The Bridge to Terabithia is down

The recently turned eleven year old got some bad news this morning.

We had to tell him his favorite restaurant had closed.

He was devastated.  His face turned red, his eyes filled with tears, and after trying hard to sniffle back his sobs, he left the breakfast table and buried his grief in front of the computer, pretending to play Knights of the Old Republic but letting things happen on the screen without his attention or control.

It was sweet, it was cute, it was all I could do not to laugh.

But it really wasn't funny, not when I reminded myself that his favorite restaurant is---was---back in Syracuse, where he was born and spent the first seven and a half years of his life, and where our house is still waiting for him to come home.

What had closed for him was not a chain restaurant in a mall that happened to serve a kind of bread with an herbed butter he thought was the most delicious treat going.  What had closed was one more door to his last safe place.

It was as if we had told him that we had taken the wardrobe out back and chopped it up into kindling.

Now how is he supposed to get back to Narnia?

I still don't know what it is about Syracuse that enchants him.  And it's not as though he's unhappy here.  In many ways his life is fuller, more interesting, more exciting.  He has friends in the neighborhood, something he never had back in Syracuse.  He is involved in clubs and sports.  He's doing very well in school and his teacher is his favorite teacher ever and she adores him back.

The first year we were here he kept a running list of reasons why we shouldn't have moved.  I thought he'd get over it eventually, but the list still exists and he still adds to it.

I've asked him about it, if there's something about here or our life here that makes him unhappy.  He says no, here's ok.  It's just that things were better back in Syracuse.  He doesn't say better back home, but he might as well.

But I think I know what it is.  Here is real.  Syracuse is Narnia, and Never-land, and Treasure Island, and Sherwood Forest, and Tarzan's jungle, and Terabithia.  It is not here, not now, not this.

It is the last safe place.  He's a kid and being a kid means not feeling safe.  That's why children are so happy when they are made to feel safe.  It's a rare feeling.

Being a kid means feeling afraid, feeling sad, feeling lost and confused, feeling let down, feeling alone, feeling bad for reasons you can't name for yourself.

Being a kid is about losing something every day.  I don't mean innocence, although that word is often used glibly as an umbrella word for all that is lost.  And all that is lost is usually lost by being taken away.

Life takes it, as inexorably and as impersonally and randomly, as a wildfire takes away a forest or a storm surge takes away a beach.

People around you, your parents, your friends, your teachers, anyone and everyone you love and trust, take it, sometimes deliberately and meanly, most often carelessly and thoughtlessly, sometimes for your own good, and too many times for their own good.

Whatever is taken amounts to this:  the sense that you are loved and cared for and protected and safe, the belief that you are special and that the world knows you are special and cares that you're alive, the hope that's clung to so hard that it feels like certain knowledge that things will work out in the end, that it will be ok, that we will all be all right.

Anyone who tells me they had a happy childhood is telling me either that they don't remember their childhood very well, that they are realistic and grown up about it and recognize that happiness is a relative thing and they are speaking in shorthand, that they are very unhappy adults, or that they were among the luckiest people on the face of the planet.

New Yorker writer and editor Adam Gopnik has published a very prettily written book about his own children's childhood which appears to him to be next to idyllic.  The book's called Through the Children's Gate.

James Wolcott destroyed it in a review in the New Republic.

Gopnik writes about childhood from the outside looking in, which is fine.  Few writers have been able to see the world as it truly appears through a child's eyes, Dickens being one of the best of the few.  But Gopnik doesn't seem to regard his inability to penetrate the world of children as a problem or the given or even as the sad point---he doesn't cast himself in the position of the grown-up Wendy watching Peter flying off with her daughter back to the Never-land she can never revisit.

Gopnik doesn't even appear to think that childhood exists, that is, he doesn't see it as being about children.  Childhood is an object lesson for adults looking to recapture those lost clouds of glory we trailed with us down to earth as we came.  Gopnik treats his own kids as characters in his personal therapeutic fairy tale, spirit guides taking him back to a Never-land that was never home to pirates and crocodiles, Narnia after the defeat of the White Queen, Terabithia not as an imaginary place of escape but a real world where imagination can run riot to everybody's eternal delight.

Wolcott finds this approach cloying and annoying on the face of it.  But what infuriates him is that Gopnik writes as if his kids' privileged, pampered, nearly perfectly protected life in the best neighborhoods in Manhattan is the epitome of childhood everywhere, as if the fact of life for the vast majority of children in the world isn't a constant worry about whether or not they will make it through day alive and then, after that, if they will get a decent meal somewhere along the way.

It's bad enough that Gopnik writes as if he's never heard of Iraq or Darfur.  He's not even aware that in his own city countless children live under daily physical threat and go to bed hungry and scared and entirely alone even if they have loving parents because those parents are out working or off somewhere dealing with their own worries and fears.

But even for the lucky children, those who have decent places to live and good schools to go to, who don't have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, who wear nice clothes---clothes without holes in them, anyway---and shoes that keep their feet dry, and who live among adults who have the wherewithall to take good care of them, childhood is far from the idyll that Gopnik seems to think it is.

We don't want it to be this way, and we regularly pretend that it's not, but childhood is a time of fear and pain and continual disappointment.  It's very much like adult life because it is life. The difference for children is that they don't have the experience and the language to explain it to themselves and to help them figure it out, they don't have the physical strength to protect themselves or defend themselves, they don't have anything much to count on except the adults around them, and far too often those very adults are the sources of the pain and the fear and the disappointments.

When they're not, then again far too often, they don't have the time or the patience or the strength or the wisdom themselves to help.  And those rare adults who do, who are always at their best, who are ready when needed, often fail just by missing the point.

And then there is always that dark master lurking out there, a shadowy evil moving through the trees, springing out without notice and against whom there is no protection.

Death breaks through the defenses of even the most protected and privileged childhoods.

And this is childhood as shown in the movie Bridge to Terabithia.

Childhood is a time of disappointment, dashed hopes, and failure, of dreams that stand no chance of coming true, at least not soon enough to help.  It's a time of bullies and teasings and misunderstandings and broken friendships.  It's a time of incredible loneliness because even the kids who are your friends, or who are your own siblings, don't understand and can't be made to see that what's important to you is important.

The two main characters, Jess Aaronson and Leslie Burke, live in a world where other children are mean, sometimes intentionally, often just through carelessness, where the adults around them are not necessarily wise or fair or helpful or competent or even interested in their existence, where they themselves are always coming up short not just of their parents' expectations but in their own too critical estimation of themselves.  They are in the fifth grade, old enough and smart enough to be aware that their parents have lives of their own and that those lives are full of troubles and worries that might very well overwhelm them and their whole families.

They are lonely and isolated within their own families.  Jess's mother and father are burdened by money troubles that force them to be constantly focused on getting through the moment.  They don't have the time or the patience or the energy to deal with an imaginative and talented son, a budding artist, who from their point of view lives too much inside his own head and in the future where his talents and ambitions stand the best chance of being recognized and put to use.

But he is temperamentally a solo act, too, preferring to be alone and to be left alone.  He has a little sister who adores him but he has no time for her, and no interest, and no sense that he is hurting her feelings every day and driving away the one person in the family who is most like him and who best understands him.

Leslie Burke has doting, indulgent, super-nice parents who nevertheless have failed her by making her the subject of a well-intentioned, idiosyncratic experiment in raising a wonder child and by having lives and careers of their own that they have to tend to, leaving her too much on her own.  They have made her too eccentric to get along with other children and then put her in the position of having no one to depend on for company but other children.

Jess and Leslie are a couple of sad misfits who are lucky enough to have outsized imaginations and each other.  Together they create a magic world into which they can escape and where they find, even when confronting monsters and demons, a sense of safety and belonging that isn't there for them in their real lives.  Terabithia is their kingdom, which is to say, it is their home.

Terabithia is modeled after Narnia.  In Katherine Paterson's novel, Narnia is constantly invoked.  Jess and Leslie know it and know the Chronicles inside and out.  But Terabithia isn't a Narnia.  Narnia is real, at least for Lucy and her brothers and sister.  Terabithia is always a fantasy that Jess and Leslie have trouble maintaining.

The real world is too much with them.

I think a lot of kids who haven't read the book and who go to the movie because they've seen the commercials are going to be shocked by this.  Actually, I know at least one eleven year old who was.  He was expecting a movie like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

He wasn't expecting to see a movie that was like life.  And he wasn't expecting anybody to die.

Sometime I should do a post about how movies have always been about the denial of death.

Basically, in movies, especially in kids' movies, people do not die.  They have death scenes, but death is usually transcended somehow, either by the characters facing their ends with such heroism and nobility that death seems a small price to pay for such a beautiful moment of personal glory, or by the surviving characters managing to avenge their deaths or learn from them or be saved by them, or by the characters thought to be dead, whose deaths we witnessed and mourned, turning up at the end very much alive.

In Bridge to Terabithia, an important character just dies.

No heroism in it, no transcendence, no lessons learned, no magic return to life.

Death comes just the way it comes in real life, just the way children are afraid it will come, suddenly, arbitrarily, unfairly, and finally.

One minute the character is there.  The next minute that character is gone.

The characters who survive try to comfort each other, they try to find meaning, they try to transcend and deny it.

They don't.

There's no solace.

There is only surviving.  There is only going on.  We're left with what we're left with and we have to make do with that.

We took the eleven year old and some of his friends to the movie yesterday and he's been worrying over it ever since.

He keeps asking us which we liked better, Bridge to Terabithia or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

It bothers him that I keep answering Terabithia.

He insists he likes the movie he calls Narnia better because it is better.

It is better because Narnia is a real place.

It is better because the battle sequences are more exciting and more realistic and more...well...conclusive.

He complains that Terabithia has too many loose ends.

What loose ends, I ask him.

The Dark Master, he replies.  They never defeat him!

He's still out there, a shadowy presence in the trees, following us.

Comments

[Campaspe]

I just loved this post. LOVED it.

After Terabithia I read Jacob Have I Loved and then I quit with the Katherine Paterson. Her books did not just depress me, they devastated me. That trailer for the movie is some kind of deceptive, according to what I have read about the actual film. It makes people who loved the book stay away, thinking they have turned it into Narnia, and people who take children who are too young or sensitive for it also get mad.

My childhood home was sold a long, long time ago, under very distressing circumstances, and so I empathize wholeheartedly with the 11-year-old. There is a part of me that will always ache a little bit for that rather ordinary suburban house, and I envy people who can return to the home where they grew up.

[sfmike]

I'll be curious to hear your take on "Pan's Labyrinth." Before seeing the movie last week, I read that it had some dark elements, but I still wasn't ready for a movie THAT unrelievedly dark. Be warned.

[Claire]

Wonderful post, Lance. Give the eleven y-o my condolences. I know I read Terabithia when I was about his age, but I remember nothing except crying at the end. I'm glad to hear that the movie version doesn't somehow sanitize it. I think I would have agreed with your son about the two movies when I was his age, too.

Sfmike, I saw Pan's Labyrinth last weekend, too. Man, was I not ready for that level of dark, either.

[Redbeard]

I wonder the same question sfmike does. People die in Pan's Labyrinth, and more than one person has illusions shattered.

[Chuck]

Terabitha was one of the most important books I read as a child (in 5th or 6th grade, maybe?). I'm glad to know that the movie sticks to the spirit of the book. And the comparison with "Narnia" is interesting.

[Rana]

Thanks for the Terebithia review; D has been feeling aggravated by the trailers to no end.

Re: Pan's Labyrinth - it is certainly dark, but I liked it. It's dark, but rich and complicated, like gourmet chocolate. I felt like everything mattered - which isn't the usual case for films that involve violence. I hate horror movies, and war movies usually leave me cold - but I came away from PL feeling satisfied in a way I usually don't after seeing a "mainstream" film.

[Victoria]

I was deeply moved by this post. It brought up two memories:

The first from yesterday: My four-year-old nephew was visiting my mother's house. A documentary DVD started to play and the opening music was over-the-top foreboding, actually a dumb creative choice. From his play place in the next room, the four year-old called out anxiously, "Is something bad going to happen? Mommy, is something bad going to happen? Grandma, is something bad going to happen?" This little boy asked it over and over until, after several comforting answers failed, Grandma put him in her lap and replayed the music, allthewhile explaining why they were using it. The four-year-old has been worried about things ever since a year ago when he got the book about King Arthur it turned out that fathers die... Was it the story alone? Or did the story trigger some deeper personal…what?

A much older one: I once met a guy in his 50's who told me about going to a shaman. He had had a terrible time settling down. Although he was a carpenter and built houses for other people, he could never seem to make anything home for himself...bounced from apartment to apartment, relationship to relationship. Finally, tired, lonely, and at a loss to explain himself, he went for counseling and - after a few weeks - the counselor recommended a shaman (Welcome to Northern California!). The shaman took a journey for him and returned with the vision of visiting a particular street with a particular house and in the back yard of that house finding a seven-year-old piece of this man, hammering away on an unfinished project he was working on the day his parents moved the family and everything they had to another town. The small town street she described, the bungalow house, the postage stamp yard, the blocks of wood, the experience (not wanting to leave)… they all matched an experience in his real life. God, how he loved that place! Had he really left some mysterious piece of himself there? Whatever the explanation, once the shaman “brought it back to him”, he found he could finally ground himself in his present.

Later, he gave permission to the shaman to write about his experience in her book, so has received dozens of letters from people with similar “recovery” stories. But he still marvels at the whole thing, wonders about its mechanics, worries about children suffering radical losses through things adults barely notice or comprehend.

[yidu sun]

Well I think that Kathrine Patterson wrote this book because her husband died. So this is very similar to her life and what she experienced in her life. So she just want to tell what she experienced. There's also a lesson to it. The lesson is when ever you lose a friend you still have a powerful and strong bong of friendship. Also when your fiend passed away he/she will stay in your heart forever.

[yidu sun]

Katherine Patterson wrote Bridge to Terabithia because when her son was young, she took him and his friend, Lisa, to the beach for the day. It was a sunny, cloudless day and Lisa was struck by lightning and killed. She wrote the book for her son.

[Henry Holland]

Excellent post.

I *hated* being a kid; I had a boring lower-middle class life, good parents etc. so nothing traumatic or anything, I just loathed being beholden to adults and having no autonomy. When I was 15 all I thought about was getting my drivers license in a year because that meant freedom. And it was! If were magically able to go back to being 11 again, I wouldn't do it. 18, yes, in a heartbeat.

you still have a powerful and strong bong of friendship

Nice typo there (in bold). :-)

[Stephen Frug]

Wonderful, wonderful post.

Still, it doesn't quite answer one question I have: will this movie disappoint an adult who remembers fervently loving the book as a child?

[Theriomorph]

Beautiful & true post, thank you for writing it.

A little while back I wrote a brief post about 'Pan's Labyrinth' and my delight in seeing magic realism brought to film with all its complex political awareness and darkness and magic and beauty intact. I was surprised by a very intense comment made in real loathing of the film calling it sadistic, saying it glorified the death of a child, it was cynical, exploitative, etc., which was so not my experience I wasn't sure quite what to say. But it got me thinking along the lines of the post you've just written - the fact that some of us find our comfort in truthful reflection of childhood awareness of death and horror, some of us flip out and want a less complex/more digestible 'child-like' emotional closure - but I'm with you that there is, for many of us, no such thing. We're meaning-making machines, even young, and 'child-like' understanding includes Fascism, the bridges between imagination and reality, the very real consequences of loss.

Anyway, thank you for this moving post - nice to discover your blog.

[Theriomorph]

Beautiful & true post, thank you for writing it.

A little while back I wrote a brief post about 'Pan's Labyrinth' and my delight in seeing magic realism brought to film with all its complex political awareness and darkness and magic and beauty intact. I was surprised by a very intense comment made in real loathing of the film calling it sadistic, saying it glorified the death of a child, it was cynical, exploitative, etc., which was so not my experience I wasn't sure quite what to say. But it got me thinking along the lines of the post you've just written - the fact that some of us find our comfort in truthful reflection of childhood awareness of death and horror, some of us flip out and want a less complex/more digestible 'child-like' emotional closure - but I'm with you that there is, for many of us, no such thing. We're meaning-making machines, even young, and 'child-like' understanding includes Fascism, the bridges between imagination and reality, the very real consequences of loss.

Anyway, thank you for this moving post - nice to discover your blog.

[Levent Mollamustafaoglu]

My blog post on Pan's Labyrinth is at

http://leventskaleidoscope.blogspot.com/2007/05/power-of-fantasy-two-films-on-contrast_27.html