Step Across This Line Read Free

prepared to interrupt the gray inevitability of her life by running away but is so tenderhearted that she runs back again when Professor Marvel tells her that Auntie Em is distraught that she has fled. Dorothy is the life-force of this Kansas, just as Miss Gulch is the force of death; and perhaps it is Dorothy’s turmoil, the cyclone of feeling unleashed by the conflict between Dorothy and Miss Gulch, that is made actual in the great dark snake of cloud that wriggles across the prairie, eating the world.
    The Kansas of the film is a little less unremittingly bleak than that of the book, if only because of the introduction of the three farmhands and of Professor Marvel, four characters who will find their rhymes, their counterparts, in the Three Companions of Oz and the Wizard himself. Then again, the movie Kansas is also more terrifying, because it adds a presence of real evil: the angular Miss Gulch, with a profile that could carve a turkey, riding stiffly on her bicycle with a hat on her head like a plum pudding or a bomb, and claiming the protection of the Law for her campaign against Toto. Thanks to Miss Gulch, this cinematic Kansas is informed not only by the sadness of dirt-poverty but also by the badness of would-be dog murderers.
    And
this
is the home that there’s no place like? This is the lost Eden that we are asked to prefer (as Dorothy does) to Oz?
    I remember (or I imagine I remember) that when I first saw this film, Dorothy’s place struck me as being pretty much a dump. I was lucky, and had a good, comfortable home, and so, I reasoned to myself, if
I’d
been whisked off to Oz, I’d naturally want to get home again. But Dorothy? Maybe we should invite her over to stay. Anywhere looks better than
that.
    I thought one further thought, which I had better confess now, as it gave me a sneaking regard for Miss Gulch and her fantasy counterpart, the Wicked Witch, and, some might say, a secret sympathy for all persons of her witchy disposition, which has remained with me ever since: I couldn’t stand Toto. I still can’t. As Gollum says of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins in another great fantasy: “
Baggins:
we hates it to pieces.”
    Toto, that little yapping hairpiece of a creature, that meddlesome rug! L. Frank Baum, excellent fellow, gave the dog a distinctly minor role: it kept Dorothy happy, and when she was not, it had a tendency to “whine dismally”—not an endearing trait. Its only significant contribution to Baum’s story came when it accidentally knocked over the screen behind which the Wizard of Oz was concealed. The film-Toto rather more deliberately pulls aside a curtain to reveal the Great Humbug, and in spite of everything I found this an irritating piece of mischief-making. I was not surprised to learn that the pooch playing Toto was possessed of a star’s temperament, and even brought the shoot to a standstill at one point by staging a nervous breakdown. That Toto should be the film’s one true object of love has always rankled. But such protest is useless, if satisfying. Nobody, now, can rid me of this turbulent toupee.
    When I first saw
The Wizard of Oz
it made a writer of me. Many years later, I began to devise the yarn that eventually became
Haroun and the Sea of Stories.
I felt strongly that—if I could only strike the right note—it must be possible to write the tale in such a way as to make it of interest to adults as well as children. The world of books has become a severely categorized and demarcated place, in which children’s fiction is not only a kind of ghetto but one subdivided into writing for a number of different age-groups. The movies, however, have regularly risen above such categorizing. From Spielberg to Schwarzenegger, from Disney to Gilliam, the cinema has often come up with offerings before which kids and adults sit happily side by side. I watched
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
in an afternoon movie theater full of excited, rowdy children and went back to see it the next