the wisdom of bambi

If I could take back one thing that happened this past weekend, it would be this.  On Saturday morning, while my sister was sleeping, her 5-year-old daughter was engaged in that glorious American childhood pastime: watching cartoons.  When I asked what she watched, she replied, "55," meaning she was plugged into the Disney channel, mainlining princesses, or so I thought.  Instead, sitting there in her puffy pink chair, she watched Bambi in its entirety.

That is what I would take back, switching the channel to almost anything else, any show or movie that doesn't feature the death of the mommy.  Of course, the absence of a parent figure is a central requirement of kid lit and movies -- after all, how else do kids get to be heroes, have adventures, except when the parents are out of the way? -- but still: I would have had her watching something else, anything but Bambi.

I vividly remember taking my sisters to see Bambi at the United Artists theater at Stonestown in the summer of 1975, the year Disney re-released the film.  Carlita herself, at 5 1/2 by then, was just a little older than Elizabeth is now.  I can still feel how I felt, standing outside the theater in the sun waiting for our ride home, trying to talk them both into feeling better about the mother's death, about it not being real, shifting the focus instead to the darling Thumper, to the darling Flower, to the darling anything at all to change the subject occupying their minds.

At 12, I felt bad about the decision to take my sisters to see Bambi.  But I'd never seen it myself so couldn't have known just how scared they'd be when the fire is consuming the forest, how heartbroken when Bambi's mother is killed by hunters.  The movie is both charming and brutal, a combination I totally appreciate now but which I wished I hadn't taken my little sisters to.  And which I wish my niece hadn't seen on Saturday.  Not yet.  

Afterward when she was talking about it, her father kept interrupting her to point out that it was a story, that stories were sometimes sad and sometimes happy, that stories aren't real.  I was biting my tongue and wishing he'd let her finish her sentence, so we could hear her interpretation instead of assuming. She's so little -- she knows her mama is sick, but she doesn't know yet that she won't get better.  It's entirely possible, so possible, that for her the movie is something totally separate from her own life, from her own experience, that she was never even making a connection... 

There's so much great stuff in Bambi -- so many great lines of dialogue, so many pretty images of the animals - I just think Saturday was too soon for my niece to go there, to that place where the mom is gone.  The thing is that Bambi is a movie that tells the truth in a lot of ways -- life is tough, people die, hunters kill animals, and yet through all of that you have friendship and love.  I'm just not sure my niece is ready, old enough, for the truth yet.  I am wishing her happy stories right now, since the story she is living is sad enough, plenty of sorrow for reals already and more, a whole lot more, still to come.