In Which Size is Power and Tim Burton is less than wholly Compelling (here be spoilers)

It may be that this whole blog thing is getting out of hand. I suspect this on the grounds that this evening I went and watched Alice in Wonderland Tim Burton style, and really didn't focus. This is not just because I've read a number of reviews of varying degrees of pithiness written by my eloquent and well-read friends and acquaintances (which were much more interesting and thus intrusive to my viewing than the professional reviews which were all "that Mia girl is so hot right now" and "Oh Tim Burton, you wacky aesthete you" rather than "dude totally misquoted the Jabberwocky poem", "you call that consistent imagery and characterisation, do you?" and "Tim Burton is to Alice in Wonderland as 5ive is to We Will Rock You".) Mainly it was because I was sitting there acting like some terrible combination of an Arts Grad who takes themselves too seriously, a Year 12 English student and an early xkcd comic; intead of trying to immerse myself in the film, I was contemplating a blog post discussing the interface between size and power.


Basically - and Spoiler Alert, dudes and dudettes (or at least, for those of you who have never engaged with the Alice in Wonderland story in any way, there will be big spoilers, and if you haven't seen the movie then sort of moderate spoilers, but as if this platter of aesthetic indulgence is "spoilable", it's totally one of those journey-not-the-destination things) - Alice has to fight any number of oppressive forces, most relevantly a huge dragon thing, as well as an evil monarch who is self-concious about her unusual appearance. Fine. Also Alice repeatedly solves things in the "problem solving" type areas of her adventure by getting a bunch bigger or smaller. This is apparently perfectly normal in Wonderland, where people always seem to have the relevant potions or whatever handy, although no-one else actually uses any at any time.

But at no point does anyone, either Alice or any of the other characters, just go "sod this for a game of soldiers; I'm going to eat enough cake to be a total giant (while keeping the shrinking potion on hand to avoid plot devices) and just step on the damn Jabberwocky beast thing". Or even just evade capture or prison by growing or shrinking. The Hatter sits in prison and is all "it sure is a pity that I'm manacled and behind bars and doomed to be executed" even though we know that he had become-tiny-juice in his pocket (or on his person) 10 scenes ago, and that he was arrested in the same clothes as he was wearing when he had it last. And he never goes, "man, bugger it, I'm going to become tiny and escape, and enormous if I'm attacked".

Why is this? Is it because once anyone starts messing about like that, all bets are off? Like all the inhabitants of Wonderland have a Gentlemen's Agreement not to start down the road of getting enormous and trying to step on one another, on the grounds that the consequent oneupmanship would cause irreparable damage to the infrastructure? If so, are the potions they all have on hand just for defusing emergencies, like an OH&S sort of thing? Why else would a 2 foot rabbit in a page's uniform be carrying an untouched piece of become-large cake with him, despite maintaining a completely constant size for the whole time?

Size is Power. All you have to do is get bigger or smaller, and everything can be solved. Or could be, if they just, you know, ate cake or drank apparently-gross-tasting fluids made of unspeakble ingredients. Maybe it's all just an elaborate metaphor? Like cake makes people bigger and detox diets and wierd laxatives make them smaller in the world Tim Burton actually inhabits. Because obviously size is power in real life. Cosmopolitan sells millions of copies around the world every month (caution: statistics may not be to scale. Who the hell knows how many Cosmos they sell? I assume millions. Surely. I mean, there are a lot of waiting rooms out there, and people have to read something. God forbid anyone should bring a book to a hairdresser or doctor's waiting room) predicated very largely on the idea that the buying demographic all feel like they're too large, and their lips and shoe collections are too small. The girls on the cover are smaller around but also larger in height than many of us could ever be. "Be like this," the magazines urge, "but be yourself".

Because that's the thing about Alice too. She can be any size, but she can only fit the champion's armour when she's her own size. You can't just use artificial size to win, you have to win whilst 'being yourself'. Or your own size, anyway, since Alice spends the whole movie trying, very reasonably, to explain to the rest of the characters that Beast-slaying and sword-fighting has never quite made it above watercolouring and quadrille on the 19th Century Debutante Curriculum. Her "real self" might be all about adventure or whatever, but neck-stabbing is not a core part of Alice's sense of self.

And this fits in too. A model has only to reach size 10 to be lauded and applauded as being a "real woman", as if "real woman" models are somehow that much more accessible as role models to those of us who only wear makeup for special occasions and never spend more than $60 on a pair of jeans. More pressingly, as if thin women are either not really "real" or not really "women". This implication that becaause "size doesn't matter" but doesn't matter in a very specific and value-judged sort of way, it doesn't-matter so hard that people who fall into a slightly different set of size parameters no longer count. I'm never going to be a size 4, but I pretty strongly resent the implication that if I were, I wouldn't be a real woman any more. (Is it binary, one wonders? If you weigh more than 55kg, are you suddenly "real" then, until you reach maybe 100kg? Is it a sliding scale? Is a 54.5kg woman not real because she's not over the line, or is she only semi-real; evanescent and Cheshire Cat-like?)

And this, of course, leads us to the point of breast size and the fact that according to the people who are actually allowed to be in charge of things like the question of whether Internet Censorship is a good idea or not, women who have size A cup breasts or smaller are so far from being "real women" that they aren't allowed to be in legal pornography in this country any more, due to "looking underage" (honestly, it's like these guys have never seen a 15 year old with breasts, which I fear may be commoner than they've assumed) and essentially being a fetish object. "Why," asked Barnaby Joyce (I think it was him? Someone more douche than dude, anyway), "would anyone want to look at porn of small-breasted women anyway?".

I, uh, I actually have to move on here slightly abruptly before this airily theoretical post becomes aggressively political, because this whole internet censorship thing makes me so very, so incoherently, so unamusingly angry. I just... ugh. How horrible.

But back to size! Is size portrayed as being power because it actually is, in a completely unacculturated non-gendered way? Like, the bigger person will usually win in a fight, tall guys are attractive, and people get larger in times of plenty.

People have been getting bigger over the recent centuries. That's not even a theory, we have the tiny low-lintelled doors of ancient cottages to prove it. Interestingly, this was a big, noticeable change in the 19th century , when the industrial revolution meant that suddenly a bunch of people were getting the sort of balanced nutrition you can only really get by being able to get fruit even when you don't have an orchard in your village. This, as I mentioned with the olden-times-people-had-tiny-doors thing, meant that everyone got taller over a generation or so. It was at about this time (like, very very roughly about this time. I think it was about then, but my error margin is about 2 centuries) that Whigs (you know, of course, that these are a political party in the UK, or rather were a slightly looser sociopolitical construct in England at the time our anecdote takes place) came up with the fabulously self-indulgent theory we call Whig History.

Whig History is the way that everyone secretly thinks about history, no matter how hard they swear to you that they don't, or that they don't ever think about history at all. It goes like this: "I am alive right now, and I have this great sextant/digital watch/high speed broadband connection. People 100 years ago did not have access to these things; I am ahead of them. In the future, people will maybe have hovercraft skateboards or whatever, but that's all imaginary at the moment, and may not even happen, in fact won't happen for me personally at all, if I die before they hit the market. Therefore, I am at the crest, so to speak, of the gathering wave of human history, and am the pinnacle of evolution [this is secretly the subtext of those shirts with monkeys evolving into people evolving into either Homer Simpson or a guy at a computer]. I, effectively, win history. There are so many wildly unlikely random chances and coincidences that occured over so mnay millenia to have me, here, thinking about this, that it's pretty special that I am alive today. Really, it feels like Providence, or fate. In fact, clearly all of human history has just been building towards us; towards me and my friends hanging out and coming up with theories about history. Everything points to us and leads to us, so to speak. Let's go to the opium den, you guys, we've solved History, I think we can take the afternoon off."

And, you know, fair enough. The Whigs made a very valid point, (in this rendition) about the fact that all past folks are totally trumped by us present dudes, whereas those future bastards and their space tourism can just sod right off with their possible-non-existence. But I wonder, was all this fed into by the fact that everyone was genuinely bigger than the past people had been? Like, looking at a to-scale family tree with portaiture would only have encouraged that sort of thinking. It's maybe a bit of a long bow to draw, but I reckon it totally could be that, you guys.

Certainly it's more plausible than Alice coming back fom Wonderland and suddenly acting as if she wasn't in the 19th century at all, but actually had totally late-20th, early-21st century views of a woman's place in society. And if Tim Burton can get away with it, I can. Especially at 12:45am. So there.