Why is it that so many children's movies feature a dead parent?
In each of the last three films to which I've taken my five-year-old son, one of the parents was dead. Not away on a holiday, or just left out of the script -- but actually, irrevocably dead.
In The Water Horse, set during the Second World War, the father of the lead character, Angus, has died in battle. In Nim's Island, Nim's mother is dead (swallowed by a whale, according to the father's story). And in Underdog -- Underdog for chrissake -- the mother of Jack, the teenage protagonist, is also dead -- cause unknown.
All these movie deaths are troubling to a five-year-old boy. "Will Angus' father come back to life?" my son asks. "Is Nim's mother still alive inside the whale?" By the time we saw Underdog, it was apparently unremarkable to note one more dead parent and so I was spared any tough questions.
And how should one answer such questions? I tried honesty: "No, Nim's mother is not still alive inside the whale," I told my boy.
"Well what happened to her then?"
Chewed to bits by a whale did not seem like a good answer, so I opted for repetition: "I don't know, she just got swallowed by the whale."
"Well maybe she is still alive inside the whale, then," my son offered hopefully.
"Yes, maybe she is," I said, trying to put the matter to rest.
But five-year-olds are not so easily dissuaded. "Will she come back to Nim then one day?"
"She might," I replied. It occurred to me that this might be inconvenient for Nim's dad, who had subsequently fallen for Jodie Foster after she washed up on the beach one day. Even my son appreciated the complexity of the situation. "Then Nim would have two mums," he observed. I changed the subject by pointing out a passing red car.
Really, Hollywood, can we try to come up with some films in which both parents are alive? I realize that this makes it more difficult to score some cheap emotional points by washing new parents up on beaches to bring completeness to the lives of child protagonists and their surviving widowed parents, still struggling to come to grips with the emptiness in their lives -- but give it a try.
Let's see you earn those big Hollywood paychecks. Get creative. Because I am tired of explaining parental death to my otherwise happy-go-lucky kid. We go to the cinema for escapism. So why are you giving us dead parents?
Please don't tell me it's healthy for kids to learn to face reality. Yes, they will have to face it one day. But frankly I see it as my job to keep my young children in fantasy-land for as long as humanly possible. And Hollywood, you're not helping.
