A Child’s-Eye View of the End of the World

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 55
Guillermo Del Toro, The Devil’s Backbone

Carlos, newly orphaned and unprepared for violence, is dropped off at an orphanage in the last year of the Spanish Civil War. There he encounters one of the least subtle symbols in cinematic history: an unexploded Nationalist bomb in the front courtyard. Inside, he finds the boys playing out the events of the war outside, without really understanding their roles. He also encounters the ghost of another boy who died under murky circumstances.

This, Guillermo Del Toro’s first feature film, captures several themes which recur throughout his body of work. A society caught in rapid change, and people unprepared for the consequences of that change. A world where life and afterlife are separated by mere moments. The tedium of life, punctuated by flashes of sudden violence.

Carlos struggles to acclimate himself to the orphanage’s internal politics. The concept of “politics” turns unusually literal here: administrators Casares and Carmen support the Loyalist cause, with its rhetoric of democracy and freedom. But that rhetoric sounds hollow when Jaime, the school bully, rules the residents with an iron fist. As often happens with children, the bully appears dominant and charismatic; but like Franco’s Nationalists, he rules erratically and inconsistently.

Looming over the orphanage is the story of Santi, a child who vanished the day the unexploded bomb fell. The timing is suspicious, but nobody ever found Santi’s body. Sneaking around after curfew, Carlos encounters a spectral boy with an open head wound, but the apparition won’t communicate. Instead, it wordlessly indicates something untoward is happening with Jacinto, the orphanage janitor, whose loyalties are strictly to himself.

Del Toro’s storytelling is slow, cerebral, and moody. Despite the wartime setting, his characters spend the most time simply waiting. Jaime and Jacinto, the child and adult bullies respectively, occasionally try to make events happen, to offset their existential boredom; but when their forced actions don’t go according to plan, they feign gape-jawed surprise. Bad people claim to be helpless when bad acts produce bad consequences.

Most importantly, though, Del Toro doesn’t tiptoe around the supernatural themes. Ghost story filmmakers often attempt to skirt their ghosts’ reality, keeping their gossamer spirits in the corner of the shot, where characters can explain them away. Not here. As in other Del Toro movies, the ghost here is real, solid, and centrally framed. When Carlos runs from the ghost, he isn’t fleeing a shimmery haint; Santi’s ghost is palpable, and his blood is still hot.

Carlos confronts the ghost of Santi in The Devil’s Backbone

Jacinto believes the administrators are hiding a treasure that he could steal, in order to ingratiate himself with the Nationalists. Like the ghost, Casares and Carmen’s treasure is real, but nevertheless immaterial. The treasure matters less than the way the treasure makes people act. Greed makes Jacinto reckless, which makes Casares defensive. Eventually the administrators chase Jacinto, the Nationalist bully, out of the building. But that only makes him more aggressive.

The children’s loyalty unfortunately fluctuates. With Casares seemingly ascendant, Jaime declares his support for Casares and the Loyalists. But that reveals to Carlos how cowardly and inconsistent the bully actually is. He takes it on himself to investigate the building, and its resident ghost, willing to shoulder the cost. But when Jacinto returns, now backed with Nationalist support and the ability to actually hurt the children, Carlos realizes he’s now completely alone.

Well, alone except for the ghost.

That brings up one remaining recurrent theme in Del Toro’s work. Yes, in his world, ghosts are real, not something the living can rationally explain away. But they aren’t monsters. Del Toro’s ghosts linger because they need something: an unfinished task, undelivered message, or unresolved injustice. We, the living, can absolve the dead and set their spirits free, but only by paying attention, only by listening without words. For ghosts, this world is purgatory, and the living hold the key.

World events like the Spanish Civil War attract Del Toro, not because they're violent, but because they test human loyalties. (Del Toro would return to the Spanish Civil War for Pan’s Labyrinth.) People have to choose sides in wartime; those who claim neutrality get clobbered by those who care enough to fight. Carlos cares deeply, but without ideological commitment, so he initially gets swayed by superficial charm. He learns, however, to take sides for solid, palpable reasons.

Like with most of Del Toro’s ghost stories, the message here is far from spectral. Ghosts linger because the past isn't really the past, and the living bear a responsibility to those who can no longer speak for themselves.

Some Thoughts on Cursive

“You know why we need to teach cursive in public schools?” someone belted at me on social media. “So kids can read important historical documents!” This has apparently become something of a clobber argument online recently, in the debate over whether schools should maintain the curriculum of good penmanship. As usual, this fellow hit me with links to the most common “cursive” documents, the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Back during my teaching days, students already railed against teaching cursive writing. They regarded elegant handwriting as retrograde in an age of cheap digital printing. Cursive is rarely mandatory outside schools, mostly in rare official government paperwork. Beautiful handwriting has become an unnecessary luxury from another time.

Except, looking at the Declaration of Independence, something struck me: that isn't cursive. The most common version we all know, Timothy Matlock's transcription of Thomas Jefferson's text, was written in Copperplate, a form of calligraphy. Printer John Dunlap reproduced Matlock's handwriting with a typeface called Caslon, popular in the 18th century but mostly forgotten now.

Because of the way public schools teach cursive, I understand why people might lose the distinction between cursive and calligraphy. I studied in the waning days of Parker penmanship; by the time my sister was in grade school, D'Nealian had largely supplanted Parker. But in both cases, teachers heavily emphasized precision, elegance, and cleanliness. Cursive isn't meant to be any of these things.

I don't recall anybody telling me that the purpose of cursive isn't to write beautifully, it's to write quickly. Where the printing we all learned in kindergarten sought to create legible text that others could read, cursive meant to write at the speed of thought, letting students take notes or get thoughts onto the page quickly. Legibility to others should be secondary in cursive writing, at least in its origin.

To serve that, print writing is done mainly in the fingers and wrists. Any college student who's tried to take notes through an interminable lecture course knows how painful that becomes at speed. Cursive should move the effort of writing into the elbow and shoulder, letting the hand stay still while the arm does the effort of writing. This should result in copious quick writing with a minimum of fatigue.

But nobody ever told me that. All the emphasis in my grade-school cursive instruction stressed beautiful, elegant text. That is, calligraphy. As anybody who has ever practiced any art knows, you can have grace and precision, or you can have speed, but not both. By teaching cursive as beautiful writing, my teachers made it burdensome and impractical. No wonder my classmates and I mostly abandoned it when it stopped being mandatory.

I don't want to disparage calligraphy. In an era where text has become utilitarian and bland, I don't want to see beautiful letters disappear. But willfully beautiful handwriting is slow and time-consuming, and like oil painting or guitar playing, not meant for everyone. Those who stand to benefit should definitely practice calligraphy. But again, calligraphy and cursive are not synonyms.

Considering all the time I spent taking notes, and later watching my students take notes, we could've all benefited from real cursive. All the time squandered trying to massage out painful hand cramps or fend off carpal tunnel syndrome, could've gone instead toward art or science or business. If we'd understood how to write quickly, without fatigue, we could've had so many more hours in our days.

Instead, we were misled into thinking we had to accept hand pain as necessary for quick, practical writing. I don't think my teachers misled me deliberately. As with other subjects, their own instruction on how to teach skimmed past the “why” and onto the mechanics. While I believe teachers, at least the ones who last, are good people who love students, the school system sadly inculcates incuriosity and anti-intellectualism, in spite of teachers' best intentions.

Excessively precise handwriting therefore falls onto the same spectrum as “skillz drillz” math exercises and translating Shakespeare into “plain English.” It makes educational administrators feel useful, and gives test writers something to measure, but alienates children from their natural curiosity. Kids need cursive, not because penmanship is elegant and historically significant, but because it's a mode of thinking. Kids need to learn that getting ideas out of their heads, and onto paper, is how we turn abstract thoughts into useful action.

Writing is the bridge between thinking and doing. And cursive is how we cross that bridge without getting tired.

“The Wild Robot” and the Problem with Metaphor

Fink the fox and Roz the robot in Dreamworks’ The Wild Robot

Chris Sanders (writer/director), The Wild Robot

When the service robot identified only as Roz washes ashore on a rugged Pacific Northwest island, it wants one thing: instructions. It races around the island, pestering wildlife with its preprogrammed spiel of helpfulness, cheer, and obedience. The animals won’t have it. Until circumstances make Roz responsible for an orphaned hatchling goose, which imprints on it as his mother. Suddenly Roz has purpose and a mission.

This film’s creators intended a message. Roz (Lupita Nyong’o) is a complete cypher, even to herself, until nurturing the gosling Brightbill defines her. A local fox, Fink (Pedro Pascal), initially sees Brightbill as an easy appetizer, but Rox manages to turn him into an ally. As the island’s wild inhabitants teach Roz to become a mother goose, they also learn together to overcome their natural enmities and live in trust.

For its intended audience of older children and their parents, this inclusive, communitarian message should ring true. I appreciate the intention behind it. The thesis, that nobody on the island is beholden to their natures, and can unify to protect their homeland against encroaching human technology, seems timely. As powerful forces in American society find creative ways to divide citizens and enflame culture-war animosities, the moral of overcoming division matters.

I enjoyed the underlying conceit. In less judicious hands, Roz could’ve become needlessly messianic, especially in later scenes, when her manufacturers try to reclaim her from a flying platform, literally on high. But Roz isn’t a messiah; like Paddington Bear, her guileless attempt to manufacture a place in life inspires those around her to evaluate their own choices. She makes everyone better, not through exhortation, but through simplicity and action.

However, there we encounter the problem with this storytelling approach. Linguist George Lakoff contends that human communication depends heavily on metaphor, the comparison of one form to another. Hope is the thing with feathers, Emily Dickinson wrote. (That’s a simile, yes; bear with me.) Dickinson doesn’t contend hope is a literal bird, but that it has sufficient bird-like qualities to bear the comparison, which she justifies in succeeding stanzas.

But any metaphor, pushed sufficiently hard, breaks down. Is hope migratory? Does it hunt or scavenge or live on carrion? Is hope a sweet songbird or an aggressive Canada goose? Metaphors are, by necessity, inexact, and don’t support extensive scrutiny. Many birds are dangerous to handle, bear diseases, and could kill humans. They also have a frustrating tendency to leave at predictable intervals, which undermines Dickinson’s metaphor.

This movie presents the differences between animal species as something Roz can overcome through honesty and innocence. The animals that disparage Roz for her attempts to teach Brightbill to fly come around to her position, slowly at first, simply because Roz’s need for purpose inspires them. Eventually, they learn to trust her enough that she inspires them to trust one another and huddle together during a violent winter storm.

Except, animals aren’t human communities, which could hypothetically pause their divisions to work together. The movie shows predators like foxes and grizzly bears consciously choosing not to eat prey animals—something they cannot do, because their digestive tracts can’t process vegetable matter. I’m reminded of Timothy Treadwell, the notorious Grizzly Man, who thought his big-heartedness defended him from grizzly bear attacks. Spoilers: the bears he loved killed him.

The broken metaphor leaves me struggling. We need the message of overcoming inherited divisions to resist the corporate invaders who would steal our resources. From Bacon’s Rebellion to today, wealthy oligarchs profit when they keep ordinary people divided and belligerent. This movie tells audiences that, supported by a shared purpose, we can overcome those divisions and unite to protect our island from the third-act invasion.

But it conveys that message in language that doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Grizzly bears aren’t disobedient puppies which need trained out of their aggression; they are muscular predators whose consumption serves an important role in forest ecosystems. Anthropomorphizing animals works well in movies like Disney’s Robin Hood, which shows animals outside their habitat, enacting human roles. The forested island ecosystem behind the story undermines this division and gives false ideas.

Please don’t misunderstand me. This movie has received accolades for its storytelling, visual design, and message, and I wouldn’t take anything away. But misplaced metaphors give honest, well-meaning people like Treadwell false ideals about how nature works. The idea that predators can stop being predators because they learned from an honest, naïve ingenue, teaches child audiences falsely optimistic lessons about how animals, and possibly human societies, work.