From The Getting of Wisdom to Heartbreak High: Australian school stories on screen

Bruce Beresford's 1977 film, The Getting of Wisdom

Going to school is one of the few life experiences almost everyone shares. From the time children began to be educated in small groups in Britain, there were school stories in popular culture, beginning with what many consider the first novel for children, Sarah Fielding’s The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy (1749).

The emphasis in early school stories was on moral and intellectual learning, which the reader was supposed to absorb. However, as school became a universal experience, stories about school elevated peer acceptance, sporting success, and friendships to the main sources of drama. This has remained true from the crucial cricket match of Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) to the quidditch tournaments of the Harry Potter series.

School stories appeal to children and adolescents because they represent a world comprised largely of other young people, with adult teachers relegated to the periphery. However, they also mark changes in the kinds of ideals and goals we want young people to aspire towards.

Conformity and obedience were measures of a protagonist’s success in early school stories. However, as the genre has evolved in film and television, school stories have celebrated characters who transgress adult expectations, emphasising the importance of individuality.

Nerds, jocks and popular kids

North American film and television from the 1980s embraced stories about high school in particular, with earnest considerations of the dilemmas faced by teenagers forced into almost familial relationships with each other.

John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club (1985) was among the first films to treat the experience of high school with seriousness and empathy. In what became a template for the genre, it explores the unique forms of social stratification found in schools between the popular kids, the nerds, the jocks, and outcasts who sprinkle dandruff on their artworks.

Canadian series Degrassi Junior High

Canadian series Degrassi Junior High (1987-89) and Degrassi High (1989-1991) were pioneering in their focus on teenagers and willingness to confront mature topics including drug use, teen pregnancy, racism, and sexuality. The ultimate dark and vindictive side of school friendships were most memorably fictionalised in 1988’s Heathers, which darkly satirised teen suicide. Reflecting a significant transformation in real-world schools, the recent television reboot of Heathers had its premiere delayed for almost a year because of the Parkland, Florida school shooting.

Some of the longest-running American TV series set in schools in the 1990s nevertheless idealised beautiful, popular, and often wealthy students. Both the Saturday-morning comedy Saved by the Bell (1989-1993) and the prime-time drama Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990-2000) were largely told from the perspective of fashionably dressed and perfectly coiffed characters at the zenith of the social hierarchy.

Outsiders and underdogs

Australian school stories have differed from their British and American counterparts from the outset. Henry Handel Richardson’s classic novel The Getting of Wisdom (1910), which was adapted into a film in 1977, is the story of poor country girl, Laura Tweedle Rambotham, who is sent to an exclusive Melbourne boarding school.

While the usual arc of the school story was to teach the outsider appropriate lessons about how to conform and contribute to school spirit and sporting success, Laura lies in an ill-fated attempt to be liked, cheats to pass her final exams, and finishes school without having found peer acceptance. It is her very inability to change herself to fit stifling gender and class expectations that has made her an enduring and beloved character for the past century.

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Read more: The case for Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom

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Such irreverence toward authority figures is a frequent attribute of Australian stories about school. In its early years, teen soap Home and Away (1988-present) built many dramas around conflict with high-school principal Donald Fisher, who the students privately referred to as “Flathead”.

With conscious efforts to present a grittier and more realistic depiction of school life, Heartbreak High (1994-1999) not only included a cast that aimed to represent Australia’s increasingly multicultural society but depicted teachers as less authoritarian, and heavily invested in their student’s welfare.

In a reworking of the opposition between student and teacher, it has become common for Australian stories about school life to retain a focus on the underdog but to draw out its comedic potential. Hating Alison Ashley (2005), based on the novel by Robin Klein, cast pop darling Delta Goodrem as the beautiful, superficially perfect student, but presents the story from the perspective of friendless hypochondriac Erica Yurken.

Rather than a disciplinarian setting in which the teachers and principal have ultimate control, Barringa East high school exhibits a loss of adult order, with graffiti and rubbish covering the campus.

The film opens with the explanation that three teachers have retired due to the trauma of teaching at the school, with two institutionalised and one escaping to join the Hare Krishnas. While the overall culture of underachieving students allows Erica to shine academically, she does not feel comfortable in herself until she makes an unlikely friend in her imagined rival, Alison. A happy ending for Erica is found not in changing herself and achieving popularity, but in finding a supportive friend to join her outside the mainstream.

The trailer for 2005 film Hating Alison Ashley.

Chris Lilley’s Summer Heights High (2007) at once adopted the perspective of an underdog in the form of Jonah Takalua (a Tongan character controversially played by Lilley), and a queen bee in the form of Ja’mie King, a private school girl “slumming” at a state school.

Rather than glamorising the wealthy, image-obsessed Ja’mie, the series positions viewers to laugh at the shallowness of her manipulations to gain the approval of teachers and the few students she deems worthy of her attention. While many of the teachers at the school do care for student welfare, the infamous Mr G is the ultimate demonstration of the way teachers and authority figures are often depicted as flawed and ineffectual.

Chris Lilley as Ja'mie

Across time, Australian stories about school have more in common with the narratives of outsiders like Napoleon Dynamite than those of inspirational teachers as in Dead Poets Society or the beautiful students of Riverdale.

Attributes such as wealth, attractiveness, and family connections and status often distinguish the protagonists of American and British stories. Similarly, working hard and behaving correctly often brings success and popularity to these characters.

In contrast, Australian stories about school days are more likely to question structures of authority and social status. And anyone who wants to suck up to the popular kids or teachers can just, in the words of the students of Heartbreak High, “Rack off!”



This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Electric Girlhoods: ACMI Alice in Wonderland Event

I'll be part of an event to coincide with ACMI's Winter Masterpieces Wonderland exhibition on Tuesday 15th May at 6:30 pm.  The event is titled: Electric Girlhoods and Alices Past and Future

Alice was first brought to life by Lewis Carroll, but she's sparked imaginations and been immortalised on screen many times since.

Join film critic and author Alexandra Heller-Nicholas in conversation with Dr Michelle Smith (Monash University) and Dr Dan Golding (Swinburne University of Technology) as they discuss these 'electric' Alices and the unique representations of girlhood across time, space and media, exploring historical significance, contemporary potency and what Alice might mean in the future.

A photo from the event

Alice on Screen: Who is Alice? Curious Interpretations of Wonderland

To coincide with ACMI's Winter Masterpieces exhibition "Wonderland", which focuses on Alice's representation in the moving image- from magic lantern slides to Tim Burton's film- I was invited to prepare a video essay on screen Alices. In the video, I talk about Alice from her first silent film appearance, her use in psychedelic counter-culture and anti-drug propaganda, and Dr Pepper ads, through to the fascination with Alice in Japanese popular culture and her darker incarnations in video games.

We’re Definitely Not in Kansas Anymore: Return to Oz (1985)

Earlier this year I introduced a Cinemaniacs screening of Return to Oz. Here's a transcript of my talk.

Return to Oz is a strange film. It’s a strange film given what would now be accepted as a children’s film. It’s a strange film for a Disney film. And it’s a strange film to follow the overwhelming cultural legacy of MGM’s 1939 Wizard of Oz film.

Reviews that followed Return to Oz’s 1985 release could not reconcile expectations of what a big-budget sequel to the cheery, sentimental musical Oz should be with the dystopian film with no dancing munchkins and no dance numbers but plenty of frightening new characters and a new framing story that placed the beloved Dorothy in a mental institution poised to receive a dose of electroshock therapy.

Roger Ebert: “Somebody should have thought at the very first when they were starting out with Return to Oz, somebody should have had this thought: 'It oughta be fun, it oughta be upbeat, it oughta be sweet, it oughta be wondrous. It shouldn’t be scary'.”

Gene Siskel: “Kids under six are gonna get nightmares from this picture. Kids over six, they’ll just have a bad time at the movies.”

Labyrinth (1986)

The film is typical of a different era of filmmaking for children in the early to mid-1980s, in which darker themes, genuine terror, and traumatising deaths of innocent characters were not seen as beyond the emotional comprehension of young viewers. Think of The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth and the heart-rending demise of the horse Artax in The Never-Ending Story. But even in this context, the film is unusual, and this contributed to Disney effectively disowning the film by contributing minimal marketing and merchandising effort. You won’t find a trace of some of the most iconic  characters of all time –those from the world of Oz - in Disney parks or products, unlike its treatment of its legacy from the animated Alice in Wonderland from 1951.

So what is the story of Return to Oz? How did such an unusual children’s film come to be made on such a big-budget and then be almost disowned by Disney?

Walter Murch with Fairuza Balk (Dorothy) on set

The root of the weirdness of the film begins with Apocalypse Now, the logical place to start when you want to make a Disney children’s film. Walter Murch was the sound editor and designer on the film; he was developing an impressive reputation and gaining deep respect within the industry. At the same time, Disney was going through a creative lull with a number of commercial failures and was scouting around for new directorial talent. They approached Murch, asking him what kind of film he might be interested in making and he mentioned that he had always loved L. Frank Baum’s series of Oz books. 

The original Oz book series by L. Frank Baum

In an amazing coincidence, Disney happened to own the rights to 11 of the Oz books and were receptive to the idea of capitalising on these rights before the copyright period on the books would soon expire. Of course, these were the rights to the story as it appeared in the books only, not the visual depictions that MGM had derived for their film. So, for instance, in Baum’s original books Dorothy wore silver shoes but these were changed to ruby for the MGM film to take advantage of technicolour with red standing out in colour. Indeed, Disney had to pay for the right to use the trademarked ruby slippers in Return to Oz. Dorothy’s braids are the only other element borrowed from the MGM film.

Dorothy as she was originally
illustrated with silver shoes

In total there were 14 Oz books, and the series was continued by Ruth Plumley Thompson for a further 21 books, so there was actually no shortage of material that could have been plundered for sequels to the MGM film. Very early on, Baum and others recognised how adaptable the stories were to the stage and screen. The first Oz book was published in 1900, and by 1902 musicals began in Chicago and it was then translated to a Broadway hit. Baum’s first infatuation had been the theatre and he invested a great deal of money in the production of elaborate musicals. He financed the first attempt to film Oz with The Fairylogue and Radio Plays in 1908, which mixed live actors, magic lantern slides and Baum himself appears on stage interacting with the characters on stage and screen. Even though performances sold out throughout Michigan, Chicago and New York, it cost more money to produce than could be recouped.

Baum with the cast of The Fairylogue and Radio Plays (1908)

Baum then founded the Oz Film Manufacturing Company to adapt his films and in 1914 released the first silent film version of The Patchwork Girl of Oz.  It was not a financial success and after it failed to live up to expectations when exhibited by Paramount Pictures in New York they refused to accept any subsequent Oz films, or indeed any others from Baum’s company. Baum’s company nevertheless went on to make The Magic Cloak of Oz (1917) and His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz/The New Wizard of Oz released after his death in 1925. Baum lost the rights to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as well as other books in the series when owing money to a creditor due to his numerous failed ventures.



This explains how Walt Disney was able to acquire the rights to 11 Oz books in 1954. He wanted to create an adaptation of The Patchwork Girl of Oz for the Disneyland television show. Disney thought the screenplay was good and wanted to make a feature film using the Mouseketeers from The Mickey Mouse Club with Annette Funicello as Ozma, but the film did not eventuate and two of the intended songs were performed on the Disneyland television show.  



Like the 1939 film, you can see the influence of the vaudeville stage tradition on this musical number and how the planned Disney Oz film would have developed in the same way. Return to Oz sidesteps that tradition and returns to Baum’s books for source material. While the absence of the settings and characters from The Wizard of Oz, the film felt like it was departing from what Oz was supposed to be for many reviewers and audiences. However, it actually combines two books from the Oz series, Ozma of Oz and The Marvellous Land of Oz.

Ciudad Encantada: one of the locations scrapped from
the film.

Hadrian's Villa

Return to Oz was going to be a very different film that took advantage of developing special effects technology to reproduce all of the Oz characters- rather than dressing people in costumes- and pre-production took a long time. By Autumn of 1983, $6 million had already been spent. New Disney boss Richard Berger shut down production in November 1983, six weeks before filming was due to start in London as anxiety grew about the film’s $27 million budget and the potential for costs to blow out further. They were even contemplating canning the film despite having poured a lot of money into its development.

Producer Paul Maslansky was instructed by Disney to give an assessment of whether it would be possible to cut at least $5 million from the film’s budget. It is tantalising to consider how the film might have looked if not for this substantial hack into the money available for location shooting, mechanical effects, the creatures and Claymation. The Deadly Desert sequence was going to be shot on location in Sardinia and Algeria. The scene where Dorothy and Tik Tok are trapped by the Wheelers was to be filmed at Ciudad Encantada (Enchanted City) north of Madrid. The Nome King’s throne room going to be shot at Caserta near Naples while Hadrian’s villa outside Rome would double as Mombi's palace. There was also going to be two weeks of shooting in Kansas. With the cuts, all of these locations shoots were cut and 80% of the film was to be shot on soundstages at Elmstree Studios outside London (where Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back were filmed). The Kansas scenes from the beginning of the film were shot on the Salisbury Plains near Stonehenge. While shots of the ruins of Oz were created using miniatures.

For those of you have seen the film, it will make sense when I say that it was the characters of the Cowardly Lion, Scarecrow and Lion who suffered from the budget cuts. The Lion was one of the first things to be cut. There were supposed to be three heads constructed for close-up, medium shots (the one produced) and a light stunt head. The crew were not allowed to make a duplicate costume, only spare legs and feet. Nevertheless, he’s arguably a more successful look that the Scarecrow who had a minimally articulated cable-operated head that looks unconvincing in close-up scenes. The Tin Man was supposed to be created with a marionette-style puppet and opticals but this was going to be too expensive so they were forced to create something in which a small person could sit inside to perform some basic movements. Deep Roy- who rode the racing snail in Neverending Story and was the Oompa Loompa in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory— operated a rod inside the torso. It was such a crude set-up that Roy’s legs hung down out of the Tin Man’s body and in plain view, which is why he is always seen behind another character in the scenes in which he appears!

How Tik-Tok walked revealed

Nevertheless, regardless of these restrictions, some of the creatures and effects are startling for the pre-CGI period.  More finances and effort were directed into creatures such as the chicken, Billina; and the mechanical man, Tik Tok, who was operated by a full-sized man concealed within the torso. However, they may appear to us now, the Wheelers scared the bejesus out of a generation of 80s kids. Originally ice and roller skaters were hired to assume these roles with the expectation that skating skills would translate to rolling along on wheels taken from wheelchairs. It turned out that no pre-existing ability prepared anyone to move as a Wheeler and so 17 people had to train specifically for the task including a man who had had his feet amputated.

The inexplicable terror of a Wheeler

Special effects designers from The Dark Crystal and Greystoke worked on the film, along with Zoran Perisic who invented the Zoptic method, an in-camera front projection system that was used to make Superman fly in the 1980s films. The Claymation work in the film is extremely innovative in its replication of movement in stone, particularly given that the Nomes as imagined in Baum’s work were traditional miniature men-shaped gnomes. The process of the Nome King transforming into the form of a man was also made extremely difficult by the fact that filming occurred in London but the Claymation studio was location in Oregon.

Return to Oz bubblegum cards

The financial limitations and their effect on the look of the film were not the only major challenge faced during film. After seven weeks of shooting, Murch had a breakdown during the shooting of the scene in which Mombi changes her head. According to Maslansky, Murch was extremely confused and said to him “I don’t know where we are in the picture”. He was lost in terms of how the film pieced together and went to lie down in his office. With 500 people on the payroll, thoughts immediately turned to a list of other potential directors.

Return to Oz comic

However, because of Murch’s reputation and previous work with other industry luminaries, there was an almost immediate remarkable response from within the film-making community. Within an hour George Lucas called from Japan and agreed to come immediately to England to help Murch get back on his feet. Murch had worked on THX1138 and American Graffiti.  According to Maslansky, 20 minutes later Stephen Spielberg called and said he would come to the studio the next day. Shortly afterward, Francis Ford Coppola phoned to say that it was his birthday the next day and that he would be in London. Lucas took over filming for the week, shooting the scenes with the flying Gump until Murch could recover. Reportedly, he urged Disney to keep Murch on the film with the reassurance that he would personally finish the film if it did not work out. While the film has obviously become a cult classic, and was ahead of its time in embracing the type of dystopian vision of Oz that has become more common in TV series such as Tin Man and the novels Dorothy Must Die, the experience of directing was clearly not for Murch. He has not directed another film, although he is one of the most respected sounds designers and editors in the industry.

Japanese Return to Oz figures

Disney had flip-flopped on the film numerous times, studio heads had changed multiple times during pre-production, the budget was slashed, and then on the film’s release very minimal support was leant to its marketing. In an era in which product tie-ins and cross-promotions for children’s films were becoming extremely important, the film has an unusually tiny amount of merchandise associated with it comprising of books, a comic, and a promotion for Smuckers jelly involving  hand-puppets. The only figurines produced were made for the Japanese market. In Disney’s terms it was something of a failure. And for those who came to the film expecting a light-hearted musical, it was also a failure.

I saw the film on its release when I was six years old with my grandfather. I can still remember how odd it felt to have to manage his disappointment as he kept saying “that’s now how the yellow brick road is supposed to be—all broken”. Of the generation that would have seen the MGM film on its release, Return to Oz made no sense and was even disturbing. But to me the darkness of the film seemed more magically real than Judy Garland’s cheerful land of Oz and it has stayed with me in more ways than one.

Goodbye Horses (and Transphobia): Transgenderism in Film and Literature

In Laurie Frankel’s new novel This is How it Always Is, an American family grapples with prejudice about transgender children. Youngest child of five boys, Claude, in addition to wanting to be “ a chef, a cat, a vet, a dinosaur, a train, a farmer” when he is older, tells his parents that he wants to “be a girl”.

This Is How It Always Is, Laurie Frankel (2017).
Flatiron Books

The Walsh-Adams family readily embrace his difference, but the world beyond is less capable of processing the gender non-conformity of a five-year-old child. At kindergarten, Claude is permitted to wear dresses, but is castigated for using the boys’ bathroom. After his decision to become Poppy, a school friend’s parent threatens violence in the face of Poppy’s imagined queer contaminating effect upon his son.

Coupled with a transgender woman being shot on a local college campus after a sexual encounter, the family decides that Madison, Wisconsin is an inhospitable environment for Poppy and moves to more progressive Seattle. Nevertheless, they still find it easier to start again without explaining that Poppy is transgender.

Frankel’s novel was inspired by her own experience raising a transgender child. Western culture is currently facing the challenge of understanding transgenderism and the first generation of openly transgender children.

John Phillips, author of Transgender on Screen, suggests that “the crossing of genders will prove to be the most significant single cultural challenge” of our era “because of the redefinition of sexes and sexualities that necessarily accompanies it”. Practical issues such as preferred pronouns, bathroom usage, eligibility to participate in sports, and hormone treatment for young people remain contentious.

A gender neutral bathroom sign. John Arehart/shutterstock

In attempting to reshape our understanding of sex and gender, it is helpful to look back at how we have represented – or, most commonly, omitted – transgender people in popular culture. The historical lack of understanding of transgender people is evident in a cultural tendency to depict them as objects of comedy, or, most often, as freakish or monstrous.

Sensational freaks and psycho killers

Ed Wood’s cult film Glen or Glenda (1953) was designed to shock and is primarily about a man who cross dresses. The film’s final section “Alan or Ann”, comprised largely of stock footage, is more specifically about a transgender (and potentially intersex) character.

Alan was born a boy, but raised as a girl and then served as a man during World War II. While recovering from combat in hospital, Alan learns about gender reassignment surgery and becomes a “lovely young woman”. The “Alan or Ann” section of the film was reportedly added to meet distributor calls for a sensational “sex change” film, implicitly suggesting that transgender people were a freakish spectacle who would increase ticket sales.

While Wood was sympathetic to the practice of cross-dressing, categorising himself as a transvestite, most horror films and thrillers that followed situated transgender characters as villains. The list of transgender murderers is extensive and persistent from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Homicidal (1961) features a murderous woman, Emily, who wears a wig and prosthetic teeth to conceal that she is, in fact, Warren. Nevertheless, Warren was actually born a girl, but raised as a boy by her mother because his father desired a male child and would have harmed a girl. In keeping with the sensational representation of transgender killers, the film was screened with a “fright break” at its climax, in which audience members could leave the theatre and seek a refund if they were too scared.

Hammer Horror’s 1971 film Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde makes the famous splintered personality tale more disturbing by motivating Jekyll to concoct an elixir of life serum with female hormones from murdered corpses. The serum transforms Jekyll into an evil woman, who eventually kills girls in order to obtain more hormones to maintain the transformation.

The 1983 slasher film Sleepaway Camp has an infamous final scene in which the serial killer is revealed. The character of “Angela” stands naked, smeared with blood, with her penis clearly visible to onlookers who scream, “Oh my God! She’s a boy!” Angela was originally a boy named Peter, but was forced by his mother to assume the role of his twin sister after her death.

Being forced into a particular gender role is clearly traumatic, as in the well publicised case of David Reimer who was raised as a girl after a failed circumcision. However, the implication of Sleepaway Camp and other films with serial killers who are arguably presented as transgender, such as Silence of the Lambs (1991) (and even Psycho [1960]), is that gender non-conformity is frightening and unnatural. As Phillips suggests, revelations of transgender murderers not only make the killings bizarre and monstrous but also “trade on the otherness of transgender to engender fear and loathing”.

Life in pink: transgender children

It is only recently that transgender children have begun to be overtly represented in literature and film. This is indicative of shift from demonising transgender people to greater attempts to understand them and represent them positively, as in mainstream films such as the award-winning Transamerica (2005).

One of the first representations of a transgender child was the Belgian film Ma Vie En Rose in 1997. It playfully blurs the line between fantasy and reality in order to show the thoughts of a seven-year-old boy, Ludovic, who wants to be a girl.

Georges Du Fresne as Ludovic in Ma Vie En Rose. Canal+

Despite its arthouse aesthetic and the fact that Ludovic, as reviewer Roger Ebert suggests, exhibited “no sexual awareness in his dressing up”, the film was given an “R” rating in the United States. The rating suggests that two decades ago there was still significant discomfort with the idea of a boy who might not “grow out of” his femininity. It also signals that young people should not be exposed to the reality of transgender children.

L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz (1907)

This sensitivity explains why there were only a handful of stories intended for children — usually fantasies — that included characters who might be understood as transgender until very recently.

The most notable of these is Princess Ozma, who appears in every book in L. Frank Baum’s Oz book series (1900-1920) apart from the first. Princess Ozma is born a girl, but transformed into a boy named Tip by the witch Mombi, in order to prevent her becoming the ruler of Oz. Tip has no recollection of being a girl when Mombi is compelled to revert him to his original form as the girl Ozma.

Children’s books have historically been willing to show boys and girls who “play” as the other gender (often categorised as “sissies” and “tomboys”), but the expectation is that these characters will mature into cisgender, heterosexual men and women.

Julie Anne Peters, Luna (2004)

It was not until the new millennium that a young adult novel featured a transgender protagonist. Julie Anne Peter’s Luna (2004) depicts a teenage boy, Liam, who progresses from only assuming his true self, “Luna”, at night to eventually making the decision to publicly transition.

Victoria Flanagan, in her study of cross-dressing in children’s literature , explains that contemporary Young Adult fiction has begun to recognise that “cross-dressing has implications that relate to sexuality and sexual/gender identity”. These ideas were previously cordoned off into the realm of adults only, as culture was largely uncomfortable with children reading and viewing stories about queer or gender non-conforming characters.

The next wave of representation

This is How it Always Is is symbolic of the next wave of representations of transgender people. In novels and films for adults, psycho killers who were forced into the “wrong” gender by a parent, or tragic figures such as trans man Brandon Teena, whose real-life rape and murder is dramatised in Boys Don’t Cry (1999), are being replaced by more positive depictions of transgender people.

We are beginning to see stories of young people who are being supported by friends or parents to live as the gender with which they identify – such as transgender boy Cole in The Fosters – and of teens learning to accept a parent’s transition, as in Australian film 52 Tuesdays.

The newfound ability for transgender children to begin their transition or at least delay puberty means there could be a transgender boy or girl in almost any school classroom. Rightfully, novels for young people are also beginning to represent transgender children.

Nevertheless, as with the continued challenges to depictions of gay and lesbian characters in fiction for young people, transgender characters are still rare and sometimes considered inappropriate.
Now it is not the threat of the freakish transgender monster, but the threat of disrupting long-held ideas about gender binaries that has the most potential to send transphobic people to the fright room


This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Dorothy and the Resurgence of Oz

Promotional image for Disney's Oz the Great and Powerful

The two most enduringly famous fictional girls are surely Lewis Carroll's Alice and L. Frank Baum's Dorothy. Alice has made her way into countless film and television adaptations of Carroll's novels, as well as recent grittier manifestations in games and comics. (She also features with Dorothy in a sexually explicit graphic novel, Lost Girls.) While Alice is still very closely associated with Carroll's books, even if not a great number of people have read them, Dorothy, and the land of Oz, have drifted further and further from Baum's original series of books. Indeed, it is hard to find current editions of all but the first book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Books of Wonder's hardcover facsimile editions, while beautiful, are oriented toward adult collectors. There is some scholarly interest in the MGM Wizard of Oz film of 1939 but there is scant research on Baum's Oz, especially in contrast with an abundance of papers on Alice.

It seems, however, that Oz is entering a phase of cultural renewal. In the past decade we have seen the birth of the successful musical Wicked (which debuted in 2003 and was based on Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel), the Sci-Fi Channel's dystopian mini-series Tin Man (2007), the abysmal, low-budget Dorothy and the Witches of Oz (2012), and now several major films in 2013.

Dorothy of Oz

The upcoming Dorothy of Oz is a computer animated film based on books written by one of Baum's great-grandson's, Roger S. Baum, a former banker and stockbroker. L. Frank Baum did work as a travelling salesman, bred rare chickens and wrote a book on visual merchandising prior to creating Oz, so perhaps we won't  let Roger S. Baum's former career prejudice us too much against his stories. The trailers suggest the film is aimed at a pre-teen audience, but the now familiar motif of an Oz that is no longer quite so "wonderful" is central in even this version. The story outline states that not only has Kansas been devastated by the cyclone that transported Dorothy to Oz in the first place, but that Oz itself "is in a state of decay". 

Fairuza Balk at Dorothy in Return to Oz (after escaping a
mental institution)

Disney's Return to Oz (1985) pioneered the representation of a severely decayed Oz complete with the yellow brick road in rubble. Though one of the books on which it was based, Ozma of Oz, did indeed feature some of the characters and places shown in the film, including the Wheelers (though I don't think they had punk hair in Baum's day), the deadly desert and the Nome King (who imprisoned the Royal Family of the Land of Ev within ornaments). Dorothy being sent to a dubious mental institution for electroshock therapy after her first visit to Oz, however, was solely the questionable invention of Disney.

Dorothy in one of W.W.
Denslow's original
illustrations (1900)

Dorothy of Oz, Return to Oz and Tin Man all retain Dorothy, or a Dorothy-like figure, as the protagonist. The first two preserve Dorothy's girlhood, as in Baum's books, where illustrations suggest that she is under ten years of age. Judy Garland was sixteen at the time that she played Dorothy in the MGM film, and despite having her breasts bound and supposedly wearing a corset, she contributed a much older, and substantially less feisty, Dorothy to our popular imagination. Tin Man's D.G. is a small-town waitress who has been hidden in the world beyond Oz by her mother, the former Queen of Oz, from her sister, Azkadellia, who is possessed by the spirit of an evil witch. As an adult, she is not especially dependent on others, is smart and brave, and eventually discovers her own magical powers. For an article on this very topic, you can read Deb Waterhouse-Watson's "Re/deconstructing the Yellow Brick Road".)

The most heavily promoted new Oz adaptation is Disney's Oz the Great and Powerful (dir. Sam Raimi), which is described as something of a prequel to The Wizard of Oz. Disney has clearly decided to eschew the large body of Baum sequels that they might have adapted to film after the commercial failure of Return to Oz. The new film focuses on the back story of the Wizard from his time as a circus illusionist in Kansas to his travel to Oz and encounters with three witches who question whether he really is the great wizard that the people in the land of Oz have been awaiting. The trailer emphasises his journey towards becoming "a great man". This seems a little bizarre in the context of the original novel and the MGM film in which he is shown to be merely a charlatan using smoke and mirrors to deceive those who he leads. Crucially, this big-budget film necessarily omits the character of Dorothy in order to reveal the Wizard's history. Baum himself did not include Dorothy in the first sequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Marvellous Land of Oz (1904), which tells the story of Princess Ozma, who for the most part of the book is enchanted in the form of a boy named Tip. But the question that remains to be answered is whether a contemporary tale of Oz needs Dorothy as much as any story of Wonderland requires Alice. As in Wicked, the focus on the tension between good and bad women, might fill the void left by the writing of Dorothy out of Oz.

The Forgotten History of the Babysitter

Some people think that the study of girls' literature and culture is somewhat frivolous or pointless. Others, including one grant assessor I recall, feel that researching girls reveals nothing that we don't already know from studies of women. Babysitter: An American History by Miriam Forman-Brunell (New York University Press, 2009) is a compelling counter to such ideas. It takes the topic of the teen girl as child minder and, in turn, unravels the history of girls' employment (including their formation of babysitter unions), the development of youth consumer and print culture, theories of child development, and the tension between competing discourses of sexual "threat" in the home and girls as victims of sexual harassment. The book  explores both the lives of actual girl babysitters, who contribute their own little-heard voices —often with indignation about their working conditions—cultural imaginings of the babysitter in film, television and literature.

Forman-Brunell approaches babysitting as "a cultural battleground where conflicts over girlhood—especially regarding sexual, social, cultural, and economic autonomy and empowerment—are regularly played out" (4). She shows that adults were uncomfortable with "modern" girls from as early as the 1920s, when babysitting was a only new concept. In this period, girls were redefining female adolescence, especially through their part in the burgeoning youth commodity culture by wearing make-up, reading magazines, and going to the movies, amusement parks and ice-cream parlours (often on a "double-date"). Girls' new-found independence and interest in socialising at night made the task of caring for other people's children less desirable. Babysitting therefore held little appeal to many American teens at this time. Child development experts also advised parents to be cautious about babysitters, describing these "flirtatious girls" as posing a threat to helpless children.

Barbie embodying the myth of babysitting as
"easy" labour

The Great Depression, as Forman-Brunell argues, provided financial incentive for girls to become more enthusiastic about sitting, as their own families were no longer able to provide generous allowances and constraints on employment meant that other jobs were not available. More than 750,000 high-school aged girls became "mother's helpers" or babysitters, in part, Forman-Brunell explains, because of significant cultural shifts such as the number of teenagers becoming a larger part of the overall population, the growth in high school attendance (which enabled fads to spread rapidly) and the growth of commodity youth culture.

Adults nevertheless remained suspicious of girl babysitters, at first over their contested use of the home telephone, and later over crimes such as raiding food from the refrigerator. There were also numerous urban myths of wild parties, drug use and child neglect. Forman-Brunell punctuates her history with the various ways in which this suspicion has been made manifest through fears about "bobby-soxers" in the '40s, who were scandalised for "pursuing their social and sexual pleasures" (42) and sexually unstable girls who might spread communicable diseases, as well as fictional representations of crazy, murderous vixens out to destroy happy marriages. The "disorderly babysitter" becomes a prominent figure in the 1960s when American culture "simultaneously stimulated girlhood rebellion but also stifled it" (121). While from the 1970s, the babysitter is heavily eroticised in slasher movies, including Halloween, and pornographic novels.

Throughout their history, babysitters have consistently complained about poor and unfair working conditions: adults regularly failed to provide sufficient emergency information, girls were left stranded for hours when parents did not return home at the agreed-upon time, sitters were commonly underpaid (or received no payment at all), and, in the Depression-era, girls were required to complete extensive housekeeping tasks in addition to childcare. Sylvia Plath is perhaps the most famous babysitter of the 1940s who recorded her cynicism about child minding. As a fourteen-year-old she declared that "little children are bothersome beings that have to be waited on hand and food" (56). The discontent among sitters, primarily about overwork in comparison with meagre remuneration, grew to the point where girls began to form their own babysitter unions in the Midwest and Northeast to demand fair working conditions and payment.

Iowa State College "Y" members, 1955

World War II opened up many employment opportunities for girls, not only in after-school positions, but in jobs that lured them away from school altogether. The growth in new occupations for girls, an increasing birth rate, and the movement of many families away from cities (and grandparents) to the suburbs created a chronic sitter shortage. Forman-Brunell shows how many magazines therefore presented babysitting as a patriotic duty for girls, in which a girl might "guard the home front" in a mother's absence.  Parents attempted to find their own solutions, such as sitter exchanges or co-ops where groups of parents would take it in turns to mind each other's children. Inevitably, some parents did not pull their own weight and these co-ops failed to provide the answer to the sitter shortage.

An unexpected aspect of the history of babysitting in America is the cultural support for boy sitters, who were viewed as more reliable and authoritative than their female counterparts. During the Depression, the scepticism about girl babysitters contributed to the popularity of hiring boys to mind children and, similarly, during World War II, the sitter shortage meant that boys actively pursued jobs as child minders. Male college students even formed their own babysitting services, such as Princeton's "Tiger Tot Tending Agency". Male sitters also answered fears about the feminisation of boys while their fathers were busy working 50-hour-weeks: "boy sitters could pry loose the 'skirt-clinger,' and by playing 'rough-and-tumble' games outdoors, instill the manly hardiness experts anxiously promoted" (107).

Ann M. Martin's
The Baby-Sitters Club series

The latter part of the book concentrates on the increasing popular cultural representation of the babysitter from the 1970s and offers some intriguing insights into how this figure comes to be blamed for the destruction of the domestic ideal (especially by maniac male stalkers). For girls themselves, however, series such as the Baby-sitter's Club, which began in 1986 with Kristy's Great Idea, promoted sitting as a means to a career and a demonstration girls' competency. The books also presented sitting as an enterprise among a confident sisterhood of friends, well in advance of the concept of "Girl Power". Forman-Brunell argues that the cultural construction of the "Super Sitter", which the Baby-sitter's club espoused, "appropriated feminist ideologies but neutralized empowerment so that girls would not become too powerful" (177).

The Babysitters (2007), a babysitter transforms her child-
minding business into a call-girl service 

Babysitter: An American History necessarily charts the "fall" of babysitting, as girls became more preoccupied with after-school activities and part-time work in malls than minding children in private homes. While girls have always shown some reticence about sacrificing their social life during their teens, Forman-Brunell includes the perspectives of girl sitters that show that discontent with parents sometimes turns girls away from sitting. This history uses the practice of babysitting as a focal point for mapping changes in girls' education, employment and popular culture across the past 90 years. While babysitting may be a less popular form of employment among American teen girls today, the cultural resonance of the babysitter, however, lingers on, as both a trope of forbidden teen sexuality in pornography and a potential threat to children themselves in the horror genre. 

The Mad Hatter, The Goblin King and Mr Tumnus: Girls Desiring Men

After a return journey from hell, I'm now back from Canada and the girls' texts and cultures symposium in Winnipeg. As someone who studies inanimate texts that do not speak back, it was a real revelation to hear researchers who work with actual girls speaking.

One paper ended with a video edit of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with a love song spliced over the top to suggest a kind of love plot between Lucy and Mr Tumnus. Immediately, I was reminded of the relationship between Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter and Alice in the recent Tim Burton film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. While the film made a connection between the Hatter and Alice's deceased father through their mutual fascination with things outside the "normal" range of thought, the tension generated when Alice must decide whether to remain in Underland or return home seems much greater than that of a girl who must leave a friend behind. On the part of both the Hatter and Alice, there seemed to be a romantic interest that made the decision all the more poignant.

On the long flight from Vancouver to Sydney, the paucity of movie choices gave me the opportunity to find another filmic girl who is placed within a romantic relationship with a man. In the 80s classic Labyrinth (directed by Jim Henson), the fifteen-year-old heroine Sarah must rescue her baby brother from the goblin king, Jareth, who is disturbingly played by David Bowie, replete with backcombed hair and a codpiece. She must do this before the thirteenth hour or her brother will become a goblin, and she'll presumably be struck from babysitting club membership across the nation. As part of Jareth's attempts to prevent Sarah from reaching his castle by way of the labyrinth and rescuing her brother, he enters her hallucination of a masquerade ball (though both are unmasked). Sarah suddenly looks a lot older than she has throughout the film, with her hair elegantly styled and a face full of make-up. Jareth attempts to prevent Sarah from moving forward in her quest by dancing with her, and the scene again seems to show a girl desiring a man, or at least the idea of one, as she is temporarily transfixed by the spell of the ball and Jareth.

I'm not sure whether there are other examples, and the Lucy/Mr Tumnus one is a stretch (although I did feel a little uneasy with Mr Tumnus on first viewing the film as he seemed lecherous to me!), but with all the paranoia about paedophilia in contemporary culture it seems interesting to see at least a few very popular films that acknowledge the possibility of a girl desiring someone who is an inappropriate love interest. Perhaps it is a part of the demonstration of the girls acquiring maturity that they are shown as having the capacity for romantic interest in men, and the quick return to the normal world outside of fantasy lands leaves any conflict between social norms and the girls' feelings behind? I suppose it is an awkward reality that girls often experience sexual desires before boys their own age have matured and hence desires are projected on to much older pop culture idols, in what is usually only ever a fantasised relationship. Perhaps that's why these girl/man tensions turn up in fantasy films, as they'd be too awkward to contemplate in realist ones.