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In light of the troubled times we live in and the many serious issues which surround us today, I would like to discuss a profoundly important topic, namely, The Decapitated Head In Narrative.
I am eminently qualified to discuss this subject, as I once mailed a head to my collaborator and friend![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
telophase.
I was thinking about it because, as you all know, I am reading The Mahabharata, and that contains a number of decapitations, including two of the best stories about heads that I have ever heard:
First, there is the self-removed magic nodding head on the hill. You have to read the comments and follow the links, especially the last one in the original post, to get the full effect.
And then there is the Exploding Head Of Jayadratha's Father. At the climax of a very intense battle, Arjuna shoots an arrow to cut off the head of his enemy, Jayadratha. As his... um, for the benefit of the newbies, I'll just say "best friend and ally" Krishna had instructed, Arjuna aims the arrow so it carries Jayadratha's head off the battlefield and dumps it in the lap of Jayadratha's father, who was watching from the sidelines. To the astonishment of everyone but Krishna, Jayadratha's father's own head explodes!
Krishna explains that Jayadratha's father had made a pre-emptive attempt to get revenge on anyone who might kill his son by making it so that whoever held his son's decapitated head would have their own head explode. Oops! Those sorts of boons never do work out as intended.
There are, of course, many heads in anime and manga. Sometimes they are in jars. Perhaps my favorite is the head in a jar in Yami no Matsuei, not because it does anything in particular, but because of the reason for its jarred existence: a man killed his brother, then kept his head in a jar in the hope of some day bringing him back to life... so he could kill him again.
I also like the disease in Planet Ladder which causes people's limbs or heads to suddenly fall off, while they are going about their daily lives. It brings up the issue of emotional response:
Drawing of someone's head suddenly falling off: comedy gold.
Drawing of character we already know, but now with her handless arms wrapped in bandages: horrifying and tragic.
The decapitated head, clearly, creates some narrative difficulties. One is unintentional comedy. When characters weeping over the decapitated body of their friend go on to pick up and caress the head, particularly in visual media, it is about fifty-fifty whether I will weep or snicker.
Then too, decapitation is instantaneous. (Or unwatchably horrible if it isn't.) This precludes the possibility of long death scenes. (Unless it's the sort of story where heads can keep talking) I recently read a book where the main character canonically dies from getting his head cut off. But it seemed very much the kind of book that would have a long and dramatic death scene. To my delight, the author resolved this problem by having the character die from having his head half cut off, thereby sticking to canon but getting in the requisite lengthy (and, I must say, memorably disturbing) death scene.
What are your favorite moments in literature (or anime, etc) involving heads?
Please do not spoil significant plot points. For instance, if you want to write about heads in X/1999, you may describe the scene, but please don't say who is cuddling whose head.
I am eminently qualified to discuss this subject, as I once mailed a head to my collaborator and friend
telophase. I was thinking about it because, as you all know, I am reading The Mahabharata, and that contains a number of decapitations, including two of the best stories about heads that I have ever heard:
First, there is the self-removed magic nodding head on the hill. You have to read the comments and follow the links, especially the last one in the original post, to get the full effect.
And then there is the Exploding Head Of Jayadratha's Father. At the climax of a very intense battle, Arjuna shoots an arrow to cut off the head of his enemy, Jayadratha. As his... um, for the benefit of the newbies, I'll just say "best friend and ally" Krishna had instructed, Arjuna aims the arrow so it carries Jayadratha's head off the battlefield and dumps it in the lap of Jayadratha's father, who was watching from the sidelines. To the astonishment of everyone but Krishna, Jayadratha's father's own head explodes!
Krishna explains that Jayadratha's father had made a pre-emptive attempt to get revenge on anyone who might kill his son by making it so that whoever held his son's decapitated head would have their own head explode. Oops! Those sorts of boons never do work out as intended.
There are, of course, many heads in anime and manga. Sometimes they are in jars. Perhaps my favorite is the head in a jar in Yami no Matsuei, not because it does anything in particular, but because of the reason for its jarred existence: a man killed his brother, then kept his head in a jar in the hope of some day bringing him back to life... so he could kill him again.
I also like the disease in Planet Ladder which causes people's limbs or heads to suddenly fall off, while they are going about their daily lives. It brings up the issue of emotional response:
Drawing of someone's head suddenly falling off: comedy gold.
Drawing of character we already know, but now with her handless arms wrapped in bandages: horrifying and tragic.
The decapitated head, clearly, creates some narrative difficulties. One is unintentional comedy. When characters weeping over the decapitated body of their friend go on to pick up and caress the head, particularly in visual media, it is about fifty-fifty whether I will weep or snicker.
Then too, decapitation is instantaneous. (Or unwatchably horrible if it isn't.) This precludes the possibility of long death scenes. (Unless it's the sort of story where heads can keep talking) I recently read a book where the main character canonically dies from getting his head cut off. But it seemed very much the kind of book that would have a long and dramatic death scene. To my delight, the author resolved this problem by having the character die from having his head half cut off, thereby sticking to canon but getting in the requisite lengthy (and, I must say, memorably disturbing) death scene.
What are your favorite moments in literature (or anime, etc) involving heads?
Please do not spoil significant plot points. For instance, if you want to write about heads in X/1999, you may describe the scene, but please don't say who is cuddling whose head.
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Especially when the person then sings a duet with the head, as happened with Margaret and Suffolk's head in the 2001 RSC production of Henry VI -- it was a brilliant production, on the whole, but that was a little bit WTF. (The Henry VIs are, of course, a terrific play for severed heads, as there are lots and lots and lots of them about. They're usually not required to sing though.)
Also, two of the severed heads are at one point made to look like they're kissing -- I just read a paper about that gesture for the conference I'm at, which talks about its significance in 2 Henry VI, especially since it comes from the chronicle accounts not only of Jack Cade's rebellion but of the Revolt of 1381...
Also also, a while back, I compiled this.
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http://buymeaclue.livejournal.com/321599.html
Do I win? *g*
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Even if reading it after reading the sagas may make my own head explode ...
I'm working on a middle grade that begins with a decapitated head. :-)
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Subramaniam's is very moving, written in simple prose, and obviously leaves more out.
Menon's is more of a page-turner, sometimes overwritten but often brilliant, and is very good at capturing the inner lives of the characters though less likely to make me cry.
I could copy you some excerpts from each if you want to compare the prose.
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I wrote a mud area based on the Battle of Kurukshetra, with many extra gods watching from above in the clouds...
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Like an LJ, the first part is at the bottom of the page, and the later parts at the top.
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1) A certain Vorkosigan book.
2) The anime Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto, which is mediocre, but whose basic premise (http://rilina.livejournal.com/379269.html) features a head.
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Do it that way, and the silliness works for you, instead of against.
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Things you don't usually think about when planning your death...
And then, of course, there are the head-cradling-and-weeping scenes in X.
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There's also one where some cyborgs are basically racing on roller-skates, and someone slices someone else's skull open. This, naturally, causes the person's brain to pop out and skid ahead along the racetrack. Whee! This manga has probably done me irreversible psychic damage.
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Not quite so, for better or worse. Here's Wikipedia's statement on the matter: "Before passing away, Close requested that his skull be given to the Goodman Theatre for use in Hamlet productions, on the condition that he should receive credit in the program as Yorick. However, in 2006 it was revealed that an alternate skull was given to the Goodman instead."
In skullduggery closer to home, when I won a bunch of SFF pulps on eBay once they were sent to me in a reused box that had originally transported body parts, including a skull. That the mags had come from the Forrest Ackerman (Famous Monsters Of Filmland) estate made the whole thing even creepier/funnier. (The eBay seller worked at the Museum Of Natural History, IIRC, and obviously wasn't above absconding with some packing materials.)
Although my literary pursuits don't seem to include detached or exploding heads, offhand a few movie moments come to mind:
The Crawling Eye (aka The Trollenberg Terror) (1958)-- "Eye" rips off head of Sherpa type with tentacles.
Clash Of The Titans (1981)-- Perseus (Harry Hamlin) claims the head of Medusa. (This was the film also responsible for the now comedic catchphrase "Release the Kraken!")
Scanners (1981)-- Perhaps most well-known modern cinematic exploding head.
The Fury (1978)-- Amy Irving makes John Cassavetes go all to pieces. (With her mind!)
Oh, and my icon is an episode from Chris Ware's Quimby The Mouse.
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Rrrg, you just totally squicked me with this sentence. Gah! I can't shake it off. Dammit, that's one of my buttons.
=P
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PS. Don't read Planet Ladder. Or the F. Paul Wilson short story "Soft."
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It's the spontaneously falling off bit. The two horror movies that mess with my head are The Ring and The Mothman Prophecies, not because of the general integrity of their storylines, but because of certain visual/reality effects - there's a bit in The Mothman Prophecies where someone's face just looks... wrong. Very wrong. And The Ring has those weird things, like VCR tape counters going funny.
Stuff going wrong at a basic level of reality really gets to me somehow - like limbs suddenly disattaching. It makes me feel a little sick.
I'm totally down with horror movies with folks gettting gutted and blood everywhere, or even folks in manga (my main experience of this being X) hauling heads around with them for chapters on end.
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To get really obscure, Stanley Holloway did an album of comic songs and recitations ('took stick wiv the 'orse's 'ead 'andle and poaked it in Wallace's ear') one of which was about Anne Boleyn (in Holloway's (pseudo)-north English accent) 'wiv 'er 'ead tooked underneath 'er arm/ She waaaalks the Bloody Tawr' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22With_Her_Head_Tucked_Underneath_Her_Arm%22): which I've always rather liked.
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At the museum I worked at in South Dakota, we had a number of human remains collected throughout the years from
rampant graverobbingscientificish expeditions, including a skull from Peru that still had hair on it. And a wee little shrunken head, carefully stored in a plastic fishbowl that was filled with multicolored packing peanuts and closed off with one of those old shower-cap thingys that people used to use to close jars and such in the refrigerator. You could just see its wee little nose peeking out through the packing peanuts.That actually bothered me more than did the skull with hair, because you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that that man had died violently.
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P.S. I *love* the Mahabharata! How about those giant flying cities?! Which version are you reading?
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---L.
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In the third Star Wars prequel (Phantom Menance, I think?) there are also two severed heads - one played for comedy and one not, in what I thought was a fairly tasteless and...insensitive? clueless? manner. (This is movies, does that count?)
- hossgal