Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Making the day-to-day important: Peppa Pig

When it comes to TV shows, Helena goes through phases.  One month, all she wants to watch is Pocoyó.  The next month, it is wall to wall Fishtronaut.  For the last month, she wants to see the English series Peppa Pig all the time.  If you haven't seen the program, here's a quick clip to give you an idea:



Though all of the characters are animals, they live the lives of middle and lower class Brits -- or at least some imaginary variation on that life -- with plots based on getting sick, the consequences of putting a red shirt in the white laundry, or playing in the park.  Far from the American tradition of superhero cartoons, where every episode is a new threat to the existence of the world, the show just focusses on the quotidian, the day to day life of a relatively happy family.

In fact, Peppa Pig feels less like narrative, and more like a transposition of play to the TV screen.  When Helena and her friends get together, they play house or school or maybe "going to the park"; when she plays alone with her stuffed animals, they often do the same thing, with the hippo becoming "mommy" and the giraffe and wolf as her children.  Where most adult narratives, plays, and movies gain their caché by portraying things that are out of the ordinary -- a murder detective, a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown, a solider on a distant planet -- both Helena's play and Peppa represent the normal stuff of everyday life.

The TV screen, like the frame of a picture, is a way to draw attention to a particular part of the world.  "This," we learn, "is something to which we should pay attention."  Medieval and renaissance artists put frames around religious paintings, while later on kings and grandees got their images framed.  Today the TV tells us what news matters, that police officers and doctors live the most interesting lives....  In the end, we often feel that our own little lives aren't that important, that our little struggles and joys don't merit a place on a stage.  Nietzsche called this way of looking at the world "life-denying", as if what really mattered was always elsewhere.

Peppa and little kids' play take exactly the opposite tack: they put the frame around the "nothing" of everyday life and say that it does matter.  This works for little children, I think, because for them the world is still so new.  The discipline of school, the power relations of family, the novelty of a new bug found in the park... in some way, they have to ingest all of these ideas and make them homely, comprehensible.  The strange becomes normative and normal.  There are problems with this perspective, of course -- I think of the kids I work with in slums or in the Amazon, for whom Peppa's normalization of British life means a negation of their own day-to-day reality -- but for Helena, the program is fantastic.

Monday, November 25, 2013

Mowgli is a Girl? The Jungle Book

Last week, Helena Iara was sick.  First she had strep, then a sore throat that just wouldn't go away, even with the antibiotics.  She actually felt pretty good -- except for the throat -- so we had to work hard to keep her from running around barefoot outside.  One of my solutions to force some rest was to download The Jungle Book.  Helena loved it; so much that we watched at at least seven times this weekend; when any new person would come into the house, Helena would declare, "I want to show 'The Bear Necessities' to such-and-such."  And opening that one song meant watching the whole movie again.

There are loads of things to criticize in the movie -- it is based, after all, on the stories of a bald-faced apologist for the British Empire in India -- but I'm not going to take that up this morning.  What I found more interesting this weekend was that Helena, in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary in the movie, insisted that Mowgli is a girl.

Like Mowgli, Helena lives in the jungle: yes, she sleeps in a nice brick house, but when she steps outside the door -- and she always want to be outside! -- the palms and orchids and bromeliads don't look that different from the way The Jungle Book portrays India.  The stories I tell her before nap-time always start in that sort of jungle-garden, where her imaginary dinosaur and wolf friends play with fairy tale characters.  She wants Mowgli's adventures to be her adventures, so she is quick to identify with him... so Mowgli, as a stand in for Helena, must be a girl.  Literary identification is a powerful thing.

Helena, with a friend in the favelas of Recife.
There is lots of textual evidence for Mowgli being a boy, especially the fact the the other characters always use the masculine pronoun for him, but Helena still pays more attention to image than to text.  In cartoons, the bikini top is always the key to showing that a girl in the tropics is a girl, but Helena lives in a country where little girls don't need to wear bikini tops, so she doesn't see that as a mark of gender. The real problem for Helena's hypothesis is the penultimate scene, when Mowgli is seduced to go to the "man village" by a little girl.  In the sexual politics of 1967, when the movie was made, Mowgli had to be a boy to fall for a girl in that way.

Helena found a simple solution to that narrative aporia: she see the little girl as Mowgli's mother.  Helena loves to play house, and she will turn anything into "minha filha" (my daughter): her own mother is "daughter," as are her dolls, stuffed toys, imaginary friends, real friends, even a bag of flour at the supermarket.  For Helena, the mother-daughter relationship is the axel around which the world turns, so it is unsurprising that The Jungle Book should also find its conclusion there.  Boys and girls falling in love "makes the world go round" for a teenager, but for a little girl, the fundamental manifestation of love is her Mommy.

Helena has to go through a lot of intellectual acrobatics to interpret The Jungle Book so that it makes sense to her, but she's hardly alone.  All of us do the same thing when we read: we highlight the issues that matter to us, ignore evidence that doesn't fit our hypothesis.  For the conservative Christian, the New Testament commands a strong, patriarchal family even though Jesus says "For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law." (Matt. 10:35)  I'm just as guilty: I want to see Monsters, Inc as an expression of Marx's idea of the alienation of labor, for instance.  Reading is always an act of blinding ourselves to the parts of a complex and internally contradictory text that we don't like.  Helena's reading of Mowgli is particularly aggressive, but not really that different from what any of us do.

A lot of American feminism has postulated that one of the major problems with the European concept of gender is that the masculine stands in for the generic.  "Man" means human beings, for instance, and when we think about general categories of people -- "doctor", "professor", "worker" -- we generally give them masculine characteristics.  "Child," according to that logic, will generally be understood as a boy.

I think it is a good sign that Helena hasn't (yet?) fallen into that trap.  Mowgli's mid-length hair and pre-pubescent body -- truly unmarked as to gender -- have the default meaning of the feminine to her.  So even though there is a lot of evidence against her reading of The Jungle Book, I'm letting her run with it.

Friday, November 22, 2013

Wackily Ever After

Most video for little kids bores me to tears.  I can't imagine watching Dora or Teletubbies day after day with Helena.  But the Spanish show Pocoyó -- she loves it, and it even makes me think.  Like a Pixar movie for the youngest set.  Just one example:


The short film is, I think, the best example I have ever seen of the distinction that Jacques Lacan makes between the speaking and spoken subject... and quite frankly, it's much more fun to watch Pocoyó and Pato explain it than reading any number of academic commentators on the subject.

Now, a lot of left wing theory in the 1950s and 1960s was very pessimistic about the possibilities of human agency.  People like Louis Althusser and the young Foucault saw the subject (the actor, the person who does something) in its etymological sense, as one who has been subjected (literally, "thrown under"); one is, after all, the "subject of the king" or of a country.  A good bit of the philosophy of that era focusses on all of the different external forces that structure our subjectivity: the way that language makes us see the world as we do, or how gender and power and monetary differences limit how we dream or what we think we are capable of.  Though useful as a critique of ideology, it's a deeply pessimistic philosophy, and I think may lie at the root of the current fiasco of the European and American Left.


If we think about these ideas in terms of Pocoyó, it's the first couple of minutes of "Wackily ever after", when the narrator tries to control the story (and the actors) by means of his voice: "Ely will do this," "Pato is the crazy villain..."  The voice is making explicit a kind of "should"that all of us feel: we all should strive for success, which means being a lawyer or an i-banker (even if most of them aren't very happy).  Clothes have this power, too: Pocoyó gets the crown, and so will be the prince, while the top hat and cape make Pato the heavy.  Lacan, however, focusses on the aspect of speech: that's why he talked about the spoken subject, the subject created by the voice of the narrator, the other, or power.

But Lacan opens another door: the speaking subject.  Pocoyó and his friends are not about to let the narrator tell a classic (read: boring!) story about princes and princesses and evil monsters.  Ely wants to be a princess, but the kind of princess who lifts weights and rides a scooter (vide Fiona, in Shrek).  Pato doesn't really want to be the villain: he wants to play and to water the flowers.  Pocoyó isn't going to duel his friend Sleepy Bird, so he invites him to dinner.  The play of children, their resistance to the voice of the narrator, takes the story in new directions, makes the kids speaking subjects as well as spoken ones.

No one really controls everything about his or her own agency: our parents and culture and genes and who know what else are strong influences on what we think and do.  But I think that subjectivity -- for Pocoyó, for Helena, for me -- comes at the intersection of the voice of the narrator and the rebellious play of a child.  Surfing back and forth between those two is what makes us... well, us.

Pocoyo's shoes

It's tempting to turn this blog into a series of commentaries on Pocoyo (don't worry, I won't really do it, but the Spanish cartoon does open so many amazing ideas in little kids' heads...).  Here's one I found particularly interesting:


Like many other things we buy, Pato's shoes seem at first to be magical: they allow him to do things he never could before, they give him and intense kind of joy... and they make him better than his friends.  It's what we want from our athletic shoes, isn't it?

Pato soon finds, though, that the magic in his shoes isn't completely under his control.  In fact, they soon control him much more than he controls them.  Though the metaphor is childish and drawn in primary colors, it is also quite honest: Rita and I were just in Los Angeles, for instance, and found the bus and metro to be much better than anyone thought, and we were amazed at the friendly atmosphere in public transit.  In contrast, most people drove their cars alone, with a grimace on their faces, and then had to pay $10-25 a day to park.  Might these cars be like Pato's shoes?  After all of the financial and emotional investment we put into them, we simply can't take the bus.  The car, to some degree, comes to control us.

Marx says this about the products we consume, words that seem even more interesting today than in the 1950s when he wrote:
A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.
Pocoyo shows some of these theological niceties, more exactly how the shoes come to function as a magical power outside of ourself, not too different from a charm in animist religion.  But in general, Pocoyo is quite a bit more fun than Karl Marx... and it has better colors.

Watching TV with a little girl


It's hard to take children's television seriously.  Sociologists dismiss it as an electronic babysitter, while many exhausted parents just say  "Put a movie on so we can get some rest."  Barney's repetitive songs and the constant explosions of the Transformers look like the bookends of a vast wasteland of images played before slack-jawed media consumers.
I thought exactly that before starting to watch children's TV and movies with Helena Iara, my three year old daughter.  Clearly, there are major problems with kids' media, but something else, something much more interesting, is also going on.  As I watch TV and movies with kids, I have seen that they use these narratives, characters, and songs to think their world, to give a frame and a meaning to their experiences.  The TV or computer screen isn't so much an electronic babysitter as a kind of digital picture frame, a way of teaching what is worth looking at and thinking about.
I studied philosophy.  My wife is an anthropologist.  As you can imagine, the tools I'll use to think about kidvid come from those disciplines.  I hope, though, that I'll also be able to capture something of the way that Helena watches movies and videos, creating a kind of dialogue-within-the-blog with a very little viewer.  I hope it can serve as a resource for other adults who want the TV to be something more than just a way to keep the kids out of their hair so they have time -- finally -- to clean the bathroom or cook dinner.