What I watched : The wizard behind the wizard

Being very much not a 'people person', I normally am not particularly interested in biodocumentaries about famous people. I have to admit I generally care relatively little about the lives lived by others, except in so far as light can be shed on actual tangible events (e.g. in documentaries on the movers and shakers of history); however, I can also acknowledge that this is probably less to do with being hard-nosedly attuned to what really matters, and likely more to do with a paucity of imagination, since when I do watch or read about people and their times, I often find it not only enjoyable, but informative as well. It's probably this same prejudice at work in my half-joking claim that I rarely read fiction because there's barely enough time in life to read about the real things let alone for stuff that's been made up. The point I'm missing of course being that while hard facts may seem to be perferable, often it is the soft information that yields true insight, especially in the human domain, where objective truths are so hard to come by.

So I was pleasantly surprised with the BBC4 program "The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz: The True Story" which detailed the life of the author, L. Frank Baum.

Given the repeated rise and fall of his fortunes and his seemingly unquenchable optimism and entrepeneurship, Baum's story was engaging enough in its own right (even to a people-phobe like me), but what I found most interesting and thought provoking was how the story of the Wizard of Oz (only written when he turned to being a novelist after a string of other careers, from theatre manager to poultry breeder) went from being 'merely' a wildly popular children's book to encapsulating the hopes of the world many decades later, when the clouds of war were gathering. And like so many other famous childrens' tales which we take for granted, even at its time was more than just a simple fairytale, but was woven of important themes of the moment.

Written at the turn of the century, it became an instant hit, captivating a generation of children. While its story of adventures in a fantastical land may seem standard enough to us, what passes us by is how unique it was to have a strong female lead in such a story. Depictions of women in American children's literature were apparently up till then at best of the resilient silent type, but here was a girl, a little girl, powering her way through a strange land, full of determination and demands, not just challenging the power structures (in the case of denouncing the wizard when revealed a fraud) but even destroying them (putting paid to not one but two wicked witches). When this is pointed out, then even I am interested by the background fact that Baum's wifewas an ardent feminist, which reminds us that at the time of writing, when there were few rights and no votes for women, feminism was a much more tangible struggle than it is in the modern day. I don't want to downplay modern feminism out of hand with this, rather to point out how much more unique and symbolic the character of Dorothy is in light of this.

But it was with the terror of the thirties that the story of Oz seemed to come into its own. The movie with Judy Garland was released as WWII was beginning, and despite its success being for sure in part due to its cinematic appeal, this alone could not explain its worldwide popularity. At a time when dark forces of change were on the march, and the lights were going out over Europe, it is easy now to understand how a tale of a quest to get back to normality (even if normal Kanas) struck a chord. The movie was also a perfect merging of story, vision and sound, a combination not probably much known before, and which doubtless made its emotional message more resonant; there is something hauntingly about the plaintive song 'over the rainbow' that will always stir feelings of hard to reach dreams and hopes, even without those dreams and hopes being threatened by the horror of war.

So I found it very poignant to hear that when the Australian troops were marching into battle, they would sing the other famous song from the movie 'we're off to see the wizard'. Here were young men heading off to certain hell, and probable death, and yet still able to keep tounge in cheek. The fact that that song, from that movie, was used in this way, feeds back into how it captured the spirit of the free world at that time. We weren't in Kansas anymore, but we would keep our spirits high in the quest back.

The pleasant surprise of learning something novel about a story I thought I knew well this documentary about a story, and suddenly seeing it in a new light, was also another reminder that the best known childrens' stories, are often more than just 'stories'. For example I was recently surprised to read how in Alice in Wonderland there hides beneath its surface a satirical take on complex mathematics and theories of reality that were being developed at the time, an absurd world representing absurd, yet real ideas.

Indeed it's well possible that it's because such famous stories do have so much depth to them, that they are carried down through the ages, and remain famous. Maybe we repeatedly tell them to our children because they subconciously resonate with current preoccupations, and maybe the children register this importance, dimly sensing it in the world about them, take the stories more to heart.

Unfortunately sometimes the discoveries, while no less thought provoking, are more unsettling, when the background fact shows the fiction in a new and disturbing light. One particularly unnerving instance for me was finding out first about the concept of psychogenic dwarfism, whereby a child's growth can be physically stunted by extreme emotional neglect, and then find out that the author of Peter Pan, JM Barrie, suffered from it. Here was the ultimate story about the boy who didn't grow up, didn't want to, written by a little boy who didn't. It seems Barrie's older brother died, and from this time on his mother not only neglected him emotionally, but even made him seem less wanted than her other lost son. Here was what seemed like an everyman tale dealing with the not wanting to grow up, and how we must, but written by someone who probably did want to, but couldn't. Suddenly the story is turned on its head and cast into negative, and it is hard to separate it from Barrie's condition, which being so tragicially abnormal inhibits us from viewing the story as a universal comment. But despite this unsettling feeling, it probably still is, but just in a more subtle and complex way. Indeed, it even goes to explain better things like Michael Jackson's obsession with childhood as exemplefied by his personal playpark, named of course Neverland. Rather than being a recreation of childhood which he longed to escape to, it represented the prison of a person who loses their childhood. Paradoxically it would indicate that a lost stage in development doesn't mean one skips it and moves on to the next, it means one never moves past it.

"All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, "Oh, why can't you remain like this for ever!" This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end."-J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan"

I see now a new element in this paragraph. Before I would have thought of it just as a lament to how youth fades, and how we might want to retain it forever. But it is the adult, Mrs. Darling who is dismayed by it, Wendy, the child, knows what is natural and needed. It might be the beginning of the end, but we need to go the end. But for some tragic people, they never could.