Wrinkle In Time
Mar. 11th, 2018 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraI can't remember now whether I met Meg Murry or Nita Callahan first. By the time I was ten or so, they were the two most important characters to me I would ever meet (plus Valancy Stirling and Anna Newland later). I spent a lot of time when I was younger being angry about L'Engle giving Meg a zillion children and a supporting role and letting Calvin have the recognition and career... and then time when I was older thinking about the fact that just like Meg I too had abandoned all my childhood potential to be a mom and never accomplish anything. Honestly I'm still thinking about that. Whether it's comforting to have Meg here with me, or still too much of a betrayal, what it means that L'Engle left her there and who she might have done that for.
The Wrinkle In Time movie got me right in the personal history, right from the start, with Dad Murry's demonstration of Chladni figures (the vibrating sand) and the hexaflexagon. My dad, and every one of his four younger brothers and sisters, did a science project on Chladni figures with my grandfather - it was like the family science project, handed down when you got to whatever grade. It was offered to me but I didn't want to do it, I came up with my own idea that didn't work very well (about paper decomposition with varying soil moisture level - my parents still talk about the four reeking bins of dirt in the garage) and then ended up doing a different one of my grandfather's old projects the next year, about Liesegang rings, which also didn't work very well but involved some cool bench science (plus a dichromate exposure that, well, so far so good...). Hexaflexagons were also a big thing with the same grandfather... he had this machined metal strip that was the right width to get the folds right, if you wrapped an adding-machine tape around it, I think it was... anyways, you could hardly pick two better images to hit me right in the "science as a generational enterprise" feels, this difficult thing wrestled with by Meg and me.
To be clear, that's not what movie-Meg wrestles with in the actual movie, which is mostly about loving yourself and trusting/believing in the love of others. Which I thought it did beautifully, the whole emotional arc really worked for me (and we are absolutely at a cultural point when a Black girl shouting "I deserve to be loved" is the climax we need.) I didn't really have any negative reactions to anything, althoughglassonion pointed out that we never actually see Mom Murry in the lab, with her iconic microscope or Bunsen burner, which is a huge and stupid omission, grrr. I liked the re-imagining of the final confrontation as taking place in a giant brain (or at least somewhere vaguely neuronal) instead of with a giant brain, and I liked the move of the names to the denouement (and the addition of women), and I liked the ladies, and I missed Aunt Beast, but, like my 8yo said, how were they going to do the whole "planet with no eyes" thing in a movie? I thought the Meg-Calvin scenes were very sweetly played, really good chemistry, and I didn't mind Mr. Jenkins being less of an asshole (although I guess it would make his movie-two redemption less dramatic), and, you know, I got the thing I really wanted out of it, which was to make the 8yo read it and then take her and get to hear what she thought. (Because books are a generational enterprise...) I don't think she'll remember it as an important or special outing with her mom... we ran into one of her friends there, so, if anything, she'll remember it for that... but it was special for me. I spent a lot of time last year wondering if the world would last long enough for me to get to take my kid to this movie, and it did, and, like, there's Meg again, making it through Swiftly Tilting Planet. (I really didn't understand, as a kid being let down by Arm, how grateful she must have been just that the world survived for her to have all those kids. Who cares *what* degree she has or doesn't have, seriously.)
The Wrinkle In Time movie got me right in the personal history, right from the start, with Dad Murry's demonstration of Chladni figures (the vibrating sand) and the hexaflexagon. My dad, and every one of his four younger brothers and sisters, did a science project on Chladni figures with my grandfather - it was like the family science project, handed down when you got to whatever grade. It was offered to me but I didn't want to do it, I came up with my own idea that didn't work very well (about paper decomposition with varying soil moisture level - my parents still talk about the four reeking bins of dirt in the garage) and then ended up doing a different one of my grandfather's old projects the next year, about Liesegang rings, which also didn't work very well but involved some cool bench science (plus a dichromate exposure that, well, so far so good...). Hexaflexagons were also a big thing with the same grandfather... he had this machined metal strip that was the right width to get the folds right, if you wrapped an adding-machine tape around it, I think it was... anyways, you could hardly pick two better images to hit me right in the "science as a generational enterprise" feels, this difficult thing wrestled with by Meg and me.
To be clear, that's not what movie-Meg wrestles with in the actual movie, which is mostly about loving yourself and trusting/believing in the love of others. Which I thought it did beautifully, the whole emotional arc really worked for me (and we are absolutely at a cultural point when a Black girl shouting "I deserve to be loved" is the climax we need.) I didn't really have any negative reactions to anything, although
glassonion pointed out that we never actually see Mom Murry in the lab, with her iconic microscope or Bunsen burner, which is a huge and stupid omission, grrr. I liked the re-imagining of the final confrontation as taking place in a giant brain (or at least somewhere vaguely neuronal) instead of with a giant brain, and I liked the move of the names to the denouement (and the addition of women), and I liked the ladies, and I missed Aunt Beast, but, like my 8yo said, how were they going to do the whole "planet with no eyes" thing in a movie? I thought the Meg-Calvin scenes were very sweetly played, really good chemistry, and I didn't mind Mr. Jenkins being less of an asshole (although I guess it would make his movie-two redemption less dramatic), and, you know, I got the thing I really wanted out of it, which was to make the 8yo read it and then take her and get to hear what she thought. (Because books are a generational enterprise...) I don't think she'll remember it as an important or special outing with her mom... we ran into one of her friends there, so, if anything, she'll remember it for that... but it was special for me. I spent a lot of time last year wondering if the world would last long enough for me to get to take my kid to this movie, and it did, and, like, there's Meg again, making it through Swiftly Tilting Planet. (I really didn't understand, as a kid being let down by Arm, how grateful she must have been just that the world survived for her to have all those kids. Who cares *what* degree she has or doesn't have, seriously.)
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Date: 2018-03-13 02:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-13 03:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-14 12:10 pm (UTC)I had to deal with this kind of thing less directly since my mother was openly against my being a lawyer (money quote: "You're too creative"). I don't know how my brother feels about it.