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matilda and pinocchio

2023-01-31T11:19:43.505Z


If Collodi's character symbolizes the child who learns through trial and error, experience in short, the protagonist of Dahl's novel, who seems to educate herself, represents a kind of enlightened childhood.


"Mom says I'm a miracle."

With this phrase sung in

off

and the image of a few days old baby in her cradle opens the film version of the musical

Matilda

, adapted in turn from the famous book of the same name by Roald Dahl.

A miracle is also Pinocchio, the wooden doll that comes to life in the latest frame-by-frame animated feature by Guillermo del Toro, recently awarded a Golden Globe and inspired by the classic novel by Carlo Collodi.

With each birth, Hannah Arendt thought, there is a new beginning, a new possibility of action on the human sphere.

She wrote Arendt in

The Human Condition:

"The miracle that saves the world (...) from its normal and 'natural' ruin is ultimately the fact of birth."

And he concluded: “This faith and hope in the world found perhaps its most glorious and succinct expression in the few words that announce great joy in the Gospels: 'Today a child has been born to you'.

Not so long ago we celebrated Christmas and, nevertheless, in these moments of general pessimism in which the sense of continuing to procreate ourselves is even being questioned, suggesting that each birth implies a new beginning and with it the possibility of changing the world constitutes almost a radical political expression.

yes

matilda

tells us the story of a girl of prodigious intelligence and creativity whom her parents consider anything but a miracle, Pinocchio, sculpted by a drunken Geppetto, out of pain and anger at the loss of his beloved son Carlo, tells us about that abrupt get into the world, learn its rules... and disobey them when their goal is to crush us.

It is no coincidence that both Dahl in his original novel and Del Toro in his adaptation of Collodi's novel set his stories in places and times evocative of 20th century fascism.

The Crunchem Hall school (a play on words that in English means "Let's crush them all") that Matilda and her classmates attend is not so different from the military training camp of the Juventudes Fascistas that officer Podestà (a character invented by del Toro) ) carries his son Moth along with Pinocchio and other children.

Through discipline and physical violence, both institutions are designed to subdue children, destroying what makes them unique and diverse as a group.

The educational philosopher Jan Masschelein reminds us that Arendt, in her famous study on totalitarianism, argued "that there is a connection between totalitarian terror and the destruction of novelty and otherness contained in birth."

both institutions are designed to subdue children, destroying what makes them unique and diverse as a group.

The educational philosopher Jan Masschelein reminds us that Arendt, in her famous study on totalitarianism, argued "that there is a connection between totalitarian terror and the destruction of novelty and otherness contained in birth."

both institutions are designed to subdue children, destroying what makes them unique and diverse as a group.

The educational philosopher Jan Masschelein reminds us that Arendt, in her famous study on totalitarianism, argued "that there is a connection between totalitarian terror and the destruction of novelty and otherness contained in birth."

For the infant's voice, paradoxically,

the one who does not speak,

is the innocent voice of the one who observes the world for the first time, free of prejudices.

If Pinocchio symbolizes the child who learns through trial and error, experience in short, Matilda, who seems to educate herself, represents a kind of enlightened childhood.

It is her avid reading that opens the doors to worlds that even her parents do not know (which makes them despise her even more).

Whether through experience or knowledge, both Pinocchio and Matilda conclude that the rules that govern the human sphere are not always fair and that, sometimes, it is fair to disobey them.

“Sometimes you have to be a little more than naughty,” sings Matilda, using all her wits and

special abilities .

(telekinesis) to embarrass her parents and resist Miss Trunchbull.

Pinocchio also uses wit and humor to invent his own script on the day that Mussolini himself —Il Duce, whom Pinocchio calls Il Dolce and Sua Excremenza— goes to see the puppet performance of Count Volpe that the

human doll

stars.

The fact that disobedience takes playful forms does not mean that it cannot have tragic consequences, because if there is something that tyrannical power does not understand, it is precisely humor.

After the performance, Il Dolce orders Pinocchio to be shot, who dies once more... only to be resurrected after his forced passage through the chambers of the Death Fairy.

It is precisely to her that Pinocchio later asks to be able to break the rules, no longer of the human sphere, but of the afterlife.

When, looking for him, Geppetto is about to drown in the sea, Pinocchio asks the Fairy to let him return to the world before the time he marks the hourglass in order to save him.

The Fairy finally agrees, urging him: "Make it worth it."

In the notion of responsible disobedience, breaking the rules that is not an end in itself, but a means to achieve something that is considered fair, would consist of the maturation of rebellion.

This is how

Matilda

and

Pinocchio

invite us to visualize and reflect on the political force of childhood.

Olivia Muñoz-Rojas

is a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and an independent researcher.


oliviamunozrojasblog.com


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Source: elparis

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