EXTRA CREDIT: The Kid/Spirituality

Newton’s third law can be seen, clearly, in every Chaplin film because with Chaplin, you see a pattern or rhythm of a thing and then in contrast, its opposite. The first time we see Charlie, people are throwing trash away and it falls on him. He then tosses away the gloves in which he has been preening. Charlie tries to get rid of the baby, then accepts it. The kid puts a quarter into the gas meter and gets it back. He and the kid live by breaking windows, then repairing them. Even in the lovely Georges-Melies-pure-fantasy-like “Dreamland” sequence we still see this Chaplinism showing our Tramp walking and “unwalking” ‘round a post. The Kid is a doing and an undoing, in particular, wanting and rejecting in the way that I could probably imagine Chaplin wanting and rejecting religious allegory.

Religious and spiritual aren’t the same thing but this film manages to be both, without necessarily trying to be either. A title reading "The woman—whose sin was motherhood" is in juxtaposition to the next insert of Christ bearing the cross. Maybe this was Chaplin’s way of deflecting any charge of immorality on the woman, back at the accusers. So now, a marginalized, unmarried mother (not unlike The Tramp character) goes from being a “blasphemer” to carrying a sacred burden. This film was made with the spirit of charity. Chaplin had known poverty and broken homes, so now he’s offering (as we all say) his voice to the voiceless, those who are marginalized or oppressed.

I mean, this is really good drama. It’s the best of comedy and tragedy -- even a title  describes this as a film “with both a smile and a tear.” By the end we’ll be affirmed and even uplifted, but first we have to endure a few trials. It’s pretty much Dante’s Commedia; we must go through Inferno and Purgatory before we get to Paradise. We see the realities of abusive authority. We see the trauma of a single mother giving up her baby. We see the terror (even at the idea) of a child being taken away from their parents and oppositely a parent losing their child. This is a very empathetic film.

But even with all that said, this film celebrates people and life. It’s inordinately affirming in the fact that everything will be okay if you’re just good to other people. The Tramp and John are happy with their circumstances, not unlike Danny and his dad in Danny Champion of the World. It’s silly to say that if you read your scriptures everyday that all of your prayers would be answered and all your needs would be met. Chaplin isn’t mad about that, he doesn’t even disagree. In fact, he’s basically saying that if you read your scriptures everyday, bad things are still gonna happen but it’s up to you to just still be good. That’s probably spirituality, or at least that’s my brand of it.  

This is a humanist film and if I learned anything from my Comparative Literature class I had to take, it’s that during the renaissance a “humanist” wasn’t a secular person, they were a devoted Christian believer (it's 2017 though, so that take isn't limited to Christianity obviously!) So The Kid is just Charlie Chaplin screaming, “I can hear you and I feel your pain, people of the world!” He’s glorifying humans (kids included!) in order to glorify God. Newton's third law glorifies a God for me, maybe Chaplin does too. Chaplin is asking us to be charitable and possibly even, more Christ-like. Charity and empathy are some of the best parts of Christianity for me -- that makes it a spiritual film for me.

Film/book analysis #4

Critique/Princess Mononoke

The scope of this film is enormous. It’s an epic tackling just about as many social concerns as you can count. While the film has a very clear environmentalist message, it permeates much deeper than that without being, necessarily anti-industrialism. It’s not quite an anti-war film but it would be dismissive to just call it “pro-peace”. In his introduction to the book, “The Art of Princess Mononoke”, Miyazaki draws our attention not just toward the awesome majesty of nature, but also toward the social context in which the film takes place. He consciously avoids the popular period-drama tropes of rice farmers and samurai where everyone knew their place, instead setting the film during a period of social upheaval, with the hero Ashitaka representing one of the nation’s forgotten aboriginal people and has "Irontown" set up as a proto-Marxist worker’s collective rising up to challenge the power of the samurai lords.

Environmentalism has been around even in the backgrounds of most, if not all of Miyazaki’s work. Clearly in Nausicaä and Castle in the Sky, but even less explicit works like My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service have a simple and genuine love for the natural world. Each of the film’s varying factions are shown with detail and Miyazaki’s typical humanism. It’s not even just as simple as man vs. forest. Even the creatures of nature are divided, with the apes getting in the way of the wolves’ progress, and the boar clan trying to act out their own agenda. The humans, meanwhile, are just as divided as the animals, with samurai, iron workers, and a group of hunters all fighting for control of both the forest and the future of mankind. So not only is Mononoke addressing environmentalism or war or capitalism but it examines its messages intersectionally. The film is a rigid condemnation of partisanship and closes with bittersweet compromise -- Miyazaki shows us that although humans and nature should respect each other, there exist differences that neither side will ever be able to overcome. Humans and nature may not always agree, but there is no reason to hinder goodwill between them.

Miyazaki tends towards progressive female characters, sure, but we don't want to dismiss or reduce this fact here, and in turn, ignore the bigger picture. Eboshi is the ultimate adversary for this story: someone who wears a mask of benevolence in order to manipulate the masses to her own desires -- a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s kind of amazing that she still ends up feeling just as sympathetic and human as the other characters by the film’s end. Eboshi's character is a means for Miyazaki to actually subvert his own progressiveness, baiting the audience and then giving us something that’s even more difficult to wrestle with. The gender of this character in relation to their actions is inherently political. This complexity and grayness is how, in a way, Eboshi is using these more modern notions to exploit women and the underclass for her own means, rather than benefit them. It’s just one example of many regarding the layers and layers of pathos and detail that Miyazaki brings to each of the film’s factions.

Yes, “Princess Mononoke” is deeply concerned with nature, but it is also a paean to working men and women. Its heroes are oppressed minorities, lepers, prostitutes, ox drivers and orphans. The result is a film whose most defining declaration is: “Life is suffering. It is hard. The world is cursed. But still, you find reasons to keep living.”

Family/Danny the Champion of the World

This is a story of courage, play, wisdom, and the deep connection that can exist between a parent and a child. After the death of his mother as an infant, Danny is left to live with his father and together, they forge a bond so close that no one can come between them! This is quite simply, a sweet book. They live in a colourful wooden caravan under a large apple tree, serving petrol and fixing cars together. At night his dad tells him fabulous stories. When Danny starts school at seven, his dad walks him there and back. Danny has the best life, and he loves his dad more than anything.

Danny's father is a fantastic figure, and when Danny calls him the best father in the world, you kind of find yourself nodding along in agreement. When Danny discovers his secret hobby, pheasant poaching, he teaches Danny the best ways to steal birds off the large estate of the wealthy and pompous owner. I could be writing about Critique just as easily because Danny the Champion of the World is a win for the working class. Danny loves life and sees the riches in it rather than his poverty stricken surroundings. The objective reality is that they live in a caravan and just scrape by with the barest of essentials, yet through the eyes of Danny, life is splendid. Having money isn't the key to happiness, a notion frequently present in Dahl’s work. Here, the key to happiness is the quality time spent with our loved ones. His father doesn’t simply tell Danny what to do but rather takes the time to teach him how to do it (Danny is a great help in the garage, at only nine years old!). Not only that, but Danny’s father does the work alongside him -- they’re equals. In fact, it’s Danny himself who comes up with the most clever poaching plan, ever conceived!

Danny's inventiveness in the poaching scheme earns well-deserved praise from his dad and others, and it’s his father who dubs him “the champion of the world” -- which not only humbles Danny but leaves him reaffirmed in the greatness of his one remaining parent. The two are a close family unit who share everything with each other. The tenderness of this novel comes from its’ simplicity. They have each other, and love, and great stories and fantastic adventures. And that’s kind of it.

Danny is a nine year old mechanic who has a fabulous story-teller of a father. At times his father may seem irresponsible and a little wild but still holds all the qualities you want in a great father. Not only does he provide and protect, he is attentive and involved, and he’s also a friend. Danny is enamoured at the possibility that his father and him have this activity they can share together and like a good parent, Danny is cautioned against the danger (and illegality) of poaching. Proudly spelled out on the back of the book, Dahl says:

A MESSAGE
to Children Who Have Read This Book

When you grow up
and have children of your own
do please remember something important

a stodgy parent is no fun at all

What a child wants
and deserves
is a parent who is

SPARKY

Speed racer/critique

I have a pretty watered down knowledge of Althusser’s theory of ideology. Basically from what I know, he has an argument that essentially says we don’t realize we're within ideology. Basically, it lives within plain sight in everyday life yet we're in denial of the fact that we live within it. This to me is the most important effect of ideology; it “never says “I am ideological”” (Althusser, 700). When I first saw Speed Racer, I interpreted it as a caustic treatise on the evils of capitalism. Speed and his family run a small racing company threatened by corrupt corporations, so Speed must win the Grand Prix to foil the plans of the capitalists; seemingly, colorfully anti-capitalist. What I interpreted this time was way different, the opposite in fact. Contrary to the general perception, Speed Racer proposes a value system that, while being anti-corporate, speaks nothing of collectivism or equality.

Rex Racer tells his younger brother, Speed, about this special spiritual relationship between car and driver and says, “The car is a living, breathing thing.” This anthropomorphization of machine could potentially imply an organic existence of industry and thus a rationalization for capitalism which presents a useful ideological foundation for untangling the aesthetics and politics (man as machine) of Speed Racer.

Speed is a powerful individual fighting for his family, his hubris, and his quality of living. He lives on a moral code placing importance on fairness (“cheaters never prosper”). With all this in mind, we see Speed presented as an unabashed competitor. He is the capitalist ideal of spirited competition (“You’ve gotta win if you want to keep driving.”) His pre-race snack is a homemade PB&J which is in contrast to the bourgeois decadence of champagne by the evil corporate antagonists. Speed battles for the rights of the rugged all-American individual, in this candy colored landscape of shiny globalization while carrying a chip on his shoulder for the lost family-oriented, grassroots ideals. More than just a racer, Speed is indeed, a capitalist.

Maybe the film is asking if there’s room for the determined individual in the system of mechanized corporate control. If anything, the film, like Speed, attempts to remind us that people are living, breathing things, even if their surroundings are slick, shiny, plastic. This is where Speed Racer demonstrates Althusser’s view (as far as I know) that even though we think we live outside of ideology, we’re actually just reiterating ideology’s power over us. Whether we rebel or not, the individual still has to struggle against the constricting clockwork of corporatism.

So what are kids supposed to make of this?? The blogpost says that “children use their play to explore the social structures that surround them; sites of play represent places where students are questioning the nature of reality."’ A child is probably learning about social structures (gender, class, race, etc.) different from their own situation (reality) when they’re outside of the home. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s work Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children suggests that prejudice against children is based on the idea that they are property, not unlike pets or other animals (who frequently appear as surrogate humans in children’s literature). Hubler argues that “capitalism is inherently hostile to children” and “capital is to labor as adult is to child.”) Perhaps Speed Racer is attempting to encourage viewers to think critically about how an attitude of maintaining or questioning and challenging the status quo is communicated through media for children.

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis (2004) Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in Literary Theory: an Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Oxford: Blackwell (2nd Edition)