Reproductive Futurism and The NeverEnding Story

[cjbanning]

In my last post, I used Lee Edelman's notion of "reproductive futurism" as an example of a type of hegemonic social structure, and Edelman's queer antifuturism as an example of the sort of theories of radical negativity which seek to oppose such hegemony. One of my favorite examples of how reproductive futurism works in a fictional text is also one of my favorite movies: the 1983 film The NeverEnding Story, directed by Wolfgang Petersen and based on the first half or so of the novel by Michael Ende. (For a, ahem, creative summary of the events of the movie, check out this recap by a hobo-ified Nostalgia Critic).

In the film, Bastian Balthazar Bux (Barret Oliver) is a young boy with an active imagination who has just lost his mother. He has gotten in trouble at school as a result of his overactive imagination, and his father (Gerald McRaney), also reeling from grief at the loss of his wife, reprimands him, acting as the figure of what Edelman calls the synthomosexual: one who "den[ies] the appeal of fantasy" (35). "Stop daydreaming," Mr. Bux implores his son. "Start facing your problems."

Bastian's father becomes if not the villain of the story then the "heavy," as the Sherman brothers call Mr. Banks in the Mary Poppins movie—and it is precisely this sort of figure which Edelman wishes to reclaim: "why not," he asks, "acknowledge our kinship at last with the Scrooge who, unregenerate, refuses the social imperative to grasp futurity in the form of the Child[. . .]?" (49). Bastian's father, focused on the reality of death, is thus able to provide a corrective to the futurism which attempts to mask it.

Bastian steals a book called The Neverending Story from Coriander's Book Shop and cuts school in order to read it. In it, he finds a tale of a land called Fantasia which is ravaged by the destructive Nothing. (Roger Ebert asks, "Were children's movies this nihilistic in the old days?") Here, the force which resists the impulse to reproductive futurism—the psychoanalytic death drive which "names what the queer, in the order of the social, is called forth to figure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability"—is evoked. Indeed, this force is not merely evocative of the death drive but is actually a result of it, as it is revealed later that the Nothing gains its destructive power from events in the "real" world, where people like Bastian's father have ceased to dream. This force (and the two other like it which will appear in the next two films), powered by realism, is exactly what Edelman is extolling.

The land is ruled by a Childlike Empress (Tami Stronach) who, in true Grail King fashion, is taken by mortal sickness as her kingdom is slowly extinguished by the Nothing. Edelman notes the rôle of the "image of the Child" in our collective myth: "this fantasmic Child" represents the future for whose sake we forsake the present (9). The Childlike Empress of Fantasia fills this rôle by ruling over, and on some level having identity with, a land which is acknowledged to be imaginary, one populated completely by desires and wishes, and thus exists within a reproductive future which is forever separated (other than through the vehicle of the magical book) from the "real" present. The Empress, like the other Child-figures Edelman discusses such as the orphan Annie or the "waif" from Les Miserables, focuses our concern onto an adorable prepubescent. Indeed, even once all Fantasia (with the exception of a single grain of sand) is consumed by the Nothing, hope is not lost as long as the Childlike Empress survives.

Or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to put it the other way: since Fantasia exists parasitically off of the imagination of humans, the Childlike Empress survives as long as hope is not lost. The NeverEnding Story makes explicit Edelman's insight that "[t]he pleasurable fantasy of survival [. . .] requires therefore, more than anything else, the survival of a fantasy" (45). For Edelman, the immortal, eternally-young Empress would be "always already dead, mortified into a fetish animated only by the collective fantasy (48).

Aongside a cast of sympathetic, often comedic fantastic creatures—a racing snail, a rock-biter, a luck dragon—Fantasia is populated as well by synthomosexuals. There is Morla, the ancient one, whose response to Fantasia's dying is utter apathy: "We don't even care whether we care." And there is Gmork, the panther-like creature of darkness who actively seeks to allow the Nothing to destroy Fantasia, "because people who have no hope are easy to control. And whoever has control . . . has the power." Gmork represents, on the level of the imaginary, the perfect counterpoint to the Childlike Empress: if she is what we almost instinctively seek to preserve without fear, then he, no less a fetish or perhaps the direct opposite of one, is what we fear no less unthinkingly.

The boy-hero Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) sets off on a set of ultimately arbitrary storybook quests in order to defeat the Nothing, but it is ultimately revealed that only Bastian, from his position outside the story, can save Fantasia. He can do this, he finds out to his amazement, only by giving a new name to the Childlike Empress. He does so, shouting out the name of his mother, "Moonchild," and finds himself in darkness with the Empress, who solemnly informs him that all that is left of her kingdom is a single grain of sand. Bastian takes this grain of sand and, by injecting it with the vitality of imagination, is able to create a "new" Fantasia:

BASTIAN: Then everything has been in vain.

EMPRESS: No, it hasn't. Fantasia can rise anew from your dreams and wishes, Bastian.

BASTIAN: How?

EMPRESS: Open your hand. (The empress puts the grain of sand in his palm, then smiles.) What are you going to wish for?

BASTIAN: I don't know.

EMPRESS: Then there will be no Fantasia anymore.

BASTIAN: How many wishes do I get?

EMPRESS: As many as you want. And the more wishes you make, the more magnificent Fantasia will become.

BASTIAN: Really?

EMPRESS: Try it.

Bastian makes his wish, and soon he is flying on the back of Falcor the luck dragon over the newly restored Fantasia, "even more beautiful than before."

The first NeverEnding Story film, then, while ostensibly a fairy tale for children, is at its heart a heteronormative parable of sexual intercourse and procreation. "Imagination," as a "creative" force which the film so powerfully advocates, serves as little more than thinly-disguised reproductive futurism.