Full Speed Ahead
Full Speed Ahead
Not So Snug in Their Beds
December 9, 2020
Children on the Train
The children are melting.
It is at least the twentieth time you have watched The Polar Express and the DVD is losing the battle with time. This is not supposed to happen like it did on VHS or film. Digital is supposed to last forever.
But the children are melting.
That’s how it looks as you watch the children on the train, guided by Tom Hanks, being ferried to the North Pole for their inconceivable meeting with Santa Claus. Their faces, which were already a bit contorted and weird, are now sagging so slightly.
Or are they getting older? Have the kids become old people, stuck on the train to a Yuletide Neverland that doesn’t return them safely back to their beds in time to wake up and reap Santa’s generosity in the morning? The eyes of the children seemed robotically fake to begin with, computerized windows into an electric soul. Now they are old eyes, passageways into a shadow dream.
You watch it every year and the children are getting older. There will be a Christmas soon in which the train is crowded not with youth and hope, but haunted with the aged and the decrepit, the tired and the frail.
Press the rewind button, over and over, with a bullishness that you say will never be defeated as the train goes backwards through the pounding snow and the movie starts again and the children…are not children at all. --TK
Wednesday, December 9, 2020