Fearing the woods: Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood

Mr. Rogers, that wonderful cardigan-wearing MC of my childhood, died several years ago, but his legacy lives on for Helena's generation through my favorite character from the Land of Make Believe, Daniel Striped Tiger.  For those of you without 3 year olds to keep you up to date, Daniel now has his own animated show, full of the same elements that Mr. Rogers used to such good effect: the trolly, a crazy cast of caring (and of course multicultural-multiracial-multispecies) characters, and lots of catchy music.  Helena loves it and I confess that I like the fact that we get to sing "It's a beautiful day in the Neighborhood" together as we drive to swimming lessons in the morning.

Unlike many movies about solitary kids looking for family, Daniel already has a family, and a very good one.  Reminiscent of my own, in fact, with a caring mother who has a solution to any problem Daniel faces, a Dad who loves to play, a grandpa who shows up to Daniel's great expectations.  (Since the program is a conscious attempt to revive a show from my childhood, it isn't unusual that I should see my own childhood hidden in it, I guess...)  In that way, and in its focus on the quotidian events of a child's life, it is an interesting counter-example to the movies about orphans I used to talk about American individualism last post.  I confess I find it a little slow, but Helena loves the valorization of day to day life, and the way that the loving relationships seem to reflect something in her own dreams of family life.

Without the adventures and extra-quotidian elements that fuel Disney and Pixar movies, Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood needs something else to drive the plot, and it uses the anxiety of childhood: worry about going to the doctor, concern about being liked at school, fights between friends...  These "tiny" things play a huge role in a child's life and imagination, and I certainly remember how the fear of being teased, of going to the dentist, or of not finding friends in a new school brought about something close to trauma in my eight year old head.  It's important for Daniel's mother to sing "Before we do, something new, let's talk about what we'll do," or, when leaving Daniel at school, "Grownups come back."  (Helena has come to sing both of these little ditties, much to my consternation)  In spite of how boring it may seem to a grownup, this reassurance is important to little kids.

Here's the problem, though: not every kid suffers the same anxieties, but the show wants to touch on the fears of every kids in the audience.  In one episode, for instance, the friends are going to go for a walk and a pretend camping trip in the woods, and O the Owl is horribly frightened.  Much of the show is dedicated to showing that we fear things we don't understand, so when we are afraid, we should go and look more closely -- and thus find out that the shape that looks like a monster is the shadow of something innocuous.  A good message, both practically and socially, and one that even adults would do well to hear.

Helena isn't anxious about the woods, though.  In Brazil, she lives in the jungle.  Here in Santa Fe, some of her favorite times have been walking in the juniper and piñon forests in the foothills.  She doesn't need the message of reassurance... so what she picks up on is the fact of fear.  Just as Michel Foucault showed wonderfully how the prohibition of certain "offenses" actually creates the desire to do them, sometimes when a children's program wants to calm a fear that a child doesn't have, it actually draws attention to that fear, and may construct it out of thin air.  For a day after Helena watched the episode about camping and the woods, she wanted to "Play Daniel Tiger": she would be Owl, and I would be Daniel Tiger, calming her as we walked through the pretend woods of our loft.  Helena is a very good actress, so pretending to be scared turned quickly into being scared.  Since then, she has also shown more fear in real situations, like going down the "Big Scary Slide" (4 stories tall: it is big and scary) at the park, or putting her head underwater at swimming lessons.

Here's the interesting thing, though: one of Helena's favorite new games recently has been playing out the plots of her favorite movies.  It's not just Owl and Daniel Tiger in the woods: she tells me to be Baloo so she can be Mowgli and Rita can be Bagira (from The Jungle Book); or I am Sully and Rita is Mike Wazowski to her Boo (from Monsters Inc).  She works very hard to get inside the personality she is playing: feeling the fears, laughing at the same things that make the character laugh.  There is a negative part of this, one that I feel very quickly, as the fears of Owl or Boo (or the rebelliousness of Mowgli) start to filter out into Helena's real life.  But there is also a very positive part of the process: as she plays new roles, she starts to see the world through other eyes, to empathize with people (and animals) who live a very different life from hers.

Helena and her friend Jazmim, swimming in the Rio Negro (April, 2013)

According to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, the great anthropologist of Amazonia, this shift in perspectives, seeing the world through the eyes of the other, is the fundamental goal of life for indigenous peoples in Lowland South America.
Thanks to our work, Helena has spent a lot of time with Amazonian Indian kids, but I don't think she learned this idea from them.  It's interesting that she gets it from watching the most mainstream of American children's films.  So in the end, though I may get frustrated at her new fears, I'm proud of the fact that she is learning to see the world through the eyes of many any diverse creatures.  Amazonian Perspectivism, and she still isn't even four years old...

Orphan monsters and kids' fears

For the last week or so, Helena Iara has been suffering from nightmares.  She wakes up screaming in the middle of the night, and in the morning, when she relaxes enough to talk about the night, she tells us that a monster has been chasing her.  I suppose that the experience is relatively normal, if disturbing to bother her and us, but the solution that she and Rita have developed is interesting: as they talked about the monster, the have invented a son for him.  The son is little and cute, will play with Helena... and then, as her friend, will intervene with the monster on her behalf.  Almost two years ago, when Helena was afraid of the Big Bad Wolf, inventing Lobinho (the little good wolf) served the same purpose; Lobinho is Helena's imaginary friend even today.

What does any of this have to do with media criticism for children?  Many children fear monsters, and some movies have addressed the issue very well: Monsters Inc, for instance, tries to show kids that "Monsters are people too," and if you get close enough to them, they turn out to be good and kind.  Helena's solution to the monster problem forced me to notice something, though: Sully and Mike Wazowski have no family.  Yes, in Monsters University we discover that Sully's father was a famous scarer, but we never see Sully with his family.  The most important relationships they have in the University are with other student and frat brothers; in Monsters Inc, their important relationships are with co-workers.

As we think about other children's movies, we see that most of the main characters are alone in the world.  In Annie or Despicable Me, the children are explicitly orphans.  In Up, Carl is a widower and Russell tormented by the lack of care by his absent father.  A Bug's Life, Shrek, At Home on the Range, Open Season... in all of these films, the most important relationships are those that the characters choose, not the ones that they have been given by birth.  Even as we look at more traditional movies, we see many, many children without families: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Pinocchio...  Clearly, this rule is not universal: Bambi and Dumbo involve close family relationships, and Finding Nemo is all about the attempt to reconstruct family (I could note, however, in all of these cases, that the protagonists are children of single parents).

Helena swings her cousin Fernando.

Bruno Bettleheim and other critics of fairy tales have reflected well on the fears of children, how they both desire independence and fear being alone, without mother and father.  Certainly, those issues play a role in the choice to make children's movies about orphans.  I wonder, though, if it doesn't also say something about American individualism.  Helena lives between two worlds, between the fragmented family of the American educated middle class, and the intense nuclear and extended family of Brazil.  For her, solutions are often familiar (in the etymological sense): the Big Bad Wolf and the nightmare monster are both redeemed by their children.

When I look at Helena's relationship with her extended family, this perspective makes sense: she has a dozen uncles and aunts who form an active part of her life; she loves playing with her many, many cousins.  Family is a resource and a pleasure.  I don't see that in American children I know: they may love their grandparents and get excited about an uncle's visit, but these events seem unusual, something out of the normal.  They are not going to save you from a monster.  And that break in the extended family has an impact in children's movies, and finds its way into the evil "mother" in Tangled and the solitude of the robots on Wall-E.  Though Helena has enjoyed watching those movies, from her perspective, there is something missing in them.

Words that work: Winnie the Pooh

It's hardly unusual for Helena to like Winnie the Pooh: generations have fallen in love with the little stuffed bear and his motley collection of friends.  I certainly remember my father reading stories from the hundred-acre wood, and words like Heffalump and Woozle come back easily, even after all these years.


What I hadn't remember, though, is the materiality of the words in the stories.  Let me give an example from the 2011 Disney version of Winnie the Pooh: all of the major characters have fallen into a pit, and they can't find a way out.  After much despair and a couple of foolish mistakes (Piglet cuts the rope into six pieces, Tigger falls in dressed as a Backsoon monster...), suddenly the letters from the words on the page fall into the pit, and Pooh and Piglet use them to make a ladder to climb out of the hole.  The words read by the narrator cross the line between text and image, and become part of the story they were supposed to describe.

If we would see this kind of a literary device in a "serious novel" (say, by Italo Calvino or John Barth), and it would be lauded (or jeered) as postmodern metafiction, something bold and innovative (or precious and annoying).  In a kids' movie, on the other hand, it seems like a throw away joke.  Clever, perhaps, and even a bit funny, but hardly worthy of the dozens of doctoral dissertations in comparative literature on Borges and Milan Kundera that gather dust on academic bookshelves.

But here's the issue, whether in the scene with the words that serve as a ladder, or another, earlier in the movie, where Pooh walks along the lines of text across the book's page, only to find the letters falling out from under him (just think about that, you deconstructionist English majors out there!): Children, wizards, animist witch-doctors, and ordinary language philosophers like Wittgenstein and Austin all know that words are powerful things.  European modernism wants to make a rigid break between words (which signify) and things (which are signified), but the truth is that words are things, they are actions: they change the world.  As JL Austin says, when a priest or a judge declares "man and wife", the world itself changes.  These words don't mean anything; they do something.  The same is true for a wizard's spell or a voodoo priest's pins in a doll.  These words do things; they break down the simple division between things and words.

Winnie the Pooh, a commercial movie (by Disney, no less!), conveys this message in a way that's much more fun than the impenetrable prose of Derrida or Paul de Man.  Perhaps I don't remember the message from my own childhood (it is also present in the 1977 "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh", which we just watched with Helena as well) because kids intuitively know that words have power, that they don't just describe.  We only go down that mistaken path after years of school.  As anyone who reads to pull himself out of depression knows, words do pull one out of the pit, they are a ladder to freedom.  Pooh can teach that just as well as Wittgenstein.