During an early scene in Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood, a young kid named Mason and his sister Samantha are lying in their mother’s bed as she reads Harry Potter. For Mason, and so many kids of the past 15 years, Harry Potter appears to be a primary childhood fantasy. The series appears throughout Boyhood; at one point Mason and Samantha dress in Potter costumes for the midnight release for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
As I watched Boyhood, I thought a lot about magic and fantasy. The film was shot over the course of 12 years, and watching the seamless passage of real time is a stunning display of the magic movies offer, knowing that with any cut of the camera, Mason and Samantha might be a year older. Boyhood truly is time-lapse cinema, as Ethan Hawke (who plays the father in the film) described it.
Part of the magic of Boyhood comes with the somber realization, not new to this Linklater film, of watching a childhood unfold before our eyes, and seeing what is lost with the inevitable passage of time.
A couple of years (in the film) after reading Harry Potter in their mother’s bed, the siblings spend a night in their father’s apartment. Mason, tucked in for the night on the living room couch turns to his dad to talk about magic. “There’s no such thing as real magic in the world, right?” Mason asks his dad, a little sheepishly. “There are no elves, or anything?”
Mason’s father does his best to answer honestly while hoping to keep alive in his son the feeling that magic exists in the world. There may not be elves, the father tells his son, but what if there was a gigantic sea-creature with a heart as big as a car, arteries so large you could crawl inside them, and that used sonar to communicate to its giant relatives? Would that not be magic?
Mason isn’t buying it: “But, right this second, there’s, like, no elves in the world?”
In Boyhood, as Mason says, there are no elves. There’s no escape to fantasy to be had. This is not that kind of movie. Mason will grow up, have his first beer, take up photography, be lectured by adults about applying himself and eventually graduate high school. Normal human stuff; no elves.
Still, the question lingered as watched I Boyhood: why is an elf more magical than a whale? The natural world is filled with incredible creatures and occurrences, some of which Mason encounters on camping trips and hikes in the mountains, and more he will surely experience. Does growing out of the childlike belief in elves mean growing out the wonder of seeing magic in the world?
Boyhood isn’t the first film to combine the difficulties of growing up with the desire to embrace magic in the real world. The frequency with which the subject is considered, in films for children and adults, testifies to the lasting impact of losing the sense that there is really more happening in the world than we are seeing with our own eyes. On one end of the spectrum are full fantasy stories, inhabiting worlds of actual magic, like Mason’s beloved Harry Potter. On the other side are realist dramas, like Boyhood itself, depicting that growing up realization in our own world. But there is a curious collection of stories in between that have sought to portray the difficulty of being a child in an adult world through a child’s belief in magic.
Sometimes these stories combine the magical with the mundane, literally. In The Never Ending Story for example, a quiet kid named Bastian spends his time running from bullies and reading books. In one of those books Bastian finds a parallel universe called Fantasia (Fantastica, in the book) ruled by a young and dying Empress. The world of Fantasia is threatened by the consuming evil called the Nothing-representing apathy and loss of magic-which stands to destroy, essentially, imagination. The fate of the magical world Fantasia becomes dependent on Bastian’s actions in the non-magical world in which he lives.
Other stories, like Pan’s Labyrinth take a darker twist to mixing childhood belief in magic, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy not because of the joy of a fantasy world but because of the terror in the real world. Pan’s Labyrinth is about a small girl named Ofelia and her life in Franco ruled Spain in 1944. The film blends the violence of Fascist Europe with a magical fairy-tale world that Ofelia finds hiding just beneath the surface of her home. She escapes the horrors of war by retreating to a fairy world, but in this instance, both worlds take part in the violence that Ofelia cannot escape. As the world around Ofelia partakes in ever greater violence, the fantasy world of her retreat likewise increases in terror.
Both The Never Ending Story and Pan’s Labyrinth combine the magic of childhood with the real-world life of being a human kid: bullies, parents, school, forces beyond one’s control. Escaping from these things into fantasy during childhood provides not only creativity and imagination but relief from those realities, for better or worse.
Boyhood does not literally portray the magic and fantasy of Mason’s youth. It portrays only his adolescence and the consequences of growing up. But there’s a reason that our movies—be they fantasies like Never Ending Story, or realistic dramas like Boyhood—continually encourage us to maintain the magic of our childhoods. Because our world has plenty of magic and cause for wonder, if we only foster and maintain our capacity to see that wonder.
Over and over in the movies we watch, with our without our children, we are reminded that this world maintains magic of its own. Be it grace or love or the uncanny realities of our natural world or the mysteries of deepest space. There is in this world that which can only be called magic. We often hear ‘grow up’ used as admonishment, a way of rebuking children for the manner in which they misunderstand the important matters of the real world. But Mason’s dad—just like the stories we love—doesn’t go for that. He doesn’t lie to his kid and tell him, yes there are elves here right now. But he doesn’t squash the magic, either. He just presents us with the relevant question: What makes an elf more magical than a whale?
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