I need to stop watching videos of cakes being made. I don’t even like cake. No, I need to turn my attention to that which is most important–the continued Hollywood buffoonification of books by trying to make them into “movies.”
I’ve been reading about the demise of Marvel (I don’t really know what that is so I don’t know what it’s ruin would look like) and the general ennwee (I’ve decided to adopt PG Wodehouse spellings from here on) that seems to have stricken Hollywood’s “best and brightest”–witness that old movies can only be remade, apparently there are no new stories to tell–but I never like to succumb to the alarmism until I see it with my own eyes.
Which, unfortunately I was able to do, because Facebook thought I would be interested in two trailers, one from “Peter Rabbit” (those are scare quotes, truly, today, they are all scare quotes), and one to tell the “true story” of the writing of Winnie the Pooh. I think its called Goodbye Christopher Robbin.
Now, remember, I am the movie and tv critic who is so incandescently visionary that I don’t even have to see the movie or program to know if it’s bad or not. My powers of discernment allowed me to know, for instance, without bothering to pay for a ticket, that I would hate Wonder Woman, and to know, without having to waste my precious Netflix hours, that Anne with a Wretched E was the ruination of all that I hold most dear.
But those two flashes of insight–that I would hate them both–at least required some subtlety, some nuanced consideration to derive, without watching anything, what it was that was wrong with them. In this case, though, Hollywood, or whichever dumb bricks are responsible for these monstrous blasphemies, have so overplayed themselves that you don’t even really have to have vision, discernment, or an IQ over 35 to understand how bad and wrong they are.
Still, I’ll just point it out, shall I? (Don’t answer that.)
You might remember Peter Rabbit. He is a little bunny who wears shoes and a blue coat. He nearly looses his own life because of his greedy pursuit of lettuces in somebody else’s garden. He is caught as we all are, struggling with the desires of the flesh, and the deep helplessness that befalls all of us as we go through life. The creative genius behind this little bunny, Beatrix Potter, knew how to take the very small, the ordinary troubles of life, and poignantly illustrate them, putting them in little books that would fit in the chubby hands of a small child, pouring into perfectly chosen words the pathos and the humor of the very small. Her cadences, her lines, her deep drama in the sweeping of the sand outside the door, of the way a duck walks, of disobedience, of trying to make things right, of humiliation and triumph–all these provide an underlying rhythm and language for childhood, and for the adult reading the words out loud, running the finger along underneath so that the pictures, the words, fall together into the fabric of one’s very life.
And So Also Winnie The Pooh. Honestly, if I could make a law forbidding people who were guaranteed not to ‘get it’ from reading certain books, I would embrace such a totalitarian but So Needed power. If you pick up a book and you have the impulse to “make it better” or in some way “fix it” or worse, to “explain it the big screen” you should put the book down and go seek help. It’s not the book that is wrong, it is you.
Having now, to take a break from my turgid prose, gone to watch both trailers, you will have seen that Peter Rabbit has been made into an anarchist frat party, the only portion of the original remaining to be the clothes, which are not the main point of the original, and that poor Christopher Robbin has been made to face the darkness of war and real life, because, as per usual, if you can’t immediately see the grit of dystopic modernism in every single word you read everywhere, you must take it and cram it in, so that no one will be under any illusion about how bad things are.
Of course, in so doing, you miss the subtle realities of the very thing you are so anxious to find. But whatevs man, let’s have another dumb story where the bright child heals the dummy grown up, and then suffers mightily because the grownup is still a dummy.
I would have been inclined to argue with this meme long ago. The child doesn’t always lead the way. These books were written by adults who knew how to spell and put words together. They helped the child to come into adulthood, the books and poems and pictures and words acting as bridges to help the child make sense of the lives they were living right then and the lives they would lead later. But when you yourself don’t know how to “adult”, nor how to read a book on its own terms, and are afraid of true beauty and goodness, and you get a job at a movie making conglomerate, well, then, you’re going to be the ruination of the goodness and beauty that you can’t even see. You need the gospel is what you need. You need to go to church and repent for all your bad, wrongheaded sins. May God have mercy on your soul.
Pip pip.
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