This meme, at last report, has been shared one hundred five thousand fifty-nine times.
Even worse, a Google search for the same meme did not readily find it; but it found dozens of other memes that attribute the same quote to Carroll, or simply to "Alice in Wonderland".
This makes me very angry. (Chorus: What doesn't?) A friend advises I should pick my battles better, as this meme "will not change one person's life one iota."
(Of course, Dorothy Gale was similarly betrayed in that seminal family/fantasy film, 1939's The Wizard of Oz: L. Frank Baum offered no such pablum about finding the satisfaction of Home; indeed, Baum pointedly made Kansas seem like... well, Kansas; and he was quite content to side with his heroine in a middling distaste for the prairie, the farm, Henry and Em, and her situation in general.)
Sorry for the sidetrips. My point is this: the Alice stories are about an unflappable young girl—Ogden Nash's Isabel is a cheap knockoff...
But the misquote from Burton does more than betray Carroll; it gets to precisely the same modern FUBAR psychology I lamented last month re the Star Wars franchise: Trust your feelings, Luke! OMG fuck that. Don't trust your feelings. Poke your feelings. Rigorously examine and cross-examine and contemplate and consider your feelings. Interrogate your feelings with bright lights and good-cop-bad-cop. Feelings are the least reliable things your brain makes, for fuck's sake. And, sorry Alice, but maybe it's really not fun and cool to be mentally unstable. Maybe "the best people" aren't schizophrenics, and maybe you shouldn't hold schizophrenics up as role models.
I don't mean to belittle mental health issues or those who suffer from them. I mean to point out that the popular coöption of words like "bonkers", "crazy", and "insane" to mean "individualistic", "quirky", or "colorful" does belittle them. And while I can't hope to combat that tidal wave of usage, I cannot bring myself to be sanguine about ATTRIBUTING THAT MOTHERFUCKING SHITE TO LEWIS FUCKING CARROLL.
No matter what happens to her, Carroll's Alice never once doubts her own sanity; never questions the strange happenings around her to the point where she suspects the defect is hers. When the Cheshire Cat insists she must be mad, she silently and logically refutes it. Even when her own brain produces wholly new material in place of what she thinks she knows—as in "How doth the little crocodile" and "You are old, Father William"—she finds it a curious phenomenon but still never loses lucidity. But that pigfucker Tim Burton wants you to know that, if you find yourself in some kind of Wonderland, it's because you're entirely bonkers—but that's cool!
Both bits of advice may well owe some debt of devilry to the self-positive messaging that was ubiquitous in late 1960s/early '70s children's television programming—"free to be you and me"; "the most important person in the whole wide world is you!"; "I'm ok; you're ok"; etc.—a general instruction for budding psyches that any and every thought and feeling and action was ok because they, the thinkers/feelers/actors were capital-S Special. It was supposed to build healthy personalities. Didn't anyone consider they'd be making sociopaths and congenital shitheads feel better about themselves, too?
So that, in a really big (Denmark-size) nutshell, is why this particular bit of misinformation makes me froth at the mouth.
Oh, and the really good news? IMDB lists Alice through the Looking-glass (which Burton produced but did not direct) as "completed" and scheduled for release this year.
I disagree. It will change the life of every single person who reads it who cannot summon knowledge of the original Alice stories to dispute its validity. Indeed, the same applies to seeing the Burton movie—and Burton's not alone here; the 1999 made-for-TV version, despite a quite breathtaking cast, veers even farther south of Carroll than Burton dared, adding a tiresome frame story and a moral lesson—and rigorous self-confidence building—for Alice. A certain Joel "Yagotta" Eatmon at imdb has said this as well as I might have, so I will quote:
(Of course, Dorothy Gale was similarly betrayed in that seminal family/fantasy film, 1939's The Wizard of Oz: L. Frank Baum offered no such pablum about finding the satisfaction of Home; indeed, Baum pointedly made Kansas seem like... well, Kansas; and he was quite content to side with his heroine in a middling distaste for the prairie, the farm, Henry and Em, and her situation in general.)
Sorry for the sidetrips. My point is this: the Alice stories are about an unflappable young girl—Ogden Nash's Isabel is a cheap knockoff...
—who on her two journeys meets precious few people who are even civil to her and no one, not a single person or creature, who feeds her horseshit feel-good advice like the cited quote. Indeed, the closest Carroll comes to the sentiment is the Cheshire cat telling Alice, "You must be mad; otherwise you wouldn't have come here"—which invites contemplation of one's own sanity and borders on horror story logic.
But the misquote from Burton does more than betray Carroll; it gets to precisely the same modern FUBAR psychology I lamented last month re the Star Wars franchise: Trust your feelings, Luke! OMG fuck that. Don't trust your feelings. Poke your feelings. Rigorously examine and cross-examine and contemplate and consider your feelings. Interrogate your feelings with bright lights and good-cop-bad-cop. Feelings are the least reliable things your brain makes, for fuck's sake. And, sorry Alice, but maybe it's really not fun and cool to be mentally unstable. Maybe "the best people" aren't schizophrenics, and maybe you shouldn't hold schizophrenics up as role models.
I don't mean to belittle mental health issues or those who suffer from them. I mean to point out that the popular coöption of words like "bonkers", "crazy", and "insane" to mean "individualistic", "quirky", or "colorful" does belittle them. And while I can't hope to combat that tidal wave of usage, I cannot bring myself to be sanguine about ATTRIBUTING THAT MOTHERFUCKING SHITE TO LEWIS FUCKING CARROLL.
No matter what happens to her, Carroll's Alice never once doubts her own sanity; never questions the strange happenings around her to the point where she suspects the defect is hers. When the Cheshire Cat insists she must be mad, she silently and logically refutes it. Even when her own brain produces wholly new material in place of what she thinks she knows—as in "How doth the little crocodile" and "You are old, Father William"—she finds it a curious phenomenon but still never loses lucidity. But that pigfucker Tim Burton wants you to know that, if you find yourself in some kind of Wonderland, it's because you're entirely bonkers—but that's cool!
Both bits of advice may well owe some debt of devilry to the self-positive messaging that was ubiquitous in late 1960s/early '70s children's television programming—"free to be you and me"; "the most important person in the whole wide world is you!"; "I'm ok; you're ok"; etc.—a general instruction for budding psyches that any and every thought and feeling and action was ok because they, the thinkers/feelers/actors were capital-S Special. It was supposed to build healthy personalities. Didn't anyone consider they'd be making sociopaths and congenital shitheads feel better about themselves, too?
So that, in a really big (Denmark-size) nutshell, is why this particular bit of misinformation makes me froth at the mouth.
Oh, and the really good news? IMDB lists Alice through the Looking-glass (which Burton produced but did not direct) as "completed" and scheduled for release this year.
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