2
Childhood

What Maisie Knew (USA/Canada/Netherlands, 2012)

Directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, written by Carroll Cartwright and Nancy Doyne (from the novel by Henry James)

A rare example of older literature being updated for the screen while retaining the texture of the original, What Maisie Knew is heartrending, though not hopeless. Maisie’s parents are tearing each other apart without recognizing that their tug of war has Maisie at its center. The interaction of unresolved wounds infecting an adult’s capacity for truly loving a child, along with the child’s natural capacity for wonder and resilience, gives way finally to a form of reconciliation by departure, and embrace by setting free.

Kathleen

What Maisie Knew can be difficult to watch if you care about children and understand what they need from the adults around them. One of the saddest things I have ever heard is what a friend with five siblings said of her parents: “They’re two people who never should have had children.” She could have been speaking of Maisie’s parents: Susanna, played by Julianne Moore, and Beale, played by Steve Coogan. Mom’s a self-important, fading rock star; Dad’s an international art dealer who pretends to be more successful than he is. They’re two unhappy people who reflexively inflict their pain on those around them: the mother overtly, in loud flashes of rage, the father in a more guarded fashion, hiding behind a comic mask.

In the 1897 novel on which this film is based, Henry James notes that in fighting over custody of their young daughter, Maisie’s parents had “abandoned [her] to her fate. What was clear to any spectator,” he writes, “was this lamentable fact of her being a ready vessel for bitterness, a deep little porcelain cup in which biting acids could be mixed.” Her parents “had wanted her not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other.”1 Today, as in the nineteenth century, it’s not unusual to see parents using custody battles as an opportunity to settle scores.

Children are so vulnerable because they accept the world they are given. Maisie’s innocence is inspiring, but she is also an observant six-year-old surviving in a household in which bickering is the constant background noise. While Dad shouts, “I’ve had my midlife crisis; you should get on with yours,” and Mom responds with an obscenity, Maisie knows to ignore them and help Margo, the au pair, by running to get cash for the “pizza man” when he rings the doorbell of their luxurious multilevel apartment. She even knows how much to tip. Maisie seems thoughtful and wise beyond her years, and the look of resignation on her face when her parents break their promises or tell her things no child should have to hear is heartbreaking.

Maisie’s parents not only use their child to strike at each other; they use others in the same way. After their inevitable separation, her father suddenly marries Margo; in response, Mom marries Lincoln, a handsome, good-natured hanger-on in her entourage. Neither is a love match: the appeal of these two young people is apparently that they can provide free childcare. And they do their best. One night Maisie is running a fever and needs rest instead of being shuttled to the chaotic environment of her mom’s apartment, because the custody agreement specifies that it’s her night there. Lincoln says that Susanna will be angry if he returns without Maisie, but Margo appeals to his common sense: “She’s a child; she’s not well,” words that come as a breath of fresh air.

It’s tempting to romanticize childhood as a carefree time, but any teacher can tell you that many children arrive in their classrooms with the weight of the world—or at least their dysfunctional families—on their small shoulders. We need the relief of seeing Maisie giggling with other children at school, throwing herself into art projects, and playing basketball. But it’s painful to see her try to make sense of the changing relationships of the adults around her. How can she begin to comprehend Susanna’s bitter description of Margo as “a tramp with a daddy fixation”? And when Lincoln arrives at school one afternoon to pick up Maisie, it is clear she doesn’t know that this man she’s seen in passing at home has just married her mother. Susanna has not told her. Lincoln tells a startled teacher, “I’m her new stepfather,” but admits that “she doesn’t really know who I am.”

Later, at home, sitting on her mother’s lap, Maisie asks her if she really married Lincoln. Susanna replies, “Yes, but I still love you best.” We wince when Susanna whispers in her ear, “I married him for you,” and are not surprised that Susanna grows jealous when Lincoln and Maisie begin to develop a bond. Lincoln has helped Maisie draw a castle with a moat and drawbridge, and Susanna clearly feels ignored while Maisie reads the report on castles that she’s prepared for school. “What am I? Invisible?” she whines and snaps at Lincoln, saying in front of Maisie, “You don’t get a bonus for making her fall in love with you.” At moments like these the film can feel like a manual on how not to raise a child. But it can also cause us to think about how we relate to children and how we can choose a way that is better for them and for us.

We see Maisie weep only once, when her mother’s carelessness creates a cascade of mishaps that make it seem that everyone in her life has abandoned her. Waking confused to find herself in a stranger’s apartment, Maisie says, plaintively, “I want to go home.” We’re relieved when Margo arrives to take her there, and relieved also to find that unlike the child in James’s novel, Maisie is not abandoned. Margo and Lincoln offer genuine affection, and Maisie’s response to them reassures me about what it is that she knows. While Maisie loves her mother and father, she also understands that they are ill-equipped to provide the love and attention she deserves. What Maisie endures cuts me to the heart, and while she accepts the incomprehensible and sometimes cruel remarks of careless adults, she knows it’s important to soak up love when it is offered.

I have worked as a kindergarten aide and have long been interested in how children develop their sense of how the world works. It amazes me that we all start out as infants with only the most basic physical instincts, but within a year or two, we are stringing words together to communicate with others. But responsible parents learn to listen to their children even when they’re preverbal. I was once watching a grand-niece who was seventeen months old, happily playing with toys, and lifting them one by one for me to admire. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, she began to wail. Her mother called from the kitchen, “That’s her water cry. She wants her water bottle.” I went to fetch it, and as I handed it to the child, she accepted it with surprise, her expression indicating that she felt I wasn’t as stupid as I looked. It made my day.

This experience reminded me that parenthood is relentlessly demanding. It requires not only paying attention but making sacrifices that people as self-absorbed as Susanna and Beale are unwilling or unable to make. Susanna is like a child inhabiting the body of an adult, using her daughter as a playmate and confidante, and confusing this for love. She’s unable to recognize how unfair this is to Maisie.

The abuse that Maisie’s parents dish out is all too familiar, if you listen to what exasperated parents say to their children. It’s even more lamentable for being largely unconscious. This film is a wake-up call, not only for parents but for all of us, to remember that from infancy, children are people and deserve respect as well as love. In my experience, too many adults fail to comprehend how deeply children ponder serious issues. Psychologists have discovered that children develop a moral sense long before they can talk. In one experiment they provided a puppet show to babies and toddlers in which one puppet was notably mean to the other puppets. After the show, when the children were invited to play with the puppets, they consistently rejected the mean puppet. The psychologists repeated the experiment, switching the role of the cruel puppet so that it was clear the children were not responding to facial features or the colors of the puppet’s hair or clothing but were recognizing cruel behavior. Children as young as fifteen months old refused to interact with a puppet that had been mean.

Maisie knows that her parents’ behavior toward each other, and toward her, is not good. She has adapted and refuses to judge them. But she has also learned to stand up for herself. After Maisie has spent several happy days at a beach cottage with Margo and Lincoln, her mother appears unexpectedly and asks Maisie to join her on the last leg of a tour, enticing her by telling her she has gifts for her on the bus. When Maisie refuses to leave, Susanna whines, asking, “You know I’m your mother, right?” Maisie nods but stands firm.

The last image of this film is a marvel, a fleeting but powerful moment. It’s the next morning, and Margo and Lincoln are keeping a promise they have made to Maisie. She cannot contain her excitement as she runs down a dock to the small boat whose owner has offered to take the three of them for a ride at sea. The expression on her face is a mix of dreaminess and determination, joy and liberation. It’s the smile of a child who is finally free to be of no use to anyone but just a happy little girl.

Gareth

The Belfast poet Michael Longley says that poetry is of “no use, but that doesn’t mean . . . it has no value.”2 I think I know what he means, but I think all art forms can indeed be “useful”—especially when loneliness is mirrored, love affirmed, or injustice exposed. (Oliver Twist motivated aristocratic women to help end the monstrosity of the Victorian workhouse, and Krzysztof Kieślowski’s film A Short Film about Killing helped end the death penalty in Poland.) I suspect Longley means a different use—that poetry doesn’t need to have measurable outcomes. What it “does” for us should not be the question; the fact of its existence is enough.

If that’s true of a poem, how much more so a person? I was struck by Kathleen’s comment that Maisie is free to be of no use to anyone. What the world would be if we didn’t see one another as people to be used. To be a child is to be vulnerable, of course, and in need of protection, but being a child should also mean to be allowed curiosity and wonder. Ideal parents set their children free (within safe parameters) to explore, learn, and feel. Such parents know that, as the philosopher Alan Watts put it, “Everybody is I.”3 But there are no ideal parents or ideal situations, just invitations to decide what to do with what we have been given and to make it more like a dream—or a nightmare.

A dream it would be if everybody truly saw everybody else’s “I”—if all adults treated children as individuals worthy of respect and age-appropriate autonomy and loved them just because they are. I once daydreamed about the creation of the world while looking out at a Wyoming lake and the surrounding mountains. If I had made the world as good as this Wyoming lake and mountains, never mind the lakes of Malawi or the mountains of Tibet, I might enjoy it for a few eons, say. But a time would come when I wanted to share it. And if I knew how to make people, I might do just that.

I might then realize that forcing people to do my bidding would make them robots and not souls. I would have to let them choose for themselves—and accept the danger that they might not turn out the way I want. They would face struggles and grief as well as ease and delight. They might think well of me, or they might not love me back. But if I loved them just because they are, they might come to see that life does not have to be a competition for either affection or success. They might come to believe that everybody is I, and therefore all we need do is to bring what we have and ask for what we need.

I had a therapist who referred to the average boyhood as “an emotional genocide.” An overstatement, but I understood: he was describing the tearing and breaking of the spirit, the oppressive gender and social role essentialism, the messages of “you’ll never amount to anything,” the pressure to fight to be seen or heard in the world. These experiences are all too common across lines of gender, class, race, and culture.

But there is also the gift of claiming childlikeness as an adult, of healing the one within who was previously brutalized in body or spirit. There’s a reason that spiritual wisdom traditions speak of childlikeness as the pathway to enlightenment. Not childishness but rather a life-affirming rejection of cynicism, giving ourselves to the spirit that responds to catastrophe by planting trees. Think of Desmond Tutu’s infectious joy amid terrible suffering. Knowing the people were well aware of their pain, he also knew they needed a vision of possibility.

So I am grateful for What Maisie Knew, for honoring childhood as a place to which we can return in our minds (if it was whole) or heal from (where it was broken) so that we can experience, right now, the power of loving ourselves, just because we are.

I don’t know about you, but I can still be triggered back into childhood, scared of some “grown-ups,” scared of the boys at school, scared of the world. Yet sometimes I also seem to be older than I am. I can project myself into an imagined future as a wise elder. Such imagination is pieced together from faces I’ve seen and stories I’ve read—some from my lived experience, like my grandmother and my friend Terry, and some from cinema, like Lillian Gish’s warrior-grandmother in The Night of the Hunter (another great film about childhood, one which knows that sometimes kids are braver than the adults around them) or Bill Cobbs’s portrayal of a wry guardian angel in The Hudsucker Proxy. Sometimes I sense someone wiser than me trying to be born from within.

In What Maisie Knew, Onata Aprile gives one of the great performances by a child actor. Pushed around by insecure grown-ups who can’t grow up, she’s a victim of villagelessness who can’t experience the consolations of community because she doesn’t have one, or the one she does have is full of holes. When people hate each other as much as her parents do, it poisons everything; a quiet meal is impossible, a stress-free playdate, unthinkable.

What Maisie knows can’t be underestimated, but she will need an adult mind to help her process it. It’s no wonder that the grown-ups who show her the most care are the ones most in touch with their own vulnerabilities. Her parents are addicted to commerce: one selling art (one of the strangest distortions of reality: the trading of creative works, made to be seen but often gathering dust in vaults, only to be traded again), the other selling an onstage image. Her accidental guardians don’t have the luxury of worrying about reputation. They live from paycheck to paycheck, don’t have the security of being named on their own apartment lease, and are realizing that being in love with someone who cares more about status than people means they will always come second.

The first step of Alcoholics Anonymous is to admit powerlessness, that we are unable to heal ourselves by ourselves. One lesson of What Maisie Knew, beyond the obvious one of not abandoning a little one unable to fend for herself, is that to put your own oxygen mask on first requires the humility to accept that there are some places you can’t breathe unaided. With wisdom we might recognize our childhood wounds, might even see that the gift is in the wound, might even turn the wound into a scar, and witness the scar becoming a source of medicine.

Before we can do that, there is separation, descent, and ordeal. We must experience abandonment before we can be found. What Maisie Knew trusts that no one in the audience is without a story of abandonment, or one of doing the abandoning. But in how it sees Maisie, the movie says that even if you never were the apple of anybody else’s eye, or even if you merely never knew you were, you can still become your own treasure. Maisie observes and is touched and wounded by the world, but her resilience never suffocates her wonder. “Let’s go on a boat,” she says; her guardians want to make it happen because they love her but also because they want to be reminded of what it is to be cared for too. Her toys teach her how to be, to tend to the “needs” of a doll, to experiment with different “voices” until we find the one that is truly ours. She, like we, can be okay.

But we won’t be healed, or tended, or caressed by the world if the only world we know is made from money and power. There are villages to be made, even in cities, and they must be, for we were not made to live as machines. (One of the marvelous grace notes of this film is how it shows that architecture and built environments can leave us alternately hemmed in or liberated into possibility.) The question is if we will even see the possibility of making a village, wherever we are, never mind the necessity.

What Maisie Knew is shorter than many movies, but it’s perfectly formed. It knows that many of us grew up hearing our parents fight and that it is difficult for some of us to find love that lasts or helps us transcend our selfishness. Here children are treated like adults—or abandoned to their fate like adults—and adults act like badly behaved children. Yet Maisie loves unconditionally, learns to look after a turtle, and may even one day learn to look after herself.

What Maisie Knew is an artistic cousin to any tale about adults who, unconscious of their impact on others, haven’t turned their wounds into scars. But then, a miracle: in What Maisie Knew one grown-up finally behaves like one, remembering how she used to feel before she even knew that growing up was possible. The key to being a truly integrated adult may well be to remember what it is like to be a child.

Questions and Conversations

Thinking about childhood can be painful, even traumatic. So in discussing What Maisie Knew, be tender with yourself and others—listen carefully for the resonances with other people’s stories and for the possibility of assisting each other on the way, to hold gently the fact that while we may not be able to change the past of a painful childhood, the invitation to become childlike and experience wonder at any age is always available to us.

1. What is one of the best lessons you remember about your childhood?
2. What is your earliest memory of your parents?
3. How would you describe your parents’ understanding of you as a child, teenager, young or not-so-young adult?
4. What does Maisie know?
5. If you could live one perfect day as a child, what would it be?
6. What’s stopping you from living that same day now?
7. How could you, in the next week, help a child experience wonder? Perhaps more importantly, how could you help yourself?
8. There’s no overt mention of God, religion, or church in What Maisie Knew, but the movie clearly demonstrates the effect that genuine, unconditional love can have on a child. How do you connect your understanding of such love with your image of God?