For a director who would come to be known for taking on seemingly impossible projects, adapting a poem composed of made-up gibberish seems like an appropriately perverse way to start a solo career. In other words, she’ll experience something like a Terry Gilliam film. The familiar will turn peculiar and uncanny. She’ll be prompted to reimagine and reinvent, to look at things from another angle. Though Humpty Dumpty later assists in decoding the poem for Alice-albeit in a way that muddies rather than clarifies its meaning-the critical takeaway is that “Jabberwocky” evokes a state of mind: “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas-only I don’t exactly know what they are!” It’s significant that Alice encounters the poem immediately after she steps through the looking glass, because it creates the context through which she’ll see this upside-down world of magic and horror.

From the nonsense words and phrases, a simple story can be puzzled out about the “Jabberwock”-a beast with “jaws that bite” and “claws that catch” and “eyes of flame”-and an unspecified hero who fells it with a “vorpal blade” that goes “snicker-snack.” As Alice concludes after reading these lines, “ somebody killed something,” and the rest is open to interpretation. When Alice climbs through the large mirror overhanging the fireplace mantel in Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the first thing she discovers, in the reflected version of her own drawing room, is a poem called “JABBERWOCKY.” This being a looking-glass world, of course, the poem appears to her in reverse as “YKCOWREBBAJ,” but while holding it up to the glass makes it readable, it scarcely makes it more comprehensible.

Through the looking glass jabberwocky