Matilda

as always, a nostalgia watch. and yet this time I could see a little clearer, and with intention could watch a little like I’d never seen it before. I could dedicate one part of my mind to peeling back the cinematic layers, even as the rest of it remembered again the first time I saw it, and the countless subsequent watches. and god!! (here the voice of my nostalgia and the voice of my now-self merge and become indistinguishable) - what a film!  anyway, with my new artificial clarity I began wondering about the trunchbull and what her representation might tell us about the roles Roald Dahl puts his women in. the Trunch - childless, athletic, decidedly masculine, and EVIL. is she queer-coded? the most brutal, warped and clawed manifestation of repressed identity? but that doesn’t feel right - she is too animalistic, uncontained and uncontainable. she is almost not even human. contrast the Trunch with Miss Honey (who if you scroll through any of the reviews here you will notice has inspired a fair few feelings in a fair few women). Miss Honey - also childless (at least in the beginning), also totally removed from any hint of romance. there isn’t even a character that she COULD feasibly be involved with (something films should do more often, especially children’s films). Miss Honey - certifiably feminine, I think it’s safe to say. almost feminine to the extreme - so soft-spoken it’s like she’s whispering, nurturing and kind, and overly submissive (which is implied to be, in part, a result of the trauma she faced… which is also interesting). these two women are at the opposite ends of society’s (arbitrary) gender spectrum. I could say then, that Dahl (and, I suppose, Devito) implies that women should be feminine. But that is too easy, it doesn’t seem fair. Matilda, I suppose, is somewhere in the middle of the continuum. She is kind and caring, but unafraid to speak up, to go out alone and stand up for what’s right. To protect those too afraid or affected by trauma to protect themselves. and I’m biased - Dahl, for all his (many) faults, always seemed to understand the genderlessness of childhood. by this I mean, both his male and female protagonists, because he had both (though more male ones from memory), felt real. Their genders did not define them. they weren’t weak women, and they weren’t the ‘strong women’ we see today (which has overcorrected into just entrenching so-called masculine traits as strong and heroic). they were children - they were people.