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ABSTRACT

Nightmare Fun: Dr. Seuss' The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T

Bernard Welt

Professor, Academic Studies, Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington DC

Bernard Welt, the author of Mythomania: Fantasies, Fables, and Sheer Lies in Contemporary American Popular Art (Art Issues Press), has taught an interdisciplinary course on dreaming for 15 years at the Corcoran College of Art and Design.

Summary:
The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, Dr. Seuss' only live-action film, is an under-appreciated example of the dream/nightmare quest, through its fantastic imagery celebrating the spontaneous imaginative power whereby children discover both autonomous selfhood and a means of reconciliation to adult authority.

Learning objectives:
Through study of one cinematic example, Dr. Seuss' The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T (Roy Rowland, 1953):
1. Awareness and analysis of the conventions of representation of the dream in cinema
2. Awareness and analysis of themes in children's dreams and nightmares, especially relating to adult authority and the development of autonomous selfhood through free imaginative play
3. Consideration of the use of the dream in film, literature, and art as a means of representing the role of imagination in life and culture

Questions:
1. How do the typical nightmare and anxiety themes of childhood appear as devices and images in The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T (and in Dr. Seuss' work as a whole)?
2. What are the characteristics of the "dream quest" as a genre in modern children's literature and film?
3. How does this film contribute to an "aesthetic of the dream"-a view that places the dream at the center of a theory of creativity?

I request a VCR and projection system or monitor to show excerpts. If that's not possible, I can make slides with advance notice and would need a projector.
I can show and direct discussion of this film in its entirety if there's a film series, or interest.
This presentation would be relevant to a panel on Dreams and Film, The Nightmare in the Arts, Children's Dreams and Nightmares, or the Dream and Creativity.

ABSTRACT

The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T (dir. Roy Rowland, 1953), Dr. Seuss' only work as an auteur du cinema, is a modern dream/nightmare with a child hero, in the manner of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. Like those practically legendary tales, it draws on the convention of the dream as escape from the boring duties and responsibilities imposed by adults upon children who would rather play. The creative exploration of children's feelings of powerlessness, betrayal, and anxiety, conquered through creative play, marks the film as a crucial demonstration of Dr. Seuss' under-recognized place as a defining sensibility in the art and culture of the second half of the twentieth century in America.
In Dr. T, the dream becomes the typically Seussian means of representing imagination, creativity, and play as universal human endowments-unmediated by cultural imperatives, social training, or artistic discipline. In addition to celebrating a "wild" imagination that confronts adult authority as either all-powerful enemy or impotent bystander, Dr. Seuss' cinematic dream quest responds to academic reductionism regarding artistic creativity. The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T is full to bursting with images right out of the psychoanalytic repertoire, with plenty to occupy both Freudians and Jungians-journeys into dungeons and sewers, stairs and ladders galore, good and bad fathers and homoeroticized initiatory brother-bands. But it refuses to reduce imaginative free play to the workings of some deeper, more primal instinctual drive. As in the aesthetics of German Romanticism, the first modern school to value the lessons of the dream, play exists not only as vehicle or sublimation of deeper instincts but constitutes a defining human need without which we cannot experience freedom and individual personality. Here as in all the typical Seussian tales, the child finds the means to discover and assert autonomous selfhood through "wild" and apparently anti-social imaginative play. But through this play, represented in The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T through the typical imagery of children's nightmares, the child also finds the means to explore empathy and responsibility, to reconcile with the demands of the adult world, and to establish a secure ground for accepting parental love and guidance.