Because I have to run out and get some things for the wife’s birthday while she’s out treating herself to one of them expensive haircuts broads are always justifying (“But look at the fine detail along the feathered edge, here, where she’s tapered it. I mean, she used a straight razor there, for Chrissakes!”), I am just going to point you to this piece by the National Review’s John Miller, published in yesterday’s Opinion Journal, on the forthcoming Hollywood adaptation of Curious George. From “Curious George Goes Hollywood”:
[…] the challenges of adapting Curious George are in fact a bit more complex. Earnest literary types have interpreted the first book as a barely disguised slave narrative. Have you considered that the man’s weird outfit could be a send-up of a colonial officer’s uniform? Or that George is brown and lacks a tail? (Lots of monkeys are brown and most species have visible tails.) Or that he is abducted against his will from Africa and brought across the sea to a foreign land where he engages in high jinks when the master is away?
This interpretation–surely the subject of many half-baked teacher-college lectures–was not on the mind of the Reys as they fled from the Nazis. Perhaps it is helpful to remember something that Margret once said of her books: “I don’t like messages. . . . These are just stories.”
Except that this isn’t really true. The final Curious George book actually authored by the Reys–“Curious George Goes to the Hospital”–was written to convince children that they needn’t fear the patient ward. It’s closer in spirit to a plainly therapeutic book such as “The Berenstain Bears Go to the Doctor” than the original tale in its own series.
Even earlier than that, however, the books displayed a form of social consciousness: In the 1942 British edition, Curious George was renamed Zozo. The publisher objected to the monkey’s name because George VI sat on the throne and, in London slang, “curious” meant “gay.”
Today’s Hollywood probably would be more comfortable making the Man in the Yellow Hat an out-and-proud homosexual than an exploiter of the animal kingdom. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, especially if producer Ron Howard and his crew deliver an entertaining movie. When it comes to children’s books, however, the film industry’s track record does not provide much confidence. For every movie such as “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”–an affectionately faithful adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s book–there’s a wretched disfiguration, such Mr. Howard’s own 2000 version of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
Curious George is famous for making mischief. Filmmakers, for their part, must learn that sometimes it’s best to leave well enough alone.
About six weeks ago, I discussed this very topic—tying the Curious George lectures I used to give to my honor’s students to several ongoing recent discussions (which continue, sadly) over the “racism” that may or may not be implicit in King Kong—in order to touch on ideas of meaning-making, interpretation, intentionalism, and the role the receiver of a text plays in defining what is taken to be the endpoint of a speech act (a role I believe they have usurped, deconstructed, and made logically incoherent, causing innumerable social problems that are now structurally embedded in our culture).
In case you missed that piece the first time, here it is. I also tried to find Mr. Miller’s email to send him a link to the original post, but alas, no luck. And I doubt very much that The Corner’s Rich Lowry took seriously my request to please pass it along.
At any rate, I’d be interested to get your responses. For now, though, I have to go find myself a nice chocolate cake.
(h/t Pillage Idiot)
My response: “To a man who has nothing but a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.
OK, I probably didn’t get that exactly right. But, I couldn’t figure how to “google†it to get the exact quote. But, the good news is, I never knew how many kinds of really neat hammers you could order on line!
Chocolate cake, eh? You mean chocolate like New Orleans? RACIST!!! No, wait… was that racist? I forget the current score.
TW: Property. JUST WHAT ARE YOU IMPLYING, SLAVE TRADER?!
King Kong is speciest gorilla p0rn – unless it’s just a story about a monkey. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference. Now a sweating armadillo bent over a football – that would be a movie. Or a football game.
Time to get the beer.
Smear the icing up a bit with a knife, maybe pushing the top layer slightly askew. Then rub a few bread crumbs into a couple cake pans, throw them in the dishwasher, then wrap the Carvel box in a brown paper bag and put it at the bottom of the trash can and cover the bag with used coffee grounds. (oh and warm the oven up a bit too, then turn it off).
Hurry.
Crap, might as well just bake the damn cake…
I doubt, though I could be wrong, that Jeff’s wife wants Armadillo flavored cake on her birthday…
So. Huh. I guess the monkey’s back, then?
Armadillo, we barely knew ye…
mmmm …. chocolate cake
I didn’t see King Kong, but would it be racist of me to compare this to this?
Just asking.
Ever see the movie “Pink Flamingos”? The scene where Crackers has sex with his girlfriend and a chicken? Replace the chicken with a chocolate cake and that’ll be the Goldsteins tonight! Yeah, baby. Yeah!
As Chef (South Park) would say: “Jeff’s gonna be makin’ sweet love”.
I posted this quote years ago, on alt.quotations; sorry I don’t have a more exact cite for it.
Political criticism, including the sociology that now calls itself cultural materialism, converts Freud’s analytical suspicions into political ones….The poem is read as if it were covering something up, as if it were an alibi that is rather too fluent to be entirely trusted. And as befits an alibi, the critic responds forensically and “interrogates” the text for those moments in which the poem seems to be displaying its stresses; where, in effect, it is sweating…. Having found these moments, the critic then announces that the _real_ subject of the poem is this anxiety, or the struggle to hide this anxiety. Forget daffodils, nightingales, autumn: they are not what lyric poems mean, not what they are about. Political criticism merely makes the anxieties political, which will be anxieties about the fact that it is a poem and not a piece of writing pursuing justice. Having been caught out, the poem is truimphantly led off in golden chains; the detective writes up his report in hideous prose, making sure to flatter himself a bit, and then goes home to a well-deserved drink.
–James Wood
Saw the Miller piece yesterday and immediately thought of you Jeff. I meant to email you the link, but then I um, er, uh, what was the question?
The monkey tail thing is a nice example of the worst of “criticism.”
My having actually drawn some cartoons disqualifies my opinion, I realize, but the reason Curious George didn’t have a tail is because it would have made every frame of his adventures into a hide-the-tail exercise for the artist (otherwise the viewer’s eye is too drawn to it, because the difference between a cartoon monkey and a cartoon kid is really only a tail to subconsciously stare at). <â€â€Nice grammar, smartypants.
It’s a solution to a compositional problemâ€â€like almost every badge of guilt the “critical” finds. Of course, only someone who’s ever actually tried to make something can see it without “reading” it. What’s evoked in the reader isn’t slavery (or whatever), but not-staring-at-a-tail-ery (which not-[…] makes for easier sympathy with the monkey).
Alsoâ€â€what James Wood said, but with a “fuckface” and a “bitch-ass” thrown in somewhere.
Howard Cosell could not be reached for comment, but I’m sure he would have said something like “Look at that monkey run.”
My favorite George, though, was from Mad TV, where the man in the yellow coat was really running an animal testing lab (Mary Kay mascara, watching Mad TV a la Clockwork Orange, etc.). George helped turned the tables on the man and the animals extracted their revenge. One of the last lines was “Even the gerbil found a new home.”
The way George Looney slimed Joe McCarthy was shameless. Typical liberal shamelessness. It’s a sad to see the way the name McCarthy is dragged through the dirt, almost reflexively, by those who know nothing about what he did or what he stood for. The portrayal of Senator Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism. Liberals weren’t cowering in fear during the McCarthy era. They were systematically undermining the nation’s ability to defend itself while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to blacken McCarthy’s name.
Did I mention that I hate George Looney?
So WTF does this have to do with Cornell*??? Damn Goldstein!
/Go Red!
*We’re not communist Columbia, fer chrissake…
Have you considered that the man’s weird outfit could be a send-up of a colonial officer’s uniform? Or that George is brown and lacks a tail?
If you will put it on your wishlist, I will gift you Mr. Johnson.
Did Henry Miller write Curious George?
‘Cause, y’know, that would explain a few things.
SB: students
honor
– Personally I’m more of a Ted Geisel man myself…and Boston Ecclairs… Geisels monkeys were always “tail on”, and quite articulate…. Both…. The tails and the monkeys…..Nevermind
TW: Sounds suspiciously like the ‘dillo is trying for a medical discharge…. so to speak