THE DARK CRYSTAL: AGE OF RESISTANCE - Jasmin Pittman Morrell
In the winter of 1982, just in time for Christmas-break moviegoers, Jim Henson’s Tolkeinesque Muppet fantasy The Dark Crystal was released in U.S. theaters. Concurrently, headlines in The New York Times wondered “Is Reagan Serious”? during a meeting with Russian diplomats around nuclear arms; Israel reportedly stepped up its role in supplying Central America with arms; and the U.S. House charged the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, a woman named Anne M. Gorsuch, with contempt of Congress for mishandling $1.6 billion in the toxic waste Superfund. Still in diapers, blissfully unaware of the political climate, I was only just beginning to toddle around the house hunting for Cheerios under the couch.
I wouldn’t see The Dark Crystal until several years later when I sat, spellbound, watching in front of my grandparents’ tube TV. Elven and nimble, the Gelflings Jen and Kira felt like creatures familiar to me. They were the last left of their kind, their loneliness palpable. For years I was an only child, and I understood loneliness. This is a piece of Jim Henson and visionary Brian Froud’s magic—the humanity pulsing just beneath the surface of his puppets. My friend Porch editor, Irish storyteller, and Muppet aficionado Gareth Higgins puts it clearly: “The specialness of The Dark Crystal is not limited to its gorgeous visual design, and the heart that Henson (and his co-director Frank Oz) always brought to their collaborations. What makes The Dark Crystal a rare work of wonder is how it imagines a resolution to murderous violence, racial supremacy, and the oppression of the innocent. In short: it transcends the myth of redemptive violence, offering a response to evil that is not just less lethal, but transcendent. A response that embodies the truth that so many of us know deep in our bones, but rarely see modeled in public: we can’t kill our way to peace, and any truly humane future has to involve not only protective boundaries from those who would do harm to others, but an invitation to those same “enemies’ to lay down their weapons, and join the rest of us at the table of the common good.”
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Fans have waited almost forty years for more. The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance is available through Netflix, a prequel to the 1980s film. It’s delightful to be back in the realm of Thra, so faithfully recreated over thirty years later by The Jim Henson Company. Using over a hundred puppets, instead of solely CGI characters, carries the opportunity for an emotional resonance similar to Henson’s beloved Muppet Christmas Carol. For me, in the opening episode, it was something of a surprise to see so many Gelfings populating different regions of Thra, amongst a people where they belonged.
Like most fantasy epics, it’s easy to apply metaphors found there to this world, this reality. It might be a stretch, but in some ways I’m reminded of the justice work that’s captured so much of my attention lately—writers, poets, theologians, and musicians from historically marginalized populations working to create a rounder, fuller narrative of their people. The counterpoint to erasure.
When one of the Skeksis, the vulture-like rulers of Thra, remarks “The Gelfings want to be ruled…they need to be ruled,” how can we not hear the language of colonization and white supremacy? Or, as the Darkening pollutes the land of Thra, turning once-peaceful creatures toward aggression, how can we not be reminded of the devastating effects of climate change?
As the Age of Resistance geared up to make its Netflix debut, a sampling of The Washington Post headlines in early August read “Last Frontier is first in warming—and on fire” referring to Alaska’s record-breaking, sweltering summer. And, also reported by The Post, the “Trump administration narrows access to asylum system,” which we might read as shorthand for “working to keep the brown people out.” The time is ripe for a fantastically told tale like the Age of Resistance, just as it was for Dark Crystal before it, and just as it was for Lord of the Rings before them. But The Dark Crystal is unique in its ending (don’t worry, no spoilers ahead!) by providing us with imagery for what’s necessary to truly heal our planet, the essential work of each and every human being who lives here.
If Dark Crystal and Age of Resistance stand in conversation with each other around the work of rebuilding splintered pieces of ourselves and our bringing balance to the world, I loved the way the Dream Space showed up in Age of Resistance as a critical vehicle for connection. “When Gelfings dreamfast,” Elder Cadia explains to Princess Brea, “we share our memories with one another. Dream Space allows us to do this and binds us to Thra and each other. It is the world within us all.” Isn’t dreaming essential to resistance, co-creation, and integration? Doesn’t the sharing of our memories, both interpersonal and cultural, serve as a tool for crafting the future?
All in all, the Age of Resistance is something to savor. Cinematically triumphant, both playful and full of pathos, it’s another journey into wonder. And you just might find yourself transported to a time when you sat on your grandparents’ floor, and there was no need to listen to the noise of grown-ups in the background. You were so alive with story, it stirred the embers within you, your soul alight with knowing.
Jasmin Pittman Morrell is a writer and editor living in Asheville, North Carolina with her husband and two daughters. She enjoys facilitating healing through creativity, imagination, and deep listening.
