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| Peter Billingsley in A Christmas Story |
Rachel Harris and Steve Zahn, Diary of a Wimpy Kid
Some might be surprised that I enjoyed 2010's Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It's an entertaining movie.
I never heard of the book series by Jeff Kinney (my kids recently started listening to the audio books) the movie is based on until I found this movie at the public library in Lincoln, Nebraska back in 2013.
I decided to watch it on a whim. To be honest, I can't remember my exact reasoning to give this movie, definitely not made for the likes of me, a try. But I did.
I know Diary of a Wimpy Kid received less-than-savory, albeit not absolutely terrible reviews. Still, I enjoyed it more than I expected to. It's target audience is junior high kids. While I'm not a junior high kid, I used to be one.
While watching it, Diary of a Wimpy Kid kept bringing the 1983 Holiday comedy A Christmas Story to my mind.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid centers on young Greg Heffley (Zachary Gordon). He fights a lot with his older brother, Rodrick. He torments his younger brother Manny a little too much. He's also starting middle school, and is bombarded with mixed thoughts and misguided expectations about it. He's basically like most kids.
Through Greg's narration, thankfully not over done, we understand what those expectations and goals are. He realizes, even at 13 or 14 - however old he is - that what he is familiar and comfortable with is changing, and will continue to change. It's a hard lesson when a kid first realizes that it's happening. And with it comes realization that he must somehow cope.
Heffley learns the good parts as well as the bad parts of middle school fairly quickly. A lack of popularity will resort to the new kid eating lunch of the cafeteria floor. P.E. teachers will also favor the bigger kids over the smaller ones. Though the audience has an unbiased view of this one particular aspect of typical American life for juveniles through the eyes of an 14-year old, they're still able to sit on the outside and look in.
A Christmas Story, released nearly 30 years prior, is also based on a book - In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd.
Like Diary of a Wimpy Kid, it takes an unbiased look at a slice of typical Americana life.
For anyone who has consistently missed the movie's 24-hour marathon on TBS every Christmas, it's about nine-year old Ralphie Parker and his quest for a Red Ryder BB-gun, which he deems is the perfect Christmas present.
The story is narrated by an adult Ralphie, reminiscing on his pursuit.
A Christmas Story takes place in the 1940s - a period often viewed as America's "golden age." But the Parker family are less than golden. I talked about it in a post called Is A Christmas Story really a stupid movie? Ralphie is living in the 1940s while Greg is experiencing life in current time. Anyhow, it's satirical, but both movies are certainly not watered down.
Like A Christmas Story, Diary of a Wimpy Kid knows a thing or two...or three, about human behavior. It doesn't talk down to young audiences when portraying Greg's experiences transitioning just a little closer to adulthood, and seeing life as it really is. The story does a decent enough job depicting the common adolescent mistake of projecting specific personas to gain respect and attention from peers which children think they deserve and need for survival. Greg even goes so far as to try and turn his friend, Rowley, into what he wants him to be. As Ralphie has his friends Flick and Schwartz to pal around with and confide in, Rowley is about all Greg has. He doesn't "have" his older brother, Rodrick, for any support. Rodrick just assumes Greg will be "dead or homeschooled" before the year ends.
But rather than appreciate Rowley for his own sake, Greg tries to change Rowley's image in order to bolster himself up on the popularity scale.
Both movies, especially Diary, reminds me of the line in John Lennon's song Beautiful Boy. "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
Both kids sure fantasize a lot about how their life ought to go if only they could steer their respective adults into doing things their way. But adults seem to love humiliating kids, whether their P.E. teacher is watching the big kids tackle the small kids, or their parents force them to wear humiliating bunny outfits their Aunt Clara sent them at Christmas.
Ralphie fantasizes how a Red Ryder BB-gun could possibly save the lives of his entire family from creeping marauders if only his parents, his teacher, and Santa Claus himself could see things his way. Greg, meanwhile, dreams how obtaining popularity could lead to an adulthood full of success, if only his parents, his friends, and fellow classmates could see things his way.
At Warren G. Harding School, where Ralphie is enrolled, he and his friends face the pressure heaved on them by dog-dares, double dog-dares, and triple dog-dares. In the film, we see this pressure applied to poor Flick who's dared to stick his tongue to a frozen pole. Chickening out such a dare leads to a lasting stigma.
Meanwhile, at Greg's school, the stigma comes in the form of the dreaded "cheese touch" - it's a side story about a moldy piece of Swiss cheese forever present on the black top of the school yard. Anyone who touches it has ths "cheese touch" which is similar to the dreaded "cooties."
Anyways, dares are as old as kids themselves. As long as kids exist, so will dares.
I think it's the simple dialogue from a pre-teen's line of reasoning, the honesty of these kid's lives - anticipations, hopes, expectations, and disappointments - that make these movies similar. Both are narrated by the main character.
But Wimpy Kid doesn't condescend to its young audience. Yes, there's boogers and other gross out humor. Yes, there's the weird kids. Everyone in middle school had their encounters with "weird kids." Ralphie did as well. All in all, Wimpy Kid has a pretty good grasp on human nature and experiences, especially when it comes to a person's need to belong.
We see this in Greg Heffley and his quest to be popular.
All these depictions, though silly, don't go overboard. They're funny from an outside perspective looking in. It's a style similar to that of...you guessed it...A Christmas Story.
When it comes to finding a niche to fit in, young Greg's options seem pretty limited to school and what it has to offer.
Both he and Ralphie do get what they want, but it doesn't come to them in the way they thought it would.
Ralphie gets his BB Gun, but from the one person he never asked. Greg does have his popularity, but he gets it through sacrificing his reputation for his friend Rowley. And he finds his "popularity" with those who actually knew him all along, and see his selflessness for what it is. He learns to appreciate what he always had. It just didn't come the way he initially wanted it to.
All audiences need to relate to Greg Heffley and Ralphie Parker are their own experiences being a kid. Either at some point in our lives, we had a toy we sorely wanted, convinced it would bring us happiness unlike anything else. And, at some point, we started a new chapter in our lives where our first task on hand was obtaining acceptance. We just needed to know the terms we needed to meet to obtain that acceptance. Both movies don't water anything down. They're blunt. What you see is what you get, even if you're 11-years old. Welcome to life!
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