Pollyanna
One
recent Sunday, my wife Carol got me to watch a movie I had somehow
missed in my childhood. I had certainly watched almost the entire
Disney canon, from Old Yeller to Darbie O'Gill & the
Little People (which featured a very young Sean Connery, by the
way!), from The Shaggy Dog to The Parent Trap.
Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, The Love Bug,
and on and on... not to mention all the classic animated films.
But I had never seen Pollyanna.
And
having missed it as a child, when I had grown to be a young teen and
then an adult, I had already dismissed it as, well, Pollyannish, and
the notion to see the movie never again crossed my mind. Which was
my loss.
It is
easy to dismiss so much of the Disney cinema vault as pure syrup.
And as the years went by, I think perhaps that the studio indeed
fell into formula and maybe lost some of the genuine celebration of
being a child. But there can be no question that so many of those
early films, crafted so elegantly and masterfully, had a tremendous
impact on the morals and ultimately the hopeful outlook of an entire
generation (mine, to be exact: the Boomers). There was
always an essence of
goodness embodied in the main characters, and that was juxtaposed
against some form of self-centered meanness, and generally an
element of danger (and fear). Good had to be more than merely
"good", it had to have the power to overcome adversity.
That’s an important lesson, and we all learned it repeatedly in the
cool darkness of a movie theatre.
The movie
Pollyanna was the quintessence of that combination of
elements. I confess to being moved and touched when I finally
watched it. The film spoke past my adult cynicism and reached back
somewhere in my memories to resonate with the child I hope we all
keep safely stored away, ready to rise strong.
Pollyanna
played the Glad Game, a way of dealing with whatever obstacles or
negativity she had to face, and she taught it to a whole town of
self-centered adults. On the face of it, the Glad Game does seem
hopelessly "Pollyannish". But in its essence it holds a great truth,
one that we should all wake up to every morning: As Abraham Lincoln
said, if you look for the bad in people, expecting to find it, you
surely will.
The world
seems ever more dismal these days, and filled with self-centered
people who can’t seem to agree on anything. But I think everyone
would agree that we would all love to have someone like Pollyanna to
teach us the Glad Game. And that if can manage to stay on the
lookout for the good in
people, we may very well find that as well.