Instructions:
Print,
mark up, and bring to class.
Find
and write answers with page and paragraph numbers for each article:
o
3-5 functions of movies
o What other kinds of
literature could their ideas apply to and how?
o What other works of
literature have performed three of these functions for you (could be all in one
work or three different works)
o Do you disagree with any of
their points? If so, which and why?
o Does literature serve any
purposes beyond those King and Klass talk about?
1.
I
think that we’re all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it
a little better – and maybe not all that much better, after all. We’ve all
known people who talk to themselves, people who sometimes squinch their faces
into horrible grimaces when they believe no one is watching, people who have
some hysterical fear – of snakes, the dark, the tight place, the long drop . .
. and, of course, those final worms and grubs that are waiting so patiently
underground.When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row
center in a theater showing a horror movie, we are daring the nightmare.
2.
Why?
3.
Some
of the reasons are simple and obvious. To show that we can, that we are not
afraid, that we can ride this roller coaster. Which is not to say that a really
good horror movie may not surprise a scream out of us at some point, the way we
may scream when the roller coaster twists through a complete 360 or plows
through a lake at the bottom of the drop. And horror movies, like roller coasters,
have always been the special province of the young; by the time one turns 40 or
50, one’s appetite for double twists or 360-degree loops may be considerably
depleted.
4.
We
also go to re-establish our feelings of essential normality; the horror movie
is innately conservative, even reactionary. Freda Jackson as the horrible
melting woman in Die, Monster, Die!
confirms for us that no matter how far we may be removed from the beauty of a
Robert Redford or a Diana Ross, we are still light-years from true ugliness.
5.
And
we go to have fun.
6.
Ah,
but this is where the ground starts to slope away, isn’t it? Because this is a
very peculiar sort of fun, indeed. The fun comes from seeing others menaced –
sometimes killed. One critic has suggested that if pro football has become the
voyeur’s version of combat, then the horror film has become the modern version
of the public lynching.
7.
It
is true that the mythic “fairy-tale” horror film intends to take away the
shades of grey . . . . It urges us to put away our more civilized and adult
penchant for analysis and to become children again, seeing things in pure
blacks and whites. It may be that horror movies provide psychic relief on this
level because this invitation to lapse into simplicity, irrationality and even
outright madness is extended so rarely. We are told we may allow our emotions a
free rein . . . or no rein at all.
8.
If
we are all insane, then sanity becomes a matter of degree. If your insanity
leads you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper or the Cleveland Torso
Murderer, we clap you away in the funny farm (but neither of those two
amateur-night surgeons was ever caught, heh-heh-heh); if, on the other
hand, your insanity leads you only to
talk to yourself when you’re under stress or to pick your nose on your morning
bus, then you are left alone to go about your business . . . though it is
doubtful that you will ever be invited to the best parties.
9.
The
potential lyncher is in almost all of us (excluding saints, past and present;
but then, most saints have been crazy in their own ways), and every now and
then, he has to be let loose to scream and roll around in the grass. Our
emotions and our fears form their own body, and we recognize that it demands
its own exercise to maintain proper muscle tone. Certain of these emotional
muscles are accepted – even exalted – in civilized society; they are, of
course, the emotions that tend to maintain the status quo of civilization
itself. Love, friendship, loyalty, kindness -- these are all the emotions that
we applaud, emotions that have been immortalized in the couplets of Hallmark
cards and in the verses (I don’t dare call it poetry) of Leonard Nimoy.
10.
When
we exhibit these emotions, society showers us with positive reinforcement; we
learn this even before we get out of diapers. When, as children, we hug our
rotten little puke of a sister and give her a kiss, all the aunts and uncles
smile and twit and cry, “Isn’t he the sweetest little thing?” Such coveted
treats as chocolate-covered graham crackers often follow. But if we
deliberately slam the rotten little puke of a sister’s fingers in the door,
sanctions follow – angry remonstrance from parents, aunts and uncles; instead
of a chocolate-covered graham cracker, a spanking.
11.
But
anticivilization emotions don’t go away, and they demand periodic exercise. We
have such “sick” jokes as, “What’s the difference between a truckload of
bowling balls and a truckload of dead babies?” (You can’t unload a truckload of
bowling balls with a pitchfork . . . a joke, by the way, that I heard
originally from a ten-year-old.) Such a joke may surprise a laugh or a grin out
of us even as we recoil, a possibility that confirms the thesis: If we share a
brotherhood of man, then we also share an insanity of man. None of which is
intended as a defense of either the sick joke or insanity but merely as an
explanation of why the best horror films, like the best fairy tales, manage to
be reactionary, anarchistic, and revolutionary all at the same time.
12.
The
mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately
appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity unchained, our most base
instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized . . . and it all happens,
fittingly enough, in the dark. For those reasons, good liberals often shy away
from horror films. For myself, I like to see the most aggressive of them – Dawn of the Dead, for instance – as
lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw
meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river
beneath.
13.
Why
bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them down there
and me up here. It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love,
and I would agree with that.
14.
As
long as you keep the gators fed.
By
Perri Klass
1.
Last
summer, people worried about whether the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were too
frightening for children. This summer, some may look at The Lion King and
wonder if the death of the father lion is too traumatic.
2.
In
the first case, the worry was that brilliant special effects would leave
children frightened of animals they know do not really walk the Earth; in the
second, that a well-told story would have children identifying with an animated
lion cub and his grief and guilt over the loss of his father.
3.
In
The Lion King, which opens today, Mufasa, the king of beasts, is trampled in a
wildebeest stampede as he saves his little cub, Simba. Mufasa's evil brother,
Scar, who provoked the stampede to kill his brother and take over the lion kingdom,
convinces Simba that he killed his father. The distraught cub leaves home,
nearly dies and wanders the veldt until he grows up enough to return and
challenge his usurping uncle.
4.
Many
reviewers have specifically noted the potentially frightening aspects of the
movie. Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times, referred to "Mufasa's
disturbing on-screen death" and wondered if the film "really
warranted a G rating."
5.
Terrence
Rafferty, writing in The New Yorker, said the film dredged up "deep-seated
insecurities and terrors."Richard Corliss, in Time magazine, said,
"Get ready to explain to the kids why a good father should die violently
and why a child should have to witness the death."And Variety pointed to
"scenes of truly terrifying animal-kingdom violence that should cause
parents to think twice before bringing along the Little Mermaid set."
6.
The
world is full of adults who think that the death of Bambi's mother is too
upsetting for small children. Too sad. Too scary. There will be parents who
feel that The Lion King may be too upsetting for children, too; a movie about
lions is a little, well, redder in tooth and claw than a movie about a deer.
7.
I
myself tend to worry more about human villains, both in real life and at the
movies.
8.
By
my standards, Snow White is the much more upsetting movie. There is nothing in
The Lion King that can compare to a wicked queen who wants to kill her
stepdaughter for being too beautiful or to a huntsman ordered to kill the girl
and cut her heart out. And for that matter, are two lions fighting for control
as scary as Cruella De Vil, who, in 101 Dalmatians, wants to kill the puppies
and make them into coats?
9.
Do
we really want to protect our children from being saddened or scared or even
upset by movies - or by books? Do we want to eliminate surprise, reversal,
tragedy, conflict and leave children with stories in which they can be smugly
confident that the good will always be rewarded and the bad always punished?
10.
Children
don't have to sit through Friday the 13th at a tender age, but neither do they
need an unending diet of wholesomely bland entertainment. A child who is
worried, truly worried, about the outcome of a book is a child who is learning
to understand what pulls someone into literature, and in fact it is a triumph
that in an age of special effects and interactive videos, words on a page still
have the power to move children.
11.
Similarly,
in an age when cartoons and live action films are full of bang-'em-on-the-head
violence that has no true dramatic impact, this is a movie in which a noble
character dies and is truly mourned.
12.
And
when we talk about children made sad by a movie, we are talking about children
being moved by things that are not really happening to real people, and that is
what art and drama and literature are all about. Those children are recognizing
a character and feeling for that character, and that is a giant step toward
empathy.
13.
Maria
Tatar, professor of German studies at Harvard and the author of Off With Their
Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood, points out that stories and
folk tales have always offered children a way to consider and even control
death and other difficult and forbidden topics. "Kids can handle almost
anything if they're authorized to see it, talk about it," she says.
"They're much smarter than we give them credit for."
14.
Barry
Zuckerman, chairman of the department of pediatrics at Boston City Hospital and
an expert on child development, agrees that these stories offer children an
opportunity to master troubling issues. "It's not bad for children to be
exposed to stressful things. They can cope by having a parent available, so
they can cuddle up to a parent who provides safety and security."
15.
And
if a child responds to The Lion King on some level that is deeper and more
intense than a pow-pow Saturday morning cartoon, that is because the people who
made this movie are trying for something more complex here, and children know
it.
16.
What
there is in The Lion King, along with sometimes breathtaking animation and
well-cast voices, is an interesting mix of Hamlet, Bambi and The Jungle Book,
all shot through with some contemporary sensibility about men who can't grow
up.
17.
Yes,
the father dies. And there is a stampede, which is some kind of heroic triumph
of animation. But the stampede is not so much scary as it is inexorable, an
animal-world event, even if it is provoked by the evil uncle and his hyena
henchmen.
18.
Yes,
the cub is tortured by guilt, thinking that he started the wildebeests running
and is therefore responsible for his father's death. But even small children
will have no trouble identifying whose fault it really is; Jeremy Irons gives
the evil uncle, Scar, a personality worthy of the long and distinguished line
of Disney cartoon villains. And cartoon villains have always had a certain
license to be evil, just because they are not real people, and children can see
that they are not.
19.
It
all comes down to what is real and what is not-real, which can admittedly be a
complex question for children. A few months ago my 4-year-old daughter,
Josephine, was going to her first opera. Her opera-loving but perhaps
overambitious father prepared her as carefully as possible, playing his
favorite recording of La Traviata, a little each day, explaining the story,
showing her a photograph of Maria Callas, and teaching Josephine to listen for
her voice of voices.
20.
Toward
the end of the week, I came into the living room to find Josephine sobbing
hysterically on the couch, with the music blaring and her father looking
flummoxed.
21.
Why
was she crying? "Because Maria Callas is dying!" she wailed. And it
was hard to know exactly how to comfort her; when her father told her that no,
Callas was just playing the part of a woman who was dying, Josephine promptly
asked, "So Maria Callas did not die?" Then, of course, he had to
explain that as a matter of fact she was dead - and Josephine was in tears
again.
22.
She
was eventually comforted, and went on to enjoy the opera tremendously, probably
because Maria Callas did not die in our local production.
23.
Are
there some children, maybe children under 4, who could be too upset by this
movie? Probably.
24.
Will
I take Josephine, my own 4-year-old? Certainly, and I would have taken her a
year ago. The bad guys get it most satisfactorily in the end, and none of the sweet,
cute, funny little fellows get hurt - the bird Zazu is actually endowed with
cartoon invulnerability and can emerge unscathed from a lion's mouth or a
boiling pot.
25.
Children
may be made sad by the film, as their parents certainly will be, and they may
find the villains scary, but they will also be interested and amused and
involved, and that, after all, is the point of art.
26.
Some
children may make it through the death of Mufasa, and then fall apart at the
final apocalyptic battle between lions and hyenas, which goes on a little too
long for the just-keep-your-eyes-closed crowd (the ones who were traumatized by
the wolves in Beauty and the Beast).
27.
If
you do have a child who identifies too completely with Bambi or Simba, you can
practice some reassurances, just to see how they feel. Then decide which you
would be more comfortable saying: "Darling, I promise, there are no bad
men with guns," or "Darling, I promise, there won't be a wildebeest
stampede."
Perri Klass is a pediatrician in
Boston. Her most recent book is Baby Doctor.
