Disney’s Dickens’s A Christmas Carol

If you watch the trailer or any one of three commercials for the forthcoming Disneyfication of A Christmas Carol, you’ll notice that the name Dickens is neither seen nor heard. The story is now “Disney’s A Christmas Carol.”

This sort of appropriation is offensive, especially when the appropriator is the very corporation that lobbied for the Copyright Term Extension Act (the piece of legislation that now frustrates American readers in search of the final volumes of In Search of Lost Time).

It might be possible to argue that “everyone” already knows of course that this story is Dickens’s, but that seems to me a stretch. What I see here is crass rebranding, with merchandise and promotional tie-ins to follow.

Note to Disney: don’t ever try it with Homer.

“Betty’s Graduation”

I recently made my way through the first two seasons of the 1950s television series Father Knows Best. I borrowed the DVDs on a lark (thanks, library), planning to take in some details of mid-twentieth-century furnishings and technology. I didn’t expect to like the show, which I’d come to imagine as the model for the bland world of Pleasantville (dir. Gary Ross, 1998). Laugh if you will, but I must say it: I like Father Knows Best.

Yes, Father Knows Best presents a colorless (that is, all-white) world — at least in its first two seasons.¹ And yes, Father Knows Best presents a world in which tradespeople and members of the working class are predictably quaint or wise or deferential or gruff. But Pleasantville it ain’t. Nor is it Leave It to Beaver. The Andersons — Jim (Robert Young), Margaret (Jane Wyatt), Betty (Elinor Donahue), Bud (Billy Gray), and Kathy (Lauren Chapin) — are smart and witty people. They say things that are genuinely funny, often at one another’s expense. They are far from simple and cheerful: Jim is a deeply fallible, poetry-loving father; Margaret, like Jim, is a college graduate, and she struggles with the limitations of life as a “housewife.” The kids are a handful: Betty, histrionically critical; Bud, moody and resentful; Kathy, maniacally energetic and, sometimes, destructive. The Anderson house is filled with books; its residents never (at least in the show’s first two seasons) go to church. I suspect that if Jim and Margaret’s makers had let these characters think about politics, they’d have voted for Adlai Stevenson.

What’s most surprising to me about the Anderson household is the unmistakable attraction between Jim and Margaret. Living in TV-land, they sleep separately, but one often sits on the side of the other’s bed. Away from their beds, they cannot keep their hands or lips off one another. Marriage here is far different from the chaste co-parenting of Ward and June Cleaver or Ozzie and Harriet Nelson. (And no wonder: Jane Wyatt is a looker.)

The most moving episode from these two seasons is the last episode of Season Two, “Betty’s Graduation,” directed by William D. Russell and written by Roswell Rogers. It first aired on May 30, 1956. Betty faces time’s passing and the end of high school with utter angst. She’d like her life to stay as it is: “I’d stop all the clocks. I’d padlock time,” she says. She decides to skip the graduation dance, because there’ll never be another to look forward to. Though she’s the class valedictorian, she misses the graduation rehearsal. Her parents don’t find out until they get a call from the school. And then, as Jim prepares to go out to look for her, there’s another call. It’s Betty. She’s taken a taxi and then walked to a little place along the stream in Sycamore Grove Park, her “thinking spot” whenever she had problems as a child. She’s calling from an emergency phone there. Jim and Betty reminisced about this place earlier in the episode. She used to ask him impossible questions there: “Who started God?” “How do they keep the sun from burning up the sky?”

“Oh, Father, I’m so mixed up," Betty now says. “I don’t know what I’m doing.” The taxi cost all the money she had, so Jim drives out to get her. He finds her by the stream. It looks the same, Betty tells him, but it doesn’t feel the same. It hasn’t changed, she realizes. She’s changed. Here is the dialogue that follows:

Jim: Didn’t it ever occur to you that’s exactly what life is — change? If something stopped changing, it wouldn’t be living anymore. It’s the changing that makes it stimulating, and exciting, challenging. This is nothing to be sad about. This is good.

Betty: Is it?

Jim: Sure. It’s, uh — well, it’s like this stream. Look at it. Watch it. See how it flows free and fast? Like it’s laughing, dancing on the rocks. There’s excitement there. Here the water’s fresh and clear, and alive, beautiful. But look down there at it where that old log has fallen into the water, dammed it up, slowed it down, shackled it. And what happens to the water? Is it fresh and clear? Muddy and murky. There’s no laughter. Lost the excitement of discovering what’s around the next bend, and the next one after that. Stop the water completely, and it becomes stagnant. You don’t want to do that to your life, do you?

Betty: This is all very pretty, Father, but you still don’t understand how I feel.

Jim: Oh?

Betty: Let’s take your pretty little stream. What happens to it when it goes where it eventually goes, into the ocean? What happens then? Gets all swallowed up, mixed up with billions of other drops of water, drops in the ocean, lost forever. Isn’t that right?

Jim: Well — just like the old days, you sitting on this bank, asking me all those darn questions.

Betty: In other words, I’m right —

Jim: Well —

Betty: — and there is no answer.

Jim: Look, let’s face it — I’m no poet, no philosopher. I’m just a guy who sells insurance. But I know you’re mixed up on one point. You think graduation is the end of the line, the point where the stream empties into the ocean. But it’s not. Graduation is back there, one of the first bends. The best part is still ahead.

Betty: How can you say that? Don’t you realize all I’m losing when I walk away from that school for the last time?

Jim: But Betty —

Betty: Things I can never, never regain.

Jim: Of course not. You don’t want to try to regain things. That spoils them. Just be grateful that you have wonderful memories. Now you want to move on, to new things. True, it’s rougher from here on, but that makes it more challenging. The reward’s greater. Look, I know that all this sounds to you just like words. I have something here that means more than anything I can say.

[He takes something from his pocket. It’s a book Kathy found in the attic, a book about a “dairy.” Jim began looking through it earlier in this episode, not knowing what it was.]

Betty: What’s that?

Jim: A book.

[He reads.] “June eighth: Last night I graduated from high school. No, not from high school, from life. I feel so lost it hurts, in the pit of my stomach. It’s all over, gone, all the things I loved, things I can never regain. Could I preserve these things by suddenly vanishing into thin air? Should I climb to the top of the steepest cliff and hurl” —

Betty: Go on.

Jim: The author never completed that sentence. The next entry explains why. [He reads.] “June ninth: Sorry we were interrupted yesterday, diary. But Jim called. We went on a picnic and had the most perfect time. We laughed over the silliest things. I can hardly wait till he calls today.”

[And Betty realizes that her mother too must have thought that she was alone in feeling this way.]

Jim: But that was on June the eighth. June the ninth was the important day.

Betty: You know, I feel like somebody just held a big mirror up to me, and suddenly I see this half-grown, awkward, gangling girl with pigtails who can’t see beyond the end of her nose.

Jim: Yeah, you’re a mess, all right.

As by now you’ve guessed, Jim’s stream metaphor becomes the stuff of Betty’s valediction.

I don’t think I’m wrong in finding this dialogue beautiful and moving (and even a bit Proustian). I’m sure my situation in life (as the father of two wonderful twenty-something children) has something to do with my tear-smeary response. But I think too that any reader or viewer willing to set aside preconceptions about 1950s television shows will find this moment surprisingly profound. Jim and Betty’s apparent agreement that individual lives travel toward an ocean in which they’re “lost forever” might be a unique moment in television comedy. I can think of nothing else like it.


[Elinor Donahue and Robert Young.]

¹ In Season Three, Margaret hires Frank Smith, a “Spanish” gardener (Natividad Vacío). In Season Five, an Indian exchange student (played by Rita Moreno) visits. In Season Six, Frank wins the chance to meet the governor at the dedication of a Springfield park, and the members of a city committee object. Jim insists that Frank represent the city. Frank does so, making a speech “in which he explains that people should emulate trees, who, no matter what variety, have all learned to grow together in harmony.”

My source for details of these later seasons: the original Screen Gems Storylines, reproduced as PDFs. The transcription of the Jim and Betty dialogue is mine.

Still to come: a post on the strangest episode from these two seasons. Stay tuned.

[Here it is: “A Woman in the House.”]

Today’s Beetle Bailey

[Beetle Bailey, October 17, 2009.]

Say what?

Thelonious Monk, off-balance

August Kleinzahler, in a review of Robin D. G. Kelley’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press):

Always a sharp dresser and stickler for just the right look, he also favored a wide array of unconventional headgear: astrakhan, Japanese skullcap, Stetson, tam-o’-shanter. He had a trickster sense of humor, in life and in music, and he loved keeping people off-balance in both realms. Off-balance was the plane on which Monk existed.

“Monk’s Moods” (New York Times)

Related posts
T. MONK'S ADVICE (1960)
Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane

Metaphors for life

A recent poll asked participants to pick the metaphor that best describes their life:

51%  a journey
11%  a battle
10%  the seasons
 8%   a novel
 6%   a race
 5%   a live performance, like a play
 4%   a carousel
 2%   other
 2%   unsure

Yep, Gilgamesh and the Odyssey rule.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Diane, Nadine

I had a question. I made a phone call. I was told to call again in the morning: “Ask for Diane.”

And then it was morning. I asked, “Diane?”

“Nadine.”

[Cheerfully.] “Oh, that’s almost the same!”

[Not cheerfully.] “Not at all.”

[More cheerfully.] “I mean the letters of your name!”

[Silence.]

And then I tried just asking my question.

[Note to self: reserve anagram thoughts for New York Times crosswords.]

The parsnip

Its flavor: light, earthy, mellow, sweet. Hail to thee, blithe parsnip!

[Elaine made a glorious vegetable stew last night that reminded how much I like the parsnip.]

Update: Parsnip fans should take a look at the comments for a soup recipe from Julia Ringma, who doesn’t believe in keeping recipes secret.

A cow on the tracks

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele offers an ill-chosen metaphor about impeding progress on health care reform: “I’m the cow on the tracks. You’re gonna have to stop that train to get this cow off the track to move forward.”

Well, no. There is the cow catcher:

A cow catcher is a device attached to the front of a train in order to clear obstacles off the track. . . . A cow catcher is typically a shallow, V-shaped wedge, designed to deflect objects from the track at a fairly high speed without disrupting the smooth movement of the train.

Related reading
All metaphor posts (via Pinboard)

Translations, mules, briars

Dwight Garner, writing in the New York Times:

The most plain, direct and noble translation of The Iliad into English, at least for that generation of college students who had it pressed into their lucky, sweaty palms, has long been Richmond Lattimore’s of 1951, though Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of 1974 and Robert Fagles’s of 1990 have their fierce adherents. Lattimore’s version, once read, doesn’t leave you: it is supple, unvarnished, morally complex and, in a word, thrilling.

It is unusual to find such words as plain, direct, and supple applied to Lattimore’s work. Here is Guy Davenport on Lattimore, in an essay I’d recommend to anyone who reads in translation. Davenport is writing about Lattimore’s Odyssey, but still, the shoe fits:

[H]e is writing in a neutralized English wholly devoid of dialect, a language concocted for the purpose of translating Homer. It uses the vocabulary of English but not its rhythm. It has its own idiom. One can say in this language such things as “slept in that place in an exhaustion of sleep” (for Homer’s “aching with fatigue and weary for lack of sleep”) and “the shining clothes are lying away uncared for” (for “your laundry is tossed in a heap waiting to be washed”).

Professor Lattimore adheres to the literal at times as stubbornly as a mule eating briars.

“Another Odyssey,” in The Geography of the Imagination (Jaffrey, NH: David R. Godine, 1997), 35.

My favorite translations of Homer: those of Robert Fitzgerald and Stanley Lombardo.

Related reading
All Homer posts (Pinboard)

Pocket notebook sighting

Policeman: What do you know about this?

Pharmacist: I never saw him before.

[Angels with Dirty Faces, dir. Michael Curtiz, 1938.]

More notebook sightings
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
Extras
Journal d’un curé de campagne
The House on 92nd Street
The Palm Beach Story
Pickpocket
Pickup on South Street
Red-Headed Woman
Rififi
The Sopranos