"Inkheart" Film Review

            This time around, I have decided to review a movie that I have already seen many times.  I saw the movie version of Inkheart many years ago and I’ve always loved it, despite its poor reputation among critics. Before I go any further, I must clarify that I have not read the book, so I will not make distinctions between it and the film. There are two aspects of Inkheart that I want to focus on: (a) the magical power of text and the act of reading and (2) the relationship between the primary and secondary worlds.

            Inkheart is about a girl named Meggie and her father, Mortimer (Mo). Mo (and, as we find out later, Meggie) has the ability to read things and characters in and out of books. One night when Meggie was a baby, Mo was reading Inkheart aloud to her. Suddenly, characters from the book appeared in the primary world and Resa, Mo’s wife and Meggie’s mother, disappeared into the world of the book. From that point on, Mo refused to read aloud and tirelessly searched for a copy of the book so he could try to read Resa back out again.

            Upon re-viewing this film, I set out to analyze the power of text and reading. First of all, language is performative in Inkheart. Similar to speech acts like “I now pronounce you husband and wife” or “You’re fired,” Mo’s reading aloud makes things happen. Of course, in the story, we have an exaggeration of the performative power of language because it can employ magical power and cause physical phenomena. For example, in the opening scene, Mo is reading “Little Red Riding Hood” to Resa and Meggie and as he reads, a red cloak floats down from the sky and gets caught on a clothesline. Also, characters that aren’t smoothly read out of their books are left with text all over their skin; the reading process leaves its mark. This certainly lends itself to a reader-response analysis. The reader meets the text and the result is meaning. The reader “actualizes” the text, quite literally in Inkheart. The power is not inherent in the text but requires utterance, which clearly has some magical property, in order to be "enacted."

            I am also interested in the inversion of the primary world/secondary world relationship. We have read and viewed several texts in which characters travel from the primary world to a secondary world (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), or the primary world is revealed to contain magic (The Mortal Instruments), or the world of the narrative is purely secondary (The Hobbit). But we haven’t really explored the idea of a secondary world invading the primary world. In Inkheart, Silver Tongues, through the act of reading aloud, bring elements of secondary worlds into the primary world and vice versa. This raises an interesting question: what and where is the secondary world? Because Silver Tongues read things out of texts, where exactly are they coming from? Does each text create and inhabit a world? Is there one big magical world of fictional characters and objects out there somewhere (which would be pretty awesome, if I may say so myself)? We have to believe that, even its absence, the secondary world is real because we see traces of it manifest themselves, which is quite a deconstructive move (also think of the traces of text on some characters’ skin).

            In his review of the film, Roger Ebert, starts with the following statement: “I never knew reading could be so dangerous.” In most fantasy stories, narrative plays a major role, whether it's in the form of myth, history, physical texts, etc. In these stories, we come across many texts that speak of danger, but rarely does the act of reading them cause something to happen in such a tangible way. We know that readers have unique experiences with texts; now add magic to the mix—one this is certain: you’re in for one heck of a read.