Dr. Seuss’
Dream Vision: The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T
Bernard Welt, PhD, is
author of Mythomania: Fantasies, Fables and Sheer Lies in
Contemporary American Popular Art, and has taught an
interdisciplinary course on dreaming for over twenty years at the
Corcoran College of Art and Design.
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 quest with a child hero,
in the manner of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. Like
those classic tales, it portrays the dream as an 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, 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 vision is presented as the typically Seussian
means of characterizing imagination, creativity, and play as
universal human endowments, unmediated by cultural imperatives,
social training, or artistic discipline. 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, stairways galore,
doubled father figures, and strikingly homoeroticized initiatory
bands of brothers. But unlike Freud’s theory, it refuses to reduce
imaginative free play to the workings of some more primal
instinctual drive; unlike Jung’s theory, it presents the dream
less as compensation for the conscious attitude than as
subversion. As in the aesthetics of German Romanticism, the first
modern school to value the lessons of the dream, in Dr. T
play is not a sublimation of deeper instincts but constitutes a
defining human need without which we cannot experience freedom and
individual personality. 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—messy,
naughty, and often surprisingly tinged with disturbing themes. But
through this play, the child also finds the means to explore
empathy and responsibility, to become reconciled with the demands
of the adult world, and to establish a secure ground for accepting
parental love and guidance.
