Issue 18: It's Always Ourselves We Find in the Sea
Hey there!
When the clock’s ticking down on Wednesday night and you’re fishing for issue titles, sometimes your best friend is an e e cummings poem. Like Maggie and Milly and Molly and May, the protagonists of two of the three works we cover this November find self-realization on the waves. Alex covers the goofy subversiveness of Muppet Treasure Island, and Claudia explores the thematic links between Temple Alley Summer and The Kingdoms.
Alex on Muppet Treasure Island
I fell in love with Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel Treasure Island through its many adaptations, so I tend to forget all but the bare bones of the plot after every reread. And so with every reread I rediscover that brewing under the book’s layers of pop culture influence is a gritty, creepy story about Jim Hawkins’ loss of innocence. Double-crossing-pirate-slash-surrogate-dad Long John Silver is so charming that most retellings soften him up, but in Treasure Island he’s a coldly calculating man getting by on superficial charisma. Jim escapes him but ends the book with his trust in human nature and spirit of adventure blown to smithereens.
The worst Treasure Island adaptations dial up the misery and wallow around in it. The best find a happy medium between sweeping adventure and depressing realism. Or, like Muppet Treasure Island, they don’t bother with realism, depressing or otherwise, at all.
In fact, Muppet Treasure Island may be one of the least depressing movies ever filmed, full of pure, snarky joy from start to finish. The Muppets’ general mission to ride roughshod over stuffy literary tropes obviously helps, but the more specific joy of this adaptation lies in its switched focus. Treasure Island is a story about losing innocence. Muppet Treasure Island is a story about finding a family. More specifically, it’s about rediscovering the family you had all along, and who just happen to be a bunch of puppets.
Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver (Kevin Bishop and Tim Curry, respectively) are the movie’s only major human characters, and Jim establishes a bit of inter-species tension early on: “Some family we are,” he points out to Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat. “We don’t exactly look alike.” Which, well, fair. In this version, Jim is a pot-scrubbing orphan eager to follow the footsteps of his sailor father. Gonzo and Rizzo, his best friends and fellow pot-scrubbers, might know him better than anybody else, but they aren’t like Jim. Apart from all the obvious differences, they aren’t bound by Treasure Island’s classical conventions: they can take down the fourth wall with a battering ram while Jim earnestly longs for the chance to prove himself to a human father figure.
Long John Silver spots Jim’s longing right away and hones in on it—he even promises in “Professional Pirate,” the greatest movie musical number ever written, to “love [Jim] like a son.” But even though it’s as genuine a promise as he can make, Silver isn’t a genuine or steadfast kind of guy. The closest this movie has to a functional authority figure is Kermit the Frog’s Captain Smollett. He treats his crew—including Jim—like family, up to and including rescuing them from bloodthirsty pirates. And in the end Jim, Gonzo, and Rizzo sail off with him, leaving Long John Silver to sink alongside his stolen treasure. It’s very satisfying and just mean-spirited enough considering the backstabbing he’s subjected Jim to.
If there’s a moral to Muppet Treasure Island, it’s probably the most obvious one: Families are the people who stick by you, not the people who look exactly like you. The movie doesn’t beat Jim over the head with this, though. It’s implied along with all the darker undercurrents that come with adapting Treasure Island, like the fact that there are people out there who will prey on your need for understanding and love. Still, these are just undercurrents in a mostly bright sea. Really, Muppet Treasure Island is about living out your dreams with a family of puppets. Which is obviously the best adventure there is.
Claudia on Temple Alley Summer and The Kingdoms
Occasionally, I’ll stumble into a moment of reading synchronicity so perfect, I need to tell friends, family, and strangers all about how these deeply different books are actually linked by a very meaningful connection. That’s why this month I’m covering a middle-grade ghost story and an adult speculative romance set in an alternate universe where Napoleon won the battle of Trafalgar.
Temple Alley Summer, written by Sachiko Kashiwaba and translated by Avery Fischer Udagawa, is about Kazu, who discovers his mysterious new neighbor has been resurrected from the dead. The Kingdoms, by Natasha Pulley, is about an engineer who realizes his phantom memories are related to a time rift that’s been transporting him back to before the Napoleonic Wars were won—by the French. On a plot, character, and audience level, the connective tissue is thin, but a deeper look at how both books deal with personhood and what makes an individual reveals a sensibility as touching as it is mournful.
Kazu realizes that Akari, the resurrected ghost, died as a little girl and was brought back to life when her mother prayed to a Buddha statuette linked to Kimyō Temple. The statuette can bring people back to life, but not to the same life—they start over with a new family, and if anyone reveals their past by calling them “a child of Kimyō Temple,” that new life ends. Kazu becomes determined to keep Akari’s secret and help her stay alive, but glimmers of her past life continue to emerge, from the stuffed animals her first mother kept for nearly forty years to a serialized story she read in the hospital and longs to finish.
Joe, protagonist of The Kingdoms, also juggles different lives. A slave in occupied London, he remembers other families and a man on a beach he’s mysteriously drawn to. Trying to untangle the truth behind these memories leads him back in time to British naval captain Missouri Kite, and the realization that this is not the first time he’s been trapped in the past, and that every journey creates a butterfly effect that changes his history, family members, and even nationality.
Akari and Joe both realize that the things we think of as defining characteristics of our lives—family, friends, preferences, and personalities—are actually secondary. Life can, and will, continue without them. So what is it that makes us us? It’s the longing. When Joe remembers his daughter from another life, it’s a “fresh ache” even though he believes she was never real to begin with. Akari’s memories of her past life are similarly hazy, but she still recalls feeling “disappointed and sad and depressed at having to leave the people I loved.” The driving force in life is that “fresh ache” that love brings, and the desire to recapture it no matter what.
However, both books conclude that it can’t be recaptured, at least not entirely. Joe and Missouri are able to reunite and create a family with Joe’s niece and nephew, but only after the portal to the past has been closed, wiping Joe’s other spouses and children from existence. Kazu and Akari find the ending to the story that was haunting her, but her biological mother still mourns her death. These endings aren’t miserable by any means, but they are melancholy, suggesting that the true marker of individuality is coming to grips with our fluidity of character and vulnerability to loss.
The holiday season is upon us–thanks for spending a small part of it with Hey, Kid! We'll be back in December.
Till next time,
Alex and Claudia