Stories and Bettelheim, Cont.

In my last post, I argued that pre-adolescent children need stories that speak directly to their distinctive emotional needs and crises, and not just to those of teenagers and adults.  This should be a relatively obvious point, yet it is often overlooked by media companies beholden to the marketing ploy of “family entertainment” (where the visuals are all for the young children, and the story, characters, dialogue, and humor are all for the benefit of adults and older siblings).  In doing so, these companies are engaging in a behavior that Bettelheim thinks will mar any good kids story, and which children themselves recognize immediately as duplicitous: that of “winking at the adults over the heads of the children.” (p. 168).   

Frozen (2013): A Bettelheimian Analysis

The fact of me seeing and enjoying a contemporary movie is such a rare occurrence that I decided it should be commemorated in a blog post, so I’m reviewing Disney’s Frozen (2013)-- even if it means I’ll have to repair my credentials as a highbrow in the weeks that follow.  More seriously, I've found myself ruminating about this movie to an unusual degree, which suggests to me two things: 1) that it is a quality film-- reasonably thoughtful and well-scripted; and 2) that it is probably a rather poor film for young children, who face very different crises of identity and consciousness than we do and often ruminate on very different subjects. 

A Review of E.P. Thompson's Witness Against the Beast (1993)

There are never enough authors around who seem worth reading.  To examine a book by one of these happy few, E.P. Thompson, written as a treatise about another of their number, William Blake, is therefore such a delicious prospect that it seemed almost immoral.  I'm the kind of person who, if there are both green vegetables and macaroni and cheese on his plate, will eat the resented flora first, just to get it over with, and realize too late that he filled up on it before getting to the good stuff.  I am the same way with reading matter, in most cases.  As soon as I realized, however, that the first two-thirds of Thompson's book was entirely going to be taken up with an exposition of the theology of an obscure heretical sect in Britain called the Muggletonians, my Protestant conscience relaxed and let me read on.  This was starting to seem more like work.

Another Iron Law

Enunciating a universal principle of ideology:  "There's always a bigger fish."

The canonical textual citation of the principle comes from Star Wars Episode I and is spoken by Qui-Gon Jinn, whose craft is saved from a "Goo-ba fish" (or something-- the name is extruded from the lips of Jar Jar Binks and is therefore difficult to make out) by an even bigger monster.

In the context of ideological warfare, however, it refers to the universally valid proposition that no matter how stupid and pernicious an idea may be, there will always emerge some even more stupid and pernicious idea that will make it seem comparatively benign.  Like in the movie, these two will feed on each other.  Unlike in the movie, however, they will not cancel each other out.

Self-Consciousness and the Victorians

Historians should have their credentials revoked if they ever quote with approval something a modern-day politician has said about the past.  Politicians are in the business of presenting their ideas and policies as at once entirely new, which they never are, and immeasurably ancient, when in fact, very little in our culture is ever as old as we think it is.  They therefore should be the last people we trust as unbiased informants about times gone by.