Beltane Early Growth Moon
Po-mo shows up where you least expect it. This time post-modernism reared its torqued and twisted head in the form of a children’s movie from Dreamworks, The Rise of the Guardians. Now, this is old news since this is a 2012 release, but I don’t stay au courant in movies, especially movies for kids.
Still. I did see it tonight. It’s quite a head-bender if you look at from a theological point of view. Two key for instances: Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. In the movie Santa and the Easter Bunny are part of a team of four known as the guardians. The notion is that they guard childhood as a place of innocence, fun, imaginative thought and belief. Here’s a theological kicker not unfamiliar in Christmas movies, Santa Claus stands in for Christmas, not the baby Jesus. That is, it is the consumer driven toy and present extravaganza that gets billed as the reason for the season, not the incarnation. You’ve seen it before.
But here the Easter Bunny represents Easter. Which is about, he says, in Hugh Jackman’s Aussie Bunny accent, “Hope, new life.” Gee, those sound like the themes of the passion without the gory stuff.
OK, at one level this is kid’s fare meant for multi-cultural audiences, many of whom are not Christian, so, maybe.
However, the real dramatic driver in the movie is the addition of a new guardian to the old group of four: Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and Sandman. The Man in the Moon, who picked all of the guardians, has now chosen Jack Frost as a new guardian. A fifth.
Bear with me here. The going gets a little theoretical, but I think the pay-off is interesting.
Jack comes into the story when the Boogeyman has gone on a campaign to stamp out belief in first the Tooth Fairy, then the Easter Bunny, aiming to get all four including the sandman who brings sleep and pleasant dreams to children. Both the Boogeyman and Jack face the same problem, nobody believes in them so they are insubstantial, real but not seen as real because the belief meter doesn’t spike among the younger set at the sound of their names.
So the movie takes on the task of finding Jack a place in the believing hearts of children while simultaneously beating back their belief in fear’s ability to hurt them. The battleground is children’s hearts. First the tooth fairy loses her powers as child after child falls victim to the boogeyman’s nightmares, then the Easter Bunny. Sandman gets disappeared by the boogeyman and eventually even Santa’s sleigh weaves and bobs and crashes to the ground, a no longer believed in Santa barely strong enough to stand.
Jack Frost, as you might expect, wins back the hearts of the children with his joyful, fun loving snowball fights and loop-the-loop kid’s sleds rides. The children begin to believe again and the guardians grow strong, defeating the boogeyman as the children step forward to defend the guardians. Jack Frost points at the boy leader’s chest and says, “The real guardians are in here.”
This, in other words, is a movie about the magical thinking of children and their charming, wonder-full beliefs, a movie that equates belief with that world and uses the characters dreamed up by American capitalist culture as the agents of restoring children’s beliefs in their existence. Po-mo. In a children’s movie.
