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Let me tell you something. Ann Beattie |
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by Steve Johnson |
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PHIL'S ROOM From writing, a kind of applied dreaming, I know that the mind doesn’t merely occupy its own small quarters either but can expand to fill whatever space contains it, so that the entire room can become as the consciousness itself. And just as such thoughts can assume the shape and mass of their enclosure, that enclosure can also assume the content of our minds, which it can then disclose like a jack-in-the-box if you know where to find the key. (A room can dream, too, as can a planet.) This is why any disruption outside or intrusion upon that space can destroy the room within, as well – what we call breaking our concentration. Try moving a coffee table in somebody’s apartment: you’ve rearranged the layout in their mind. At this moment, my wife and I are planning the room our son will dream in for the next how-many years as he prepares to leave his nursery around the time |
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of his third birthday. As it will be a space for dreaming, we want him to understand how dreams can lay a blueprint for the future as well as rehash the past, so that when he visits this house sometime twenty years into his life he may feel not only the ghosts of that past but also the spirit of the ambitions our unconscious is forever sounding outward; then he may realize the eternal project of the dreamer, to fill the world with his imaginings until that world takes on the shape of his dreams. We’re thinking trains as a design motif, vehicles to help him in his transition. Already he is learning the message of tracks and bridges, as well as the beauty of wreckage when those devices no longer serve you. Stories such as THE LITTLE RED CABOOSE teach him that sometimes, when you’ve stalled and can’t quite get over the next mountain, another, black engine (my boy’s favorite color, god bless him) will come up from behind and help push you over. That "engine" is the unconscious, the prime mover of all psychic activity and |
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development, the nursery of our dreams and the roundhouse of life’s transitions. Sometimes it may throw up scary images or put things together in such a way as to confound and dismay us, but always it has its reasons. Each mutant notion has its function, as long as we actively engage it in our development. As a boy, my son also carries the legacy of the masculinity he will have to take out of that room and into the world someday. How he constructs this |
| identity will
be based partly on the kids he meets in school and on the playground,
the media he encounters in his nearly every waking gesture, and whatever
he makes of his father and mother through all the significant
stages of his life. The first influence we can partly determine by
choosing the right locations, the most diverse and functional; the
second by supervising his encounters to whatever degree we can; the
last by providing the best mode possible of a maleness that's comfortable
with women and its own so-called feminine qualities – one based
on a private association with what’s good rather than with what
social elements may have determined for him uniquely as a male. He
needs a father with the capacity to mother and a mother with the capacity
to father in order to take a new dream into the social landscape if
the shape of that society is to change. I believe,
and so much of our media seems to indicate, that this change needs
to occur, and in fact wants to. |
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| ANDY'S DAD
Get any group of adults together who have seen the first feature-length computer-animated Disney picture (in association with Pixar, Steve Jobs’s media |
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arm), Toy Story, and the question will always come up, Where’s Andy’s Dad? Andy is the main "human" character (I qualify that term because he is still stylized and not exactly fluid in his movements, helping to blur – intentionally, I think – the distinction between boy and toy and the film’s whole take on reality itself), in whose house and bedroom the first third of the movie takes place. If we accept the mind/room analogy, this bedroom represents the consciousness in which the story unravels and the context for the entire drama to follow. Andy’s and the other humans’ irreality, then, indicates that even this may simply be a chamber within yet another character’s mind, as we discover when the action switches to the house next door, occupied by the violent and malevolent Sid (as in "Vicious") Phillips and the rest of his dysfunctional family. The irony that Sid does have a father casts his family as the shadow underside of the sunny, cheerful and fatherless household next door. So where is Andy’s dad? We’re never given a clue, and he’s never even referred to by the |
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| boy, his mother or baby sister Molly; he’s just an absence, a missing part of the male persona. In his son’s opening play – coming pre-credits, as a |
| prologue, which
we interpret as a synopsis of what’s to come as well as of what’s
gone before – the first character we see is villainous One-Eyed
Bart (portrayed by the toy, Mr. Potatohead, himself voiced by comedian
of cruelty Don Rickles), whom Andy, speaking
the part of the western sheriff Woody, captures and sends to the slammer
("Say goodbye to the wife and tater tots"). Whether imaginatively
recreating the circumstances of his father’s disappearance, rehearsing
a scene he may later have to play out in real life – one of repression
of certain behaviors in himself germane, perhaps, to the character
of all men today – or just plain playing, the upshot of all this
is that some facet of maleness has, of necessity, been locked away
for its anti-social actions or tendencies. It will be his story’s
project then to achieve and reveal this resolution, carried out by
the same toys Andy uses to therapeutically enact his private dramas
– the way dreams do, as well.
If something about masculinity has been removed from society, however, something is about |
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| to be regenerated, also, for the story begins not only with a birthday party – Andy’s – but with preparations for a move as well, suggesting a personality or |
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characteristic already in transit. (The toys’ unpreparedness for the event implies the boy’s own unreadiness for or apprehension about maturation.) Andy shares a room with the playpen-bound Molly, suggesting a continued association with childhood dependence and possibly even a vestigial femininity rooted in his connection with the mother. Though we never get to see his new-house room in great enough scope to tell, the fact that independent and possibly slightly older Sid has a room separate from his sister, Hannah (both houses are paralleled up to the point of Sid’s father being glimpsed, briefly but significantly), suggests that this is to be Andy’s destination also, especially since much of the action in between these sites and the final home is the road. Without a father, then, to demonstrate how to be male, Andy must imaginatively explore how not to be one first, which he does at Sid’s house through the offices of his Woody puppet and "Buzz Lightyear" action-figure astronaut. If a room is also a mind, then the characters occupying it – "animated," as the dreaming |
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| unconscious does images or items from our waking life – represent some facet of the governing personality. This would suggest Buzz and Woody as separate aspects of masculinity, their feud a jockeying for priority in the preadolescent mind, the resolution they reach an agreement or truce within the |
| same space. Woody, the toys’ leader, is like a barely effectual middle manager, friendly and condescending to his charges – among them a Slinky dog, Tyrannosaurus Rex, blue-collar pig named Hamm, and various strongmen, racing cars, Etch-a-Sketches and binoculars – and jealous of his position when Buzz makes the scene. His sense of dislocation is like that of his real-life counterparts in the downsized 1990s, cut adrift by a disloyal boss and forced to adapt to the new corporate strategy-cum-propaganda, teamwork. For his part, Buzz is an equally prideful blowhard, as confident in his elite position as Space Ranger and "sworn defender of the Galactic Alliance" as he is unaware of his humble toy-reality. As pioneer and astronaut, both are explorers, though the fact of Woody’s obsolescence indicates that he has become entrenched, a throwback in the face of Buzz’s sexy technology – his pull-string voicebox vs. Buzz’s microchip – a symbol of both rustic, expansionist America giving way to the vertical, hi-tech future, and earthy childhood on the verge of regimented, advanced adulthood. As parental figures in the toy- | |||
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| world of Andy’s room, they are complemented by the – surprisingly sexualized – mother, Bo Peep, whose "flock" is represented by one three-headed sheep. Matching the men against each other, many viewers may wonder why it has to come down to either of these jerks as leader when there is her |
| natural stewardship
to exploit, a given of which the animators themselves seem as unaware
as their characters. (It is repeatedly described as Andy's room, though,
as we have seen, his sister occupies the same space: It is indeed
a boy’s boy’s boy’s boy’s world.)
What’s most surprising about Woody as a co-hero in the comedy is his willingness to use his fellow toys in his plot against Buzz to regain favor in Andy’s eyes. Whereas Buzz is seen making friends by entertaining the others – helping them, involving them in his mission to repair his spaceship – Woody uses a remote-controlled racing car to knock him behind a dresser, a plan that backfires when Buzz goes out the window instead. It’s the second (or third, counting his "crash" on Earth) of his many falls, indicating an Icarus similarly brought to earth by his pride. The pair’s squabbles separate them from Andy again at a gas station and nearly get Woody killed, while Buzz’s self-involved fantasy of space heroism, in turn, leads to their finally falling into Sid’s clutches at a local pizzeria-cum-gameroom. One would like to think that their |
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| ensuing adventure leads them to the learning of each their lessons in life, but the conclusion leaves this doubtful: the final shot fixes them both in their privileged position (now shared) on Andy’s bed, high above the other toys. The announcement of a new addition to Andy’s world that will, presumably, upset both their dominion – a puppy, indicating movement out of the world of fantasy and into that of real-life responsibility – may be a demotion in Andy’s |
| estimation,
but in terms of the rest of the toys their position is unchallenged.
The duo’s "Oh, well" attitude in this shot leads you to believe
that if, after all this, they still haven’t gotten the message,
maybe they never will.
None of which is to answer the questions, How did it get this way, and So what's the next step?
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accept it for what it is and integrate it into our conscious lives. Sid, or "Bad Andy," as my then-two-year-old insightfully called him, is this shadow, in black hair, skull t-shirt and faintly lit bedroom, the latter decked out with death-metal posters and the toys he’s assembled from the vivisected parts of others. |
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The gregariousness that marked Andy’s party is missing in Sid’s house, and if Andy was dependent on others for his largesse then his counterpart is self-sufficient, sending away for the articles that lend meaning to his life and relying on his skills to acquire those other things, as when he nails Buzz and Woody in a Pizza Planet arcade game – a theme restaurant all that's left of our space-conquering ideals, a franchise all that remains of a formerly dreaming organism. Both kids fail to see the spirit in their playthings, freely abusing them and discarding one when a greater charge comes along, though Andy never takes it to the ballistic level Sid does; it could be said of Sid, in fact, that he cares nothing for things, and this may be to his credit. He is, paradoxically, highly inventive in many of his nihilistic activities, producing wonders of surrealism – an erector-set spiderbaby, a fishing rod with legs, a rag doll with a pteranodon’s head (Christ, I remember doing a lot of this with my old toys) – that Woody, in a moment of desperation, actually finds useful in his escape. He is the unconscious itself, fitful, impulsive, cross-referencing and ultimately beneficial, his House of Pain bedroom where |
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heads are removed and attached to different bodies – that is, where new perspectives are formed – an essential stop in the characters’ evolutionary movement from old to new location. If Sid’s house – the testosteronal hell to follow Pizza Planet’s adrenaline-fueled purgatory – sometimes resembles a labyrinth with potential dangers around every corner, a figure Buzz encounters while on the run may be its Minotaur. On making his getaway from the family’s pit-bull, Scud (aka Cerberus), Buzz |
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ducks into a darkened room upstairs and sees asleep on a La-Z-Boy the shadowy form of Sid’s dad, beer can at his side and television playing on as though reflecting his unconscious thoughts; projected, like a film. The stillness tells us we’ve reached the center of the house and possibly of the drama itself; even Scud backs out of there, whimpering. If the film is in fact a dream, then here at last is its dreamer, Andy – possibly even the figure himself – just a character in it. For Buzz, this is the place where he must face down his own terror – the fact that he is a toy – when he witnesses a commercial thundering out of the TV for the entire line of Lightyear dolls, his own magical nature (to Andy he’s the real thing) run to ground. How this resonates with the sleeping giant inhabiting that same space with him may be deduced by the other objects in the room (it is, apparently, "his" space), including a guitar and a mounted deer head on the wall, reinforcing the detached and disembodied nature of the dreamer. |
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| Together, they suggest many men’s failed rock-god dreams and the resultant rechanneling of these energies into the power-and-possession goals of acquisitiveness. He is the origin and avatar of his son’s own hunter nature, providing also the model for Sid’s "decapitating" surgical strikes against his quarry; when the boy mutters "I want to ride the pony" in his sleep, it implies – as reflected by Woody and his predicament – a similar failed-cowboy drama of ambitions thwarted or dismayed. The dog’s name, besides its adolescent connotations of phallic-power fantasies – the audience is especially pleased to see him "get his" – hints at a Gulf War connection, as though the father may be a veteran of that conflict as well, the closest thing to heroism he may have encountered in his presumably working-class life. Taken as a whole, it provides a portrait of men’s depressed state over their lost astro-status as |
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lords of the jungle and all its inhabitants, even Woody’s first words, "Reach for the skyyy" – voiced by Mr. Apollo 13, Tom Hanks – redolent of this peculiarly male fantasy of conquest and glory. This father’s dominion over the dark and disturbing outside world contrasts with Andy’s mother’s ruling of the cheerful and secure interior and casts him as the very source of evil in the film universe – not a devil, exactly, but maybe worse: he’s like a disinvolved God. (He might also represent the male self-image Andy is struggling to construct in his female-dominated experience, shadowy and as yet inaccessible.) After this encounter, Buzz experiences the ultimate fall when, deluded into thinking he can fly – and why can’t he? He does, after all, walk and talk freely, as no real toy can – he plummets off a railing, losing an arm in the process. There follows his greatest trial when Hannah, Sid’s timid and emotionally scarred sister, dresses him up in apron and hat and has him to tea with her two other, decapitated dolls. Woody’s horror on witnessing this scene confirms that yes, the former |
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| Space Ranger and sworn defender of the Alliance has been domesticated, reduced to socialization. Inebriated by tea and humiliation, Buzz bemoans his fate making nice with two women who have lost their heads to Sid’s cruelty when he has merely lost an arm to his own foolhardiness and oh! the castration |
| is too much. Woody rescues him and, back in Sid’s room, organizes the misfit toys into staging his and Buzz’s escape from the gothic Phillips house. That the toys have by now repaired Buzz’s arm balances Sid’s own, malevolent surgeries and demonstrates the positive transformative quality of the mutant unconscious. Their cooperative contrast to the snarky and strained communality of Andy’s room calls into doubt the latter’s dayworld as superior either structurally or constitutionally, their lack of a leader indicating the possibility of a society based rather on uniqueness, diversity and creativity than on the mass production and arbitrary favor which characterize Andy’s hierarchical world. (Paradoxically, they also yearn for conformity in their efforts to "fix" Buzz and two other toys Sid has disfigured.) Without the voices with which Andy’s toys are almost unanimously gifted, they reflect the debilitating influence of a remote and unreachable master who could permit such inequities as they experience to go on. | |||
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The larger political context for all this comes clear as the film replays many of the Cold War (and especially sci-fi) dramas of the last few decades when Sid intends to send Buzz up on The Big One – an explosive in the form of a model rocket – the next morning. Its phallicism recalls "Scud" and suggests it as |
| another, possibly nuclear, warhead, the alarm clock ticking away the hours till daybreak like the time bomb of so many ’50s thrillers, reminding us, as did those others, that our fate may soon be at hand. Of course, even this threat proves useful, however, after the toys stage a Freaks-style attack on Sid (his repentance the only real character transformation we see in the picture, he the only person who ever realizes the immanence of his toys – the soul-life of the world) when Buzz and Woody have to flee to catch up with the departing movers. Buzz’s final descent here, after "disarming" Scud, is restored to its heroic dimension (as was his first on-screen fall) as he disengages from the rocket that is their transport to the New World and the two drop through the moon-roof of Andy’s car into a box at his side. The message is the same as in those post-war potboilers (see, especially, Arch Oboler’s Five, THE SHRINKING MAN, Robot Monster, and The Last Woman on Earth): Whether it blows up or is disconnected – both happen here – man’s atomic ambition will ultimately lead him back to innocence and regeneration, a healthy Icarus fall ("We’re not flying," Buzz echoes Woody’s | |||
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earlier derogation; "we’re falling – with style!") that will leave all slightly humbled but the men, ridiculously, still in charge. We have yet to see if this will ever |
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be so, but the success of Toy Story in the marketplace suggests that this may be the will of at least a huge part of the population, for better or for worse.
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| action and corporate liability – increasing companies’ capacity to exploit the lower classes above whom they seem to hold themselves – his words have a cautionary ring, a self-congratulatory, bad-boy posturing that yet gets what it’s after and leaves its assistants in the dust with a surprisingly abrupt "Bye, |
| guys!" while
running ahead to meet its glory. In a disposable-toy universe, Woody
is no more loyal than his own father, Andy, who was himself abandoned
somehow by his dad, too – the real trickle-down
effect of the family economics.
There is a vestigial attachment in our culture to this unloving or invisible father figure, as to the romance of a god-given masculine priority, as suggested by the resurgence of such macho appurtenances as cigars and pickup trucks and reflected in the blustery, sports-related jargon of so much media today ("Life is a sport. Drink it up.") – all of which are, I hope, only the death-rattles of a dinosaur so big, as one writer has characterized, it doesn’t even know it’s dead yet, the message having taken so long to get from its heart all the way up to its tiny little brain. It’s a Toy Story because it’s trivialized, miniaturized, reduced to simple, mass-market terms and with intimations of planned obsolescence, but it also means that the story itself is a toy, a device to not only amuse but also to reflect, to promote identification and thus ego |
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growth. Since virtually all the toys here carry Boomer resonance – Slinky; Mr. Potatohead – the argument may be made that the passage is not only from one generation to the next – from those very Boomers to the Generation X of which marketers are so fond – but also backwards, in the same way that the great destination of Buzz and Woody is not maturation and growth (Sid’s reconfiguring domain), but reunion with the film’s childhood-symbol, Andy, albeit in a new location: a chance to start again. If there truly is such a thing as a dreaming universe, as Fred Alan Wolf puts forth in his book of the same name, then perhaps the world does want to see old images of conquering masculinity such as these two make way for a new, more nurturing profile, as the gift of |
| a puppy suggests
in the uh-oh conclusion to the drama. "Can you imagine," I once asked
a friend as he lofted his two-year-old above his head and I rolled
with him on the grass, "what kind of people we'd be if you and I had
been our fathers?" My own son used to watch Toy Story regularly, following an affection for the pig-movie Babe that saw that film playing in our house nearly every day for four or five months. Both will still be around, like the toys Andy drags from old house to new, and sometimes he’ll even ask for one or the other again, but they’re neither the adored fetish they once were; now it’s The Land Before Time and its own built-in limitation of the cataclysm that will eventually put an end to its dinosaur characters. But tomorrow, who knows? My wife and I sometimes wonder what motif will follow the train wallpaper and what it will reflect of the mental wallpaper he’s projecting now, but for the moment he can’t wait to inhabit this new place she, for the most part, is preparing for him, wrapped in the primary-colored fantasy |
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| of eternal progress –
eternal because going nowhere in particular, just going. He knows
little about meaning or patterning that he can tell us about, he just
watches what pleasures him and what maybe forms vague indices of the
dreams he holds for the future (which is only the present, to him:
a long, possibly eternal now). And I, as a father, watch him sometimes
and wonder if I can possibly address the stream of messages given
him each day about males and females and each their respective places
in society which I myself have invited into our home, our many-chambered
and communal mind. I don’t want to deprive him of the ability
to think great, heroic thoughts; I’m just glad Buzz realizes
he, Woody and I are each "falling," and hope it's with some style.
Maybe it’s enough that he knows that we, as reflected in two recent (and similar) film titles, Once Were Warriors; Once We Were Kings, and now, as men, can content ourselves with flying mostly in our dreams, as in our lovers’ arms. Our spaceship may be gone – irreparable, like Buzz’s – but what a wonderful planet this can be to be stranded on if you know how and agree to dream its dreams along with it; even dreams of obsolescence. |
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