Lauren Wilford makes the case that not only children’s film, but film in general needn’t always follow narrative, that doing so is a restriction of its potential. More in her piece Towards a True Children’s Cinema: on ‘My Neighbor Totoro’:
As cinema grew up and learned to talk in the 1930s, it
developed more rules and conventions. And as children
grow, they learn how a movie is “supposed” to go; they
internalize the beats of the structure. Most people spend
the rest of their lives watching a type of film they were
taught to enjoy in their childhood. Those who venture
into the world of international film, art film, and
counter-cinema may find that it’s not just about
developing a taste for the slow or unusual, or getting
out ahead of our desire for traditional narrative—it’s
about getting back to our cinematic state of nature.
Perhaps our mistake is in wanting to use films, to have
them cater to us and keep us from boredom, rather than to
see them, love them, and respect them as the free,
precious, ephemeral things that they are.
All this may
make it sound like I’m making an “eat your vegetables”
argument for watching My Neighbor Totoro. I do think that
most children’s entertainment has been pumped with a kind
of spiritual and aesthetic corn syrup, in a desperate
effort to make it go down easy. But I think the
desperation is unnecessary, and has resulted in a sort of
“Dorito effect” in children’s media: louder, faster,
higher-stimulus, partially-hydrogenated entertainment is
addictive, and tends to crowd out quieter pleasures.
And this sums up a scene that, after 1.5 viewings has already stuck fast in my mind, far better than I can:
I remember how Mei first met the giant Totoro—innocently,
awkwardly climbing onto the belly of this unknown beast,
but somehow sensing in the cadence and rumble of his
powerful breath that he was good. As I watched Mei’s
delicate physical and emotional arc over the scene—she
goes from giggling delight to apprehension to
full-throated roaring to, at last, a deep and peaceful
sleep—I could feel love emanating from the frame. Love for
Totoro, love for Mei, love for the forest, love for the
viewer.
A few days ago, Ess and I were walking through the garage to get the watering cans so she could play her current favorite outdoor game: mashing tiny toy ladybugs and ducks and geese in the dirt so she can rinse them off in the watering can water. She’ll do this for the better part of an hour before losing interest. So anyway, Ess starts conversations on her own. I love her topics:
*cough cough*
I ate some bugs there on the bike ride.
In a few hours, it’ll be three years since Ess was born. For the first two years, there was kind of a catching of the breath after each stage: after she began sleeping more reliably, after she stopped needing to be burped, after she could sit through a meal out at a restaurant. Beginning with this birthday, it is a less of a catching of the breath and more this sense of taking a memory (“hope I don’t fall down” whenever she climbed the stairs) or a mis-pronunciation (dooDAHNdaht for banana) and reverently setting it on the shelf, leaving it behind.
We flew a kite with Ess today, and she laughed riotously as I continually crashed it into the ground. I read her a story before bed. Mykala made her a birthday cake shaped like a purple ladybug. I carried her on my shoulders. All of this, the way we spend time, the things that entertain Ess… we’ll have to eventually cede them to growing up and moving on. I try to keep at the front of my mind to help me remember that this makes it all precious.
Four of us were busily chatting in the kitchen the other day, and Ess came in to tell us all something. We were very engaged talking to one another, and Ess could tell and she started to get this little hitch-stutter-filler in her speech, uncertainly stretching out words, aware that nobody was listening, wondering whether to continue. Essie’s experience lasted a brief moment, but the profound pain I felt in response, my daughter here, talking, no one listening, startled me. Here’s the flip side of that:
Now the commencement speakers will typically also wish you
good luck and extend good wishes to you. I will not do
that, and I’ll tell you why. From time to time in the
years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so
that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope
that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you
the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you
will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take
friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time
to time so that you will be conscious of the role of
chance in life and understand that your success is not
completely deserved and that the failure of others is not
completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will
from time to time, I hope every now and then, your
opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you
to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope
you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening
to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to
learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not,
they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them
or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in
your misfortunes.
Chief Justice John Roberts, speaking at his son’s commencement ceremony.
I’m listening to a lecture by Alan Watts that begins with the topic “social institutions as games”. The term “games” in this context is not speaking of the trivial, but rather something that is always played for its own sake. Recognizing social institutions, (including identity!), as games, gives us perspective on our society and our lives that is sorely missing when we insist on taking everything deadly seriously.
Social institutions go a great deal deeper than anything
we’ve mentioned. And the most important kind of social
institution is that which has to do with role-playing. Who
you are. Now, when we ask the question “Who are you?”,
people think of this question in two different ways: one
person, when asked ‘who are you’ will answer “I’m a
doctor.” Another person will fall silent because they
realize how profound the question is. They realize they’ve
been asked what their ego is. But a lot of people don’t
realize that when they’re asked ‘who are you?’.
I’ve noticed just a little bit of difficulty in my
investigations of discussing identity with people — that
they fix on their role and use that to describe their
identity. Their name. Their family. Their place in
society. What they do, what their hobbies are, and so on
— all these are roles. And then also there is the role of
character playing.
All people are, more or less, taught to
act. We are all hams from the beginning. And we were
schooled in acting in our childhood, although it wasn’t
called that. It was called education, it was called
upbringing, but a great deal of
it is schooling in acting. And you very soon learn as a
child from your peers and from your parents what acts are
appropriate and what acts are not. It is the concern of
all parents that their child learns a role in life and has
an identity by which the child can be recognized. It would
be extraordinarily disconcerting, wouldn’t it, if a child
had one personality one day and another personality the
next. But children can do that!
Don’t you remember as a child that you were many different
personalities? Depending on your environment, that you
were one person at home with your parents, that you were
quite a different person out alone with other children;
then, when you went to visit your uncle and aunt, you were
someone else altogether? And so on.
And finally, the whole trend of education is to shake all
this down and make you more or less constant, in every
sort of social environment that you enter, so that
everybody knows who you are. Otherwise it’s disconcerting.
So, we are made to believe that we have a real self. That
is to say, somebody who we really are, and whom we have to
find. To find yourself, to settle down, to grow up—means
to fit into a role. And there are a lot of people who are
troubled in our society, and who seem to be misfits and
are terrible unhappy because they just can’t find the role
that they’re supposed to fit. They don’t know who they
are. There is an inner pandemonium and conflict.
But it’s obvious, isn’t it, that the role you play is a
social institution. Because you can’t be an object to your
own consciousness, at least not in the ordinary way. You
are a subject from your own point of view. And you can
only become an object to the extent that you adopt the
attitudes that other people take towards you.
Other people, from the beginning of life, are mirrors. And
by the way they respond to you, you begin to learn what
they think of you and therefore who you are. We all tell
each other who we are. And so, the role we play, the
identity we have in that sense, is a social institution.
You can listen to the first part here. The next parts include: “How to Play the Game”, “YOU are Your Worst Enemy”, “The Joke of Death” and “Don’t be Deceived”.
As a mirror in Ess’ life, I gotta take a shot at understanding this before I try to impart it to her.
It’s 9:21 in the evening, and since it is nearly the longest day of the year, I can look out our open window and see the green grass and tree leaves in the slowly fading twilight. Dads and Grads — my favorite time of the year. The time when the days are longest and summer still feels like all possibility and nothing spent.
Yesterday, Father’s Day, while Mykala made some spectacular savory chickpea stuffing inside wontons, I asked Ess if she wanted to go on a bike ride. Watching her face change is always amazing: she’s never not said “YES!”.
So we went through the usual rigamarole of putting shoes on (make sure they’re on the right feet, Ess!) and picking out which stuffed animal would sit with Ess on the bike. We walked outside and… flat tire. Then something wonderful happened: Ess helped me fix it. Helped me turn the bike upside down, watched me use the tire levers to pull the tire and inner tube. Sat patiently in the car while I looked up the bike shops, found they were closed (5:15 on a Sunday) and listened intently when I gave her the bad news we wouldn’t be biking. But, we looked online and found an inner tube at Target!
We went together, picked it up, and then Ess helped me put it all on — and, after a delectable dinner outside with Mykala, there was still time for a bike ride through a beautiful summer evening, with my daughter.
I was out at continuing education tonight, learning about our current opioid epidemic, and I got home just before Essie’s bedtime. She and Mykala were upstairs in our bedroom, reading some stories when I got in the door. I ran up the stairs and I could hear this little voice going “dada! dada!” and when I opened the door, Ess ran up to me and gave me this GIANT hug. Then she asked me to read her this library book:
Called Triangle by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Jon Klassen.
A few pages in, Ess just quietly stared at me, and then threw her arms around my neck. And then around Mykala’s neck.
“Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to Dada…” is what I heard Ess singing in her pack and play on the morning of my birthday. She and Mykala sang it again later that day, and we drew with chalk on the sidewalk. Mykala baked a yellow cake (one of my favorites), and frosted a birthday greeting on the top of it. I visited my parents, and the sun was out for the first time in a few days. I tripled my age and got 96; I looked back and realized I started at my current job when I was only 27, and that Ess was born when I was 29. I recalled looking at my official birthday certificate when I was in college, and seeing my mom’s age at my birth: 29.
I’ve been slowly piecing together logic and math in a kind of rudimentary numerical summary, arranged in a spreadsheet I nicknamed ‘Prognosicator alpha’ — it tells us how our student loan payment decisions affect Essie’s college fund and how that affects our retirement — and looking at a grid of all those years and their numbers gives me the sense that this can’t possibly be my life, so easily moved in time from age 29 to 65 that the rows don’t even take up the height of my laptop screen.
As I’ve told Mykala before and as I reiterate now: I have no idea what I’m doing. Not in a small way, like how do I teach Ess about inequality and the way people can behave in frightful ways. Not in a small way, like what’s wrong with our water softener or how to repair it. Not in a small way, like why can’t I just call the insurance company so we get the Jetta’s windshield fixed. No. I don’t know what I’m doing in a BIG way.
A big way, like what will I teach Ess about trading time for money. Trading autonomy for security. Trading future comfort for present pain. Are those even the real choices… or are they straw men, false dichotomies?
A big way: is there an escape from the strictures of consumerism and society? Do we wish to escape? Should we?
A big way, like what even is our full menu of choices?
A big way, like why is it that philosophical understanding puts the events of our lives on such a grand cosmic stage that it feels like nothing matters?
Andrew Sullivan’s short and potent The Madness of King Donald levels-up when it ends with a subject rather more profound than our current administration:
I’ve managed to see Scorsese’s Silence twice in the last
couple of weeks. It literally silenced me. It’s a
surpassingly beautiful movie — but its genius lies in the
complexity of its understanding of what faith really is.
For some secular liberals, faith is some kind of easy,
simple abdication of reason — a liberation from reality.
For Scorsese, it’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery, and
often inseparable from crippling, perpetual doubt. You
see this in the main protagonist’s evolution: from a
certain, absolutist arrogance to a long sacrifice of
pride toward a deeper spiritual truth. Faith is a result,
in the end, of living, of seeing your previous
certainties crumble and be rebuilt, shakily, on new
grounds. God is almost always silent, hidden, and
sometimes most painfully so in the face of hideous
injustice or suffering. A life of faith is therefore not
real unless it is riddled with despair.
How efficiently he gets from his summary of secular liberals’ imperfect understanding to the realities of a life of faith. As a secular liberal guilty of precisely that imperfect understanding, reading this helped me understand that faith doesn’t resolve all existential angst or salve all philosophical bramble.
