Roy Edroso catches a conservative blogger over-reacting to that wildly subversive, almost Almodovarianally transgressive bit of filmmaking, Mulan II.
The blogger didn't like it, mainly because she objected to its theme, which she sees as being that a child's inclination to follow her own heart should trump any demands to do what grown-ups regard as her duty.
I just watched Mulan II (I have two young girls), and -- I kid you not -- "my duty is to my heart" appears to be the explicit message of the film (as it was in the Princess Diaries II). In the immortal words of Ryan O'Neal at the end of What's Up, Doc? -- that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. If you want a succinct and hilarious refutation of the idiotic notion that one's duty is to one's heart, watch the "Be Like the Boy" episode of The Simpsons.
Nothing I'd argue with here. But she's not done.
Duty is a category which is by definition separate from "heart." It represents all those things -- family, tradition, state, law -- which have a claim on us that transcends personal affection and selfish desire. For goodness' sake, what does our generation make of Antigone?
Antigone?
Antigone. And as if Sophocles isn't heavy duty enough, she then drags in Edith Wharton and The Age of Innocence. To which Edroso responds, essentially, Lady, it's only a movie!
"This woman is actually subjecting her afternoon child-quieting videos to strict moral-aesthetic analysis." Not that there's anything wrong with that. "It can be useful to examine the moral underpinnings of a work of art," Roy allows. But, come on! "This is fucking Mulan II!"
The blogger, Kate Marie of What's the Rumpus?, says she got into blogging because she was:
Fascinated by the blogging phenomenon and [I] think the blogosphere has provided a sorely needed counterweight to the entrenched biases, journalistic laziness, and eminently unwarranted arrogance of traditional media.
Or, in English, she's another right wing dittohead who wants to whine about how the rest of the world should think just exactly as she's been told to think by her favorite wingnut blowhards.
So I can understand Roy's exasperation and his urge to usher her out the door as quickly as possible, as if he's the pastor and she's one of the parish shrews and tattle tales who's burst into his office to complain that the other ladies in the Altar Society aren't using enough Lemon Pledge when they polish the pews.
There has been a contingent of scolds doing this sort of thing for over a decade. One of its early practitioners, Melanie Kirkpatrick, plagued the Wall Street Journal in the 90s with similar kernel-picking exercises. Here's one of her classics, in which she faults Paul Rudnick's AIDS comedy Jeffrey for not being more about duty and honor. She thought the play's model should have been Camille.
This would seem an unusual recommendation to an author of light comedies, but you have to remember that, for a certain type of person, even pop art is not at all about pleasure -- it is about morality, or rather, that modern, debased version of morality called Values.
What horrible lives such people must lead, seeing dark messages everywhere -- in children's entertainments, in TV shows, in popular songs. Sounds like paranoid schizophrenia without the relief of upswings.
Bye bye and buy bonds, Kate Marie. Nice job, Roy, except, and I hate to say this, I have to side with the wingnut on this one.
In general, I dislike morals in movies and books, and that "Follow your/Listen to your/Be True to your heart/self/dreams" one really boils my onions, as I've said here before.
First off, following your heart is a really bad idea. This is why we have civilization, so people don't do that.
Hearts are like pirate caves. They are reputedly full of hidden treasures but usually when you open one up a whole lot of bats, spiders, and angry bears come rushing out, and there's no gold.
Second off, to have this message keep popping up again and again and again and again and again and again and again in children's movies and TV shows is very frustrating to parents because most of what we do all day long from the time the kids start to crawl to the time they graduate from college is pick up the pieces after the little darlings have followed their dreams, listened to their hearts, and been true to themselves.
Good parents talk themselves blue in the face trying to convince their kids not to follow their hearts. Followed hearts generally do not lead children into good grades, good company, decent colleges, and stable marriages.
(Of course, this is, like everything else in life, a yin and yang proposition, and I'll have to deal with the yang in another post.)
And yet this stupid moral, which is damn near amoral if not immoral, is about the only moral Hollywood seems to know.
The people who make movies and shows for kids stick it into everything, as if it was a law that all children's entertainment has to include it. They put it into stories that already have other, better morals, that even have contradictory morals. It's in Jackie Chan's recent embarrassment, Around the World in 80 Days, even though you'd think that the lesson Jules Verne built into it, Be open to adventure, would have been enough and even though that lesson can even be read as a variant of the Follow Your Heart lesson so that putting Follow Your Heart in there on top of it is redundant. And they sneaked it in at the end of A Series of Unfortunate Events, even though throughout Lemony Snicket's books the Baudelaires keep finding themselves in situations in which they have to decide that following their hearts would be the wrong thing to do.
One of the themes of the books is that hearts contain a lot of conflicting things, that along with love and compassion and other noble urges and desires they can hold hate and greed and anger and fear and despair. If he does nothing else, Count Olaf follows his dreams, listens to his heart, and is true to himself.
(Again there's a yin and a yang. Esme Squalor is almost as villainous as Olaf but she never follows her heart---she follows fashion. Hearts, she might say, are not In!)
Those Disney made for video sequels---Pochantas II, Mulan II, Little Mermaid II, Simba's Pride, Return to Neverland---are especially egregious offenders on this score. I don't know why or how this happens, since the originals are mostly free of it. The first Mulan was more about what Kate Marie wishes Mulan II was about, doing one's duty. Yes, Mulan saves the day in the end by being true to herself---that is, she uses her head, a case of following your brains more than following your heart---but the reason she is there to save the day is that she has sacrificed herself to her duty.
You can argue that because she defies tradition in order to go for a soldier she is being true to herself. But defying tradition is almost irrelevent to her decision. She puts on her father's armor in order to save his life. That's following her heart, in a way, but it's not what the makers of Mulan II and their like mean when they preach that gospel. In their version, Mulan would go for a soldier because she wants to be a soldier, soldiering is her dream, soldiering makes her happy and so she should do it and everybody else needs to get out of her way.
In the original, following one's heart is a complicated proposition, it isn't easy to even know what your heart wants you to do, and success and happiness result from a combination of doing your duty and being yourself---but only if you understand that being yourself means using your talents to help others and that often means you have to put aside your dreams, ignore your heart, and sacrifice yourself.
I'm not sure about the sequel, because our kids have shown no desire to see it, thank goodness. One of the other things the Disney video sequels have in common is that they are pretty crumby. The animation is cheaper, the storytelling is more simplistic, and they often can't get the original stars to do the voices. Dan Castellana is wonderful as Homer Simpson, but he makes a very poor substitute for Robin Williams as the genie in Return of Jaffar. I'm betting Mark Moseley doesn't come close to filling Eddie Murphy's shoes as Mushu.
But enough of the sequels and too many other Hollywood products are full of it, so I don't doubt that Kate Marie is right about its message.
"It's just a movie," Roy says. But kids learn about life from the stories they're told, and the stories they're most familiar with are the ones on television and in the movies. So it's good to be careful. Doesn't mean that everything they watch has to be educational and morally uplifting, anymore than everything they eat has to be broccoli and sugar-free.
The trouble is that the makers of these movies don't think "Hey, we're just making a movie here, let's just have fun."
They think, "We need to have a moral." And then everybody in the room pipes up together, "I've got it! How about 'Follow Your Heart?'"
I'd rather there was no moral rather than it always being that moral. I don't want my kids fed a steady diet of intellectual Ho-Hos and Mountain Dew. But it would be nice if the makers of kids' movies would stop serving them the same old spinach.
It's funny, though, that one of the things conservatives liked about The Incredibles back when they were insisting it was a Republican movie was its theme, which they, thought, mistakenly, was Be true to yourself.
And the moral of our story is: Roy Edroso has posted a thoughtful, and righteous, rebuttal, in which he makes clear a point I glided over here. His quarrel is not with parents who don't like Mulan II for whatever reasons. He's standing up to what he sees as a general right wing assault on art, an attempt to reduce it all, from children's videos to Sophocles into neat little lessons fit for inclusion in Fast Billy Bennett's Book of Hypocrisy for Children. As Roy puts it,
Bad art is too bad, but what I really can't abide are the folks who are so freaking obsessed with values that they treat the great works of our civilization as lessons in deportment. It is a miracle that Sophocles call still speak to us across the millennia, but the more these nuts succeed in convincing people that Antigone and Creon are just a more hortatory version of Goofus and Gallant, the further the play's mysteries will recede into obscurity.
And Our Girl in Chicago, who did me the honor of making a quote from my post here one of her Fortune Cookies at About Last Night, swung by Roy's to drop off this comment, reconciling Roy's points and mine fairly neatly, I think:
It seems to me Roy and Lance are deeply in agreement on some level--the Disney folks who make Mulan II the vehicle for a bumper-sticker-worthy sentiment and the critics who set that up against a different bumper sticker are both enemies of art, no? No matter which b.s. you roughly sympathize with.
Also, you should check out J. Bryant's comments to this post. She has some good objections to my point.
To a certain extent, the root cause of this problem is Shakespeare. But let's not blame Shakespeare for it. The root may be Shakespeare, but it's actually everyone's misreading of one particular scene in Hamlet, made even worse by misreading it OUT OF CONTEXT, in which Polonius tells his son, "To thine own self me true." (I can never recite this line without remembering the Gilligan's Island episode in which they did a musical version of Hamlet, and sang, "Do not forget, stay out of debt!") Polonius' advice reads like an aphorism, like a moral from Aesop -- but it's actually intended to be a moral from a sop. Polonius is a fool, and he is advising his foolish son. Shakespeare most likely did not for a minute expect his audience to take this "advice." He most likely knew that, with an Elizabethan sensibility, everyone would understand that in this context, they ought to do exactly the opposite. And, certainly, if they had children, they would never give this advice to them and expect good results.
So, too bad people take their advice from Gilligan instead of the context of Shakespeare's "Hamlet."
By the way, do not forget that Hamlet spends most of the play struggling with following his heart and doing his duty, and wondering even if his duty is just a figment of his dark heart's imagination. No wonder he wants to kill himself but rapes Ophelia instead.
Posted by: mac macgillicuddy | Thursday, February 10, 2005 at 04:40 PM
Could it possibly be that these movies -- the Disney direct-to-video swill you somehow keep buying -- are just cynically churned-out anaesthesia meant to milk egregious profits out of the need for parents to stun and hypnotize their children so they can have five seconds of peace? I mean, you say that kids learn a lot from the stories they're told, and that's absolutely right, but would you be so cavalier with their diet? "OK OK OK, here's something I picked up on impulse at the checkout line at Target. Now eat this and shut up." The imagination can be stunted or nourished just like the body.
The morality vs. art argument can wait, methinks. Get your kids some better stories. And if they scream and cry about what they want -- well, it's a perfect time to put your heart theory into action, right?
Posted by: sjc | Thursday, February 10, 2005 at 04:55 PM
Well, that's not being very nice!
Posted by: mac macgillicuddy | Thursday, February 10, 2005 at 05:47 PM
Christopher Hitchens wrote a funny column about the Woody Allen Business that said (paraphrasing), "Take any popular saying/proverb/whatever containing the word 'heart,' substitute 'dick' and you'll have a much truer statement."
The Dick is a Lonely Hunter
I Lost My Dick in San Francisco
And, of course, Woody's famous justification: "The (dick) wants what it wants."
Posted by: Nance | Thursday, February 10, 2005 at 07:19 PM
a plague on all their houses. Who exactly lets their kids watch this stuff? Why not just purchase large quantities of soporific drugs and be done. I believe that you sir(lance the m) just recently ranted against watching videos in the car. If people are learning their life lessons from disney fantasies, this explains the last election. Although, your blog is still excellent (what's a little hypocrisy among friends).
Posted by: lance | Friday, February 11, 2005 at 12:26 AM
OK - so many disagreements with you -- but let's start with this: I think you describe Mulan saying she does the right thing by going against the norm ("duty" apparently being to follow the norm) by saying in this case she is trying to save her father's life. So you say she is kind of following her heart but not the way they mean it in Mulan II (although you haven't seen it but you're saying you've seen its ilk). I haven't seen it either so I don't know if it's good or bad but...Doesn't Mulan I's father starts out trying to explain what his duty is and he follows it but - it is not at odds with his heart (full of bats, spiders, etc.) I think the parental job is to help shape the immature heart so duty is part of it....and their heart has to tell them what real duty is....is it to society's petty mores (should we bring in Age of Innocence?), is it to the real Christianity (I'm not talking the cherry-picking Bush type), is it to - I don't know - the Hitler Youth (how do you overcome that kind of teaching at a very young age) - would women have ever gotten the vote if they followed duty because I do believe I know what their "duty" was considered at the time. Luckily there is a strong backlash against feminazis and maybe we can have women back doing their duty - perhaps getting those good marriages their parents help them with to the guy with the most money, their good careers as their husbands often (to this day) want them to have as housewives....Okay - I'm going way off now - I'll just say I disagree that duty and heart are mutually exclusive.
But --- first comment --- Ophelia raped by Hamlet? I know the Polonius blowhardicus speech - I don't know if what he says is of no value but I believe the point is he just likes to hear himself speak and the topics are extremely lofty or they've heard him too many times - whatever. But Ophelia raped by Hamlet...I'm curious about that one.
Posted by: j. bryant | Friday, February 11, 2005 at 12:25 PM
Seriously, Lance, how do you do this reasonable thing? I start to froth at the mouth as soon as I open Blogger. Is it a Typepad feature?
Posted by: roy edroso | Friday, February 11, 2005 at 04:14 PM
i'm gonna side with roy on this one.
the trouble with the art that the wingnuts want is that it's boring and makes a point by hitting you over the head with it -- much like the socialist realism school of communism art.
and there are many, many parallels between the wingnut and commie outlook.
in contrast, i remember seeing tootsie back in 1982 and finally realized that i should start treating women with more respect. i got that point from it, altho' it wasn't that blatant. you could always laff at dustin hoffman in drag.
a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, in a most delightful way.
Posted by: harry near indy | Friday, February 11, 2005 at 04:20 PM
Roy,
You should switch from Blogger. Whenever you open up Typepad's compose a new post page images of pixies and baby animals dance across the screen, mpegs of beautiful women strolling through flowery meadows automatically download, and the sounds of babbling brooks and chirping birds come through your speakers. It's very calming.
Actually, I think the difference is the difference between the guys on the front line and the guys in the rear echelons. You spend a lot of time crossing over into enemy territory, regularly reading the likes of Kate Marie, the ole perfessor, Lileks, and Simon, while I sit back here and play cards with the generals' wives, have my uniforms altered by Saville Row tailors, and wait to read the reports you send back. "Dear me," I say as I look over one of your singed and bullet torn dispathes, "It appears Edroso's having it a bit rough up there at the front again, brave fellow."
Posted by: Lance | Friday, February 11, 2005 at 05:46 PM
I think many of you are misinterpreting my use of Antigone and The Age of Innnocence to suit your notions, perhaps pre-conceived, of my "right-wing wingnut" ideas. I would never suggest that great works of art like Antigone and The Age of Innocence can be reduced to "bumper sticker morality." My intent was to point out how great works of art take the conflicts they present seriously -- that they don't provide us with bumper sticker notions of concepts like duty and tradition, even when they can be plausibly interpreted as favoring the "other side" (which is arguably the case in The Age of Innocence). My objection was to the stupidity of the endlessly repeated "follow your heart" mantra. Children's or "family" entertainment needn't be vapid and artless. Is that a right wing notion?
Posted by: Kate Marie | Friday, February 11, 2005 at 05:57 PM
"the trouble with the art that the wingnuts want is that it's boring and makes a point by hitting you over the head with it -- much like the socialist realism school of communism art"
-- But Mulan II is precisely the kind of art (I use the term loosely) that is boring and hits you over the head with its message.
Where in my post do I advocate such a view of art?
Posted by: Kate Marie | Friday, February 11, 2005 at 06:03 PM
"Followed hearts generally do not lead children into good grades, good company, decent colleges, and stable marriages."
What makes you think this?
Posted by: Aaron Swartz | Friday, February 11, 2005 at 06:22 PM
Hello, everyone.
Longtime reader...
Lance, as an antidote to what's making you sad, may I recommend the amazing work of Hayao Miyazaki, in particular Spirited Away, Kiki's Delivery Service, and My Neighbor Totoro. Themes of duty to family, responsiblity, kindness, mercy, compassion, tolerance (that is, actual tolerance, not the political variety), and respect blend to form a delicious broth.
Plus, no shock of realizing that Disney's Captain John Smith was modeled after Hugh Grant!
Everybody wins.
Posted by: Jason Miller | Saturday, February 12, 2005 at 07:10 PM
Dang, I was about to post something about Miyazaki and I see the very last post before me did so. But I will anyway. Miyazaki's heroines usually find their way into the world by finding a job, sticking to it and performing it well, thus demonstrating a growth in maturity. A weirdly conformist ambition for a cartoon heroine, you might say, but it's amazing how satisfying it is in his hands. (Good profile of him in the New Yorker 3-4 weeks back, by the way.)
I agree that some of this is reading way too much into a Disney movie. Which as a genre usually achieve the blissful incoherence of Beauty and the Beast, in which a girl's reward for not being taken in by appearances and status is... a handsome prince. But Miyazaki proves it can be capable of more.
Posted by: Mike G | Sunday, February 13, 2005 at 10:48 PM
Jason and Mike G, Good recommendations. We've seen and enjoyed Spirited Away and Kiki. Will have to check out My neighbor Totoro.
Disney can't be blamed for the ending of Beauty and the Beast. That's in the original fairy tale. Plus I think we're supposed to see the Prince's handsomeness as metaphorical.
Posted by: Lance | Monday, February 14, 2005 at 02:43 PM
Ah, yes, Totoro. See it, Lance, and never again look at an ordinary bus without disappointment.
Posted by: Jason Miller | Monday, February 14, 2005 at 05:39 PM