Moonrise Kingdom and Times of Wonder
By Debra Mitchell
I think you’ve still got lightning in you.
— Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) to Jared Gilman as Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) in Moonrise Kingdom, 2012
Summer’s end. I can think of few more evocative phrases in the English language. The words conjure vivid sense memories and emotions: the splashing-laughing sounds of the final day at the pool, shopping for school supplies, swirling midway lights and the scent of fried food at state fairs, a subtle change in the quality of sunlight, the first few yellow leaves, geese starting to migrate, the first day of a new school year… Melancholy mixed with anticipation. I feel it even now, long after my last graduation.
I find myself thinking of the night before school starts, lying in my hot pink bedroom with a new scooter skirt and matching knee socks spread out on a red vinyl bean bag chair. I retrace the early morning walk down a winding path from our house to St. Matthews Elementary. I see the Velveeta-box building. Our new school logo—a tiger riding a rocket with the words “et schola amore pacis” (school of peace and love – can you tell it was the Sixties?)—is displayed outside the principal’s office. I smell the strong lemon floor wax used by George, the suspender-wearing janitor, and feel the smooth, freshly papered bulletin boards trimmed in corrugated paper.
My elementary school had a magical librarian, Eleanor Kuhn, whose silver hair was always perfectly coiffed. She wore her glasses on a chain and dressed with simple elegance. Her voice was whisper-soft and calming as she read picture books while we sat upon carpet squares on the floor, entranced by her cadences and the perfect choreography of how she stood, turned the pages, and showed us the illustrations. I felt awe in her presence, certain that she possessed the magic and mystery of every book ever written within her mind and body.
Sometimes the library came into our classroom. Mrs. Kuhn wheeled in a funny-looking machine. Not exactly a film projector or a television screen, but a rolling metal box that showed magnified versions of picture books with camera movement so that illustrations could be seen in close-ups or panning shots from one side of the page to another, but without the crease of the binding showing. The books were read by unseen narrators with hypnotic voices, and there was music, too. The lights would be turned off in the room, and there was nothing but the glowing book—like some strange and beautiful creature performing in front of the class. It didn’t happen very often and on no particular schedule. I made up my own story about the mysterious story box. It was a librarian robot from outer space—part of an intergalactic exchange program of librarians that Mrs. Kuhn was secretly a part of. I imagined Mrs. Kuhn going into space and reading to alien robots with her glasses hanging over her astronaut’s suit.
I loved the alien story box, and I loved one book it showed most of all: Time of Wonder by Robert McCloskey—a book without much story, yet wonderfully atmospheric. It was about a place, a cluster of islands in Maine—Isleboro, Western, Spectacle, Hog, Pond, and Two Bush. An unnamed family lives on an island for the summer, gently exploring the landscape, sailing, and encountering the sights and sounds of a small sea town. The water-color illustrations mesmerized me: the soft blues of the ocean and sky, the deep greens of the pine trees, the earthy browns and golds of the craggy rocks where children climbed and jumped into the water, the white triangles of sailboats, and the gray underbelly of towering cumulus clouds passing over the islands.
The climax of the book is a hurricane (I adored and feared storms as a kid). Slowly, so slowly the storm builds. I was entranced by the simple tension of oncoming weather. Then all at once, it hits and blows, thrilling and terrifying. A single yellow light burns in the window of a single house in the dense water-color pools of black and midnight blue. Waves and winds clash. The window slams open and the storm invades, tossing books and board games across the pages. But the hatches are battened down again, and the family inside the house sits tight together on the couch, singing against the storm. And then it’s over; the moon rises over quieting waters. In the morning the storm’s wreckage is another world for children to explore. Finally and without warning, it’s time to go. We are at summer’s end. Robert McCloskey’s text reads:
It is the end of another summer.
It is time for you to leave the island, too.
…
Pack your bag and put in a few treasures – some gull feathers, a few shells, a book of pressed leaves, a piece of quartz that came for a crack in the old rock on the point –
…
A little sad about the place you are leaving.
A little glad about the place you are going...
Time of Wonder became my favorite children’s book, although I never owned it as a child. I knew that I was moved by this book in a profound way; I was changed by its story. It became a deep and unchangeable part of me. It captured a feeling I had, but didn’t know how to describe for myself. I lost the book’s title as I got older. I held onto the images and feelings, but didn’t know what to call the story and couldn’t remember who had written it.
While moving into our first apartment after college, I talked about this elusive book with my friend Laura (now a magical librarian at Ballard High School). She remembered it, too. She tracked it down and gave it to me for my birthday. Every time I re-read the book as an adult, I felt more deeply connected to it. I experienced new layers of the story—its subtle meditation on life’s transitions, small treasures and discoveries, and of being connected to the earth and aware of a “time of wonder,” of childhood memories, secret places, and storms.
I had not read or thought much of the book in years. Until Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. I saw the movie at the Lake Theater in Oak Park on a July Saturday night when the air was hot, humid and filled with the sound of cicadas. The air conditioning of the theater felt especially sweet and cool as the lights dimmed. I was captivated immediately by the opening scenes, tracking through a Crayon-red house by the sea. The house has a name (I’m always a sucker for that) and its name was: Summer’s End.
Moonrise Kingdom tells a story in which not much happens, at least in terms of action and plot, but the film creates an evocative atmosphere, a time of wonder. Scene by scene—as I was enchanted by the tale of two lonely, distressed children, Suzy and Sam, who form a letter-writing friendship and run away together to find their own special place—I had a growing sense that something unusual was happening beneath the surface of my movie experience. I felt a distinct tingle; I was reconnecting with old, powerful sensations I couldn’t quite explain. Then I realized that I was seeing a cinematic variation on Robert McCloskey’s Time of Wonder.
My most cherished children’s book was definitely in the creative DNA of Moonrise Kingdom. Bob Balaban as a quirky narrator/weather guy warns the movie audience that a hurricane is approaching this small cluster of New England islands, and I heard distinct echoes of McCloskey’s lyrical prose as he described the coming storm:
Over in Blastow’s Cove, Harry Smith looks at the sky and says, “We’re going to have some weather.”
On Eggamoggin Reach, Clyde Snowman listens to the loons and says, “It’s a comin’.”
On Cape Rosier, Ferd Clifford listens to the bell off Spectacle Island and says, “She’s gonna blow.”
Some of the overhead shots of the islands looked amazingly like Robert McCloskey’s illustrations. The boat that Suzy and Sam use to escape—before the storm hits—was an exact replica of the sailboat on Time of Wonder’s cover. Once Suzy and Sam reach their private, secret place (which Suzy names Moonrise Kingdom), they leap from craggy rocks into green-blue waters, much as the children in Time of Wonder play on similar rocks in a similar secluded inlet.
In Moonrise Kingdom, Sam is a water-color artist (like Robert McCloskey), and Suzy is always reading children’s books. As a passionate fan of children’s literature and someone who spent ten years working for the Magic Tree, an independent children’s bookstore, the titles of the made-up children’s books in the film delighted me:
Shelly and the Secret Universe
The Girl from Jupiter
Disappearance of the Sixth Grade
The Francine Odysseys
Suzy reads her books to other characters. She casts that wondrous spell of reading a book aloud, especially a children’s book. Turns out that Suzy’s real magical power (she longs for one in the film) is very much like Eleanor Kuhn’s. Even the boys who were mean to Sam earlier in the film are drawn to the stories as Suzy reads to them.
I’m sure that Wes Anderson understands the primal power of children’s literature and illustrations, and it’s one of the things I admire most in his filmmaking. It shows up in most of his films in one form or another. For instance, The Royal Tenenbaums features scenes in which children spend the night in a museum, a famous story element in From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
Anderson also uses other artforms to amplify the experience of immersion in a child’s universe. Moonrise begins with a boy playing a record: The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic). Hearing that record catapulted me back to the Louisville Orchestra’s programs for school kids called the Making Music Concerts where I would sit in uncomfortable, metal folding chairs, yet get lost in the music and the worlds it provoked in my imagination.
And then there’s drama, another passion I had as a child, and a frequent force in Anderson’s films with children (think Rushmore and Max’s elaborate school plays). One of the most memorable scenes from Moonrise Kingdom is Suzy and Sam’s meeting at a church theatrical production. Sam is attracted to her costume as a raven in Noye’s Fludde, Benjamin Britten’s opera for young performers. The concrete-block dressing rooms and amateur theatrical effects from these scenes were so familiar that I almost felt like I was remembering something instead of seeing it for the first time. And I had quickfire memory flashes of producing a four-hour production of Mary Poppins in a neighbor’s basement which included epic set and costume changes like suspending a life-sized, poster board “Uncle Albert” from the ceiling with dental floss.
Looking back, I think Moonrise Kingdom is like Wes Anderson’s Invitation to the Dance. In his notes about the film’s soundtrack, the director invites children to make movies one day and says he “can’t wait to see them.” By the way, the soundtrack is a beauty. Among its many pleasures is an homage to children’s classical records (like Leonard Bernstein’s) in which Jared Gilman (who plays Sam) breaks down the instruments used in Alexandre Desplat’s lush and whimsical score.
The underpinning of children’s art and literature in Moonrise Kingdom had a tremendous impact on me in the theater as I fell under the film’s spell back in 2012. But at the center of the movie is the unique connection between two children at odds with the world—how they find and understand each other and create their own universe. That’s the ultimate “time of wonder”.
Sam and Suzy’s intense, authentic relationship sent me hurtling back through personal history one more time—to the year I joined the Brownies (another ritual of childhood that Anderson evokes with his hilarious troop of “Khaki Scouts”) and I met Leandra Peak. I remembered a particular night after dinner at her house, playing with a battery-operated tape recorder and a little plastic microphone. I couldn’t remember anything we said, but I was sure I had never laughed so hard before. I had never met anyone my age who made me laugh or who was easy to talk to and understood the things I wanted to talk about. That night we found our own “Moonrise Kingdom,” and the difficulties of growing up were diminished for a while.
Leandra moved away a few years later. Summer’s End.
St. Matthews Elementary gave way to Waggener Junior High. Summer’s End.
High school gave way to college, and so on, and so on… Summer’s End, infinity.
As I finish this story, I’m sitting on the screened-in porch of a house by Lake Michigan. It’s just before Labor Day. A soft rain is falling, and a chilly breeze cuts the humidity of the late August afternoon. The porch light is on, casting a warm glow on the worn wicker furniture. Leaves rustle. The sky darkens. Thunder rumbles.
We’re going to have some weather.
It’s a comin’.
She’s gonna blow.
Next door, a family is packing up their car to go back home after spending their summer by the lake. A little boy wears a beach towel over his head to protect himself from the weather. It’s been a year of disease, violence, death, loss, and restriction. Most people haven’t had a normal summer vacation. But there’s still the sense of fall about to begin, life in transition, and melancholy mixed with anticipation. There’s still the sense of summer’s end, a time of wonder, and the memories of our lost Moonrise Kingdoms.