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...

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.