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.
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