Film/book analysis #3

Nostalgia, Hook

The progress of the world has provided numerous reasons to long for glowing revelries of the past. Nostalgia, like we discussed in class, is inherently accompanied by aches and pains. It’s the longing to return home and desire to venture out. By leaving our society we can regain our innate connection with nature, and even God. Neverland is a perfect representation of that desire for adventure and the connection between people and the earth. Hook portrays this type of nostalgia perfectly.

          Nostalgia is a weird topic for a Children’s Media class for me, at least the ethics of it are complicated to me. Peter Banning is lucky because even as an adult he gets to physically retreat back into the world of a child. He gets to go back to his magical origins, revisit his hazy past. Nostalgia movies are made for the adults, not necessarily for the kids and it feels a little selfish. Or at least not very productive? We see Peter’s children in Neverland but our protagonist is an adult! Even Tinkerbell is an adult. In nostalgic films, or just ones about kids, there’s the sense that children inhabit a secret world, that there are things only they can see. Adults may be granted passage if they can find it in themselves to believe, which I think is a lovely thought. But Peter Banning gets access to this world even before he believes. So are we seeing that kids don’t really have anywhere to go that won’t be co-opted by adults? Maybe that’s okay. Can’t the kids have anything that the adults can’t have! Steven Spielberg, like the rest of America, succumbs to inner nostalgic longings. Not only does Steven Spielberg makes nostalgic films, he inspires them too. Pete’s Dragon and Stranger Things are two things just from this past year that draw inspiration from Spielberg. And not only is the film expressing Steven Spielberg’s nostalgic longings, our characters are also exercising nostalgia, the audience who loves the original book or Disney film experiences nostalgia, and now simultaneously, it’s nostalgic for me (the audience) watching it having not seen it since being a kid living at home. That doesn’t sound too bad. But nostalgia is a weird thing to try and portray on screen and also try and . Adult filmmakers are just trying to be empathetic. Maybe empathy isn’t always as altruistic as we’d like to think it is.

         With all that being said, I love Hook, or at least I loved it as a kid probably like most people my age. Peter Pan was a story I always liked as a kid (I even got the nickname Nana as a kid, because of the Darling family’s dog.) I wanted to partake in the feast of colorful pies, come up with badass things to call people like “lewd, crude, rude, bag of pre-chewed food dudes”, and I was highly interested in the Lost Boys vast array of homemade, mischief-causing gadgets. That dinner scene really is something else. When you watch that for the first time as a kid you start some really rapid fire thinking: Hey maybe boredom doesn’t exist! No wait, since I can imagine anything this means anything can exist! Boredom sure, but anything else I can think of too! Recalling these things I thought of as a child while watching this film as an adult, was really fun and a little bizarre. My nostalgia isn’t serving any children, so now I’m left wondering what my role is here. How can I turn this nostalgia into something productive?  I haven’t figured it out yet. This question will probably end up informing most of my work in this class. Hopefully by the end of it I’ll have come up with something.

Diversity, The Watsons Go To Birmingham

This book was an all timer for me in elementary school. It was one that my fourth grade teacher recommended to my best friend Miranda and I for the most unofficial, official book club two nine year olds could’ve started. I remember mostly loving all the stories of mischief and only vaguely being aware that race was a factor. We were in the process of learning about the Civil Rights Movement so it was all still kind of fresh to me. Then we read it as a class in the fifth grade. A year older, fifth grade Morgan knew a thing or two more than she did before; at this point the Civil Rights Movement had been covered a few times. Plus my fifth grade teacher was a black woman; she obviously knew what she was doing when choosing this novel for us to read together. There was some sort of context now and it weighed much heavier on me that time around. I think it was a terrific way to sort of be introduced to the issues of race as a child. Reading it again wasn't much different. Heavy handedness can be isolating and sometimes stifles conversation or dialogues but here, the book gets to have its cake and eat it too. It gets to teach us a message while still being totally entertaining. We get to talk about race without only talking about race. We get to take a look at the past, without being nostalgic but still have some fun. So we're both entertained and we get to learn something, what a good combination.

         The Watson family rises above the experience of racism and violence in the same way that they overcome all difficulties -- with love, pride and determination. That's a huge lesson this book wants to teach. Although most of the story is actually set in Flint, the last sixty pages are dedicated to the events that occupy Birmingham. I think that’s a great strategy, again, for teaching children. It’s like the good version of a bait and switch. The contrast between the North and the South is a focal point of the story. In Flint, the only inkling of racism is a teacher's reminder that "as Negroes the world is many times a hostile place for us." As the Watsons travel south, the reader feels the danger growing. Mrs. Watson carefully plots the three-day trip, making sure that they stop in locations known as friendly to Negroes. Mr. Watson is not as confident of a friendly welcome, and instead chooses to drive straight through. When they make a rest stop in Appalachia, Kenny is at first afraid of encountering a snake in the dark, but Byron tells him that snakes are the least of his worries. "Man, they got crackers and rednecks up here that ain't never seen no Negroes before...they'd hang you now, then eat you later." Kids, unfortunately understand difficult things. This child’s experience is already vastly different than my experience as an adult woman. When the family travels together back to Flint they struggle to regain normalcy. Byron and Kenny undergo changes as Kenny suffers post-traumatic stress, and Byron helps him overcome it. Did we all hear that? A child with PTSD! That is scarcely a quality we see in children’s media. Eventually, the Watson family rises above the experience of racism and violence in the same way that they overcome all difficulties -- with love, pride and determination. Children’s media can deal with real issues and real violence and real suffering while still being for kids and I think The Watson’s Go To Birmingham is an excellent example of that.

Film/book analysis #2

EXPERIMENTATION
Alice (Neco Z Alenky)

The idea that growing up is tough and scary is not a novel idea, nor is the observation that lonely children might have more active imaginations. Svankmajer’s adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s story hints at something a little more sinister about growing up: we are expected to follow the whims and notions of authority. That makes sense for someone who lived under a government that emphasized obedience, conformity, and censorship; that persecuted or even imprisoned those who went against the status quo. So the entropy of postwar Eastern Europe is clearly informing this film. Alice says that we MUST NOT FORGET that children are citizens and products of a dark world too. Is Svankmajer making a comment on his own childhood? Maybe even a retroactive attempt at escapism?

Much of Svankmajer’s work deals with children and childhood. Alice is in the world of a child that’s been structured by the fears of an adult. Alice, even in the bliss of childhood, is burdened by adults and expectations that cripple and silence her. Political undertones (overtones?) aside, children are a mistreated demographic and it’s because we don’t know how to talk to or listen to children.

Kids don’t always have the tools to express what they want or need. When we tell children what to do, what is right and what is wrong and they don’t understand it, it’s not the child’s fault it’s ours for not accommodating to their needs. We need to adapt and innovate new ways to talk to kids in ways they can understand. That doesn’t mean patronize or condescend, it’s a call for creativity and experimentation in the adult.

Lewis Carroll's classic story has always been too erratically-paced and episodic to be successfully translated to film so who better to adapt it than a Czech surrealist? It was the first feature to be made by Jan Svankmajer after two decades of producing short films. The world of this experiment is set entirely within the confines of a series of connecting rooms (not unlike his short Down To The Cellar, which also features a young girl.) Svankmajer is experimenting with how we engage with kids here! The issue underpinning this, of course, remains animation's enduring identity (and burden) as "children's entertainment."It is clear here that in suggesting there are no aesthetic boundaries that a child may not cross, Svankmajer is already challenging the socially and legally determined parameters of what is, and what is not suitable for children.

The quietness of Svankmajer’s film only emphasizing the silencing effect society has on people who dare to fall out of line. His filmmaking feels motivated by careful observation of the surrounding world, the movements of children and animals informing a great deal of his work. It seems like he models his reanimated dolls after the stumbling and waddling of toddlers.

Svankmajer’s experimental take on a classic story might be the best depiction of the mood the original is attempting to create. It’s also an experiment of what constitutes children’s media. Alice is touching things and licking things and feeling the world that she’s a part of, but doesn’t necessarily belong in. The denizens of Wonderland are outcasts and it’s unfortunate that Alice, and children in general can sometimes be lumped into that category.

DOCUMENTATION

Catcher in the Rye

Like all American teens, I read Catcher in the Rye as a sophomore in high school, the same year Salinger died. Then I read it a couple more times just as an introspective person probably does with this novel. I retired it from my arsenal a few years ago because we all have to graduate from teen angst sometime but I really enjoyed revisiting it.

I noticed that the things I loved about it as a teenager weren’t things I love about it as a non-teenager, and the things I loved about it now weren’t even on my radar in high school. It’s difficult for me to hear about people who read the novel as teens and despise it as adults. It seems like a betrayal of your former self. Most of the discourse surrounding this novel is simply asking a bunch of adults whether or not Catcher in the Rye will really “reach the youth.” That’s pretty silly, if you ask me. This only helps prove Salinger’s point that adults were once young and disillusioned themselves, but they’ve grown out of it, and they assume the rest of the world has grown with them.

That Ring Lardner is one of Holden's favorite writers is a considerable, if wholly inadvertent, irony. Lardner was the master of the American vernacular who, as H.L. Mencken wrote, "set down common American with the utmost precision." Salinger does the same thing with American teen-speak. The language is dated but it’s written with such innocent sincerity. I bet if Catcher in the Rye was written today, he would’ve accurately documented exactly the way teenagers speak and interact now as well as he did in WWII/postwar America. Some people might find the writing manipulative, but it's not phony. Salinger writes a bildungsroman without making that it’s sole purpose. I think that’s the biggest issue with a lot of YA fiction today.  Countless YA novels follow a troubled yet appealing teenager but hardly any are written like they’re speaking to citizens (there’s that word again!) I feel like YA novelists are working backwards. They’ve decided they want to write for kids and teenagers instead of just writing for people. They then become beholden to the conventions of YA fiction and if we’ve learned anything from Holden Caulfield, it’s that teenagers can sniff out a phony from a mile away. It’s so obvious to young readers when the writing is inauthentic, artificial and insincere. They’ll reject it as false. "The Catcher in the Rye" is from the heart -- not Holden Caulfield's heart, but J.D Salinger's.

So our generation has cellphones and the internet -- the world is always changing in little ways like that. It’s the big things that don’t change -- and even in an era of such impossible interconnectedness, there is no way to circumvent the feeling of being utterly alone and misunderstood. Salinger managed to document those intangible feelings into something tangible. A case could be made that "The Catcher in the Rye" created adolescence as we now know it, a condition that barely existed until Salinger defined it. It’s one of the few good versions of a petulant teen that I’ve seen in media. This is a documentation of teenagerdom and unfortunately, just as in life, often goes misinterpreted and misunderstood.

We are plagued with awful teens in media and it’s really unfortunate. Whining rebellion may be a reality for a lot of teenagers, but when an adult creates a teenage character without care and affection that character turns into something completely unproductive. There’s no nuance, there’s no conversation, it’s just an adult chastising kids and wagging fingers. Holden, as a character, has been turned into a product -- commodified for lazy media makers. They’ve isolated one part of him and turned that into the entire thing and it’s remained such ever since.