Last year, I had the privilege of attending a signing and reading by Neil Gaiman.  He mentioned Mirrormask, an independent film that he wrote and Dave McKean directed.  It is a family movie, he explained, but he defines the term differently than many in the popular culture.  Gaiman noted that we don’t have to make bad art to make good family movies–in other words, we don’t have to dumb down a movie, a book, a song, whatever to ensure that everyone, even the kids, will "get" it.  Nor, for that matter, do we have to tread the route of this year’s Disney atrocity Chicken Little–inane slapstick jokes for the kids, double entendres for the adults.*  We simply have to make good art that is accessible and acceptable to all family members.

Because I try to avoid "family movies" and bad children’s books, I won’t bother analyzing them further.  Instead, I’d like to point out one book series that has it correct: Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.  I have read the first three, and I’m already impressed.  Snicket (whose name isn’t really that, but I’m too lazy to look up his real name) knows more about story structure and literary themes than many authors of "grown-up" (for lack of a better term) novels.  In the second novel of the series, The Reptile Room, the narrator interjects to explain dramatic irony.  He does so after the Baudelaire orphans’ latest guardian, a specialist in the study of snakes, says, "I promise that if you take time to learn the facts, no harm will come to you here in the Reptile Room" (31).  The narrator notes, after his explanation, that upon reading this utterance, "we should be experiencing the strange feeling that accompanies the arrival of dramatic irony" (32).  For, no matter how good things look now, "you and I know that soon Uncle Monty will be dead and the Baudelaires will be miserable once again" (33).  This sort of language is practically anathema in most "family" or "children’s" literature–not so much the death part, but the inevitable doom part.  Every ending must be a happy one, as if children cannot handle seeing failure or despair.  Snicket repudiates this trend in the first sentence of the first, aptly titled volume, The Bad Beginning: "If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book" (1).  He is true to his word: at the end of the first three novels, they are swindled by the evil Count Olaf, who escapes the authorities each time due to the incompetence of adults.  Snicket reinterprets the unhappy ending, though.  In each of the novels, one gets the feeling that although the Baudelaire children are not happy–in a strict sense of the word–they have grown closer together.  At the end of the third novel, The Wide Window, "To  have each other in the midst of their unfortunate lives felt like having a sailboat in the middle of a hurricane, and to the Baudelaire orphans this felt very fortunate indeed" (214).  The remarkable aspect, for me, about this ending is that it doesn’t sink to the level of triteness; it avoids this trait common to other family/children’s literature by acknowledging continued struggle. 

Children, like adults, are intelligent beings who know that their struggles are real and that their struggles will not end succinctly.  Therefore, children are not to be talked down to.  Snicket achieves this first by assuming that both his young and older readers can, if good explanation is given, understand advanced vocabulary and literary themes.  Then, he ends his novels not as cliffhangers but as representations of real life–real life that never ceases to become a struggle.  I am reminded of another family novel, one that could be called a commentary on the way we tell stories to children: William Goldman’s The Princess Bride.  Goldman’s novel, like Snicket’s series, is filled with both advanced satire and good humor.  It also ends similar to Snicket’s novels.  After the heroes have rescued the beautiful princess (you more or less know the story, even if you haven’t read this particular rendition of it), they "live happily ever after."  At least, that’s how it’s originally told to the fictional narrator.  The narrator explains that the real ending has everything go right for a moment just before everything goes wrong again in one sentence before it ends in ellipses.  Then the narrator makes an aside, explaining the ending is a "Lady or the Tiger?" type, and he would choose the Lady.  "But that doesn’t mean," he explains further, "I think they had a happy ending either" (283).  Their happiness would be interrupted by squabbles and aging, bad fights and bad wine.  I think Goldman is right, and I think Snicket is right–though only Goldman, between the two, is directly making the point.  And I think Gaiman was right too.  We don’t have to dumb things down to appeal to families–if anything, literature written for the whole family needs to be filled with the stuff of real life, turned on its head so that we can recognize it easier.  Mirrormask, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and The Princess Bride resonate with families not because they fool us into believing a lie, but because they tell us a great truth–we can succeed with each other’s help, so long as we realize there will be struggles thereafter, and thereafter.

*One of the characters, an aloof pig, is a Barbra Streisand and Bee Gees fan, and is seen dancing to Elton John during the credits.  Is any adult unsure about what they’re suggesting?  Can any kid get the joke?

Works cited:

Goldman, William. The Princess Bride. New York: Del Rey, 1973.

Snicket, Lemony. The Bad Beginning. New York: Harper,  1999.

———-. The Reptile Room. New York: Harper, 1999.

———-. The Wide Window. New York: Harper, 1999.

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