![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
- ch: dale arden,
- ch: flash gordon,
- ch: hans zarkov,
- ch: ming the merciless,
- ch: prince barin,
- ch: prince voltan,
- ch: princess aura,
- cw: genocide,
- fandom: star wars,
- film: flash gordon,
- film: highlander,
- genre: meta,
- genre: review,
- incest,
- music: queen,
- person: adolf hitler,
- person: bff,
- person: brian blessed,
- person: chaim topol,
- person: max von sydow,
- person: timothy dalton,
- racism,
- the holocaust
Flash Gordon!
The BFF and I rewatched Flash Gordon (1980) last night!
I always remember the weird art film buried in it (when Zarkov's mind is ostensibly being wiped, the villains play the highlights of his current memory on a ... TV? and along side strange images of cats etc he's revealed to be a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who was able to escape to the USA, build a career in NASA, unjustly fell into disrepute, and his wife unrelatedly drowned). I had forgotten that one of the villains remarks that Hitler had potential (...) and that Zarkov later reveals that he preserved his mind by reciting the Talmud, the equations of Einstein, works of Shakespeare, and a Beatles song to protect the integrity of his thoughts.
This is all embedded into a bright, cartoonish, frequently hilarious film that, unfortunately, plays into the racism of the source and also adds some of its own. The random subject that is killed to show how evil Emperor Ming is has been changed from some weird creature to just Black people in costumes clearly designed to look "tribal", while Emperor Ming and his daughter Aura are played by white actors but strongly coded as East Asian in an extremely stereotyped "Yellow Peril" way. Max von Sydow's Ming ranges between ludicrously villainous (he has buttons for various natural disasters he can and does inflict on Earth; my personal favorite is "hot hail") and genuinely chilling (when he offers to make Flash a vassal ruler, he coolly responds that the people of Earth should be more tractable; when Flash asks if he's talking about slavery, Ming simply says that they will be satisfied with less).
Flash being framed as the great savior of everyone is interesting, because in the story as written the victory is decidedly cooperative, and I honestly think Zarkov and Aura were probably more instrumental. Obviously that claim is not meant to be taken all that seriously, though I've always been puzzled by Barin succeeding Ming rather than Aura (I think there's some lore that explains it, but in the movie as is, we have no idea what that is). Timothy Dalton's Barin is pretty great. Everyone is baffled by his attachment to Aura and although neither outright say "our compatible kinks have created a special bond between us" it's extremely clear.
J and I don't exactly forgot that it's a horny movie, and yet it's always surprising just how sexual almost everything in it is (it's allegedly PG). There's a sexy pillow fight between Aura and Dale (funnier because we've previously seen Dale wipe the earth with multiple armed men; it's okay, Aura, if she didn't actually like you, you'd probably be clubbed into oblivion already). There's the slow-motion, emotionally laden handshake between Barin and Flash in which Barin very earnestly proclaims that he will follow Flash ANYWHERE. There's Aura's attempt to seduce Flash while he's flying and him outright saying he's getting really turned on, which is telepathically received by a baffled Dale, and his response that it's not about her. There's Dale suddenly announcing that she and Flash are engaged (news to all of us!). There's basically everything Ming chooses to be (including with regard to Aura, yikes).
The rock/pop soundtrack for all this could have gone really badly, but Queen—wildly successful as they already were—might have been created in a lab specifically to provide musical numbers for Flash Gordon and Highlander. They're my favorite musicians so I'm not unbiased at all, but it's hard to imagine any act of the time who would have been a better match for the combination of comedy, ridiculous drama, and flashes of something deeper and more ambitious than a good time in both films. (Highlander is certainly the more ambitious film with the better soundtrack, but Flash Gordon is so exactly what it's attempting to be that it's impressive in a weird cheesy way.) Given the history of how Star Wars, my beloved, came to be, I sometimes amuse myself by imagining a universe where John Williams scored Flash Gordon and Star Wars was backed by Queen.
Anyway. We both enjoyed the Arborians'(?) initiation rite, in which young men achieve manhood by sticking their hands in a stump that contains a monster that might bite them and thus drive them to insanity and death. There's also pounding of sticks they carry and a lot of moaning in the dude circle, to which Aura gleefully responds, "I love initiations!" Just in case we somehow might not have noticed how sexual the whole thing is. One of the young men is bitten by the stump monster and begs for a quick death, which Barin gives him, and his body just falls to the ground.
(J and I just described the whole thing as "the worst bar mitzvah.")
Somehow I've gone this far without mentioning PRINCE VOLTAN, a gleefully Chaotic Good (arguably Chaotic Neutral tbh) vassal of Ming's played by Brian Blessed, who truly gets the assignment in a way that ... well, in fairness, everyone in this film gets the assignment, but I think only Chaim Topol as Zarkov and, well, Queen get it on the level of Brian Blessed. He was born to be PRINCE VOLTAN, was apparently a devoted Flash Gordon fan as a boy, and joked that he probably would have murdered anyone else who tried to take the part from him. Fair.
Unrelated to anything, the sign at Ming's wedding to Dale is one of my favorite details:
ALL WILL MAKE MERRY
ON PAIN OF DEATH
I also kind of love the implication that the defeat of Ming sets the murder robot drones free of his control, so now they're just friendly photographers, I guess. And that Flash escapes into space on the Hawkmens' flying scooter even though they themselves can fly and are never seen getting around via scooter. And "THE END ... ?" is truly the only possible ending for this particular film.
I always remember the weird art film buried in it (when Zarkov's mind is ostensibly being wiped, the villains play the highlights of his current memory on a ... TV? and along side strange images of cats etc he's revealed to be a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who was able to escape to the USA, build a career in NASA, unjustly fell into disrepute, and his wife unrelatedly drowned). I had forgotten that one of the villains remarks that Hitler had potential (...) and that Zarkov later reveals that he preserved his mind by reciting the Talmud, the equations of Einstein, works of Shakespeare, and a Beatles song to protect the integrity of his thoughts.
This is all embedded into a bright, cartoonish, frequently hilarious film that, unfortunately, plays into the racism of the source and also adds some of its own. The random subject that is killed to show how evil Emperor Ming is has been changed from some weird creature to just Black people in costumes clearly designed to look "tribal", while Emperor Ming and his daughter Aura are played by white actors but strongly coded as East Asian in an extremely stereotyped "Yellow Peril" way. Max von Sydow's Ming ranges between ludicrously villainous (he has buttons for various natural disasters he can and does inflict on Earth; my personal favorite is "hot hail") and genuinely chilling (when he offers to make Flash a vassal ruler, he coolly responds that the people of Earth should be more tractable; when Flash asks if he's talking about slavery, Ming simply says that they will be satisfied with less).
Flash being framed as the great savior of everyone is interesting, because in the story as written the victory is decidedly cooperative, and I honestly think Zarkov and Aura were probably more instrumental. Obviously that claim is not meant to be taken all that seriously, though I've always been puzzled by Barin succeeding Ming rather than Aura (I think there's some lore that explains it, but in the movie as is, we have no idea what that is). Timothy Dalton's Barin is pretty great. Everyone is baffled by his attachment to Aura and although neither outright say "our compatible kinks have created a special bond between us" it's extremely clear.
J and I don't exactly forgot that it's a horny movie, and yet it's always surprising just how sexual almost everything in it is (it's allegedly PG). There's a sexy pillow fight between Aura and Dale (funnier because we've previously seen Dale wipe the earth with multiple armed men; it's okay, Aura, if she didn't actually like you, you'd probably be clubbed into oblivion already). There's the slow-motion, emotionally laden handshake between Barin and Flash in which Barin very earnestly proclaims that he will follow Flash ANYWHERE. There's Aura's attempt to seduce Flash while he's flying and him outright saying he's getting really turned on, which is telepathically received by a baffled Dale, and his response that it's not about her. There's Dale suddenly announcing that she and Flash are engaged (news to all of us!). There's basically everything Ming chooses to be (including with regard to Aura, yikes).
The rock/pop soundtrack for all this could have gone really badly, but Queen—wildly successful as they already were—might have been created in a lab specifically to provide musical numbers for Flash Gordon and Highlander. They're my favorite musicians so I'm not unbiased at all, but it's hard to imagine any act of the time who would have been a better match for the combination of comedy, ridiculous drama, and flashes of something deeper and more ambitious than a good time in both films. (Highlander is certainly the more ambitious film with the better soundtrack, but Flash Gordon is so exactly what it's attempting to be that it's impressive in a weird cheesy way.) Given the history of how Star Wars, my beloved, came to be, I sometimes amuse myself by imagining a universe where John Williams scored Flash Gordon and Star Wars was backed by Queen.
Anyway. We both enjoyed the Arborians'(?) initiation rite, in which young men achieve manhood by sticking their hands in a stump that contains a monster that might bite them and thus drive them to insanity and death. There's also pounding of sticks they carry and a lot of moaning in the dude circle, to which Aura gleefully responds, "I love initiations!" Just in case we somehow might not have noticed how sexual the whole thing is. One of the young men is bitten by the stump monster and begs for a quick death, which Barin gives him, and his body just falls to the ground.
(J and I just described the whole thing as "the worst bar mitzvah.")
Somehow I've gone this far without mentioning PRINCE VOLTAN, a gleefully Chaotic Good (arguably Chaotic Neutral tbh) vassal of Ming's played by Brian Blessed, who truly gets the assignment in a way that ... well, in fairness, everyone in this film gets the assignment, but I think only Chaim Topol as Zarkov and, well, Queen get it on the level of Brian Blessed. He was born to be PRINCE VOLTAN, was apparently a devoted Flash Gordon fan as a boy, and joked that he probably would have murdered anyone else who tried to take the part from him. Fair.
Unrelated to anything, the sign at Ming's wedding to Dale is one of my favorite details:
ALL WILL MAKE MERRY
ON PAIN OF DEATH
I also kind of love the implication that the defeat of Ming sets the murder robot drones free of his control, so now they're just friendly photographers, I guess. And that Flash escapes into space on the Hawkmens' flying scooter even though they themselves can fly and are never seen getting around via scooter. And "THE END ... ?" is truly the only possible ending for this particular film.