Media Musings: Fantasy fuels imagination
Culture and media blurred more walls this year, creating great performances alongside the lowest common denominators aimed at the very young.
Three events, however, should be linked because of the impressive and wonderful influence they’ve had on the young and the passion for the written word.
My obvious first choice must be brilliant work of J. K. Rowling, the creator of the worlds of Harry Potter, and its conversion into motion pictures. One must admire the wondrous creativity of her mind, even though one of the world’s greatest literary scholars has dismissed her work as a media-driven event being worthy of trash bins. (Serious scholars often are among the most jealous people in the world.)
Even so, children from across the world are lining up to get her books in ever-growing numbers. Any writer who can get a child to read a 700-page book is a hero to me.
The second is a joining of two art forms in a way we seldom can see and enjoy.
Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” could’ve searched the motion picture universe and not found a director who loves the books more than Peter Jackson. Elvis Mitchell, the New York Times lead reviewer, said of Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” the work closes the trilogy with grace and honest sentiment rather than cheap sentimentality; his love and affinity for Tolkien’s material meant that he was able to offer three movies with completely distinct tones.”
Book and movie are a marriage made in heaven here. Go to any major bookstore and you will see the old professor’s books wrapped in a variety of ways, selling strongly to young and old alike, along with all sorts of paraphernalia the world of commerce weds to such fine work.
(I’ve secretly watched as children approached his books and wondered what Tolkien would think today, perhaps hiding quietly among the stacked books like a Dicken’s ghost, seeing the children’s curiosity.)
What continues to trouble me is the never-ending attacks on these writers. The written word is the skin of living thought, one of my favorite Supreme Court justices wrote, and to create whole worlds where children can find joyous fantasy is not the work of anybody’s Satan. It’s easy to laugh at such remarks, dismissing them as extremist rubbish. But be careful. These attacks are not humorous and are serious attempts to get the books banned. Of course, it’s not going to happen, but such passionate rejection of the books – usually never read-leads to attacks on textbooks because they don’t reflect the prejudices of the offended.
What’s missing in the debate is recognition of what is, to me, a psychological truth: Children need fantasy to fire their own gifted imaginations. Remember the joy and surprise they give us when they speak to our own personal contradictions and mistakes or when they show us-though yet innocent eyes-their powers of intellectual creation?
Go back some generations to another time when B-grade westerns and cartoons and newsreels filled movie houses on those unforgettable Saturday afternoons. Children would leave to run around backyards and down long halls in apartments firing cap pistols and shouting movie dialogue.
Today is a million years from then. But movies and books, when wedded in the hands of masters, are still fulfilling the desire for fantasy. Comic books continue to do it, and were never aimed a children’s audience. But children read them.
One last Hero (remember your Greek fantasy; Hero was a priestess): Dolly Parton. It should not go unnoticed or un-lauded that her effort to give books to children just past the one million book mark. This incredible woman, who has never forgotten the coat of many colors of dirt poverty, then held a concert to raise more money for her effort.
Dolly may not know who Andrew Carnegie was, but the old steel baron began public libraries in this nation by his philanthropy. I think he would love Dolly, because behind her self-described “trashy” dress lies rich talents and a great heart.
These heroes give immeasurable support to our never-ending efforts to be a literate people. May your 2004 be marked by sharing a book with a child. It’s one of the greatest thrills you’ll ever know.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)