Children’s stories
APRIL 6TH, 2016 — POST 093
Jeff Nichols has a new movie out. The writer/director of Take Shelter and Shotgun Stories, his latest movie Midnight Special, again starring Michael Shannon, and arrives in cinemas this month. Crafted, as Vox.com puts it, with sci-fi minimalism, Midnight Special seems Michael Shannon searching for answers when he discovers his son possess special powers. In anticipation for this release, from one of the more exciting writer/directors, I went back to Nichols last film, 2012’s Mud.
Led not by Matthew McConaughey (as the film’s poster might lead you to believe) but instead by two boys in their early teens, Mud sees the discovery by these two boys of a homeless wanderer living on an island in the Mississippi. The boys, Ellis and Neckbone, get involved with the man, Mud, and his attempts to get back his lover and escape those chasing him to avenge a man he killed. Even without the iconography of the Mississippi and the little dingy Ellis and Neckbone run along the river in, Mud is essentially a lost adventure of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. It paints a world where children are the conduit through which the problems of adults are solved.
With the McGuffin of Midnight Special being the super power-endowed child, it’s worth asking the question as to the narrative function of children in cinema. The elevator pitches of both Mud and Midnight Special gloss over the child characters as if they are purely mechanical. In Mud, marketed as a vehicle for McConaughey who would appear in 25% of the movie at most, the children might be seen as tantamount to telephone wires: the means of connection between Mud and the outside world. Midnight Special is being written about as Michael Shannon’s movie, his supernatural son might as well any other object to get the story started. Whilst I’ve only seen one of these movies, I can attest to the child’s function in narrative cinema to be a little more complex.
It is unarguable that the child in cinema solves a lot of mechanical problems. Invariably, their perspective on the world is simplified and as such much closer to ours, looking into this world we’ve never been in. We share their naïve eyes and they are an elegant solution to the solution of brute translation of information. It would be hard to get into the world of West Africa in Beasts of No Nation if our protagonist were an adult, presumably understanding the nuances of the rebel/military conflict from years of experience. Instead, the boy is our hero: one who knows the world but is yet to fully come to terms with it as we the audience are. This inherent naïvete opens up a gap of narrative possibility: the world is still new to a child. Where all the adults warn children to keep away from the house of Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird, the story opens up when Scout aims to find out for herself through the secret trading of gifts with Boo. And lastly, the emotion range of a child is limited. When James is responsible for the drowning death of his friend Ryan in Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher, he becomes a vessel to fill with our own emotions. Instead of being asked to empathise with an adult’s emotions, the child’s limited perspective provides a mechanism by which to rawly feel the emotive weight of narrative beats. The child in cinema, on the most basic of levels, is a surrogate for the audience to inhabit.
Where some movies are content with the mechanical possibilities opened up by a child protagonist, such as Scorsese’s Hugo, Mud affixes a simple but strong desire to Ellis to provide alens through which to understand the rest of the film. For Ellis, his parents going through his divorce, helping Mud is really helping love survive. Powerless in the breakdown of his own familial unit, Ellis is driven to rebuild another unit. Agu in Beasts of No Nation is powered by the search for a father figure, one which the brutal conflict in his region robbed him of. Without the cynicism of adulthood, children provide models of faith in the most universal of human strengths of love, family, goodness (for Scout in …Mockingbird), and hope (for James in Ratcatcher). In the best cinematic examples, children compel the audience to see an ideal world.
Because sometimes that’s hard for us to see for ourselves.
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