I believe that ethologists have been able to de-code the strange dance that bees do when they return to the hive after a pollen-collecting trip. They are able to communicate all kinds of things about the environment, such as the location of sources of food. Astonishing as this scientific achievement might seem, I feel that I faced a task of comparable magnitude last night.
Our six-year-old grandson is staying with us at the moment, and as a consequence our cultural diet has undergone some temporary revisions. Last night my wife dug out a film she recorded some time ago with precisely this eventually in mind, namely the Bee Movie. Leaving aside for the moment its content I reckon that this deserves special commendation for the clever title. If you don’t know it, the plot is interesting.
An intelligent and independent young bee is reluctant simply to fit into the routine of things bees have always done, and starts questioning the rules. He discovers the regime of exploitation under which bees have come to exist, stripped of their honey by large agricultural firms, and with the aid of a human side-kick mounts a law case to secure restitution. He is successful, and all the honey has to be returned to the bees. No longer under any compulsion to work they abandon their accustomed labour of pollination. Not surprisingly the natural cycle of things comes perilously close to grinding to a standstill.
I was fascinated by the complicated mixture of partially contradictory messages that the film seemed to be putting over. On the one hand it presented a critique of industrialised agriculture, together with a satire of the world of work in the contemporary world. The profession of law was lampooned as expensive parasitism. There could be said to be a strong “green” message in there, about the ecologically vital role of bees. Radical stuff! But wait a minute!
The world comes close to disaster as the result of somebody asking awkward questions and asserting their own individuality in the face of all the rules. The other side of the film’s message could be read as a warning against the folly of challenging the settled order of things. Just look what happens when you do that! In this reading of the film it is profoundly conservative and conformist, despite its surface as an apology for traditional “rugged individualism”.
I like art that makes me think, even if it does so because of its internal contradictions. Looking after a six-year-old can be challenging in more ways than you might expect. Today was blackberrying day. We get back to art tomorrow.