in death Tristan has become part of the infinite; Yvaine is condemned to be separate from it.

But at the end of the movie the narrator informs us that Tristan did not die, but after he and Yvaine jointly ruled Stormhold for many years, they used a magic candle to transport themselves into the heavens, where they lived as stars, presumably for eternity. So, I wonder, did Tristan achieved immortality, did he remain a very old man? Or was he somehow rejuvenated? More importantly, what does it really mean for Tristan to become a star? Did he retain his human appearance, or was he transformed into a different, sort of being?

Despite the transformation of the hero into a star, this is in essence the conventional ending of a fairy tale: the hero and heroine live happily ever after, in this case, literally forever. But the book has an unconventional ending for the genre. For one thing, the narrator cautiously implies that Tristran and Yvaine’s life together was not entirely blissful: “they were happy, as these things go, for a long while.” The narrator acknowledges that Tristran inevitably died, and that Yvaine faced a life (perhaps eternal?) of loneliness. All good things come to an end.

This is a more realistic and thought-provoking ending, befitting a fairy tale for an adult audience. Indeed, I would say that what makes Stardust the book interesting is its unconventional approach to familiar tropes of fantasy and fairy tales, while many of the changes that the movie makes push the story in a more conventional direction. This is a subject I will explore further in next week’s column.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

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