Childhood fears a sinister current (and kidnapping): 'Growing Up' (1983)
The possibility of the surreal stalks a film about the ups and downs of youth.
Growing Up (Xiǎo Bì de gùshì) (1983), dir. Chen Kun-hou, Taiwan
Paperbacks from Mr. Wang’s bookstore in his flip-top bag and Little Bi (Chuan-Wen Chang) in after-school shadow; his tight stare knits the focus of a shark and he winces, the balance tinked over in this weighty game of marbles. “You’re dead!” The puppy at his feet, a snout in a handful of dust, yaps and yaps—Little Bi’s new baby brother has not stopped crying since the day he was born, and all around town he and his father have put up pleas for help: “Heavenly spirits, earthly spirits, there is a child in my house cries all night. Passing gentleman, please chant it three times, making him sleep until the sun shines.” Lines of fourth-graders stumble through the prayer as Little Bi prods them on; the marshal has no time for mistakes—“Get out of the way! You’re dead!” Sun glints on the pair of scissors that Little Bi pulls from the bag, he flips the dog over, yap yap yap! (I can’t see him with the other kid’s leg in the way), the scissors descend. “Hold it tight! Clip the tail! Clip the neck!” Little Bi gives the dog a haircut and everyone giggles.
The bloody mess has dissolved into breaths of fur. What a relief! How close Little Bi came to killing, to pushing a game of marbles past the line of a warm afternoon and into memory’s stomach pit. “Remember when Little Bi killed that puppy?” “Where is he now?” My stepmom once told me a story about how she watched a man down the sidewalk near her house, sensed something dark about him, and later found out he killed his girlfriend that week.
When I was a kid, I had a nightmare that I was a swaddled baby and that several men kidnapped me, sewed a paper plate over my mouth, and packed me in the trunk of a red car. I could never sleep at my cousin’s house because we watched a Linkin Park music video that had Klansmen in it; I froze on the trundle bed with visions of white robes marching around the backyard threatening not to kill me, but just to make their presence known. These images, and the obsessive childhood fear of kidnapping they planted in me, brought to my attention a sinister current flowing under the world. I feared of course that the fabric would wear and I would see through it, that these forces would spring out and really hurt me. But mostly I feared that they existed at all and that I would, every day, have to live in this world that they stalked in dreams and sensations.
When I saw Ratcatcher (1999) I tried to figure out what scared me so much about the boy’s drowning that opens the film. It was more than the fact that a child dies; how the child dies pulls off the veil that hides the sinister: he and his friend play by a canal, he falls in, and he drowns, just like that. This scares me most: that if we push just past the ordinary realm of fun and games, we fall into the void where death lives and something regular turns into something grave. It is the flash of Little Bi’s scissors; it is also that I made up, in an association of the beach with vanishing, a memory of seeing missing posters of Natalee Holloway at Point Pleasant; or another dream I had of being cornered in a fast-food tube maze by two men with long beards; it is my brother shattering his elbow on a jutting two-by-four on the playground in fifth grade and the idea (thankfully not the memory, as my mom tells it) of him in the hospital, screaming for morphine.
In the “surreal” moment, defined by the fact that we tell others about “where we were” when it happened, the sinister, not unimaginable but improbable, surges up and changes how the world feels. It surprises us and makes us afraid because of how easily it can slip in, because the sun still shines; in other words, that the surreal has always existed not above the real, as its prefix would make us think, but below it, and that it emerges to blend with everyday existence and therefore become real. It marks the mundane with the possibility of the remarkable; it stains that day, then warns both that it will return to stain others and that the distance it has to cross to do so is much shorter than we think.
As a teenager, Little Bi slices holes in another kid’s pants, so the kid’s older brother (the fearsome Big Chin) finds Little Bi on a date and humiliates him by throwing his new shoes in the mud. Little Bi and his friends take their revenge: they meet Big Chin and his goons in an alley and beat them with a club. A rumble in blue school jackets—the boys smile and laugh as much as they swing fists and curse blood—and another glint from a pocket leaves Fan Tung with his guts hanging out. Lazy guitar music while Fan Tung is rushed to the hospital; is this not a time for fear? Near the end of the film, Little Bi’s stepfather finds his mother dead in the kitchen after gassing herself because she couldn’t take Little Bi’s harsh words against her husband. Fan Tung survives and Little Bi goes off to the army.
The dog’s haircut starts a push and pull near the cliff of the surreal. Is this growing up? In the film, the world of children does not resemble the world of adults in miniature, it is the world of adults; kids wear blazers and read quietly in Mr. Wang’s store, they squint at gleaming marbles like street gamblers, they fight brandishing weapons. That the surreal always threatens to intrude stops me from drawing a line between the world of kids and the world of adults. Is this why my dreams of kidnapping and Klansmen scared me so much? Because I knew not only that these images could harm me, nor that they existed under my everyday world, but that my youth could not protect me? When I was very young I saw a special on Oprah about child kidnappings in which Oprah herself looked directly into the camera and warned, “They will come into your house and take your children away.” My family laughs about this now, but I screamed then; the sinister could invade my very own home, the castle outside of and above the world.
I still feel like a scared child, but I don’t play games anymore. I used to love flying; now I know that planes crash and could crash with me in them. I walked along the highway to the mall with my friends and went out drinking in new cities and ambled home all alone. Of course I am not afraid of being kidnapped anymore. Now I am afraid that someone will stab me in the street after midnight, shoot me point blank on the subway, or run me over on the sidewalk with a van. I didn’t invent these fears, just as I didn’t invent them when I was a kid: I read about these things happening online, or someone told me about them, and they are true and they killed people. I feel as afraid now as I did then that this life I have spent so long living will prove very fragile. I don’t doubt that I love life because of this weight, but it is heavy, maybe so heavy that as kids we can only bear it as a ghost.
See other films from: 1980s | Taiwan
Cross Dissolve is my blog about film, how it makes me feel, and how I see it reappear in my life—how movies and living dissolve into one another. Please subscribe if you enjoyed today’s entry. Thank you for reading!
Love, Tyler