“Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand
In the moon that is always rising . . .”
Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”
1In rough narrative structure and the recurrence of certain details, Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom clearly parallels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Like Mark Twain’s 1884 novel, the 2012 film follows a young orphan runaway joining forces along a waterway with a fellow escapee having left a family behind. Pursued by armed representatives of the community, the pair symbolically creates a new family unit, living happily off the land before a largely coerced return to the social order. While the tone is consistently light and the world Anderson creates is – unsurprisingly, given his other work – preciously stylized, Sam and Suzy’s excellent adventure nevertheless addresses with a degree of gravity at least two central themes of Twain’s subversive classic. Against a backdrop of social conflict, both treat the tension between individual freedom and communal constraint at the violently beating heart of American culture since the first English religious Dissenters set sail from Plymouth. And, as stories of childhood, both film and novel furthermore speak to the process of personal growth with its inherent transition between the poles of innocence and experience.
- 1 Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [1884]. Edited by Thomas Cooley. 3rd ed., (...)
2Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Moonrise Kingdom are tales of youthful marginality followed by escape, with that desperate flight morphing into pursuit of affectionate connection. The story of Huck is familiar. “All cramped up” (14)1 in the widow’s foster home, the young narrator next finds himself even more constrained, imprisoned as he is in the hidden cabin of his drunken, abusive father. Pap having gone for a drink-up in town, Huck sneaks out a hole sawed in the logs, gathers some provisions, covers his tracks, and, true to his piscatorial last name, paddles down the Mississippi in a canoe. There, of course, he will come by chance upon the fugitive slave Jim, the two continuing together on their raft for a series of justly famous adventures, and all this culminating in Huck’s great crisis of conscience and the story’s often criticized coda, with its farcical coincidences and forced resolution. In Moonrise Kingdom, bullied Khaki Scout Sam follows a similar trajectory, off in a canoe with survival gear after having slipped unnoticed through the classic prison cell trope of a disguised hole in a (tent) wall. Where the narrative differs significantly is in his fellow escapee. Certainly unhappy as a Scout, Sam’s also in love. As a later flashback indicates, the romantic correspondence he and Suzy engage in after meeting at a youth theater production will lead to a rendezvous in the woods, a surprisingly violent skirmish with pursuing Scouts, a stilted/adorably cute first kiss, and their eventual round-up by the forces of order. Suzy ends up back at home, while orphan Sam’s adopted by a kindly chief of the Island Police.
3This brief sketch is in no way the prelude to an in-depth examination of Twain’s monumentally great novel and Anderson’s winsome, critically acclaimed film. What this commentary will instead offer is a small, non-exhaustive handful of critical approaches to the multiple intersections of these two works. Moonrise Kingdom and Huckleberry Finn are very different narrative responses to very different historical, aesthetic, and personal circumstances that nonetheless speak to each other at times in compelling ways. For a better understanding of the manner and meanings of these conversations, the remarks to follow will examine, among other things, the nature and role of humor in both stories, their treatments of childhood, the weight of historical context in each, and the surprisingly similar endings crafted by Twain and Anderson. The stakes in the two works differ radically, of course – two young lovebirds in flight on the safely circumscribed space of a New England island vs. an abused child and escaped slave on the run down river in the 1840’s Deep South – but in their treatments of growing up and freighted history, the way they go for the funny bone and how they bring it all to a conclusion, these storytellers separated by more than a century display at times remarkably similar cultural and artistic DNA.
- 2 In their elaboration of a key principle of so-called New Criticism, Wimsatt and Beardsley argued ag (...)
4Huckleberry Finn and Moonrise Kingdom are both extremely funny works, with humorous touches that, while superficially different, are grounded in related comic strategies and, it seems (apologies to Wimsatt and Beardsley),2 similar intent. With notable exceptions such as, among several others, Huck lost in the fog and what follows, the Grangerford-Shepherdson horror show, and, of course, the narrator’s tortured internal debate about turning Jim in, Twain often goes for laughs. Whether it’s the widow calling her charge “a poor lost lamb and . . . a lot of other names” (14) or Huck, aware the Duke and King are frauds, not telling Jim because, anyway, “you couldn’t tell them from the real kind” (170), the humor is largely driven by the flagrantly innocent honesty of Huck’s narration. In the lost lamb excerpt, the rural boy’s simple naivete powers the joke, whereas in the other it’s the wised-up, tolerant awareness that’s also part of his character. Here as throughout the novel, humor is the happy residue of incongruity, the released tension in inversion and playfully subverted expectations recognized as early as the 18th century by such philosophers as Hutcheson and Kant. Expecting one thing, you get another, and in that fissure lies the laugh.
- 3 W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. The Pirates of Penzance; or The Slave of Duty. Premiere: New Yor (...)
5While this same impetus of incongruity makes for much of the comedy in Moonrise Kingdom, the vehicle is frequently different. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a masterpiece of verbal comedy. In the Anderson movie droll understatement or overstatement certainly do tickle – think Chief Sharp’s acknowledgement to Sam that “You’re also a bachelor” or frustrated Mr. Bishop’s frantic intention “to find a tree to chop down” – but the larger humorous tension tends to be stylistic in nature. Not surprisingly, as certain critical responses have shown, the archly theatrical world Wes Anderson creates here and in so many of his films is not to every taste. That said, in this tale of powerfully emerging youthful desire and inchoate yearning, his now familiar pattern of caricatured costuming, stilted movement, overexpressive gesture, and expressionless stares plays an effective comic and thematic role. It’s fondly chucklesome to watch Suzy’s mother bark orders into a bullhorn, and, on an island whose name alludes to Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance,3 can one help but hear the classic number “Modern Major General” at each shot of the cartoonishly military Khaki Scout troops crisply saluting. Against this over the top antic backdrop we have, of course, the authentic, surging puppy love of Sam and Suzy. With its juvenile hormonal intensity, still very much a mystery even to the young couple undergoing it, much of the ambient comedy comes in the discrepancy between an operetta world of exaggerated gesture Anderson elsewhere so generously provides and the inexperienced protagonists’ utterly deadpan seriousness of countenance and verbal expression. And as a cinematic experience, that it’s a hoot doesn’t make it any less oddly moving to witness that gap between the pair’s intensely emotional adventuring and their muted, buttoned-down behavior and expression.
- 4 Joyce Carol Oates, “Jocoserious Joyce.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Summer 1976): 680.
6In her reflections upon humor in Ulysses, Joyce Carol Oates offers terms relevant to the serious nature of the comedy infused throughout Twain’s and Anderson’s tales of childhood mutiny and flight. “Comedy is never gracious to fixed forms,” writes the novelist and critic. “The comic spirit is by its nature youthful and irreverent and rebellious.”4 Notably, in developing the theme of the friction between individual desire and social adherence, both artists turn throughout their works to this comic spirit. While his naïve rhetorical inversions and misunderstandings are a ready source of laughs, Huck’s innocent candor speaks equally to the weightiest questions of truth, conscience, and real vs. conventional morality. From his fussing about the small-pox lie to protect his friend (113) to a rough mid-feud Grangerford Sunday service with its “ornery preaching . . . about brotherly love” (129), Twain prepares Huck’s great internal debate about Jim. The boy’s pained arrival at the purifying embrace of “wickedness” in tearing up the letter to Aunt Polly serves as nothing less than the moral ballast of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and a signal moment in the history of American literature.
7While, of course, much less is at play in Moonrise Kingdom, its incongruity-based stylistic humor addresses a parallel tension between personal conscience and social pressure. More than playfully baroque exaggeration, Mrs. Bishop’s summoning bullhorn is a florid image of the simultaneously distant and controlling parental figure, and if you need a picture of the absurdly enforced public conformity both are fleeing, look no further than the Khaki Scouts’ tightly marched lines and the hilarious Scoutmaster Ward’s Last Supper breakfast table. In a related way Suzy and Sam’s tautly impassive manner covers for sharply awakened feelings and urges. Throughout Anderson plays this for laughs, but just where one might expect the most extravagant expressions of emotion he is certainly as well addressing the bonds of learned “proper” behavior and socially cultivated inhibition. Like Twain, Anderson reaches instinctively for his comic toolbox, and often with subversively serious intent. In her critical essay Oates again provides language, this time a single word, indirectly illuminating the work of both artists. That word is James Joyce’s famous neologism, “jocoserious.”
8Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Moonrise Kingdom are similarly built around the tension between the world of children and that of adults, between Blake’s famous realms of Innocence and Experience. And in both, while the symbolic flight from adult restriction, cynicism, and corruption towards youthful innocence and possibility certainly offers a charmed interlude, it also represents the inevitable transition towards maturity, with its incumbent losses and gains. Huck hightails it from the tight religious hypocrisies of his foster home to worse from his violent father and even worse still in Bricksville and with the sanctimoniously violent Grangerford clan, before truly only escaping to peaceful domestic harmony on the river with new father figure Jim, torn from his own family and adopting “honey” Huck: “We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all . . . . You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable” (134). Yet where does this temporary idyll end but back on the shore and in town with a new authority figure threatening to “sivilize me” (296). The fantasy lure of Tom Sawyer’s falsely rebellious “howling adventures” remains strong, but one hears the click as Innocence becomes Experience in the regretful last line of the book, “I been there before” (296).
9A glance at the calendar and the map of New Penzance Island certainly suggests that adult-identified problem children Sam and Suzy will take a similar route. Indeed, setting the action in early September around the locality called Summer’s End explicitly draws on the seasonal myth of birth, youth, maturation, and death. Before the summer season turns, young Sam will escape a loveless foster home, cruel contemporaries taking the orders of adults, and a grown-up world of bland khaki uniformity and military hierarchy. Candidly innocent, he seeks the connection and adventure missing from his young life with Suzy, literally on the lookout for the same things and off with her adventure books to join their fortunes together. Yet despite the purity of a symbolic union contrasting with Suzy’s mother’s called-out infidelity, the young couple will see their youthfully romantic summer come to its September end. Suzy finds herself back in the same room in the same dollhouse, while Sam, once the escapee, now swaps Davy Crockett coonskin for a uniform cap as a symbolic keeper of island order.
- 5 M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York, W. (...)
- 6 Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill.” Deaths and Entrances. Littlehampton Book Services Ltd., 1946.
10As the Romantics clearly recognized and critics led by M.H. Abrams have extensively elaborated upon,5 the use of the seasonal paradigm to model the process of growth furthermore recalls the myth of Eden. As Thomas wrote in “Fern Hill,” childhood is the time of “Adam and maiden . . . / So it must have been after the birth of the simple light / In the first, spinning place.”6 And, indeed, what is the last day of summer but the beginning of the Fall? Together with Jim, Huck certainly shares moments of Edenic union on the river, there where “you feel free and easy” and you “wouldn’t want to be nowhere else” (134, 60).
11But, like the serpent that bites Jim (63), the risk of expulsion from Paradise is never far off, notably just there on the shore to which Huck will ineluctably return at the end of the novel. On that shore lies the hellscape of Bricksville and the Dantesque vision of the slaves sold by the King and Duke, “them poor miserable girls and niggers hanging around each other’s necks and crying” (195). In its intentionally frothy manner, Moonrise Kingdom again skirts such weighty images and issues, but its protagonists do traverse similarly mythic territory. With the declaration “This is our land!,” the fugitives declare “dominion” over their garden “Kingdom” (Genesis 1:26), with its firmament, waters, and turtles. As a couple, Sam and an undressed, biblically “not ashamed” Suzy (with her not unsymbolic cat) play juvenile Adam and Maiden, and, of course, their forced separation is the emblematic end of innocence. All along, too, the calendar is there to remind the viewer not only of the impending storm but of time transforming childhood adventure into adult routine and responsibility. In the Bible, banishment from Paradise corresponds to what Yeats among others called Adam’s Curse, the obligation ever more to work, for the bounty once offered freely in the Garden now can only come from man’s hard labor. The day after the great storm heralded throughout Moonrise Kingdom is September 6, 1965, which is not just coincidentally Labor Day.
12Though they are literally escapist fictions, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Moonrise Kingdom take place in history. This is, of course, most evident in the former where the joined flight of Huck’s pal and adopted paternal figure Jim lends poignancy, thematic heft, and sometimes terrifying adult risk to what begins as a simpler child runaway episode. From a post-Civil War perspective as a respected, well-travelled author, Twain wrote about Southern and Border State America, and the very different world that was his own childhood in Missouri. Hailing from a town with the historically resonant names of Hannibal and, fictionally, St. Petersburg, he grew up in a society accepting slavery as an unquestioned norm, then lived through the Civil War and on into a post-Homestead Act America of the Indian Wars and emerging Gilded Age monopolies. Twain famously joined a quickly-disbanded Confederate militia, but the evolution of his beliefs on race and power is evident throughout Huckleberry Finn in his protagonist’s moral questioning and the sure growth of his relationship with a Jim affectionately humanized in such episodes as Huck’s regret for the nasty trick on his friend and the moving episode in which Jim remembers how he treated his deaf daughter. All this leads, of course, to Huck’s epic moral conflict, while elsewhere on the banks of a Mississippi further contextualized by the brief Ohio River subplot, Twain highlights the dark moral underpinnings of that world in a religion hypocritically twisted by shysters and the powerful, a world drawing on, show the Duke and King, the deep social background of corrupt European aristocracy. By the last pages in which Huck half-plans new adventures in the West, the Twain of the 1880’s makes clear that his comic tale of childhood adventure has further enlarged the borders of its satire and moral concern to include the Indian Territory.
13Setting his tale like Twain in the decade of his birth, Wes Anderson benefits from similar historical perspective. That he’s enticing the viewer to take such context into consideration seems clear in the Narrator’s precise warning about September 5, 1965, three days from now, when an historically epic storm will hit New Penzance Island. The collision in perspectives is interesting. On one hand, we have an unlikely childhood romance between an imaginative raven in a children’s production of Britten’s Noye’s Fludde and a pirate orphan who might have hailed directly from the operetta the island is named for, and all on a cute little space against a preciously designed diorama décor. On the other, we have the second to the fifth of September, 1965, the nearly precise middle of a decade known for its jarring, sometimes violent social change. In his tale of the Very Troubled Children Sam and Suzy, Anderson empathetically recreates a pre-adolescent world at once fully impervious to adult pressures and concerns, and necessarily at the mercy of snoopy Social Services and neglectful parents asserting their authority. That the world off the island is in a certain turmoil certainly works to reinforce the theme of these innocently creative young individuals in mobile revolt against forces of conformity while navigating their personal journeys towards that adult world. In early September of the year of the Selma March and the first large-scale demonstrations against the Vietnam War, the top songs on the Hit Parade were melodic squeals of dissatisfaction, in the U.S. the Beatles’ “Help” (“I need someone!”) and in the U.K. the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Fleeing his junior military base, what better soundtrack as Sam paddles Huckishly away to share with Suzy the domestic bliss of what even tricked Scoutmaster Ward would call a “commendable” camp site?
14The forebodingly heralded storm of Moonrise Kingdom further speaks to the historical framing of events on the island. Lashing New Penzance and Summer’s End as predicted, it eventually leads to the dam’s collapse and a Fludde recalling the theater production at which the couple first meets. The commentary on the larger adult world of historical consequences in a decade of escalating war and fading moral promise is clear in the Biblical Flood’s role as divine punishment for “the wickedness of man . . . great in the earth” (Genesis 6-4). Like the Raven, Suzy’s mascot and Noah’s first recourse after the Flood, the innocent lovebirds do fly largely free of blame, yet in their peregrinations even they are seen to follow the soon-to-be-inundated Chickchaw Harvest Trail across earth symbolically stained by America’s genocidal past. After all, “this is our land,” they boast. In the world Jim and Huck traverse, of course, far more explicit forms of wickedness are a constant presence similarly signaled by emblematic rains and flood. Following the cannon-powered menace of the town search party, Jim first enacts his oncoming parental agency, reading the birds as signs and safely guiding Huck to the warm domesticity of the cavern during the unending storm and constantly rising waters. A tawdry, cluttered locus of evil complete with murdered Pap’s carcass, the house then floats past as the striking image of a foundationless “civilized” world in clear contrast to the dry, secure cave and its connotations, a century after Rousseau, of the innocently primitive. As Jim shields Huck from knowledge of his father’s death and the two return to the cavern in relief, this is the moment of symbolic transfer to the pair’s new “home” (62). In Biblical terms the flood justly punishes a Pap Finn spied “laying on the floor” (61), his corpse buried in the heaped rags of a cruel white-trash life anticipating the violent moral abyss of others soon to be encountered along the storm-fed river.
15Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Moonrise Kingdom end in strangely similar manners. In both, society at last more or less gently reels in its antisocially nomadic protagonists, returning them to their families or placing them in newly reconfigured family units. Each seems to offer something in the neighborhood of a happy ending. As to Twain’s version, though, that happy ending has made few critics happy. From an indignant Hemingway to Leo Marx and beyond, the conclusion to Huckleberry Finn has tended to bomb critically as, at best, a lightweight shirking of narrative responsibility. According to the many discontents, Twain deftly wove a series of picaresque adventures into a deeply human fable of moral growth and friendship, then allowed the conventionally rebellious Tom to highjack the story, transforming it into a game of wildly improbable chance and repugnant, immoral manipulation.
- 7 Adam Gopnik, “Why the Mark Twain Industry Keeps Growing.” New Yorker (Nov. 21, 2010), quoted in Gar (...)
16Adam Gopnik called the ending “indefensible, callow and dull,” with “the inconsequence of a comedian looking for a way off the stage.”7 Yet, while this is certainly the consensual, more than respectable view, I would suggest that it’s not unreasonable to support a nearly exact counter-argument, that Twain knew the truest end would be one that sends Huck and Jim inevitably back into the waiting clutches of Tom and Aunt Sally.
17The worldly, unsentimental author who would shortly after write the breathtakingly cynical A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court casts a cold eye on human nature. For Twain’s baseline view concerning the behavior of most, just look at the Mississippi shoreline. Jim and Huck escape it temporarily to create their humanist republic of two, and an occasional kindly soul like Mrs. Judith Loftus will pitch in to help, but the almost inescapable norm off the raft is an ambient conformity, the unquestioned if ill-understood husks of religious language and gesture, and blind, thoughtless acceptance of social injustice. Its scale can run from, at its worst, the freak show horrors of vigilante justice and inbred, multi-generationally murderous feuds to the relatively benign daily hypocrisies of St. Petersburg and the Phelps plantation, where slavery remains nonetheless the norm and Huck, playing to the local audience, lies that luckily nobody died in an accident, just “a nigger” (230). Jim and Huck may flee this norm, but Twain knows its sheer, persistent inevitability. The author created a well-known narrative jam in sending an escaped slave downriver to the Deep South; his solution is most definitely a superficial storytelling magic trick but one built around a cynically realistic view of human nature and the irresistible pull of the conventional. Society, he knew (sadly, in all likelihood), wins at the end of the day – Huck and Jim had to be brought full-circle back into the social order of the novel’s beginning for that is the nature of things.
- 8 Roy Harvey Pearce, “’The End. Yours Truly, Huck Finn’: Postscript.” Modern Language Quarterly, IV, (...)
18Twain’s subtle confirmation of this fact occurs on the last page when Huck muses about accepting Tom’s offer to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” (296). As Roy Harvey Pearce brilliantly demonstrates in “’The End. Yours Truly. Huck Finn’: Postscript,”8 from his historical vantage point forty years after the events of the novel, Twain knew well that the then wild Indian Territory would soon inexorably fill with “the rest” to come, Manifestly Destined white settlers with fateful predictability slaughtering the indigenous tribes or pushing them further along, then establishing carbon-copy versions of towns and plantations. Despite his adventure fantasies a conventional realist, Tom Sawyer plans on “howling adventures amongst the Injuns . . . for a couple of weeks or two” (295), clearly time-stamped play and not the romantically open-ended flight of Huck or gravely personal quest of Jim. Even Huck by now knows that, while adventure beckons in the Territory, “the rest” are coming as sure as day, and there soon a new St. Petersburg will be setting up its wooden sidewalks. Growing up in Hannibal, Twain vastly admired the truly independent, charismatically marginal model for Huckleberry Finn, a boy named Tom Blankenship. But even that town rebel, as the author later found, would go the way of all things and end up a respectable member of society, nothing less than a Montana Justice of the Peace.
19Which invites a parallel look at Moonrise Kingdom. Sam may have slipped the bonds of the militaristic Khaki Scouts, but one of the film’s closing images is of the young boy in an Island Police cap heading down to the official squad car of his new adoptive father. Chief Sharp is a kind Justice of the Peace, but still. To be sure, much of the end of Moonrise Kingdom does project a gentle contentment. The storm has come and gone, assures the Narrator, leaving behind a bumper crop of corn. Suzy is again with the Bishops in their diorama house, every child and game in its place, and Sam, avoiding the David Copperfield future threatened by the toxic Social Services, plays a part in a newly reconstituted family. All placidly satisfying, to be sure, yet an alternate lens perhaps brings into focus a reading that one might consider somewhat less rosy.
20The image of Suzy aloft with Sam in the church tower clearly recalls the girl’s binocular-accompanied ascensions to the home lighthouse tower with their powerful sense of yearning for adventure, and in particular for the Penzance orphan pirate who is Sam. In the context of Noye’s Fludde, its destruction by a divine bolt of lightning from the heavens and the couple’s near-tragic fall undermine to a degree the good news that follows. Like the Odyssey to which one of her adventure books alludes, flight from home was perhaps never destined to be more than a circular journey. On her home island group, the Khaki Scouts weirdly and somewhat ominously go on with their maneuvers after the summer camp season, and the storm has fully erased the inlet of the young couple’s symbolic baptism, first kiss, and new home. Sam does recreate the image in the painting completed just before slipping out of Suzy’s room, but like the bedroom window it echoes, the small, circumscribed rectangle of its frame offers a poor version of the sweeping, open vistas and piercing closeups of Suzy on the lookout upstairs.
21While the associated image of Sam slipping surreptitiously out of his girlfriend’s window draws directly on a cinematic history of adventuresome teenage disobedience, what is he in fact doing but returning to a chosen role partnering with the cop waiting below? Following this, the pleasant closing credits audio will then jauntily leap from instrument to instrument but do so, it must be remembered, in the context of the Benjamin Britten instructional record playing in Suzy’s house at the film’s opening. All about the different parts of the orchestra fitting into a whole and how Variations exist as the different ways “everyone plays the same theme,” the commentary emphasizes hierarchical control and a guiding spirit of adherence to common purpose. Complete with requisite wedding, Moonrise Kingdom is certainly a comedy, but, I would argue, to the film’s credit its sweet narrative of quietly rebellious innocence and first love also subtly recognizes the compromises to come. Leaving the viewer not with first light but with a rising moon, like Huckleberry Finn Anderson’s film is unafraid to confirm that everyone gets evicted from Eden and that the destination of all childhoods is Summer’s End.
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