An Absurdist Tale of Sand
Post from Cinema Surrealismé Netlog, by Darque Tydd, April 15th, 2007
Surealismé comes in many hues. It can be dark, scary, psychedelic, psychological, cerebral, and even silly or absurd. My long-time readers will know that I typically engage the darker side of the style, be that Giger or Lynch or Tool, but it is important to explore the lighter side on occasion, if only to better know the darkness by looking into the light.
And it is my opinion that the master of the lighter, sillier side of surealismé is none other than Jim Henson.
Yes, I expect some pushback for saying that, but it is true my brothers and sisters. You pushed back when I maintained that Walt Disney was a great surrealist (watch the “Destino” short he created with Salvador Dali or the acid-trip nightmare sequence of “
Heffalumps and Woozles” if you don’t believe me) and now, surely some will assert that the man behind the Muppets is not a true surealisté simply because his art was (gasp!) popular.
Look to
The Dark Crystal or
Labyrinth. Behold “Hugga Wugga” or its predecessor “
Sclrapp Flyapp”. Watch
Timepiece or
Limbo or
The Cube.
Or better yet, simply behold 1991’s
Sand.
This is a bit of that old, experimental Henson from the psychedelic ‘60s in the vein of
Timepiece. It’s 92 minutes of surrealisté non-sequitur and dream imagery. It’s classic Henson fourth-wall breaking absurdity. It has no plot, no seeming purpose, and a circular narrative, like a Dadaist “Exquisite Corpse” poem made visual.
The story, or what appears to be a story, follows a largely silent protagonist known as “Mac” (Tim Robbins) who walks into an Old West town only to be greeted by a swinging ‘60s-style party with a Dixieland band. He’s greeted as a hero, given leis and flowers and kisses, and greeted by a kindly old Sheriff (Andy Griffith – more on his casting later). He’s then given a map, a backpack of truly random items like stop signs and records and a giant key, and given a “10-minute head start” and told to “run!”
Support your local Sheriff (All images from the brilliant Ramon Perez graphic novel of
Tale of Sand commissioned by Lisa Henson; Image source “ifanboy.com”)
From this point forward, a sureallisté set of events and encounters plays out as Mac runs, constantly encountering the mysterious “Blonde” (Laura Dern), and hunted by the dapper but diabolical “Patch” (Antony Sher). He must get to “Eagle Rock” before Patch can kill him, with such bizarre obstacles along the way as a huge cabaret in a tiny shack, a swimming pool full of sharks, a pack of Bedouins, and an angry football team.
And yet the plot is hardly the point. It’s existential. It has themes of life, time, and mortality. It explores the absurdity and pointlessness of life. It’s hilarious!
Be warned, however. The film includes some stereotypical portrayals of people. The characters are caricatures, not rounded people. The Bedouins are old movie stereotypes, as are the African natives in the service of the white big game hunter. Laura Dern’s dismissively named “The Blonde” is sexualized to the point of fetishization (which makes the eventual “reveal” of what lies underneath all the more shocking and impactful). Yet according to Juhl, that is the point. The characters are, by nature, reflective of our biases and preconceptions, a subliminal connection to the meta-narrative of the west, with our biases intact. Still, it can be a shock to see such portrayals in a piece from the early 1990s.
But brothers and sisters, the true story here is the story of the film’s over a quarter-century production. Jim Henson came up with the story idea in the late 1950s and his old partner and Muppets head writer Jerry Juhl turned it into a screenplay in the ‘60s, which was revised constantly throughout the 1970s. They called it “Tale of Sand”, for sand is everywhere: in the sands of the desert or beachfront, the proverbial (and occasionally visual) sands of time in the hourglass motifs throughout, or the sands of “the sandman” and the dreams that he brings.
It should hardly surprise anyone that no studio was willing to pick up what was essentially an arthouse piece with almost zero mass market potential, even with Jim Henson’s name attached to it.
It makes just as much sense in context (Image source “theglobeandmail.com”)
And while some may decry how Jim Henson “sold out” by joining Disney, the decision did come with a major advantage in this regard, for now he was the one who could greenlight a picture. And after working with dark sureallisté David Lynch on
Less than Zero and
Ronnie Rocket, which I discussed earlier (see links), and after his numerous collaborations with the great surrealisté writer/director Terry Gilliam, he established a production partnership with them to finally put his and Juhl’s creation to film.
At first, Terry Gilliam was on deck to direct. But then Henson scored the beautiful Magritte-inspired
Toys and had Gilliam direct that wonderful feature. Lynch was offered the director’s chair, but did not feel that his dark style meshed properly with the light absurdist story. Gilliam and Henson, however, soon approached Gilliam’s fellow Monty Python “Terry”, Terry Jones. Jones, who was struggling for opportunities following the failure of
Erik the Viking (which I will address in a later post), read the script, loved it, and immediately accepted. Agreeing to aim for an arthouse/film festival release “for the art”, they truncated the title to, simply,
Sand.
Thus, a story devised by Jim Henson, written by Jerry Juhl, produced by David Lynch and Terry Gilliam, and directed by Terry Jones, with effects by the Creatureworks, went into production, and a comedic Surealisté triumph occurred.
Rather than Jump the Shark, Jim Henson chooses to punch it (Image source “multiversitycomics.com”)
Terry Jones brought two of his former collaborators from
Erik the Viking to the picture: the great Tim Robbins as the protagonist Mac and the sublime Antony Sher as the sexy and villainous Patch, who hunts our protagonist, representing both Mac’s fears and mortality and “whom he wishes that he could be.” At Lynch’s suggestion, Laura Dern was cast as “The Blonde”, a mysterious and alluring woman who is equally (if not more) dangerous as Patch, and represents temptation, sin, and vice. Finally, Andy Griffith was cast as The Sheriff, which Jerry Juhl called “serendipity personified.”
For you see, when Henson and Juhl first devised the tale, they envisioned the Sheriff as “an old Andy Griffith”. This was back when Andy was still starring in his titular TV show as a small-town sheriff. And as it worked out, thanks to the intervening decades, Andy Griffith was exactly the right age to play the character himself!
The film was quite inexpensive to make (a few million dollars) as it could be filmed almost entirely on location in Arizona (including Tombstone) plus a handful of existing sets, mostly using existing random props. Even so, the film only screened in “arthouse” cinema and to this day has probably yet to make a profit.
But Cannes and Sundance loved it, winning the Prix du scénario in the former and a special mention in the latter. It was lauded by critics, received Oscar nominations for Editing and Original Screenplay, and won the Hugo.
It is, simply put, magnificent, comedic surrealismé at its finest.
The clock is ticking (Image source “goodokbad.com”)
So, for my readers, set aside your preconceived notions of art and who has the right to be called an artiste, and see
Sand before the sand runs out on you.