I was in a popular fast-food restaurant recently with R&B. I can offer no excuse for this. We were out, it seemed like a treat and after 11 years of French baguette and croissant breakfasts, I craved bacon and eggs. Yes, it’s that simple to corrupt me. But we transformed the situation!
That day, a collection of plastic characters was being marketed to our children. We decided to take a long har
d look at them.The girls were invited to drool over a choice of four ‘animals’ (I use this word loosely as they do not resemble anything that ever lived on the planet earth) from ‘The Littlest Pet Shop’. We know that cartoon characters always have distorted body and facial proportions, and we had a look at the morphology to see what message was there for us. These little cuties were mostly head, and the head was mostly eye, and the eyes were mostly gaping black pupils gagging for love, gleaming disturbingly with at least three light points. These heartless gutless legless eyes in heads said ‘settle for pretend love’, they said ‘vacuous’, they said ‘hypnotise’, they said (and I didn’t say it to R&B) ‘hallucinogenic drug’ and…worse. I invite you to try this, look deep into the eyes of one of these beasts, and see what you find there.
B, who is now 11 and very lofty about such things, was quite in agreement - even though not so very long ago he was buying such effigies from jumble sales. R also, was quick to abandon the sinister side of cute.
‘But I like these!’ he said, pointing to the boys’ option: alien robots which ‘transform’ into cars – I know it’s not much of a transformation but there it is. As one Mom put it on her ‘coloring for kids’ site: 'If you want to know what’s hot for kids right now, it’s Transformers!’ Yeah! Swallow that PR! But, hold on a
minute…The biggest things about these guys, due to some outrageous foreshortening, are their weapons. One character is not much else but a giant fist in your eye. When I looked closer I saw that their hands, organs of sensitivity, are mutated into hammers, balls on chains, and 3-pronged metal claws. They have wretched little heads. They are so wretched and little that with my failing eyesight, they are barely discernible above the grotesquely huge shoulders, biceps and upper torsos and machinery. They have no guts, spindly legs and hoofy projections from the knee down.
‘Yes’ I said to R, ‘You like this sort of thing because you are 7, and you like fighting and bashing’. I put my arm round him and he grinned, safe in the knowledge that he is loved, despite his appalling taste. ‘But you don’t really know what this is. You haven’t finished developing yet. I hope when you are older, you will see things differently’. (R took note, he really did take note).
Together, we unwrapped the message of morphology.
I asked R&B to give me their observations.
‘Yes, they have very small heads’ I agreed, ‘so I don’t think they do much thinking do you?’ (R laughed delightedly, and started thinking, with his normally proportioned head).
‘Look, this one even has a dog head, what kind of person has a dog head?’ (Squeals and peals).
‘They aren’t people Mummy, they are machines!’ R pointed out.
‘So, human boy, you admire a machine with a dog head?’ (More delighted laughter)
I gave a little lecture on how a boy transforms into a man, how the shoulders enlarge and the muscles develop, R is very interested in muscles. Then we went back to the cartoon and wondered what it means when such things are SO exaggerated, could we be getting things out of proportion?
‘And look at the eyes!’ I exclaim, ‘Did you know that the eyes are said to be the windows of the soul? Look R, look into my eyes, look at what you see there’ and R dutifully did so, and our souls rejoiced in one another as they always do
‘And look at this, their eyes are EMPTY WINDOWS! You can’t get much more obvious than that!’ We are really having a good time now. (Of course I’m thinking atrocities of war here, which isn’t funny is it, but I didn’t talk about that to R&B).
B has practised karate. He can understand from karate, that we can be rooted and stable from the ‘hara’, the lower gut, and these human machines don’t have a hara to speak of, perhaps that is why they need machine hoofs to keep their balance, to trample relentlessly, without feeling their way. And we wonder, as some of them do have extra-large chests, whether they could have an extra-large loving heart in there, but to make sure there is no doubt, the creators of these monster machines have painted a little demoniaic red head over the heart , the ensign of the goodies apparently. ‘It doesn’t look very nice to me, I said, ‘Does it to you?’. ‘No’ agreed
R&B. (The picture on the right is the emblem the 'goodies' wear on their breast).‘So, these creatures are the opposite of all we hold dear, all our values, all it is to be human. Why do we admire these things?’ I asked, hoping to engage R’s head, heart and hara in a final overthrowing of the hold these things have on him.
‘But they are the goodies!’ said R, grinning, one tooth missing.
(Isn’t this amazing? I’m noticing more and more in childrens’ cartoons and films, that good and bad is getting very muddled up. The other day R came back from the neighbours after watching a film called ‘Hellboy’, a harmless little number where Russian occultists and some leftover Nazis create a devil…which goes on to be employed by the American Government to fight…evil?. In R’s 7-year old opinion, the hero, the goody, is the aforementioned Hellboy, a little red devil complete with horns, tail and trident! With a secenario like
this, how do we know where we stand?. ) The message of the picture on the left is obvious, the head less so.‘WHAT?’ I exclaim to the delight of the crowd, ‘If these are the goodies, what are the baddies like for goodness sake?’
‘He is a big um sort of a guy with loads of metal things sticking out, and he is the BIGGEST of the transformers. He has a mane on his head, made of metal. And he can turn into a space ship, and he can throw missiles from here,’ he points at his chest, dare I say, to his heart, ‘he is trying to destroy the world – with some other baddies.’
‘What makes him worse than the goodies?’ I asked, looking very unconvinced.
‘He is all dark blue and he looks all horrible.’
‘But don’t the other guys look just as horrible?’
‘No, they look better, yellow, red, normal.’
Well, I sigh to myself, obviously we
have some way to go. Can you tell which of the above is the goodie, and which t
he baddie? Below is the Hero in Chief, cuddly isn't it?I would like to meet the people who came up with this idea – what on earth possessed them to conceive of such a thing? I find myself reflecting on this very phrase, what on earth possessed them? When I look into these things on the internet, they always seem to have a crude debased occult content, for example, the ‘goodie’ alien robot machine suffers visions following the release of the Matrix’ energy, foretelling a great transformation, orchestrated by a mega-computer, to restore Cybertron’s Golden Age. Oh Please. Beast raging against beast.
Well listen, you creators of devil-seeds in our childrens’ souls, I am onto you. Your devils are out there, proud, very very loud, shaking their little tushes on the catwalk. They are saying ‘Look at me, I’m a devil, here I am, catch me if you can, aren’t you going to STOP ME?’. Are we all half- asleep in the listless sweaty queue at Toys Arse?
It’s no good either, standing in the sidelines pointing the finger at the baddies. We need to keep our heads, if we are to educate ourselves and our children to understand and choose to reject this horror. We need guts, we need, above all, our hearts full of love. And we need humour (I’m not sure where that’s located). We need to shape up because our children are exposed to this, whether we like it or not. We might try to protect them from such images, but we can be sure a cousin, a neighbour, a friend of a friend, a television advert, a free magazine, a hoarding will get to them. PR people are paid very good money to make sure they do.
The question is, how do we deal with it? Or put another way, what must we learn from these things?
We could use this invasion of demons to transform ourselves and our world. The ultimate 'what not to do' educational tool. Will we?
