Psychologists tell us that geese undergo a process known as
“imprinting” which attaches them to their mother for long enough to
learn from her how to be a goose. At a certain point in their
infancy, they will “imprint” on the first thing they see. As this
is nearly always mother goose, this works out well for your average
goose. But if by some chance mama is away and a dog or a fire
engine happens along at the crucial moment, the gosling will grow
up thinking it is a dog or a fire engine instead of a goose. Set in
Britain in1982, Son of Rambow by Garth Jennings (The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) shows us what might be
considered a human instance of imprinting. Eleven-year-old Will
Proudfoot (Bill Milner) is a member of a sect called the Exclusive
Brethren, who are forbidden to watch movies or TV — among many
other things they are forbidden to do. His father is dead, and when
he accidentally catches a snippet of a pirated copy of First
Blood on the television of his first non-Brethren friend, he
thereafter regards John Rambo as his father.
As it happens, the friend, Lee Carter (Will Poulter), is making
a movie of his own with the videocam he uses to make pirate copies
of Hollywood films. He hopes to win a prize offered by a television
program for young film-makers. Will swiftly takes the project over,
turning it into a Stallone knock-off called Son of Rambow
(because he doesn’t know how the name is spelled) with himself in
the role of the son. Really, of course, it’s the movies that Will
has fallen in love with and the forbidden fantasies that they give
rise to. To this very slight extent, therefore, Mr Jennings’s movie
surprisingly allows us a glimpse into what it is that might lead
rational people to forbid their children to watch movies and even,
perhaps, into why and how movies can be bad for us, too. Even those
of us who love the movies ought to be reminded of that once in a
while.
But any such serious purpose, if it was ever more than an
accident in the first place, is soon forgotten as Mr. Jennings
allows himself to get caught up in exploring the friendship between
the two boys, the tensions within Will’s family, and between them
and their church, which are occasioned by it, and by the sheer
comedy of the boys’ movie-making. There is an elaborate sub-plot
involving the coming to town of a group of French exchange
students, including the impossibly cool Didier (Jules Sitruk) who
strikes the school like a thunderbolt. As all the other kids defer
to him, he defers to the hitherto unknown Will because he wants to
be in his movie. This drives a wedge between Will and Lee Carter
with more or less predictable consequences.
It doesn’t do much for the movie, however, and in spite of many
funny and enjoyable scenes, it begins to stray farther and farther
from plausibility or realism as it goes on. Where it really didn’t
ring true to me was in the end when the finished cut of Son of
Rambow is shown and both boys apparently find it as
screamingly funny as we are obviously supposed to find it. This
presupposes that they knew all along that they were making a funny
movie and not an action adventure flick like First Blood.
Now we know as well as Mr. Jennings does that First Blood,
like other movies featuring cartoon heroes, is itself laughable,
but the kids don’t know that. If they had known it, they would
never have wanted to make their own version of it in the first
place. The impulse to parody comes along later much later in life
than age 11.
Then, it is sober earnest heroism — or what, like First
Blood, can pass for it in a dim light — that appeals to
children. The film itself makes it clear that this is what makes
Will want to make the movie in the first place. The part of
First Blood that we see along with him is the part where
Richard Crenna warns that 200 men won’t be nearly enough to catch
the amazing, the super-human John Rambo. “You’d better make sure
you’ve got plenty of body bags,” he says, or words to that effect.
At this point we cut to Will, watching from hiding, as his eyes
widen: “Two hundred men!” he says wonderingly. It is precisely the
cartoon quality of the movie’s heroism that attracts him: not
because it is a cartoon but because, to him, it isn’t.
One of the picture’s virtues, in fact, is that it shows nicely
how Will, before he meets Lee, is perfectly adapted to life as an
outsider, living very much in a fantasy world with his drawings and
his little secret treasures in the shed behind his house or the
back row of the classroom where no one takes any notice of him.
Rambo simply gives a new direction to his already rich fantasy
life. How much better the movie would have been if we could have
been allowed to see, however distantly and imperfectly, the
down-side of this gap between real life and the fantastical and
therefore the sense in which Will’s mother (Jessica Stevenson) is
right about the movies. At least in some sense it is for
his own good that he should be spared the meretricious charms of
the popular culture.
Instead, mom is the one who is converted to his view — and Mr.
Jennings’s and yours and mine and the whole wide world’s for that
matter. This is the view that pop cultural trash is, if not to be
loved in every instance, at least to be preferred to a cloistered
virtue. We may even agree that it is better not to protect children
from such trash, just as it is better not to isolate yourself in an
exclusive community that looks down on “outsiders.” But that
doesn’t mean that those who are so isolated do not have a point
about the artistic junk food that we all consume so eagerly. It is
not merely irrational or foolish in them to seek to protect
themselves and their children from the spiritual and intellectual
degradation that so much of popular culture rejoices in. A bit of
an effort to see why they do it, and the real dangers to which they
are reacting would have made what is in any case an enjoyable film
a truly great one.
