Labyrinth (1986)

Jim Henson's Labyrinth (1986) endures as a curious artifact: a twenty-five million dollar puppet musical that stumbled at the American box office, found its congregation on home video, and now persists as a cult object of real affection. The plot is a girl, a maze, a stolen infant, and a Goblin King who wears more eyeliner than the entire New Romantic movement. Terry Jones wrote the script. George Lucas produced. The result is glitter, Escher staircases, and a swamp that smells. It is a film assembled from puppetry and whimsy, and it makes no apology for either.

The cultural inventory here is thin, and honesty requires saying so. Sarah is a female protagonist who defeats her antagonist by refusing to fear him, which registers as coming-of-age business, not a manifesto. The principal cast is uniformly pale. Race, climate, economics, body image, and neurological difference receive no attention at all, because the film concerns puppets and a girl learning to grow up. Jareth complicates the ledger. Bowie's glam-inflected androgyne, all feathers and suggestion, has invited queer readings for decades, though the film never names or pursues such themes. The costume does the work. The screenplay does not.

The junkyard scene, in which a Junk Lady tempts Sarah with the refuse of her childhood, is the closest thing to a social argument, and even that is a lesson about sentimentality, not wealth. Nobody lectures. Nobody is corrected. The film wants only to delight, to frighten a little, and to reunite a teenager with her brother. In an era when family entertainment often arrives with a moral appendix, this one hands us a peach and lets us fall asleep in a ballroom. We can score it accordingly: a modest artifact, largely innocent of the modern catechism, and all the more charming for its refusal to preach.