I don’t know how many times I watched “The Dark Crystal” as a kid, but it was a lot. I hadn’t seen it in years until recently when I was at a local bar with friends and the movie was playing on one of the TVs. I was instantly absorbed in the movie and in my memories. What I remember most are the Skeksis because they truly frightened me as a kid: their cruelty to the Gelflings, their use of the black beetle-like Garthim, their political machinations and lust for power, their voices and appearance.
It so happens the scene playing at the bar was the duel between the Chamberlain and the Garthim Master to determine the next emperor. After the Chamberlain loses the duel, the other Skeksis fall on him, disrobe him, and cast him out. Let me be clear: I hated the Chamberlain. He was just as vile as all the others and he was whiny. But suddenly I felt pity for him. I still wanted the good guys to win, and these days I’m a little worn out on stories that ask us to sympathize with cruel or deranged villains, but as a kid, the idea that villains could be sympathetic was new to me. In movies like “Krull” or “The Neverending Story” the bad guys were evil and irredeemable or just monolithic forces at work. I thought that all bad guys were all like that. The recognition that they had their own complex relations opened my mind to new possibilities about motivation. In a lot of ways, that has filtered into Far Away Land where even the most terrible actors and locations of the world have a depth that allows for this kind of storytelling.
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