GENERALIDADES DEL MONÓXIDO DE CARBONO

Connie’s second viewing of The Tiny Fish, which took place just ten days later, on 28^th June, provoked a very different response. It was a hot day, and she had just woken up from her nap, with sweaty tangled hair and a sleepy expression; Alfie was still asleep. She asked to watch “the girl and the fish” and settled back on the sofa holding her two stuffed elephant toys, her knees drawn up. The first part of the film ends with a scene on a frozen lake where the little girl protagonist²⁵ meets an old man fishing through a hole in the ice. He catches a fish and throws it down on the ice, chuckling gloatingly, but the girl is distressed to see the fish’s frightened struggles, and throws it back into the water. The old man instantly snatches it out angrily, stuffs it into his bag and walks away across the ice: slow piano music starts while the girl watches him go, with an expression of dismay on her face as the sombre music continues to play (Figure 4.17).

Figure 4.17: shock and dismay in The Tiny Fish

Throughout this sequence, Connie has been showing signs of anxious tension, breathing more heavily and jutting out her jaw as the old man stuffs the fish into the bag. At the first notes of the piano music, she gathers up a toy in each hand and hurls them away (Figure 4.18).

25 Ryabov has stated online that this character is meant to be a boy, but I had always thought it was a girl and so has everyone I’ve ever shown the film to, so I will persist in this error here.

Figure 4.18: Connie (aged 2;6) throws her toys away, in response to the killing of the tiny fish

One toy lands on the floor but the other remains on the sofa; she repositions it on the left beside herself and turns to the camera briefly with an expression that could denote either anguish or rage – and possibly she also turned to check my reaction (Figure 4.19).

Figure 4.19: Connie turns to the camera/me: appeal or reproof?

She then turns back to watch, leaning her head against the sofa, watching the long, deep-focus

shot of the old man trudging away as snow starts to fall ever more thickly, and his boots are heard crunching through it. She raises her right hand to point to the screen, saying wonderingly

“It ‘tartin’ to ‘now” [It’s starting to snow] and watches the rest of the film attentively, only showing a little anxiety during the dream sequence, and tremulously asking me to “turn it off now” as soon as the paper cutout fish has been returned to the lake and miraculously comes

alive again (perhaps here she fears another sudden snatching of the fish by the old man), but I talk her through to the girl’s return home with her cat at dusk.

Why she decided to throw her beloved elephant toys on the floor remains unclear. Clearly she had remembered, or realized, that the fish was not going to be rescued this time. There is a possible parallel with the on-screen action of the girl throwing the fish back into the water. So it could be that Connie is instinctively trying to reverse events and re-play the throwing-down action, but successfully this time. However, the action suggests rage rather than sadness. She may be cross with herself: that the fish-killing moment simply came before she expected it to and she had failed to ask me to stop the film, because her seeking emotion had won out over her anxiety over having to endure the sad bit. Or she may be angry – rather as she was with the breaking tug-of-war rope, six months earlier – that the man still threw the fish into the bag, despite her hope that this time he might not. After all many of us, when watching Romeo and Juliet, harbour a vestigial, irrational hope that this time Juliet will wake up before Romeo kills himself. Panksepp’s argument that rage is aroused by frustration (Panksepp 2004, p 50) might account for Connie’s apparent rage here. But Keating (2006) offers a different theory, which can also be invoked here despite his “Hollywood narrative” reference. He suggests that two kinds of emotions are at work when we watch a protagonist dealing with challenges:

First, we have an anticipatory emotion: hope. A Hollywood narrative typically

encourages us to anticipate future events and revelations. If these anticipated outcomes are emotionally weighted (generally, by sympathy for the protagonist), we experience hope: hope that the protagonist achieves his or her goals. By throwing obstacles in the way of the protagonist the narrative can generate another anticipatory emotion: fear that the protagonist will fail. (Keating 2006, p7)

It is significant that Connie does not immediately throw the toys when the old man retrieves the fish, but at the sound of the first few, slow notes of the piano music. As Walsh (2011) argues, (with reference to Mithen 2005, Brown 2000, Donald 1991, Sissanyake 2000, Wray 2000) music probably pre-dates language in human evolution, so “it is plausible to suppose that the

relationship between narrative and music is more fundamental, more primitive, than the relation between either one and language or symbolic thought”(Walsh 2011, pp 54-5). The tempo and pitch of these notes simply suggests an irreversible, sad finality and it may simply be this that triggers an instinctive response for Connie. I think it is also possible that she is

identifying the music, and the slow walk away, as signalling the ending, and so feels not only distressed but also cheated by such an unsatisfactory resolution.

What we see here is an interesting range of possibilities concerning a two-year-old’s difficulties with movie narratives. Once children have enough generic knowledge, they can expect that a sad event early in a film is likely to be resolved later, thus increasing the desire to find out how this happens. At two, it is hard to remember the whole narrative arc from a first viewing. In this case the sentimental resolution (as expressed in Ryabov’s YouTube comment “kindness of the baby soul is capable to work a miracle”)²⁶ may also be hard to remember, given that it rests on the belief that desire can change the course of real-life events. So if the rest of the film has been forgotten, the girl’s failure to save the fish at this point just seems irretrievably tragic: the viewer’s sympathy is with her and yet she has failed. But then Connie’s sudden change of mood must also be accounted for. Her brief violent action – a reprise in miniature of her anguished paroxysms over the Pontipine Moustache and the Peppa Pig Tug-of-War – may have functioned cathartically as a way of defusing her distress; maybe she was just immediately intrigued and distracted by the start of the snowfall; or reassured by my calmness. The fact that the snowfall begins here signals further action in the story; it might be prompting Connie to remember that the film does go on: the next scene will involve igloo-building and will have quite a different mood. The competing possibilities for interpreting Connie’s behaviour here cannot be resolved by ever-closer analysis of the video evidence: emotional responses cannot always be “read”

from expressions and gestures. What is important, I suggest, is that we do at least allow for a two-year-old’s responses being complex and conflicting.

Neither of them wanted to watch the movie again until 23^rd March 2013 when Alfie (aged 3;3), who by then was not having a daytime nap (though Connie still did), asked to see some movies while she was still asleep. He first watched Animatou three times and then chose The Tiny Fish:

with a little encouragement from me he managed to watch it right through quite calmly, only getting nervous during the scary dream sequence. But four months later, on 27^th June (aged 3;6), he dealt with it quite differently. At their request I had shown them a series of movies chosen by them from the Animagine DVD menu, and ended up with The Tiny Fish. When it came to the fish-in-the-bag scene, Alfie began to weep hysterically, screaming “TURN IT OFF!” He had to be left alone for a while to recover, after which I talked with them about the film for a bit and Connie then decided she wanted to watch it through to the end – but Alfie immediately ran out of the room.

26 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DFCpR6eMkc (retrieved 26^th August 2017)

It seems therefore that Connie had found successful ways of dealing with her powerful negative emotions; perhaps even her earlier, apparently fearful, outbursts also had a cathartic effect. This may relate to the fact that she was able to re-view the Peppa Pig episode until she had, as it were, drained its emotional charge, without adult help. Alfie, in contrast, sought adult

involvement in his extensive set of concerns during the autumn of 2012 – part sad, part anxious – stemming from his preoccupation with Percy and the Haunted Mine (see Fear section, above) and amplified by watching The Gruffalo’s Child in September 2012 (aged 2;9). He used these stories to generate games about “spooky” things: darkness, the use of torches, and the concepts of rescue and safety. Connie sometimes joined in – happily running about in a local woodland with a stick, screaming “monsters!” for example. In November 2012 (aged nearly 2) Alfie instituted a scenario at the “soft play” area in the local sports centre which we visited often:

Terry reported to me that Alfie liked to “save” Connie by making her stay at the bottom of a particularly steep staircase until he came to her rescue – which, Terry said, consisted mainly of kissing her rather than resolving the supposed jeopardy.