I sit in COVID-19 quarantine, sometimes imagining the best-case scenario of our release. At best it is an era of renewed hope, a green future, and a return to simpler pleasures. In this New Age, one may be recommended to reconnect with “the child within.” The child within does not need money, status symbols, or getting loaded. Social interactions are plain and straightforward. The child within likes things natural. The child within is rainbows and waterfalls, cabbages and kings.
Except that sometimes, the terrain of the child within is a freakin’ scary place. I’m not even talking about diabolical spring of parent-induced trauma.
For example, remember the routines you had to put yourself through to mentally maintain some kind of control of your surroundings, which you were usually helpless to understand? Habits that would cause a diagnosis of serious obsessive-compulsive disorder in an adult? Not only were there times when you could absolutely not step on any cracks in the sidewalk, but you would have to repeat certain movements or thoughts a prescribed number of times in order to save your mother from dying, or to prevent something equally terrifying from happening. How about the lunacy of verbally repeating or reading words over and over until they appear to be utter nonsense? That one could be kind of fun, until the terrifying realization that nothing is as it appears to be settles in. How about the one where you lie in bed at night imagining infinity? You lay there in the dark, thinking about the universe, and try to get your head around the meaning of never-ending. The existential angst that this produces may not be a desirable re-visitation.
The primal rage of the child within is especially frightening in its lack of control or understanding of its origins. I remember having tantrums in which the blood-boiling anger verged on the homicidal. During one tantrum, I threw the contents of my room into a great pile in the middle of the floor, with visions of torching it all. How does a small child even have these impulses? Does anyone really want to re-visit this violence and fear that is an innate aspect of the child within?
Certain children’s entertainment programming induced a kind of primal fear, a cloying existential creepiness that was downright terrifying, and lingers to corrupt the existing child within. Bruno Bettelheim as well as other child psychologists have made careers out of delving into the notion of how children’s entertainment, in his case fairy tales, purposely tap into the creeping fear of children so that they can be trained and controlled.
Certainly this was true of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. An adult for more decades than I can believe, I still have nightmares about the repellent Child Catcher. I experienced this same kind of terror once watching one of my favorite after-school programs, Speed Racer. A usually benign show, during this particular episode I succumbed to unstrung shrieking, and ran to my dad in the living room, who was perplexed that a tough kid could be so scared watching something so banal. But he didn’t see it. The sequence had to do with someone you love turning on you and becoming evil. It is a frightening archetype of what one actually has to deal with if one has intimate relationships with drunks, drug addicts, or the mentally unstable. Thanks to the wonder of YouTube, I have found this clip of Speed Racer, and I have to say, the creeping horror still spooks me and my child within:
TRIXIE’S DREAM
My husband, a childhood Dr. Who fanatic, describes feeling the creeping existential horror he felt fairly frequently upon viewing his favorite program. This was a show that, though frequently frightening to even adults, was broadcast at 5:30pm on Saturdays, a children’s timeslot.
He was also freaked by a certain episode of Space: 1999. Upon viewing it, the child within me indeed recoils:
DRAGON’S DOMAIN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tbXhu09m5s
Me and my child within have regressed into a quivering fetal position under the bed, hiding from the bogeyman in the closet.