Lee dropped by today. Like my father he has a habit of appearing, without warning, at my window; yet , like my father, its always good to see him. We went out to the cinema – I was very eager to do so, as I wanted to test a few theories I have, and its always good to get off campus. So down to festival park we drove, in lee’s nice new fiat. The film we chose was ‘The Spiderwick Chronicles’.

Interestingly, I doubt we could have chosen a better example of how memetics can be applied to film. It is as if the producers took 5 or 6 other scripts, cut them into chunks and mixed them together, and then piled a shitload of christen imagery on. It is about a book, which describes these magical creatures in our world. Some are good, some are evil. The evil ones need this book because it would allow them to rule (can we say ‘ring’). To win the day, these three kids must get the author of this book to return from this magical glade where he was prisoner. There was a griffin stolen directly from both potter and narnia. Almost every shot was borrowed from somewhere else. Even the name of the central baddie, Mulgarath, is strikingly similar to morgoth. So only by protecting the book can the kids defend themselves in an obvious reference to the bible. When he returns from the glade, spiderwick hasn’t aged, saves the day and is last seen ascending to the sky. I mean, this is a blatant piece of Christian imagery: comes again as if from the death, uses his all-powerful book to defeat the baddie, and then goes up to the sky. It would be fascinating to deconstruct if it wasn’t so awful.