Probably half the time I watch “Frozen” with M (we’ve probably watched it 20 times) I cry. When I’m driving and she’s holding my smartphone and watching it in the back seat and Elsa sings “Let It Go.” While I’m trying to take a nap on our frumpled bed and she’s sitting cross legged watching Hans betray Anna next to me. While I’m attempting to explain to her why Elsa needs to hide in her room in the palace so she doesn’t hurt Anna with her ice powers. It’s gotten to the point where we’ll be watching, M transfixed, and then she’ll look over and peer into my eyes to check on me, to see if tears are coming out. I'm a particularly emotional father; I always tell her that it's natural, when I'm crying.
Meanwhile, M is riding the dramatic waves in her own way. Exerting every ounce of cerebral muscle to square the narrative fragments she’s managed to grasp with a cloudy two and a half year old’s understanding of the overall plot. Weathering the turmoil of an angry Elsa attacking her sister Anna, the bleak loneliness of Elsa’s ice palace, the beyond understanding moment when the sisters lose their parents at sea. Her face bends, grimaces, and vegetates with the plot turns, the contrapuntal musical numbers, the expressions of the characters, the too-much-to-bear sad parts.
Frozen isn't an outlier for me. In my past year watching kids’ movies with M, I’ve cried at, I think, every movie we’ve watched. There’s a space for deeply felt, straightforward stories of love, hard won growth, and redemption in kids’ films that high culture, and Hollywood schlock, elides, with their focus on cleverness and spectacle. And there’s M's face, an intricate, unfiltered register of these stories’ affective cores; I’m so bonded to her newness to it all that she sharpens and deepens all of my own feelings. The set piece drama of the action scenes notwithstanding, these films are odes to what she and I have in common as human beings. It couldn't be any other way, with their underlying business model cashing in on with a resonance with intergenerational audiences from Vietnam to Latvia to Los Angeles. Also, I think young children are engaged in such powerful moment to moment waves of fear, sadness, joy and longing, that they can’t suffer anything less than straightforward emotional honesty.
In “Up,” the film we watched a hundred times over before getting into “Frozen,” a man who’s lost his wife drags his conjugal house, held aloft by balloons, through a magical realm in which he’s forced to defeat a now-deranged childhood hero, all while accompanied by an innocent boy who promises new love. M asks to watch the part where the villain, an ultra-masculine big game hunter, tries to burn the protagonist’s house down, over and over. She’s doing the work of coming to grips with it, asking, plaintively, why the man is mean. Sometimes I rub her back or hold her hand. Then, when our hero is ready to let his house go in the third act, it drifts off into the clouds, and M seems to work to understand a little bit about life transition as a death and a birth. “Where’s his house going?” she asks every time, sad, only partly relieved when I tell her it's for the best, M still wondering if he’ll be ok.
In “Monsters, Inc.,” which we watched before “Up,” a huggable but formidable sasquatch, voice-acted by John Goodman, comes to integrate his physical power and split-off caretaker energy into a newly mature whole, through an unlikely parental bond with a lost child. M is drawn in by the tension between the way he's both “scary” and “nice,” their need to say goodbye at the end, and their subsequent reunion. “Moana”, the first film we watched around the time she turned two, is about a Polynesian child breaking from her proscribed role as princess, voyaging into a world of fantasy and darkness in an act of righteous rebellion, and returning with new maturity. For us, I think, these films are secular churches, with the moral leakage that comes from organized religion transposed onto their status as corporate cash machines, but only viable, like institutional religion, because of their status as powerful rituals of emotional growth.
“Frozen” is special somehow. I'm feeling its power now, underneath the embarrassment that my politically radical self feels at loving a very white, conventionally gendered Disney movie. In the film, two princess sisters, Elsa and Anna, seem to form a split psychic unit. Elsa has a superpower: she can freeze things, make snow with her fingertips, shoot ice-rays, create imaginary snow creatures, conjure up frozen statues. Her parents lock her away, cover her magic hands with sterilizing gloves, and close the palace gates permanently to hide Elsa’s dangerous gift. They teach her not to feel, because feeling anything intensely brings out her powers.
Eventually Elsa retreats into the mountains, creates an ice palace, and abides there, liberated in isolation. In contrast with Elsa, Anna is an ordinary, sweet child who longs for connection with her sister, almost dying twice after her approaches to Elsa lead to accidental discharges of Elsa’s ice rays. Anna wilts in loneliness. The world freezes over, and then thaws, at the end, when the sisters embrace. Reunited, the sisters open the palace gates, and Elsa uses her powers to create a magical winter festival.
It all has the quality of a dream that Freud or Jung would have found particularly engaging. But I’m trying to get to why I find it so deeply affecting for me personally, and I know it has to do with something along these lines: a gift or talent that I weaponize to keep others away. Or, the way I disown and hate the best of myself. Something to do with how for years at a party, or a dinner, I hid behind intelligence as a way to prove to others that I was smarter than them, shamed myself for it, and then felt lonely. How as a child, amid family dysfunction, I played showy piano pieces as loud as possible, so my parents could hear, while my brother sat in the same room waiting for me to play video games with him, me knowing I was making a story where he was bad and I was good, knowing how bad that made me, and how lonely it made both of us. Knowing the praise I got for my playing was innocent to this whole drama, and knowing that I’d created this toxicity.
I will also say that the symbolic catharsis of “Frozen” is at work now, too, in writing this text, which I know is articulate, but which is also, actually, vulnerable and heartfelt. That’s new for me. And I think it’s new for me because of M. And before that, because of K, and G, and S, and F, who have helped me immeasurably in turning gifts I treated as swords and shields into mediums by which I may be able to offer something up to my community. There’s something so powerful, I’m realizing as a father, about attending to the mind and heart of a new soul, and in so doing, attending to my own tender places, my own potential for contribution to community, and my place in our collective fairytales. In this way and so many others, the need to do right by M while she reconciles herself to the world, tiptoes towards understanding loss, tragedy and redemption, is helping me to grow up.
No comments:
Post a Comment