Children’s stories can be set in the real world or in a fantasy world. But the best stories, for me, always involved the discovery of an alternative world just at the edge of everyday reality. It was the discovery itself that provided the greatest excitement, and my curiosity and wonder were stirred up above all by point of intersection between the two worlds – the threshold itself.
Classic examples of this are the rabbit hole that takes Alice into her wonderland; the tornado that sweeps Dorothy away to meet the Wizard of Oz; and the wardrobe that leads to Narnia. It’s for the same reason that I continue to love time-travel films.
One of my favourite books as a child was Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. When the new film version was in production I was disappointed to hear that the director Spike Jonze had chosen to alter the crucial ‘threshold’ moment, the moment of transition.
In the book, little Max storms off to his room in a huff, and the bedroom itself gradually dissolves into the Land of the Wild Things. The walls, the ceiling, the bedposts – they slowly transform themselves into the enchanted forest. So the distance between his ordinary reality and this alternative world is felt to be paper-thin.
In the film, Max escapes down the street, through a broken fence (which becomes the symbolic threshold), to a boat waiting on the shore. The new land feels like it is out there rather than just beside or within the strange world we call the real one.
But it’s a beautiful film. More like a poem or a meditation on childhood than a movie. It captures something about the mood of childhood and the hugeness of the questions we face there. It transports you, with Max, back into those primal experiences of the world that never really disappear.
I don’t often link to film reviews, because so many of them are disposable – and they give away too much plot. This Empire review, by Dan Jolin, is a thought-provoking meditation in its own right.
I suppose that midnight on New Year’s Eve – and in this case the eve of a new decade – is one of those imaginative thresholds that even we adults can continue to appreciate. And it’s one of the clearest forms of time-travel.
Bridges and Tangents 
Have you seen Avatar? Th one unique point of the film, I think, is the intereaction between the real human actors and the virtual Na’vi. The lead character, Jake, has a human body and is disabled. Jake also enters and in some sense becomes a Na’vi. The threshold between the two bodies and their environments is the human mind of Jake. The mind jumps, via a hi-tech capsule, from one reality to the other.
Perhaps you would find Michael Foucault’s ‘Des Espace Autres’ interesting, if you haven’t done so already.
Yes, Jake inhabits the organic body of a Na’vi; his fellow soldiers inhabit the mechanical bodies of their battle suits; and you and I are communicating through keyboards and digital signals and flat-screen displays – all of us believing that our true selves are somehow connecting… I’ll look out for the Foucault.