To Be and To Have

One of the differences between children and adults is the attitude about inquiry. Not understanding something or not knowing about something is inherent to childhood. Curiosity and wonder are the catalysts to deeper learning. To Be and To Have documents a small classroom in France over the course of a school year.

To Be and To Have is composed of long, candid takes that embody what is good and what is different and what difficult about children and their processes of learning and growing. The film resists edits because it is so interested in the development at hand. Learning demands time, repetition, and making mistakes. Early education teaches the fundamentals – letters and writing, numbers and counting, discipline and manners and how to properly wash one’s hands. There is a beautiful balance between indoors and outdoors in To Be and To Have, reinforcing the idea that all experience is educational, and all education is related and important. In Mr. Lopez’s classroom, shared learning experiences are constant. It is all very organic. Children interrupt, tease, and fight, but mostly they teach and help each other. Mr. Lopez is exemplary. He is invested in each of his students’ social and emotional and physical and psychological wellbeing. He has empathy for these little people, and tries to get them to have empathy for each other. Perhaps most significantly of all, Mr. Lopez asks more questions than he gives answers to. If pieces of children’s media followed his pedagogy of respect and patience and eye-level, they would better cultivate a comfortable and useful platform for encouraging every kind of inquiry.

Inquiry refers to more than educational material. It is a level of involvement with a child’s mind that can open doors to more learning. There is so much to learn. The pieces about crayons, cathedrals, and seahorses we experienced utilize depth, focus, and specificity, while The Power of Ten is about expansion. Both sides of the spectrum (what fits in this, and where does this fit in) are crucial.

Discovery in tandem is a beautiful and productive way to encourage the best kind of learning. Every piece we looked at needed the full involvement and interest of the adult creating the piece. And every piece we looked at taught me something as I read or watched or walked around it. Perhaps newness is the thing that most impacts a child’s intellectual experience in compared to an adult’s. But the best children’s inquiry media resists adult tendencies of condescension, quickness, efficiency, and complete answers in favor of lingering, meandering, and asking questions.

Jungle Book

            Many morality tales created for children function as didactic myths, explicitly delineating right from wrong. The Jungle Book is more suggestive and conflicted. There is a multiplicity to morality and a range of approaches to life. In fact, The Jungle Book can be looked at as a loose approximation of the story of the Garden of Eden. Since the morals of that scriptural account are contradictory and complex, the morals of this film are too.

            Mowgli is a man-cub – a feral child, raised by wolves in the jungle. His portrayal is that of an amiable, though insolent, child, perfectly content to be quite nearly unaware of his humanness. Mowgli could represent an innocent first man, neither fully good nor fully bad, and incapable of being either. But he is not without guidance. Here’s where enters an interesting conflict in this film. According to The Jungle Book, both childhood and animalness are associated with a lack of morality and a lack of progression. The binaries of childhood and animalness are adulthood and humanness. Mowgli cannot be wild and innocent, moral and irresponsible, a child and an animal. The film suggests that these things are mutually exclusive.

            Mowgli has yet to develop a strong sense of morality; and so he is guided and misguided by adults. The “adults” in Mowgli’s life are the animals he interacts with. These characters show a range of morality.

            Bagheera is serious and driven, the most “human”-like character in the film because of his impulses as a guardian to Mowgli – he has an understanding of development and species distinction, and he feels responsible to bring Mowgli to the man-village where he belongs. Baloo the bear is carefree and lovely, but ultimately stagnant, unreliable, and counterproductive to Mowgli’s character progression even though Mowgli loves him best. The elephants are militant in their discipline and routine. Kaa lulls, and tries to deceive and harm by lulling. The apes are particularly threatening because of their closeness to humanness. They long to be powerful like man but their nature disallows it. As such, their way of living ends in chaos and destruction.

            Shere Khan is portrayed as the ultimate villain of the narrative. He is intelligent and deliberate and cunning. He stalks Mowgli until he confronts him, eager to kill any and every man who might overthrow him with their inherent intelligence and constructed weapons. This puts another narrative emphasis on the significance of humanness. In The Jungle Book, humanness is not only morality – humanness represents potential and accountability.

Ultimately, though, these adult figures are all wild animals. Their views of morality, according to the film, cannot be completely whole because they are still animals in the jungle. Mowgli, since he is a human, has that capacity, but he must be in the right environment in order to progress.

            At the end of the film, after tangential adventures and resistance of his nature, Mowgli stumbles upon the girl at the river. Left to his own agency, “growing up” would have never even occurred to Mowgli. He was content with his wanderings and rebellion. The distinction between childhood and adulthood appears to be a construct, until natural impulses eventually make Mowgli’s turn towards civilization inevitable. The man-village is where he can be happier and more fulfilled. And now that Mowgli has left the Garden, there will not be any turning back. Except for in the sequel.

Son of Rambow

            This semester we will be working towards defining what Children’s Media really is, and what the implications of this category/genre/subgenre are. Is Children’s Media about childhood? Is it for children? Is it media consumed by children? Where do these ideas begin and end? It’s a nuanced thing. Maybe we over associate “childhood” with sweetness and simplicity and goodness. There certainly comes a time during childhood or right at the matrix of adolescence where danger and freedom simultaneously present themselves. Son of Rambow is a 1980s nostalgia piece based on the director’s childhood experiences with the first available digital cameras. The protagonist Will Proudfoot leaves a stagnant stage of childhood when, for the first time, he leaves home. The immediate result of this graduation is a violent catharsis, and from then on he is always joyfully living on the edge of trouble and reprimand, the flip side of unregulated creative outpouring. Will remains a dear child, naïve and very good, but he flirts with disloyalty and disillusionment and disobedience as he and the school bully Lee work tirelessly on making a movie together.

            This film is about the influence of film on children. Will was ready for this dramatic paradigm shift. He needed the feverish obsession with bombast and spectacle in order to define what he believed and aspired to, in contrast with what he had been told to do and think in his puritanical home. He needed a creative project to make connections with other children for the first time. This was how he made an identity. According to Son of Rambow, the media children take part in does not destroy them. It invigorates them. In terms of the character Will’s experience, it is a crucial outlet that he was not aware he needed, thrust upon him by a mean boy who eventually becomes his best friend.

            Son of Rambow is rated PG-13 for some violence and reckless behavior. My childhood experience was completely void of these characteristics. I want to believe that boys and girls are essentially similar, that any sweeping or stereotypical differences are due to millennia of cultural conditioning, whether subtle or overt. But perhaps physiology, psychology, chemistry, spirituality, and personality all ought to be considered. I suppose whether it is nature or nurture, some things have been so closely and incessantly intertwined and associated that maybe there is something there. It is interesting what kinds of media tend to be geared towards the male experience, especially when crassness and slapstick are involved.

            However, to immediately contradict myself against an essentialist argument, the Swedish film We Are the Best! is coarser than Son of Rambow in a way that sometimes feels more honest. We Are the Best! is also a 1980s period piece, and also a piece about a group of twelve-year-olds (girls, in this film) acting as a creative group who are striving to make a movement (they are in a punk band). But the film is serious enough and includes enough pain and sorrow that while it might be a more accurate film about childhood, it would be difficult for a twelve-year-old to want to watch.
             So, remarkably, in terms of the conversation we are having this semester, Son of Rambow covers all its bases – it is a nostalgic period piece based on the director’s own childhood experience. It talks about childhood, and several aspects and stages of childhood. It embodies the influence of media on children, and makes a connection between what is consumed and what is created. And it appeals to children with its young characters, its saturated hues and Looney Tunes antics. I hope any child who watched Son of Rambow felt inspired to create things. I know I did. I hope any adult who watched it were able to remember what it is like to be little. I did.