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.