They Kill Spiders Don’t They?

A couple years ago, armed with three juice boxes and a Ziploc bag full of Cheerios, Lauren and I took our niece to see Piglet’s Big Movie.  It was cute and fun and all.  The only thing that bothered me was that about five minutes from the end, there’s a point where you think Pooh and Piglet are dead!  Seriously, the entire cast cries for like thirty seconds because they assume Pooh and Piglet have just plummeted over a waterfall to their deaths.

I couldn’t believe they would put something that intense and traumatic into a kids movie.  But then I had a conversation with my sister about the movies we loved growing up, and it occurred to me that if kids were traumatized by Pooh and Piglet’s temporary demise, they would get royally screwed up by the things we used to watch.

Take for example Charlottes Web.  What a depressing ninety minutes that was.  A pig who fights to not be slaughtered only to have his best friend die in the end.  Now I know the movie was based on a book so I can’t really blame the filmmakers.  But then again, in E.B. White’s version you didn’t actually see Charlotte die.  It was just kind of understood.  But in the cartoon she sings the saddest most nostalgic song ever, and then on the last note, exhales her terminal breath and wilts.  Cut to a close up of Wilbur crying.  “Charlotte?  Charlotte?  CHARLOTTE!”  Then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, all of Charlotte’s children run away!

Dot and the Kangaroo was about a little girl lost in the Australian Outback who is befriended by, you guessed it, a talking Kangaroo.  Kangaroo protects Dot from dingoes, the weather and even a freaky monster called the Bunyip.  When Dot finally finds her way home, she’s eager to introduce Kangaroo to her family.  But by the time she runs back to the forest, Kangaroo has run away.  The entire ending credit sequence shows Kangaroo hopping through the forest while over the soundtrack you hear little Dot crying, “Kangawoo… Kangawoo…  Oh Kangawoo…”  Luckily for my sister and me, our parents didn’t keep a gun or straight razors in the house.

E.T. abandons Elliot.  Willy Wonka yells at Charlie.  Amalthea becomes the only unicorn to know regret.  Atreyu’s horse dies and Fantasia is destroyed.  The rats of N.I.M.H. were just plain dark and depressing.  And Luke realizes that the love of his life is actually his sister.  Seriously, was it some kind of massive, collective cocaine withdrawal that inspired Hollywood to depress the crap out of us kids in the seventies and early eighties?

Or were they trying to do us a favor?  Maybe we needed that sense of reality.  Maybe Hollywood knew there were lessons we needed to learn.  People die, endings aren’t always happy, and friends will screw you over the second something better comes along.  It’s probably easier to learn about death by watching a cartoon spider wilt in a barn than by watching Grandma wilt in her bed.  Are we doing our kids a disservice by making every movie unrealistically happy with singing bears, dancing vegetables and big red dogs?  Maybe Pooh and Piglet should have gone over that waterfall.  Maybe Nemo should have stayed lost.  Maybe rather than singing cheerfully alongside Pocahontas’s people, the white men should have stayed true to history and slaughtered them.

Hey, maybe this is the answer to ending school shootings.  Not less violence in movies—more violence.  More depressing, horrifying, make-you-afraid-to-cry-in-front-of-your-friends violence.  Let’s have less vegetables dancing and more spiders wilting.  That’s what me and my friends grew up on, and you know what—none of us ever shot one of our buddies.  We knew what death was.  It wasn’t a glorified spectacle to us.  It was a loyal spider wilting!

Will I let my daughter watch the movies I grew up with?  I may have never killed anybody, but I sure had a lot of nightmares that I apparently never got over.  I don’t know if she should have to deal something as heavy as watching Charlotte wilt or listening to Dot cry for three straight minutes.  Maybe I’ll just edit the last four and a half minutes out of Piglet’s Big Movie then take her out for ice cream to mourn.