Watching and reading and playing: The Lorax Part 3

Helena's Lorax binge is slowly coming to an end, so it's about the right time to write the last of my encomia on the movie.  Today, I want to think about what this experience of repetition and (almost) obsession says about the relationship between video, books, and play.

Helena rock climbs "outside of town."

The American upper-middle class has a very moral relation to the television.  Though only some people see it as positively evil, most see it as a sort of low grade vice, something we love, but that we should watch in moderation.  A visual version of Doritos, maybe.  A couple of days ago, we bought Helena some DVDs of the PBS series "The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot about That", and the liner notes are largely dedicated to the problem of guilt.  "No need to feel bad," goes the argument.  "You put your kids in front of this, they give you a bit of a break, and they'll still be learning something."

The problem lies in the idea that if kids start to watch TV, they will never voluntarily stop.  And if you don't run and play and read and learn, the kid will turn into a couch potato.  Helena's experience of the Lorax shows something very different going on: instead of the movie being a kind of "gateway drug" to more TV, it has actually been the gate to activities American parents generally see as the sublime childhood virtues: reading, creative play, and independent storytelling.

I had read The Lorax to Helena before she started to watch the movie, but it was only after she saw the story on TV that she fell in love with the book.  She now wants me to read it daily (if not more), and has requested it in Portuguese and even in Spanish (the library had a Spanish translation; Rita had to do the Portuguese herself).  She also spends time "reading" the book alone, and has memorized so much of the text that it probably her reading probably isn't that different from mine.

Her obsession with the Lorax has also made Helena into an active storyteller. Part of our house has become a Truffula forest, and often she and I play at being brown barbaloots or singing as humming fish. When we go out on a hike or to a playground, one part of the area will be "outside of town," another part will be the Truffula forest before it was destroyed, and then there will be a place called "Thneedville."  Rocks and pinecones play the role of truffula seeds, and we go around planting them in the snow or the sand, depending on the weather.

After all of this, I am much, much less worried about Helena watching TV.  As long as we watch with her and encourage her play, it seems much more a prod to virtue than a "book tube."

Helena speaks for the trees: The Lorax Part II

In my last post, I looked at how creating a back-story for the Once-ler and the boy in the Lorax helped to provide a more thoughtful and effective critique at the motivations behind environmental destruction. This morning, I want to think a little bit about Thneedville, the plastic city that stands at the center of the 2012 movie, but which didn't even exist in the original book.

Dr. Seuss's story of the Lorax begins on the far side of town, where the grickle grass grows, but the movie starts in a mock-up of suburban America, in a song and dance number about the virtues of a clean, plastic world in which one even has to buy air.  The color palate is dramatically different from the first pages of the book, with bright reds and yellows and greens (the sort of colors that Seuss used in all of the rest of his books, and in the flash-back parts of The Lorax).  Dr. Seuss begins with these colors because he wants to tell a dystopic fable of the future.  Forty years after the publication of the Lorax, that future has come upon us, and it doesn't look like Seuss thought it would, so the movie made the very smart decision to begin with a new visual (and political) frame.

Thneedville, from the first frames of the movie

Truth is, it is very easy to fight against an evil as obvious as the smog and pollution in the Lorax book.  When things are that bad, people are able to see how bad they are, and at least some people will have the courage to act: who wants to live amid smogulous smoke, gloopidy-gloop, and the demolished landscape the Once-ler made?  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Dr. Seuss wrote the book, those seemed like good metaphors for environmental destruction: the Cuyhoga River that caught on fire, the persistent smog of Denver or Los Angeles, the clear-cutting of the Oregon forests.  Thanks to non-governmental organizations, the EPA, and car exhaust laws, those easily visible environmental problems are largely gone today, at least in the United States.

Today, we face an entirely different environmental crisis, one that you can't see by looking out the window.  Global warming destroys reefs and slowly raises the level of the seas, but our lawns are still green.  Our hamburgers depend on the deforestation of the Amazon, but that happens (in the language of the Lorax) "outside of town," in places that most of us never see.  Our cheap computers and home appliances and clothes depend on the devastation of China's air and rivers.  But the small world we live in, inside the huge walls of Thneedville, continues to appear almost perfect.  The movie presents a much better portrait of today's environmental crisis than the book.

Helena, about a year ago, on a boat on the Amazon river

The movie also ties together marketing, profit, and power in a very interesting way: at one point, two advertising executives present a new way to sell air, now in little plastic bottles.  "Our research," one points out, "show that if you put anything in little plastic bottles, people will buy it!"  Anyone who has seen a Dasani water vending machine next to a water fountain will certainly laugh guiltily.  Second, they point out, "The factories to make the water bottles will pollute the air even more, so that people will need to buy even more air!"  Even the most radical environmental organizations are seldom brave enough to tie capitalism and environmental destruction to closely together.

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Helena celebrates a successful rock climb
in the forest above Santa Fe.

For Helena, the opposition between Thneedville and Outside of Town (the basis for all of the Lorax games that she invents and wants to play with us) must be particularly touching.  Even as a little girl, as she travels between Brazil and the US, between our home and the Amazon, she must feel the difference between the plastic world of so many people, and uncontrolled nature -- sometimes sublime and beautiful, other times destroyed and tragic.  Several times in the last week, she has told me that she misses the trees in the jungle that surround our house in Brazil.  We have gone hiking and climbing several times in the last couple of weeks, and she feels so free and happy in the juniper and piñon forests of Santa Fe.

Many people never leave the plastic perfection of Thneedville; Ted (the boy in the film) is transformed when he learns that he can go between the two worlds.  Helena, however, always already lives on both sides of the wall, inside plastic post-modernity and in the jungles and mountains.  We adults have many intellectual tools to understand and rationalize the contraction between Thneedville and Outside of Town; Helena, fortunately, discovered The Lorax as a way to think her two worlds.

Helena speaks for the trees: The Lorax

Over the last three weeks, as I have been lain flat on my back by an attack on my sciatic nerve, Helena has watched, read, and acted out The Lorax at least a hundred times.  Though I had read her the book before, this extraordinary attack of repetition began when she saw the 2012 version, made by the same people who did Dispicable Me, but has reached on to include the early 1970s film broadcast on TV, two editions of the Dr. Seuss classic, the spanish version, an improvised Portuguese version (Helena has insisted that Rita translate the book), and numerous games in playgrounds, at home, and in the woods above Santa Fe.  As you might guess, I have had quite a bit of opportunity to compare different variations on the story -- almost as much as a Biblical text critic looking at 17 versions of the Gospel of John in different greek monasteries -- and I have come to a rather unexpected conclusion: the highly commercial, computer-driven 2012 version is the best of all of them.  Yes, even better than Dr. Seuss's book.

No knocks to Dr. Seuss here: The Lorax was one of my favorite books when I was a kid, Rita bought it for me to read to Helena before our little girl was even born, and I had memorized most of it even before Helena got into this Lorax craze.  The movie, however, manages to be even more politically radical -- and at the same time more hopeful -- than the book.  Helena has been right to fall in love with it.

A book -- especially a poetry book -- can be a fable, but a movie can't really get away with that.  The characters need back stories, clear motivations, a framework for identification and catharsis.  The movie gives as the Once-ler as a young man, naïve and hopeful that he will change the world with his Thneed.  He's not the faceless evil of the book, but a sympathetic guy, a little clueless, but a portrait of young America at its best.  After cutting down the first truffula tree, he comes to see that the Bar-ba-loots and the Swammy Swans and the Humming fish all depend on the forest; he agrees not to cut any more trees.  He and the Lorax chat, dine, and play cards together: they become friends.  Before he is a success, we identify with the Once-ler, we like his music and his innocence.

Evil doesn't come from inside the Once-Ler, but from a nasty one-two punch: the demands of the market and the weakness of his family.  After failing to sell even one Thneed for days, the Once-ler throws it away in frustration... only for it to land on the head of a cute teenager.  Everyone confounds the Thneed for a fashionable hat, and the floodgates are loosed.  Hundreds of people march on the forest, each demanding a Thneed.  Second, when the Once-ler calls his family to help him produce Thneeds in the factory, we see his weakness: as he had left home, his mother said, "Now if you don't succeed, dear... then it's just what we expected!"  As she, his father, aunt, and the rest of the family arrive on the scene, we see how much he wants their approval and love.  When his father points out that to increase production they need to cut down the trees instead of just gathering the tufts, we can see the internal debate on the young Once-ler's face.  Finally, his need for family approval overcomes his promise to the Lorax, and he says, "Well, cutting down just a few trees can't hurt..."

This expansion of the story is much more honest to how evil comes about in late capitalism.  It isn't just, as the Lorax puts it, that the Once-ler is "crazy with greed," but that he is weak.  The market wants Threeds.  His family wants success.  He is flattered by their desires for him, for their ideas that he can fulfill what they want.  The Once-ler accepts the desires of other people as his own desire, even though they will not make him happy, either.  If we look at Google in China, Nike in Indonesia, Apple and Foxxcom... the backstory of the Once-ler explains that kind of banal evil much more than the simplicity of greed or malice.

Helena at the Wildlife Conservancy Preserve outside of Santa Fe.

A return to the innocent days of the Once-ler also explains his final act, keeping the last of the Truffula seeds and giving it to the boy (unnamed in the book, named Ted in the movie as a tribute to Ted Geisel, Dr. Seuss's given name).  Wracked with guilt, the Once-ler is himself unable to do anything to right his wrong, but Ted gives him the opportunity at redemption.  The Once-ler is not a bad person, but a person who has done many bad things, and has become a prisoner of that history (symbolized by the slats he nails to his window so that no-one can see him... and so that he cannot get out.

The movie also gives us a backstory for the boy who goes to the far end of town where the grickle-grass grows.  He's a young teenager in love, and the girl wants to see a tree.  For a Brazilian, the story reminds us of the strategy of the Brazilian Communist Party, which worked to recruit the best looking young women, who would in turn inspire men to join... but it also rings true.  As the Once-ler remarks to Ted, "If a guy does something stupid once, it is because he is a guy.  But if he does it two times, there is sure to be a girl in the story."

Ted, like the Once-ler, is living someone else's dream... but he soon takes it on as his own.  He comes to care about trees, to long for nature and clean air.  He soon brings in Audrey (the cute girl; her name is probably a tip of the hat to Seuss's second wife) as an ally, and not only as an object of desire.  In this way, the film recognizes that just as the motivations of those who do evil are not always evil, the motivations of those who do good are not always pure.

In my next post, the subversive critique of Thneedville...