Based on the Neil Gaiman’s novel, the film Coraline is a cynical look at the desires of children stifled by external constraints placed on parents. The titular little girl is recently transplanted to the gray often-misty Oregon landscape. She and her parents, regardless of where they were before, inhabit the first and second floor of a house that also includes an aging, alcoholic circus acrobat in the attic and two way-past-their-prime debutantes / lesbians residing in the basement with their collection of stuffed dogs, all of which are identical and all of which keep the women young. As each Scottish terrier passes, it is stuffed and donned with a hand-stitched angel’s robe and halo. But each is an exact replica of the other, as if the women take the deceased pet to the store and say “I need another one of these.”
All told, the house is for the forgotten. It’s for the lost, and it’s for the struggling.
Upon subsequent viewings of the film, we find that Coraline’s parents are in a similar situation. Both of them appear to be writers, though only the father seems to write while the mother focuses on marketing and publishing. Their project – a joint one – is a book on gardening. And throughout there’s a dark commentary on the death of the publishing industry, as her parents are trying to find one of the few remaining niche markets to make a living.
The irony that their garden is in shambles and their home is hardly beautiful or landscaped is brilliant but doesn’t offer a ray of hope for their success. Rather, they are professing to be experts in something that they fail to practice. We see this ethos much in their way of parenting as well.
This is not to say that they are bad parents. They appear to love Coraline. However, they also come off as mostly driven by their own endeavor (the book) and indifferent to Coraline’s boredom and precociousness. Within, there’s a mordant juxtaposition of parents needing to earn money to succeed as a family, but unable to be a family as they try to earn the money to succeed. Early in the film, we see Coraline rebuffed by her father who needs to finish his work, and we see her mother focused on most anything else in the house.
The intent here is not to suggest that Coraline needs to be doted upon – the overly unnecessary praise of children is also tackled in this film in the form of the “other mother,” a preternatural replica of Coraline’s mother who lives within the colonic recesses of their house. Rather, it’s that there needs to be a middle ground when interacting with young adults. They are in fact young – though not children – and in the embryonic stages of being adults – without actually being mature enough to qualify as adults.
In Coraline, her parents treat her as a peer without actually teaching her or guiding her to be one. At the same time, her “other mother,” dotes upon her hand and foot and treats her like royalty, but we (and Coraline) come to find that this is illusory. There is no perfection without a finely applied veneer. Characteristically, Gaiman’s tale is a rather dark one in which we are forced to understand the incongruent nature of the phrase “young adult.” The adjective reject the noun and vice versa. Coraline, while she’s treated as such, needs guidance. And while she seeks to be doted upon, this will hardly get her wear she wants to be.
Beneath the commentary on our treatment of children, we also find an exploration of missing children. As Coraline becomes more familiar with the world of the “other mother,” we learn that she is not the first. She’s the fourth – the fourth to fall into the mother’s clutches. The previous three died in childhood, which suggests that the mother is a murderer, not a nurturer, and we come to understand this tale of a lost young girl as one being tempted to follow a nefarious kidnapper with a tableful of candy and a dispenser full of ice cream.
All in all, there are various subtexts to Coraline¸but none more frightening than the notion that children go missing because they are given the reign of adulthood without being taught that actions have repercussions…which should be an equally frightening lesson for parents.
