The Lights in the Distance
I am a connoisseur of kids culture. Not by choice, just by virtue of being a parent. It kind of goes along with the territory. Most of it, let's face it, is bad.Children have a taste of their own, I suppose, so try and watch the new Hanake film with a 4 year old and chances are it won't go down so well. Taste is something you develop, somehow, and it develops as we mature. Until they grow some better taste of their own my kids are going to listen to Led Zeppelin not Mr Bumble Sings or whatever other shit the BBC has decided to puke into our ears to supplement their (male) employees over-inflated salaries.
Unfortunately I can't avoid all of it. In my own personal hell Paw Patrol will be on an endless loop I can't escape. As it actually is most mornings when I want 30 minutes extra peace. The problem with most of the stuff produced for the toddler market is how vacuous and asinine most of it is. Alongside the over protective, physical environment we've created for our kids is an equally mediocre mental one. For fear the precious fruit of our loins may be irrevocably damaged by exposure to any approximation of the negative in life we have to suffer through repeated retellings of bears that can't sleep and reactionary tank engines.In the past stories for children weren't afraid of darkness. Before Nazi sympathising Walt Disney sanitised them, fairy tales had some moments that would make the writers of SAW glow with torture porn pride. For example the original conclusion to Hansel and Gretel has the witch being tricked into an oven where she's cooked alive and the end of Snow White has the wicked Queen forced to dance to death wearing red hot iron shoes.
The 19th Century Struwwelpeter has tales about little girls being set on fire after playing with matches and kids having their fingers cut off for biting their nails. My kids love it. A psychoanalytical study of early fairy tales by Bruno Bettelheim suggested that the darkness of these tales serves an important developmental function, enabling kids to come to terms with separation anxiety, Oedipal conflicts and the like. I'll leave it to you to figure out what might be happening to our kids then without these darker stories to ship them off to slumber land. But not everything is shallow and mediocre since children's content creators stopped taking drugs.
Though not quite as brutal Maurice Sendak and Oliver Postgate inherited the enchantment with the lights turned down of those earlier fairy tales.Sendak and Postgate are hardly new anymore (and both are dead) but they did pass on a baton of beautiful and truthful work to some of the most popular children's illustrators and authors today including Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. Their work, hardly dripping in gore and brutality, straddles a line between the past's unflinching look at what is in store in life with an approachability and charm.
Like a drunk uncle at a family party who's full of magic tricks but who also had a stint in prison that no-one talks about.Some of the most well known of their collaborations deal with frightening or threatening subjects. What's The Gruffalo a story about if not how we can use our imagination to defeat the manifestation of a dread we thought impossible? In Tabby McTat the story is about a homeless busker who gets mugged,Stickman tackles abandonment (though it bottles it at the end). And as Where the Wild Things Are has a little brat as its main character. Donaldson's Tiddler is, in the end, about a liar bullshitting his teacher about why he's always late. Neither Donaldson, nor Sendak in his story, judge.
Scheffler compliments Donaldson's stories with drawings which are far from frightening, but the devil is in the detail. At the edges of several images he's added harsh moments of reality that might be overlooked if you weren't obliged to read them 100 times a year.As bleak as these things are, for me as a reader (as opposed to my kids) they provide something that so many other kids content lack - an authenticity about the world. An awful lot of shows or books for children are empty beyond the already hollow stories. Look at Fireman Sam, Paw Patrol or any other of the 3D animation shows out there. They're creepily barren of any depth or soul at all. Their worlds are an endless plane of emptiness. It's disconcerting, at least, if not downright terrifying.
There used to be a saying that it takes a village to raise a child, but who has a village to help them these days? We're often reluctant to ask the neighbour if we can borrow their lawnmower. For all the joy and richness of raising another human being and introducing them to the world they're going to be swimming in throughout their lives, there's no doubt that at times it can be a depressingly isolating experience. Especially the first time round and especially at four o'clock in the morning when your new human is desperate to not let go, for no apparent reason other than you're the only one capable of making them come to terms with the sheer terror of being alive after nine months in an opiate like isolation tank.
In those moments you can feel totally disconnected from the rest of the world, the one you've been swimming in your whole life. The bland falseness of most kids culture only adds to that sense of isolation. I'd rather have something true or honest, and anything true or honest about life is going to have a little darkness in it. At least at the edges.In those isolated moments I always found another common thing about Scheffler's pictures comforting. In many of the contemporary stories, in the background, he's added buildings - skyscrapers, high rises, cranes and, if at night, the windows glowing from the light inside.
A TV show from the last few years, Abney and Teal, did a similar thing. Abney and Teal is about a little girl and weird bear thing who live on an island in the middle of a city park with a turneep and some other bizarre creatures for company.
It shares a lot of the characteristics I've been talking about. There's nothing explicitly dark about the show but some of the story lines revolve around the litter they find in the park like an old radio or a handbag with a ringing phone in it that they don't understand. I mean, how did it get there? The story behind that can't be good.In this show, like those Scheffler pictures, you see the buildings in the distance beyond the park. Their lights on when dusk falls. Cars driving to wherever they're going. The hum of the city. In darker moments you can draw a comfort from that. That, however isolated you might feel, the city is carrying on out there, with all its dirt and all its dancing. It's a reminder that after the hard part - when that new human's realised, thanks to you, that being alive isn't so terrifying after all - that you'll get back there.