Coraline: Neglect and the Comfort of Fantasy Worlds

Coraline: Neglect and the Comfort of Fantasy Worlds

Sadhika Mani

FY Bsc

Reading Time- 8-9 minutes

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Do you have a movie that just defined your childhood, gave shape to the growing years? That one film that scratched a part of your brain you didn’t know existed, that would hypnotize you even if you put it on right now. You could sit down and watch it forever, until the moving pictures burned themselves into your retinas and all you hear when you close your eyes at night are whispering shadows of scenes and muted gray dialogues that stay like earworms?

Coraline was that movie for me. Chunky stop motion; eerie, haunting music box-esque tracks; bleach-washed visuals and button eyes. 

Little Coraline’s story was originally a novel which was then adapted into a stop motion movie in 2002, directed by Henry Selick (also  director of The Nightmare before Christmas), the plot being that of her moving to her new home at the age of eleven with her parents who were drowning in their work, with no one to keep her company except for two batty old women downstairs, a man with a thick Russian accent and an odd love for beetroots, a young boy around her age named Wyborn and a musty doll with disturbing similarities to herself and inky black button eyes. (I urge you to watch the movie if you haven’t, or read the novel, go nuts and do both even, I’d love to hear your theories and what you thought of it)

The time I first watched Coraline, I was around 9 years old. I watched it without looking into the intricacies of the story, I followed along with the plot, gripped onto the wooden armrests of the couch at the particularly frustrating scenes and muffled my screams of anxiety into the cushions and then got over it an hour later. It was just like any other animated piece at that time. But rewatching it over and over made me see the movie in a new light. 

And it wasn’t just a personal thing, because the way the characters were built and the way the plot flowed managed to bewitch countless others as well. You could look up Coraline and be met with the most creative, well thought out video essays around and once again I urge you to go watch those as well, solely because they get the cogs in your brain turning in ways you couldn’t possibly fathom.
My favorite theory however, despite how horribly boring it might seem, is the one that proclaims that this was all a dream. 

A daydream to be exact, conjured up in Coraline’s dyed blue head.

Hyper-realistic daydreams aren’t exactly out of the norm, at least to me, or to anyone who’s spent a couple hours wallowing in the most all-consuming, mind-numbing boredom ever,so convincing that you end up pinching yourself to leave and come back to the real world. The technical term for it would be maladaptive daydreaming. 

Why do I think Coraline was afflicted with maladaptive daydreaming?

Let me expand in detail. 

Picture the early 2000s, iPods just dropped, everyone was a diehard Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fan, people stayed up all night making blog posts on their clear sided iMac, low waisted jeans and deep necked V cut tops were the new fad, the Olsen twins were rocketed into stardom and NSYNC sported blonde highlights that sent heart palpitations through a good amount of the tweenage population. 

(Ask me what these mean in person and I will blank out)

This was also around the time women started to actively enter the labor markets, the proportion of women in the workforce being particularly high in early industrialized countries like the USA, Britain, Germany and France to name a few.

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With both the parents gone, this often left children at home, alone if they couldn’t afford daycares, to their own devices. And while this is obviously not going to apply to the general population, there was a certain sect of children that grew up emotionally neglected as the trend of the ‘tradwives’ ended, with no caretaker to be there for them. 

Now am I saying Coraline is a product of parental neglect?
Not quite so, but once again, hear me out.

Calling Coraline’s parents negligent might seem like the easy answer to go for here, to explain away my theory and wrap it up all nice and clean in a bow, but that would also mean flying over all the big picture questions the movie posed.

Her parents weren’t neglectful, not at all, but they were incredibly preoccupied with their jobs and perhaps this lack of attention directed towards their daughter was just the movie’s way of telling us that in that specific moment, they were prioritizing their work over their daughter.

Playing both sides, I could say to support the parents, that Coraline might just have been a child that needed a little extra attention, a tinge more outward displays of love and active stimulation. This I could also support by saying that Coraline was an only child and sought the companionship that she was missing out on through her parents, who were evidently unable to give it to her.
They do actively enforce boundaries and engage in healthy banter throughout the film, and Mel, the mother, promises to make it up to her too.

But this is where I stop and switch over to Coraline’s side because the dialogue in this scene got me scratching my head.
When Mel promises to make it up to her daughter, Coraline replies with ‘You always say that’ implying that this sort of neglect, I suppose, is commonplace in their household.
This could mean either of two things- that Coraline’s parents normally got very busy around the time the publication of their gardening catalog got closer and hence failed to give her the attention she needed OR that she is normally just left to get up to her own antics since they cannot afford to put aside time for her, or prioritize her.

Sometimes, it came to feel like the catalog itself might have come to become Coraline’s object of resentment. While signs of this are nowhere actually mentioned in the plot, it feels right to assume that Coraline would have eventually become disgruntled every time her parents needed to prepare for the next one since it drew the attention away from her.
Both husband wife would have to end up staying up into the odd hours of the night, often not only forgetting to care for their pre-adolescent daughter but also for themselves, a commonplace in most households with working adults whose occupation involves being a part of an economy that prioritizes toxic work cultures and deepening inequalities in financial situations and the quality of life.

Neglect is an odd feeling, especially when it comes from someone special. Neglected by friends, by figures of authority, by parents, by society– it’s odd to be the one that’s left out, to be forgotten and dusted aside.
This especially holds true for a child, a child who looks up to their parents like they hold the stars in their hands, to be almost pushed aside like they just don’t matter as much as other things do, a child who’s only unvarying constant is their parents.

Even the most dense can infer that neglecting your ward is like begging them to develop self esteem issues, people pleasing tendencies and emotional suppression and tying back to where I’ve been trying to explain maladaptive daydreaming, the sort of loneliness and boredom that soaks into your bones till they’re close to withering away.

Boredom is dangerous, especially when the one who’s experiencing it is also dealing with a whole host of other issues, *cough*attention-deficiency*cough*, and most often can and will lead to people finding their own ways to battle this emptiness and Coraline did this by dreaming up the most elaborate possible plot centering around her parents, the sprawling halls of her new home and the doll in her hands that resembled her to the point of it growing disconcerting. 

I could also argue that it wasn’t uncommon for people with ADHD and low self esteem to mal-adaptively daydream.
Obviously, it must also be noted that being ADHD does not imply maladaptive daydreaming as a surefire symptom and vice versa but we do have to take into account that Coraline was easily distracted, easily bored, highly curious, sported poor impulse control and was almost always hopped up on energy- all signs of being an ADHD child which would also explain her increased need for stimulation and attention from her parents.

The only weak point in my theory would remain the doll itself.
If you chalk up the entire plot of the movie to it being a daydream, then the fact that the doll resembled Coraline up to the scary little details would turn into a plot hole. In reality, there is no logical way to explain away how the doll came to resemble her unless you choose to believe that the happenings of the movie were real and that the beldam built it to be her little spy into Coraline’s unhappy mind.

I’d like to connect it to some symbol that would add value to my arguments but in all honesty, this is something I cannot gaslight my way out of. 

I think one of the hallmarks of having written a great novel or a movie is when the tale has people poring over it decades after it was first released. 

I’m sure there’s a dozen people out there who’d love to argue that Coraline’s parents weren’t negligent and that the beldam was real and not an allegory for the consequences a child faces when they go looking for validation or attention from whoever’s offering it, disregarding their true intentions because you know you’ve been neglected and ruined when a smidge of attention directed your way gets you addicted to it, and desperate enough to do whatever you can, to keep it flowing.

While I do commend Coraline for not succumbing to the beldam’s wishes and stitching in button eyes, I wish I could say the same for the millions of other children who failed to resist the lure of the sinister counterparts of what was rightfully theirs in the first place.