Circuit Marine

The short film Circuit Marine about the pirate captain's pets that keep getting eaten seemed a bit too morbid and depressing to be a children's short film (I only assume it is one because Professor Leeper said we would be watching children's films). The parrot, fish, and cat all die, and the pirate captain is sad each time. Afterwards, Professor Leeper mentioned that it shows that everyone eventually dies.

Ecclesiastes comes to mind.

2 “Meaningless! Meaningless!”
    says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
    Everything is meaningless.”

3 What do people gain from all their labors
    at which they toil under the sun?
4 Generations come and generations go,
    but the earth remains forever.

(Ecclesiastes 1:2-4)

Everything is meaningless. Everyone dies, and the circle of life keeps going. What a depressing "message," if I dare to use the word. It is definitely tragedy, if we are going to put it into a category of Buechner's. The tragic happenings in the film, although comedically portrayed, still resonate as depressing to the audience. The absence of God is apparent. Maybe it does not resonate as much with children, but they can see that the captain is sad about his losses. And is tragedy something we really think children should be exposed to?

C.S. Lewis gave his thoughts in the recent reading assignment. When making a story for a child, it is not good to "try to keep out of his mind knowledge that he is born into a world of death..." So Lewis' opinion was that the tragedy of the world should not be hidden for the child's sake. I would have to agree with him. To paraphrase Buechner: Without tragedy, there is no gospel. Teaching the gospel to children, as many Sunday school teachers would like to do, is quite hard when the children have no sense of tragedy.

However, a sense of tragedy does not come from experiencing art that shows tragedy. Art can evoke that sense from the audience, but the audience must learn about it and experience it themselves first. So even if children are exposed to tragic films, paintings, and even the many tragic sections of the bible, it does not really resonate with them until they have experienced suffering, pain, loss, and humiliation for themselves. Nor until they understand to some degree, the reason for suffering, pain, loss, and humiliation. Those things at learned when growing up. They add on to the stories from childhood and the fairy tales, but do not take those away, as Lewis wrote.

What I'm getting at is that the short film could be watched by children, but it is not the children that will understand the tragedy of it and see how the gospel is told through it.