Ender’s Game and Censorship

I had thirty pages left to go in Orson Scott Card’s classic sci-fi novel, Ender’s Game, when I coincidentally stumbled upon this article. As I often do when reading such asinine news, I checked the dateline for a location, and yes, of course, the story originated in South Carolina.

An aside: I was born and raised in South Carolina, lived there until four months ago. A lot of us Carolinians do cuss every time Sanford or some jackass embarrassment makes national news. A lot of us do feel a little bit more validated by Stephen Colbert (from Charleston), or Aziz Ansari (from Marlboro), to give two examples. Just sayin’, it’s not all bad.

A middle school teacher in Aiken (pretty close to where I used to live) has been suspended for including Ender’s Game in his curriculum for 14-year-olds. Nevermind that Card’s novel has won a Hugo, a Nebula, and a gazillion other awards, and that Commonsense Media – an organization that works with educators, researchers, and companies to improve the monitoring of media – says the book is appropriate for children over twelve.

One helicopter parent thinks the novel is “pornographic,” plus it contains some wirty dords (sssh, I’m watering down “dirty words”). So, you know, totally makes sense to CALL THE POLICE and have the teacher CRIMINALLY INVESTIGATED for traumatizing the children.

The teacher’ll be alright, I imagine, and he probably isn’t that surprised that this has happened at some point in his career. I get to say this because right before moving to California I finished training to be a high-school English teacher in South Carolina. The education system now, at least as far as I’ve seen it, gives relentless preferential treatment to parents, extremely little support or protection to teachers, and a case of cutthroat neurotic CYA (ssshhh, “cover your ass”) mentality to administrative figures. In the education world, everyone’s running scared. I’m sure this isn’t just in South Carolina.

Back to Ender’s Game. It’s not only long overdue that I read this, but it’s also timely, as it turns out. The novel is compelling, clever, and intellectually challenging – I’d wager that it’ll prove timeless in these regards, which is one mark critics and historians look for when determining what’s been “important” and particularly influential in a society.

Despite the story being techy (I’m pseudo-tech and pseudo-gamer, but can’t claim to be an expert in either) and male-oriented (sorry, got a thing for you know, trying to balance out the paternalistic hegemony and all), I connected with the characters a lot, and they’re what I cared about. The story is overall human. The tech is scary and challenging and relevant to real life, the fantasy world is exciting and escapist and alarming, the philosophy seems abstract but grave; but above all the story is human.

When I get a chance, I’ll go on in the series. (There are eleven novels, plus a slew of comic books and short stories.) Since Ender’s Game was released in 1985 and it’s a consensus that it’s awesome, it seems silly to do a big ol’ review of the novel itself. I recommend it. And I’m not a sci-fi junky. Go read it.

I thought instead of doing a textual review, it’d be cool to discuss how Ender’s Game is becoming relevant (or, more relevant) again today, and how we can use it to guess about future trends in entertainment – namely films aimed at kids, video games, and how parents might freak the hell out.

Ender’s Game is being made into a movie. It’s a big-budget high-profile movie too: Harrison Ford plays Colonel Graff (main adult dude) and the kid from Hugo which I totally *cough* still haven’t *cough* seen, Asa Butterfield, plays Ender. The film’s set to release in 2013, and you’ve gotta wonder if Production is already eyeing the franchise potential here. The first EIGHT top grossing films in 2011 were sequels. This puppy could launch a series of films, TV shows of varying formats, and an endless pile of toys, figurines, and board/card/electronic games. It’s making my pockets burn, for god’s sake.

Action-adventure, kid-aimed films are hot right now. Hunger Games is still making its splash at the box office and we’ll see three more films before they’re done. Twilight, for all its blue-tint open-mouth horniness – I guess some people might want to call it action-adventure – is winding down. Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and one-offers like Spielberg’s Super 8 have all offered a slightly to radically different twist on our real world. They’ve presented intriguing ethical and social challenges, built into the plot, that kids from 2 to 20 mull over with the protagonists. Everyone figures out how to navigate the new world, under the new rules, together. This isn’t comic relief entertainment, it’s not learning the ABC’s of our current practical world. It’s learning how to think when the world is flipped upside down.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the world is constantly flipping now. Tech has changed everything – new ideas are generated, adapted, and put to use in the time it takes you to make a sandwich, every day, every second. Sci-fi, which might be the master of the “what if” construction, is an excellent medium for helping us apply the “what if” to real life. What if Hitler or Martin Luther King, Jr. had never been born? What if we can travel at the speed of light? What if there’s a nuclear war? What if my couch was installed with biologically functioning hands so I could have a massage anytime I wanted it?

All that reading about robots/aliens/magic/post-apocalyptic societies? Consider it training in case the world changes suddenly, or changes gradually. Reading, watching TV or movies, playing games – whatever you’re into – it’s all processing information to solve the problems in our “what if”s and to work out the kinks in our collective innovation. It’s all highly sophisticated teaching of practical knowledge and critical thinking skills. The more sophisticated and challenging the content of our entertainment, the smarter we will become. Theoretically.

Censorship is a bit of a hot button issue right now, too. Bully, a documentary following the lives of 5 children who are tormented daily, was just successfully re-released as unrated. Overnight Update: the MPAA, under pressure from the Change.Org petition, is now rating Bully PG-13. The Motion Picture Association of America originally ruled, by one vote, that the film’s “brief vulgar language” justified its being rated R. Kids are intimately familiar with the explicit content of the documentary on a daily basis, in their real lives, but seeing it on screen might have been too much for them.

Or, seeing it on screen might have forced some who like to pretend these things don’t exist to acknowledge that they do. “I don’t care what happens to other children, so long as it doesn’t happen to mine.”

John August (a very successful screenwriter, maybe best known for Big Fish) recently blogged about the history of the film ratings system and “The Pressure of PG-13”. PG-13 films make more profit than R films, overall, so in post-production a film may be edited to lose some of its vulgarity, as well as (possibly) some of its artistic integrity and ring of authenticity. At least some industry-insiders and serious film buffs attribute the “dumbing down” of films to the ratings system; what would fly as PG in 1980 might be PG-13 today, for example. Wizard of Oz (1939) and Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) were rated G in their times. I doubt they would be today.

The films that helped shape me as a kid were stuff like Labyrinth, Little Monsters, and The Neverending Story. All alternate-reality, mysterious films with kid protagonists figuring out the rules of a changed world, meeting mentors and friends, and rising to the challenge to take on Baddies. Cool thing about stuff like this is that you can cut and paste it into real life – despite the fantasy settings, the heroic plot arc applies. If you want to be a smart, virtuous person, do X, Y, and Z – oh, and get a little brave while you’re at it, because there are real monsters in the world.

The Goonies – everyone loves The Goonies – had some totally unnecessary (but still great) fantasy in it. Even though it was set in the real world, it was still mysterious and challenging to kids. It revealed edgier, dangerous characters and concepts that kids are usually “protected” from. Stand By Me? Remember, from Stephen King’s novella The Body? Stand By Me was mysterious, and edgy, and fascinating, and very popular. It was completely set in the real world, yet it still had all those qualities that drive kids to it…

Technology might be moving too fast for us to keep up, and with the globalization of the world, culture’s only going to speed up radically too. If a bunch of kids-turned-“adults” can’t adapt every ten minutes, let alone every two seconds, well…thank the helicopter parents for their protection when they were sprites. Again, the more sophisticated and challenging the content of our entertainment, the smarter we’ll become. Theoretically.

What is it that fascinates us in these darker, more mysterious, more “dangerous” films that we remember? Why are so many banned books incredibly important and formative? And why are some people so afraid of them, convinced that they’re corrupting?

I don’t believe in original sin and I don’t think civilization is declining into moral bankruptcy. I think great films, books, TV, games – again, any entertainment medium – is an opportunity for a safe space. We work out our “what if”s, our best and worst case scenarios, moral options, and carnal instincts in our safe spaces. Kids aren’t drawn to the “naughty” because it’s naughty. Kids are drawn to it because they acknowledge the existence of less-than-perfect (or less than socially acceptable) nuances in themselves and want to work those out.

Children aren’t only fascinated by rapid-fire technology, explosions, violence, sex, and drugs. Entertainment doesn’t have to deliver a bigger bang. Despite how the world changes, kids continue to be fascinated with us. They’re fascinated by their parents, by their older siblings, by the kids in the older grades at school, by anyone on the street who looks or talks or behaves even slightly different.

It’s because they’re learning. Kids sap everything up like a sponge. They learn exponentially faster than adults, developing and incorporating knowledge and striving for genius, all to navigate the world in which they were born. They look up to the next level, to the next age, to the next dark mystery to be understood. This is why kids are attracted to edgier, darker films. They want to understand what’s in the darkness – they’re not instinctively afraid of it. They want to investigate.

This is natural and this is why humans survive. Kids want to learn, they can’t help but learn. Label too many things to protect a kid from, and you forever pervert and complicate those things. You mess with the natural processing that involves creating an accurate world view, one in which kids acknowledge the existence of less-than-perfect things but also rise to the challenge of navigating those. Maybe improving on them, maybe remedying situations all together. In a way whatever we didn’t process in our youth is a failure – when the brain slows down, and the stagnation of the adult’s “finished” point of view hits, it becomes harder to acknowledge problems, let alone fix them.

Our art and our entertainment all take us through brain exercises. The sophistication of these exercises depends on the level of “what if” intelligence we allow in the content. Our sophistication depends on what we trust ourselves to handle, our audiences to be receptive to, and our children to understand.

Ender’s Game plays with the idea of what it should mean to be a child. Children are exploited for their brilliance and adaptability in using new technologies and skills, and their innocence is intended to be protected. There’s a lot of talk about pushing a child to his breaking point, about what a child should and shouldn’t know, and about the differences between games and reality. Or maybe, to be more broad, the difference between “safe zones” and the real world.

Read from this point of view, Ender’s Game is more divisive than conclusive. But the point is that it is extremely thought-provoking, that it engages readers with new concepts that we can’t immediately resolve. Too bad there’s a shower scene with a couple naked boys. (That’s the only thing I can think of that is anywhere close to being “pornographic,” unless the parent’s upset about the aliens being called buggers.)

Ender’s Game explores carnal instincts, flaws in logic as well as morality, and hard facts prerequisite to survival. The reader travels with Ender through all the “what if”s that he is challenged with. In the end, Ender is unique because he advances far enough in training games, film footage, and cultural lore to truly understand the buggers, the proclaimed enemies.

If we want to keep advancing in our endless cultural and technological frontiers, we’re going to need a lot of Enders. We need advanced learners who’ve processed all the information, and then adapted and added to it.

“…It came down to this: In the moment when I truly understand my enemy,understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them themselves.” (Ender, confessing to his sister)▲

If we ever want, you know, world peace, we’re going to need a lot of Enders too.

▲Card, Orson Scott. Ender’s Game. 1985. New York: First Starscape, 1992. 238. Print.