Brigadoon, or What is wrong with me?

[gement]

I went to the local civic theatre production of Brigadoon today with my dad. It seemed important, one of those cultural touchstones that I needed to understand, since I base so much of my mental map on mythological fantasy.

I'd always been given the impression that Brigadoon was the story of an idyllic, perfect place, ranked up there with Never Never Land, Shangri-La, Avalon, and Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

So, I think my perceptions must be even further off from other people's than I thought, because this seemed like it was written by Lovecraft on a saccharin bender.


Itemization of HUGE FLAWS IN THIS SYSTEM:

A) The people in the town can never see out-of-town friends or relations again. They're all dead.

B) They can't jaunt out of town for those goods and services that just can't be had within a small agrarian community, which often include useful tools and medical supplies. Within one subjective year, they're going to run into some serious trouble.

C) At the rate of one day per hundred years, they'll be quite lucky if the region is still habitable for their quaint little village in one subjective year.

D) The town was supposed to be protected from the encroachment of outside influences, but there's an intake valve in the form of random people wandering past. I know it would blow the plot, but why didn't they just put a Somebody Else's Problem field around the place instead of mucking around with time dilation?

E) There's an intake valve, but no outlet. No escape without damning every other resident. No one can ever strike out for the big city, even if they're making life hell in town because they're not suited for the life of an illiterate farmer.

The moral of the story, for people born in the village, seems to be slavery to the common good. A big solemn "You can never return, and will forget this place existed" would be perfectly appropriate, but hey, so would the SEP suggestion above. They didn't think this through very clearly.

---

So you're left with one man desperate to get out, and the only way to stop him is to kill him. The kind scriptwriter kept the townsfolks' hands clean by getting a clueless outsider to do it, but without that intervention, let them go another week (2700AD, here we come!) and see how idyllic they feel about being wiped out of existence by some upstart kid... or the next, or the next.

And another man sent back to civilization a shadow of his former self, haunted by ghosts of a "perfect place," unable to savor real life as a result, until months later he travels back to the spot to be engulfed by his dream and disappear from the world forever.

In fact, I think I read that Lovecraft short, only I can't remember whether the man was eaten by the dream or just consumed by its memory because he couldn't get back in.

Comments

[morinon.livejournal.com]

Which Lovecraft short? He has plenty of idyllic dream-worlds, and otherwise, that in the end claim those who dream of it.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

You could extrapolate from E that eventually every living thing on earth will be living in Brigadoon.

mathematical considerations

[gement.livejournal.com]

This disregards population growth and the fact that you have to love a resident enough to give up the world for that resident... they didn't seem too into poly, so I'd have to say there's an upper limit of n intake per 100 years where n is the number of romantically eligible residents.

Even if they all break up with each other daily (as the next intake window is, from their perspective, immediate), you'd need 500 people lined up on the edge of town, making a mad dash to fall in love within a day, just to geometrically increase the town's population.

The effect of this activity on the larger system's population is negligible. But we could probably make a lot of money taking pictures.

[maribou]

Yeh, _Brigadoon_ was the school musical the year I was in 12th grade (I was a chorus alto), and we all liked it BECAUSE it was the creepiest thing ever, masquerading under a veneer of sugar and twill.

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

The people in the town can never see out-of-town friends or relations again. They're all dead.

I thought the idea was that they're insular; except for the outsiders who love someone enough to join, the people in town don't have any out-of-town friends or relations.

Of course this raises a whole big inbreeding thing, but y'know.