Last Saturday, daughter A. (about to turn 5 in a few weeks) and
I, finding ourselves alone and ready for a treat, went to see Boxtrolls, in the theater. It’s possible that this
is the second movie she’s ever consented to staying for the whole thing.
Maleficent was too scary, Winnie the Pooh too boring, and, of course, Frozen
was the other winner. A. did find this
movie quite terrifying in parts, but I was able to convince her to stay, and
thankfully, she missed her nap at pre-K today so she actually fell asleep
tonight.
The movie is about a boy who is raised by trolls who live
their lives in boxes, like hermit crabs. (note: if you’re interested in maintaining
any narrative suspense to the movie, read this after you see it). The movie takes for granted that this is not
remarkable, so you don’t get any backstory about how they choose their boxes
(the father figure troll is named “fish” because he wears a fish box; the boy
is named “egg” because he wears a box that had once carried eggs, and so on).
Whatever the circumstances that lead to their fantastical underground
existence, a villain appears whose mission it is to exterminate the box trolls
in exchange for the white hat of the powerful cheese eaters. The irony is that our
villain is actually allergic to cheese, and his morally ambivalent henchmen
(who turn good at the end) have to bleed him with leaches to bring him back to
sanity him every time he eats cheese.
Like all of us, he
wants something that’s just not good for him. That it takes place in an island
kingdom focused on cheese is one of the less strange parts of it.
In any case, drama ensues, and the boy finds out, with the
help of a plucky young girl (daughter of the cheese obsessed white hat
kingpin), that he’s not actually a troll, but a boy. He can
take his box off.
The climax of the movie comes when the boy discovers that
the villain is about to crush his box family to death (we find out along the
way that his father gave him to the trolls to save him—they are the only family
he’s ever known). The boy—Eggs—has found their evil lair and is thrilled to
discover they’re alive, but then is captured before he can get them out safely.
Watching from a cage hanging over them,
he entreats them to leave their boxes and flee to safety. “You make you! You
make you! You can leave! You can be safe!” He shouts at them but the villain
crushes the boxes, insisting they’ll never change.
It’s the perfect
American story.
I’ve always had a problem with that glowing, individualist
“you make you” insistence. We made us,
we insist on Columbus day, erasing violence and illness and theft against those
who were America before it was America. We made us, we insist on Thanksgiving, invoking
happy helpful Native Americans who saved our lives.
Sure you make you, sure, you “think therefore you are,” but
so much of the “you,” for good as well as for ill, is made by your
circumstances, the people you know and how you find yourself in the world. Circumstance makes who you are. Circumstance
makes how you think, it makes the very categories you have to see. My white middle class ordained Episcopal
priest heterosexually married mother of two perch in the world makes it impossible to see from anywhere else. I
will always be that woman. I didn’t make that. I became that. I didn’t make my
Swedish mother who taught me to be suspicious of jingoistic patriotism and I
didn’t make my academic father who understands himself so much as a teacher
that a month after retiring he told his university he’d come back and do it for
free. They helped to make me. My
childhood friends, my college, my seminary—all of them, for good and ill, left
their fingerprints, and bruises. We’ve
all been made, tossed out into the world and left to wander. Certainly there is meaning and grace and manna
in the wilderness; we don’t wander alone. Sometimes it’s the things we weren’t taught by someone else that
makes us all the more motivated to figure them out ourselves. But you? You didn’t exactly make you.
The boxtroll boy Eggs didn’t make himself. The other
boxtrolls made him who he is. His father, knowing where safe passage could be
had in giving him to the trolls, made him who he is.
Except that attitude will also crush us.
Whether they are the scars of our childhoods, the pain of
our own errors, or the cruelty of others, living bound to the path the past has
set us on leaves us all sitting trolls bound for the furnace.
As a Christian, I’m aware that forgiveness has a lot to do
with this. Forgiveness of ourselves, forgiveness of others. The thing is, not
only is it hard to do, it’s also hard to understand what forgiveness is in the
first place. A parishioner who’s preaching for our service for domestic
violence awareness month says “Forgiving
myself for my mistakes was not the same thing as blaming myself for the abuse.
It was just a step in the process toward healing.” It may sound a little trite to say it’s
hardest to forgive yourself first, but it really is. This is where, to Christian spiritual/religious
types, Jesus might come in. to know that in the life of Jesus it was possible
to return peace in the face of violence, it makes it possible for us to do so
as well. There is a transcendent power of love in the universe that makes freedom
possible. We are forgiven, but we can’t
forgive others until we believe this ourselves. This is joint work with God;
God’s not going to swoop in, a la Glenda the good witch, and wave a magic wand
to fix things, but when we long to mend what is broken, God will always be with
us.
So forgive. It’s your chance for making you.
Don’t get sent to the furnace.
note: lovely as it is that the trailer for the movie begins
“Some kids have two moms, some kids have two dads, some kids are raised by
trolls,” the villain’s drag queen alter ego is a little sketchy.
1 comment:
I read the book several years ago - 'Here Be Monsters.'
Seem like they made some changes, I don't remember it being THAT violent.
All the same I wanted to ask - i's a trilogy, were the Cabbageheads in this movie?
If not, and they're in the sequel, will you go easier on the Cabbageheads? They're not meant to be chimeras for our socio-political angst, they're just spooky kid stuff, with heads of Cabbage.
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