Tuesday, September 12, 2006

30 Year Secret Revealed

Recently a friend of mine was able to tell me exactly when he learned about death as a child. I had no idea when I learned about it. I recalled a time when I was very small and I couldn't sleep because I was crying with the heavy burden of guilt. I had opened up a robin's egg because I had to know what was inside. I felt so terrible about this. That was the earliest related thing I could think up.

However, a revelation came to me the other day. I was flipping channels and the movie version of Watership Down was on TV. I saw this movie in the seventies when I was a wee lassie. There is a massive death to a rabbit warren and (this movie is a cartoon) there was an image of dead rabbits floating down lots of tunnels.

It was completely startling to me because one of the two recurrent dreams I had as a gradeschooler was of friends of mine and I all slithering down these sewer-like tunnels that somehow I associated with the river behind our house... and I knew it was bad and meant death. It was a simple but scary nightmare. (The other recurrent dream involved a parade, Humpty Dumpty, and a fabric warehouse...that one might need more therapy to decipher...) The movie Watership Down probably came out around the time my first relative -- my grandfather -- died, too.

After I made this connection while watching the movie I thought about how nicely that movie deals with death as hand in hand with life, both in it's sudden extremes and the inevitability of joining that black rabbit in the sky. Kids today are allowed to see all kinds of gory violence but not generally to have to deal thoughtfully with the concept of death. It seems healthy and yet I had recurrent nightmares from it. Hmm.

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3 Comments:

At 9:23 PM, Anonymous Aaron said...

My only memory of Watership Down (which may not even be accurate!) is a tide of blood engulfing a field. It creeped me out when I was little and seems to have prevented me from apprehending anything else about the movie.

I also thought The Rats Of NIMH was eerie, but that was supposed to be, wasn't it?

 
At 10:59 PM, Blogger bethany said...

Yeah...I remember mainly that NIMH was someplace bad, and was confused while writing a donation check to the NIMH a couple of years ago in the name of a friend's sister who was schitzophrenic and had recently died.

 
At 3:40 PM, Anonymous michele said...

I am slowly introducing Andrew, who is nearly 2, to kids movies. And along with the Toy Story and Cars, I have been showing his some oldies, like Robin Hood (with the singing rooster) and The Land that Time Forgot (which has, like, five sequels.) Oh yeah, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, too.
After watching these with him, I had a terrible nightmare that I was in the movie Pinocchio .. the whole circus thing and being left behind was/is just terrifying for me. How is that a good story for a child?

 

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