If you don't, who will? Not Steven Spielburg! I just saw the new War of the Worlds (fortunately for $3) and it struck me that there were two major themes... aside from that humans make great fertilizer. They were themes not in the original and thus quite deliberately planted there, so you'd think they'd be important. One is the staccato beat of Family, Family, Family that every major Hollywood movie seems to feel is necessary these days. The other is more interesting. Denial... to protect the children, of course. Straight from the beginning and all the way through to the end, Ray (the father) never tells his kids what's going on. He never has that all important "Facts of Life" talk. "Kids, things will be a little different now that our alien overlords have landed. When a mommy alien and a daddy alien want to kill all humans very much..." Instead he covers his daughter's eyes. Tells her to plug her ears. Don't look. Don't listen. If you pretend it isn't there it can't hurt you. You're still the center of the universe. Society is collapsing all around you and people are being turned to ash but you just keep putting your magic bubble around yourself and nothing bad can ever happen. I had thought maybe they were going somewhere interesting with this, a moral about trying to "protect" our kids from reality and instead leaving them totally unprepared for life and what happens when you can't just wish or scream your problems away. Instead, it goes nowhere but to an idyllic suburb of Boston to be reunited with their mother who has somehow weathered the battle right in the middle of a major metropolitan area. Daughter is reunited with mommy, everything will be all right. And that outright lie Ray tells his daughter about the brother still being alive and going to meet them in Boston? Oh, look... the Power of Love make it true! Turkey dinner all 'round! I could draw some political parallels, but why beat the horse?
In the late 1990's, when we were awash with "disaster miniseries" movies on network television, I decided that lying to children was one of the most despicable things you could ever do. It seems like every single one of those movies contained a scene where some child asked, "Is my mommy going to die?" and even though the outcome was obvious the protagonist/doctor/nurse/whoever lied through their teeth and said, "Your mommy is going to be just fine."
I'm not exactly sure what that was supposed to illustrate, but to me all it said was, "I've got zero qualms about cheating this child out of his last moments with his mother."
Sometimes the child himself (or herself) was the one dying and told they'd be all right. You know, if I'm going to die, I want to know. I don't know what "morality" makes it right to lie to people and fail to let them know that they or someone they love is about to kick off in the next minute, but I consider it desperately immoral and depraved. I sincerely hope that if I am ever in such a situation I don't get placed under the care of that kind of medical official.
Then again, I also come from a family where we don't tell children Santa Claus is real, either. Maybe I'm just hyper-sensitive to this.
Re:Lying to children
mary.poppins on 2005-09-27T16:28:20
I heard a haiku the other day, though I certainly didn't come up with it myself:
There is no Santa
Your parents bought all these gifts
God is also fakeRe:Lying to children
jdavidb on 2005-09-27T20:17:58
Not sure if this will make you chuckle or cry, but one reason my family does not do the Santa thing is that we DO believe in God and don't want children to later doubt because "Mom and Dad lied about this, so they could've lied about that."
Re:Lying to children
schwern on 2005-09-28T16:37:17
Santa isn't real?Then again, I also come from a family where we don't tell children Santa Claus is real, either.
The characters just don't make any damned sense, and I wanted to strangle Dakota Fanning's character by the end of the movie so I wouldn't have to listen to her scream any more.
