So, a review caught my eye about the movie Prom from Disney. Written for the Washington Post, the review is not all that kind to the film and rather heavily relies on the idea that the movie is too squeaky clean to be good entertainment (what Ms Chen would say about something like Cinderella I have no idea).
The subject was tackled a little messily but well enough for my tastes here, at Big Hollywood, and I have nothing more to add to that specific discussion for two reasons:
1) I don’t care enough.
2) I care even less about the movie Prom.
What suddenly attracted me to the whole little spat was the fact that I just read The Secret Garden for the first time a few days ago. And no, I’m not a twelve year old girl, but I do feel a little weird for having read the thing at all. However, what was so interesting was that The Secret Garden was, apparently, exactly was Ms Chen was describing Prom as: super clean and without any real regard for reality. And yet (I can’t speak for Ms Chen), the world seems to consider the little book to be a classic of children’s literature, and I am slightly baffled.
I suppose, for the child who has read very little and does not have a particularly strong grasp of the narrative form, The Secret Garden is a fun adventure from India to the moors in the north of England and from pettiness to niceness, and I was along for the ride during it’s first half. Little Mary quite contrary follows a well thought out path where she learns, on her own, that her spoiled nature is no good when the world stops giving her everything she wants. She has to adapt, and in that quintessentially British manner, she does so by becoming the nicest and prettiest little girl in the moors. Everyone starts the novel hating her and ends the novel by loving her. That was all well and good for the first half, and then she started to work her magic on little Colin, the supposed cripple child of the remote uncle who took Mary in.
He starts of as an even greater brat than Mary had. He screamed through the night at imagined lumps on his back (why none of the servants ever figured out why he was screaming either indicates that these servants are some of the worst in the world, or the author, Ms Burnett, couldn’t think of any other way for Mary and Colin to connect without any real work on her part. You see, it begins to get lazy fast as soon as Mary gets Colin to look at his own back. From that point on (the second half of the book) every time Mary points out a character flaw to Colin, Colin takes a moment and decides that he will no longer do that thing that no one else likes. Quite a bit of self control for a ten year old child who was the poster child for caning weeks earlier.
My whole point isn’t to knock a well regarded work of children’s literature (although that is a small thing I want to put forward). My point goes back to the beginning of this post and the supposed worthlessness of “clean” entertainment for children. Have we gotten to a point in society where even children’s literature cannot hold the innocence of a poorly conceived children’s story? Does every work of fiction for every age group need to carry the breadth of Dickens and the depth of Dostoevsky?
The Disney Channel is not something I ever watch, mostly because the squeaky clean thing doesn’t really appeal to me. I like hard edges and dark corners to my entertainment, and it doesn’t sound like Prom is my kind of thing, but I’m also not Prom‘s target audience. The movie wants to appeal to the same age group as the Disney Channel, and that’s several years younger than I am.
Ultimately, I think that the problem in the original review wasn’t that the author had a truly jaundiced view of childhood and growing up, but that she wasn’t the intended audience for the film. So what to do about that? I wasn’t the target audience of The Secret Garden, so should I be barred from reviewing it as an inconsequential and rather completely forgettable piece of fiction? No, of course not, but no one should hire me to review it. I can’t imagine the difficulty of assigning movies to tastes and demographics, but then again, maybe there shouldn’t be an assignment process at all.
Perhaps with the death of old media we’ll see less and less of this. Older generations beating on the work designed for the younger, or the intelligentsia trashing movies about men who fly around in tights to save the world. Are their opinions invalid? Nope, but if they don’t want to see those types of movies, they shouldn’t be forced to, even for a paycheck.
So begin with me! Free the movie critics from the bonds of writing about movies they don’t want to see! Give them a blog and let the live on ad revenue!
