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Magic Realism: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|''It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise...to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of José Arcadio Buendía with impatience and made him wander all through the house even in broad daylight.''
|'''[[Gabriel Garcia Marquez]]''' (after the arrival of the railroad, when dozens of new inventions—the phonograph, the telephone, the electric lightbulb— flooded Macondo), ''[[One Hundred Years of Solitude]]''}}
It definitely isn't [[Science Fiction]] and not quite [[Urban Fantasy]] and yet... stuff happens. Unlikely stuff like tchotchkes telling the heroine what to do (''[[Wonderfalls]]'') or the ghost of your father showing up at odd intervals to offer personal and/or professional advice (''[[Due South]]'') or perhaps it's just a quirky vibe that infuses the environment (''[[Northern Exposure]]'' or better yet, ''[[Twin Peaks]]''). It's '''Magic Realism'''.
One of the easiest ways to distinguish
Also a helpful guideline (again, just a guideline, not a rule): with fantasy, often a character finds out the [[Broken Masquerade]]. However, everybody is the protagonist in their own story; what about the random [[Muggle]] who saw something really strange, but never gets an explanation? Well, that Muggle just got the point of view in
The use of [[Magic A Is Magic A]] typically helps the audience accept the incongruity. [[Psychic Dreams for Everyone]] is also widespread.
Among some people,
When
From another perspective, it's a given that any non-fantasy [[The Musical|musical]] is by definition
Not to be confused with [[Urban Fantasy]]. [[Urban Fantasy]] is an [[Fantasy|old genre]] in a [[Present Day|contemporary]] setting, Magic Realism deals with a different set of genre rules.
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Rule of thumb: Say there's vampires in New York.
* If the cover gets [[Broken Masquerade|blown]] and the protagonists spend a lot of time with vampires, either taking evil ones down, incorporating them into romance stories, etc. it's [[Urban Fantasy]].
* If a cop's partner is very pale, very strong, generally acts odd, and come to think of it, he's never been seen in daylight, but the story focuses primarily on just a [[Police Procedural]] or the interpersonal relationships, it's
* If the cop just goes through his life as a cop, but his partner is a vampire, is greeted with "Hi, Mr. vampire!" by cheerful little children in the street, and casually drinks blood in plain sight out of transfusion packs during coffee breaks, it's a case of [[Mundane Fantastic]].
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{{examples}}
== Advertising ==
* In this [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5DWyg4ylnQ Corona Commercial] the environment shifts between a ski resort and a beach and nobody finds this weird.
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** The original script had an ex-girlfriend curse him using a spell she found in a book.
** A possible example as [[Bill Murray]] often questions why it's happening and nobody believes him when he tells them.
* ''[[L.A. Story]]'', written by Steve Martin, applies many of the tropes of
* ''[[Liar Liar]]'': [[Be Careful What You Wish For]] forces [[Jim Carrey]] to tell the truth. [[Hilarity Ensues]].
* '' [[Pan's Labyrinth]]'' At first sight it might seem as a fairy tale, albeit not a happy one, once you take into account {{spoiler|that Orfelia might have just made everything up}} and add to the mix a mandragora... which is ignored by everyone since they are all too busy dealing with this little thing called the Spanish Civil War ... [[Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane|then it becomes less clear whether it's a straightforward fairy tale]].
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* The 1998 theatrical film based on the [[Cirque Du Soleil]] show ''[[Alegria]]''. It's obvious the world the characters exist in is a little more colorful and eccentric than ours, but possible magic comes in at the end when {{spoiler|the manager/ringmaster encounters and converses with his own stage character}}.
* ''[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066516/ Valerie and Her Week of Wonders]'' is a surreal Czech film based on novel of the same name, in which love, fear, sex and religion merge into one fantastic world.
* The revenge western ''[[Seraphim Falls]]'' verges into
* Take "magic realism," replace "magic" with "video game," and that's ''[[Scott Pilgrim vs. the World]]''. Enemies have unique mystical powers, video game graphics show up and may even be interacted with by characters, and people explode into coins once bested in a duel. But otherwise, you know, just the normal lives of twenty-something Canadians. While these elements appeared in the graphic novel source material, the film revels in it all, maybe just because we see it all in motion.
* ''[[Big Fish]]''
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* ''[[Midnight in Paris]]''. When [[Most Writers Are Writers|Gil Pender]] waits on a certain street corner of Paris at midnight, a car arrives and takes him to famous Paris locales [[Time Travel|in the 1920s]], where he spends his nights with people like Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso. {{spoiler|In the 1920s, waiting in a certain spot allows the protagonist to travel to an even earlier era, and so on and so forth.}}
* Several sequences in ''[[Come and See]]'' are implausible and downright surreal, and intentionally so.
* The 1948 film ''The Boy With Green Hair'' about a war orphan who wakes up one morning to
* ''[[I Heart Huckabees]]''.
* ''[[Enchanted]]'': While there are fairy tale elements (honorary princess Giselle is our heroine after all), there are also realistic elements as well. Nathaniel and Narissa are on the fairy tale side, but it’s not unrealistic for Nathaniel to end up in an abusive relationship because a woman decided to use her good looks to her advantage. Unfortunately for Nathaniel, Narissa doesn’t see him as a friend (or a love interest). She considers him to be a slave.
* ''[[Indiana Jones]]
== Literature ==
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* ''[[The Tiger's Wife]]'' features a lot of fantastical elements (most obviously 'the deathless man', who is exactly what he sounds like), which are being related at second- or third-hand and may or may not have happened.
* [[Diana Wynne Jones]] likes to play with this trope in most of her short stories. ''Plague of Peacocks'', ''Little Dot'', and ''Carruthurs'' are good examples. Even ''[[Dogsbody]]'' has this from Kathleen's point of view.
*
** [[Jorge Luis Borges]]' body of short stories pretty much invented
** Mexican Laura Esquivel's ''[[Like Water for Chocolate]]'', wherein the protagonist's feelings for her beloved are transferred into the food she is preparing, which her sister then eats, which causes her to literally burn up in passion—she goes to use the outdoor shower and ends up ''setting it on fire'' before a soldier of the revolution rides by on horseback, scoops her up, and they have passionate sex while riding away on the horse.
*** Magical cooking is a popular concept for
** Other prominent writers include Alejo Carpentier and [[Isabel Allende]].
*** And don't forget Rudolfo Anaya.
* ''And The Ass Saw the Angel'', by [[Nick Cave]], is either the paragon of
* [[Franz Kafka]]
* Italo Calvino is a famous Italian writer whose works skirted
* The ''[[Illuminatus]]'' trilogy and most of the other novels by Robert Anton Wilson tend to alternate between this genre and [[Science Fiction]]; the world is mostly as we know it, but there's usually some technology that can't exist in the era the stories are set in, such as a sentient computer in ''Illuminatus!''. There are always [[Psychic Powers]] as well, some more subtle than others.
* Writer George Saunders is big on this. In the short story collection ''CivilWarLand in Bad Decline'' he has several examples, as most of his stories are very dreamlike. In the title story, the main character works in a Civil War themed Amusement Park where he regularly encounters a family of ghosts who lived on the land during the Civil War. Another story features a man hounded by the ghost of a child who was killed due to his negligence. Other than these elements the stories are grounded in reality (if perhaps an overly bleak version of reality.)
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* A big portion of Etgar Keret's stories. Few examples: A winged man pretending to be an angel, several magicians [[Magicians Are Wizards|capable of real magic]], [[And I Must Scream|soldiers who got turned into body targets]], a guy with mind-controlling ability (who uses it to get laid) and a boy who can control ants (and uses them to take the school away).
* You could make a point for ''[[House of Leaves|House]] of Leaves'' as Magic Realism, but however you cut it, it sure has a way of straddling reality and unreality.
* ''Snow In August'' by Pete Hamill pulls out the
* Jonathan Safran Foer's ''[[Everything Is Illuminated]]'' has often been described as magical realist.
* Michael Bishop's ''Brittle Innings'' is a coming-of-age story about a mute teenager who plays on a minor-league baseball team in the Deep South during World War II, when all the 'real' ball players are fighting the war. It's almost an incidental detail that the team's slugging first baseman is {{spoiler|Frankenstein}}.
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** Odd things occasionally happen to her husband as well. Yes, it's ''possible'' that his [[Sitcom Arch Nemesis]] (who's a ''[[The Prisoner]]'' fan) might kidnap him and leave him in Portmerion ... but then Rover appears...
** And the man on the motorcycle who kept appearing whenever Bill needed help and who may actually have been {{spoiler|[[Dead All Along]]}}.
* Later seasons of ''[[Seinfeld]]'' toyed with
** Also the [[Eldritch Abomination|stink]] in Jerry's car.
* ''[[My So-Called Life]]'' was a straight up teen [[Soap Opera]] [[Dramedy]] and contained absolutely no supernatural elements whatsoever. Except for the episode "Halloween," where Angela encounters a ghost. Or "My So-Called Angels" (widely regarded as one of the best and most [[Tear Jerker|tearjerking]] episodes) where both Angela and ''her mother'' talk to a (sort of) angel.
* ''[[Twin Peaks]]'' actually barely fits here, but it's worth mentioning. Most of the show is fairly mundane, but when it isn't, it's uproariously supernatural. Actually, most of the works David Lynch is known for are like this: mundane human drama interspersed with the '''pants-crappingly bizarre.'''
** Lynch's films have it both ways. Some of them really do fit the definition of Magic Realism and fit comfortably within the genre, while others are ''clearly'' supernatural but are lumped in with
** There is some disagreement over the setting of ''[[Eraserhead]]'', whether it's a
** ''Inland Empire'' straddles the line of this and Absurdism, but ''Mulholland Drive''
* ''[[Spaced]]'' featured elements of light
* As mentioned above, ''[[Due South]]'' allows ghosts, who demonstrate abilities to affect the real world. They do, however, appear mostly only to those with an emotional connection to them. One story, too, involved the likely involvement of the literal Raven trickster, and another a voodoo conflict which may or may not have involved actual magic.
* ''[[Slings and Arrows]]'', depending on your perspective. It's possible, of course, that Geoffrey's just crazy - but it's also not made obvious that Oliver's ghost ''isn't'' hanging around.
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* Even ignoring Zack's [[Breaking the Fourth Wall|fourth wall breaking powers]] ''[[Saved by the Bell]]'' had some weird stuff going on including an apparently sapient robot and a lightning strike causing a character to temporarily gain precognition.
** ''Speaking'' of the fourth wall powers. Zack could actually say "Time out," and ''everything but him stops,'' and he usually does this to talk to the audience, but he ''was'' capable of actually moving things around while time was frozen, and once quickly used "time out" to avoid being punched in the face. It's not a gag that "doesn't count" story-wise; ''Zack Morris has for-real time altering powers.''
* It's sketchy, but ''[[Lost]]'' fits the definition of
* ''[[How I Met Your Mother]]'' sometimes verges into this territory, including events that waver between magical and highly unlikely. (Dopplegangers, some of Barney's schemes.) However, the show can always fall back on the fact that Ted has been established as an [[Unreliable Narrator]], leaving it unclear which events happened exactly as described and which have been embellished or misremembered.
** Also, a couple of season five episodes have Marshall seemingly time-traveling as minor elements.
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* ''[[Silent Hill: Shattered Memories]]'' follows an ordinary man journeying through a realistic town... which periodically turns to ice and spawns hideous monsters. Exactly what is causing these things to happen is never fully explained (merely implied, and ambiguously so at that).
** Heck, the ''[[Silent Hill]]'' series as a whole. There are various explanations, but they're ambiguous, or contradictory, or there are elements in place suggesting that things aren't quite as they seem.
*** It's not Magic Realism at all. Regarding ''Shattered Memories'', {{spoiler|None of it happened. It's a metaphor. Cheryl, the protagonist's daughter, is sitting on the couch in the psychiatrist's office. The real protagonist, Harry Mason, died in a car accident some time ago. The player's actions follow a symbolic - and absolutely not literal - [[Journey to the Center of the Mind]] of the conflict in Cheryl. The game uses the player's actions during that journey to try to guess the ''player's'' nature, and then tries to tailor that journey to pull a [[Player Punch]]. Whether it succeeds is up to each player.}} Also, the town and setting is clearly not realistic. The town's residents can be counted on one's fingers, despite some pretty big apartment buildings. There's quite a bit of [[Chaos Architecture]] in ''Shattered Memories'' (and the rest of the series). As for the others, ''Silent Hill I'' and ''[[Silent Hill Homecoming]]'' both have endings which could allow the events to have been fictional or a [[Dying Dream]], but if ''Silent Hill I'' is a dying dream, then ''Silent Hill III'' could not happen. ''Silent Hill II''
* ''[[Pathologic]]''. The setting is realistic, the characters are very human, one of the playable characters has [[Lovecraftian Superpower|Lovecraftian Super Powers]]. There are a bunch of medicine men wrapped head to toe in bandages who sell herbs that grow from blood. There are loads of children walking around without parents, and occasionally wearing the dead heads of dogs as masks. [[Nightmare Fuel|Disease clouds attack you. They come in the form of horrendous, symbolic abominations]]. We haven't even discussed the rather meta theater themes...
==
* ''[[Shortpacked]]'' is an interesting example. The previous webcomic by the same author, ''It's Walky'', was straight-out science-fiction adventure about a group of alien-abductee government agents. ''Shortpacked'' exists in the same world, but in a much more mundane setting—a toy store. Thus, the elements that took center stage in ''It's Walky'' are pushed to the edges, and the genre shifts to
▲* ''[[Shortpacked]]'' is an interesting example. The previous webcomic by the same author, ''It's Walky'', was straight-out science-fiction adventure about a group of alien-abductee government agents. ''Shortpacked'' exists in the same world, but in a much more mundane setting—a toy store. Thus, the elements that took center stage in ''It's Walky'' are pushed to the edges, and the genre shifts to [[Magical Realism]].
** Since the weirdness ''does'' have a canon explanation in [[The Verse]], just not in that series, it's more like [[All There in the Manual]]. Except replace "manual" with "[[Archive Binge|the entire archives of several previous comic strips]]".
* ''[[Pictures for Sad Children]]'' is mainly about the pressures of modern life and the clash between the opposite sides of the [[Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism|Sliding Scale]]. The main characters are Paul, a recently-deceased [[Bedsheet Ghost]], and Gary, whose extended family was recently revealed to collectively possess the same powers as [[The Bible|Jesus]].
* [[Lampshade Hanging]]: Within the ''[[Achewood]]'' anything made in Mexico contains "Mexican
** Most recently{{when}}, a Nagel serape that grants wishes {{spoiler|(actually only the "Hecho en Mexico" tag attached to it grants wishes)}}.
* ''[[Questionable Content]]'' slips in a fair amount of this, mostly in science-fiction or alcoholic form.
** "[http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1350 True story, or alcohol-induced fantasy? Either way, Steve's not tellin'.]"
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