Step Across This Line Read Free Page A

evening, at an hour too late for the kids, so that I could hear all the gags properly, enjoy the movie in-jokes, and marvel at the brilliance of the Toontown concept. But of all movies, the one that helped me most as I tried to find the right voice for
Haroun
was
The Wizard of Oz.
The film’s influence is there in the text, plain to see. In Haroun’s companions there are clear echoes of the friends who danced with Dorothy down the Yellow Brick Road.
    And now I’m doing something strange, something that ought to destroy my love for the movie but doesn’t: I’m watching a videotape with a notebook on my lap, a pen in one hand and a remote-control zapper in the other, subjecting
The Wizard of Oz
to the indignities of slow-motion, fast-forward, and freeze-frame, trying to learn the secret of the magic trick; and, yes, seeing things I’d never noticed before . . .
    The film begins. We are in the monochrome “real” world of Kansas. A girl and her dog run down a country lane.
She isn’t coming yet, Toto. Did she hurt you? She tried to, didn’t she?
A real girl, a real dog, and the beginning, with the very first line of dialogue, of real drama. Kansas, however, is not real, no more real than Oz. Kansas is a painting. Dorothy and Toto have been running down a short stretch of “road” in the MGM studios, and this shot has been matted into a picture of emptiness. “Real” emptiness would probably not look empty enough. It’s as close as makes no difference to the universal gray of Frank Baum’s story, the void broken only by a couple of fences and the vertical lines of telegraph poles. If Oz is
nowhere,
then the studio setting of the Kansas scenes suggests that
so is Kansas.
This is necessary. A realistic depiction of the extreme poverty of Dorothy Gale’s circumstances would have created a burden, a heaviness, that would have rendered impossible the imaginative leap into Storyland, the soaring flight into Oz. The Grimms’ fairy tales, it’s true, were often realistic. In “The Fisherman and His Wife,” the eponymous couple live, until they meet the magic flounder, in what is tersely described as “a pisspot.” But in many children’s versions of the Grimms, the pisspot is bowdlerized into a “hovel” or some even gentler word. Hollywood’s vision has always been of this soft-focus variety. Dorothy looks extremely well fed, and she is not really, but
unreally,
poor.
    She arrives at the farmyard, and here (freezing the frame) we see the beginning of what will be a recurring visual motif. In the scene we have frozen, Dorothy and Toto are in the background, heading for a gate. To the left of the screen is a tree trunk, a vertical line echoing the telegraph poles of the scene before. Hanging from an approximately horizontal branch are a triangle (for calling farmhands to dinner) and a circle (actually a rubber tire). In mid-shot are further geometric elements: the parallel lines of the wooden fence, the bisecting diagonal wooden bar at the gate. Later, when we see the house, the theme of simple geometry is present once again; it is all right angles and triangles. The world of Kansas, that great void, is shaped into “home” by the use of simple, uncomplicated shapes; none of your citified complexity here. Throughout
The Wizard of Oz,
home and safety are represented by such geometrical simplicity, whereas danger and evil are invariably twisty, irregular, and misshapen.
    The tornado is just such an untrustworthy, sinuous, shifting shape. Random, unfixed, it wrecks the plain shapes of that no-frills life.
    The Kansas sequence invokes not only geometry but mathematics too. When Dorothy, like the chaotic force she is, bursts upon Auntie Em and Uncle Henry with her fears about Toto, what are they doing? Why do they shoo her away? “We’re trying to count,” they admonish her, as they take a census of the eggs, counting their metaphorical chickens, their small hopes of income, which the tornado will shortly blow