Adults are right to let Bambi break the bad news

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/17/adults-bambi-childrens-films-death

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Why does death feature in children’s films and stories as much as it does? Even if death isn’t the main storyline, as in Cinderella, the gloom of Cinders having lost her mother and being largely unprotected in the world is pretty scary.

A group of researchers watched 45 of the top-grossing children’s animated films, and compared them with the most popular action movies aimed at adults, noting how often a main character was killed. The study, conducted by University College London and the University of Ottawa, and published in the British Medical Journal, found that about two-thirds of children’s animated films depict the death of a main character as opposed to half in movies aimed at adults.

This isn’t new; the enculturation of children has always included the inevitability of death. Take ancient children’s rhymes. Even if death isn’t absolutely referred to, it often feels present. For example: Rock-a-bye, baby, on the tree top / When the wind blows, the cradle will rock / When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall / And down will come cradle, baby and all.

I would hazard a guess that we dish out all this death to kids to warn them that life isn’t for ever. And we try to do it as gently as we can, so that they feel warned that the inevitable tragedy of life is more than just a concept: it really happens, and it will happen to us all.

In my experience as a psychotherapist, although we know we are going to die, realising this on a deep emotional level doesn’t happen until we have witnessed the demise of our parents or other people we have loved, which for most is not until we’re middle aged.

I’d like you to do an experiment now. Remember when Dame Kelly Holmes won her two gold medals at the Athens Olympics and she did a lap of honour, when she held the flag aloft and her eyes were popping out with glee? Relive the moment as you saw it on television. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were feeling a bit emotional right now. What is happening is, your mirror neurons are firing in the same part of your brain as Holmes’s neurons were, in hers. You have an inkling about what she is feeling because your brain, by looking at her, is a mirror for what she is feeling.

It is for the same reason that you feel sad when you watch Bambi come to terms with the death of his mother. Not that a cartoon character has actual neurons – but try telling that to your unconscious. And the animators who made Bambi so sad depict emotion with such realism that you appear to feel some of the sadness apparently felt by Bambi, just by watching it; you may cry, even as an adult.

What films such as Bambi do is give you practice at feeling a certain emotion. You will learn on a bodily level that you can feel sadness, and that it will pass. You can even enjoy the sadness because another part of you tells you it is just a film.

I sometimes call crying at a film “an emotional workout”. You are practising feeling a strong emotion but it isn’t quite the real thing. Instead what you learn from this workout is that you can feel things, and they pass. So when you experience your first real bereavement and feel desperately sad, you will know that, however deeply you hurt, this feeling will diminish. You will float in and out of it, and eventually it may shrink so small that most of the time it feels as if it has passed altogether.

Before we had films, we had poetry. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote Spring and Fall for a young girl to break it to her that sadness is an inevitable part of life: Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving? ...as the heart grows older / It will come to such sights colder.

By doing this, he is considering Margaret’s real emotion and taking it seriously even though, as a grown up, he knows that leaves dying in the autumn are not something to be particularly sad about. But he is also telling her that sadness is part of life, and in the future she will find something other than leaves to cry about. Taking her seriously like this will be of more comfort to her than to deny her feeling.

When we are sad, and other people feel the same with us, it benefits us both because we connect with one another. We do this when we all watch a film together and share the emotions of the film. The unleaving in Margaret’s case is Uncle Pastuzo’s demise in Paddington. Something childish, perhaps; but a feeling is a real thing.

Bambi loses his mother; Paddington loses his parents and his uncle. As they experience losses and we feel with them, and as they recover and life goes on, we learn that we may be able to recover as well.

Except from death itself: if we are the one in the cradle that falls, we will never recover from that. If you are younger you’ll probably have to hear this many times, and in many forms, before you eventually realise that you can’t dodge every bullet.

So let’s talk about death. Let’s have a service for that ex-pet hamster rather than simply buying a new identical one. Don’t shy away from watching sad children’s films. We all need an emotional workouts from time to time, and we need to know we can recover from them.

Life is a long journey of rupture and repair, and films can help us learn about the emotions that carry us through it – to its end. Don’t forget the end.