Dreamchild, or the Curse of Being Alice
Erin Keane
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Sandwiched between The Dark Crystal, a 1982 film I couldn’t follow as a child because the dinosauric Skeksis frightened me so much I kept my eyes closed for long passages, and 1986’s Labyrinth, that indelible heroine’s journey into David Bowie’s dark-glam goblin-king lair, came another Henson puppet-haunted story: Dreamchild, a movie released in 1985 that might as well have never existed for how infrequently it is mentioned today, even among the Muppet-obsessed. This keeps happening. I learn about a movie from way back for the first time and wonder how I could have gone this long without even hearing people talk about it, especially my friends, who love talking about old movies. Sometimes you can find these archival treasures on streaming, but others can only be watched via some janky copy uploaded to YouTube or sourced through even odder means. Now that the video stores have all closed, films—even those featuring Jim Henson’s Creature Shop creations, as Dreamchild does, which for my money should guarantee it a place in some canon—can all but disappear from our awareness. Whether by design or accidental negligence, the effect is the same: The hole doesn’t linger, the way an empty slot on a physical shelf might call attention to what is missing. It closes up, like a shallow wound heals itself, until it is like it was never there and nobody mentions it again unless Criterion rescues it from exile in Region 2, where people still believe in continuity, or you were lucky enough this year to live in the orbit of a 40th anniversary showing at the Museum of the Moving Image or some similarly rare screen.
Written by Dennis Potter (Pennies from Heaven) and directed by Gavin Millar in his feature debut, Dreamchild is loosely inspired by the real voyage across the Atlantic, in 1932, by the very English, very Victorian, and very elderly Mrs. Alice Hargreaves (née Liddell), played by Coral Brown, who travels to New York City to accept honors from Columbia University upon the occasion of the centenary of Lewis Carroll, or Charles Dodgson, as she knew him when he was an Oxford tutor and she was the young girl who inspired his master works of children’s lunacy, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. In her eighties, and under the tremendous stress of being exposed to vulgar American journalists, Mrs. Hargreaves begins to experience—what, exactly? Hallucinatory dreams? The beginnings of dementia? It’s not quite clear what these disturbing visions, which star the characters Carroll spoke into existence in her childhood and then wrote down into what became our classics, even are. What is clear is that her descents into the childhood liminal, marked by menacing visits from Henson Creature Shop-made monsters, styled as if illustrator John Tenniel’s creatures from the book—Griffon, Mock Turtle, Dormouse, March Hare, et al—had been run over by a carriage and left to molder, neglected for decades, in the parlor of a syphilitic laudanum addict, dislodge disturbing memories of her encounters with Dodgson (Ian Holm), whom the film depicts as enthralled with young Alice (played with precocious ferocity by Amelia Shankley), a bottomless pit of yearning, restrained but barely so.
Today you can find Dreamchild on Amazon Prime, but only if you know to look for it. Meanwhile, sickos in the Dark Crystal sub-Reddit actively debate their favorite Skeksis because fantasy villains are thrilling in their depravity. Labyrinth, with its ugly-cute critters and actual baby, will have its own 40th anniversary next year and enjoy the week in the algorithmic sun bestowed on beloved nostalgia products with killer soundtracks and the shivers of ambiguous sexual awakenings. On paper, drawing as it does on the intertextual history of Alice in Wonderland and illustrated partially through Henson’s chaotic embodiments, Dreamchild should also have the makings of a cult classic, albeit one not aimed at kids, as the presence of the puppets might otherwise indicate. The description on Prime, while not being dishonest exactly, is deceptively whimsical: “Ian Holm is children's author Lewis Carroll in this poignant fantasy-drama set in 1930s New York and populated by the fabulous special effects creatures of Muppet master Jim Henson.” Anyone would be forgiven for not expecting this to be an ambiguous story about grappling with the possibility that a beloved children’s book author may have been the villain in the central character’s childhood, and furthermore, a story about realizing that confronting the truth might contradict an entire society’s understanding of their own childhoods. And who could possibly emerge a heroine from that quest?
Labyrinth closes with a wink to its audience, reassuring us that Sarah’s triumph was over her own imagination, that learning to harness its magic for her own purposes was the true quest. Again, I am not sure what happens in The Dark Crystal, but I remember it as a straightforward fantasy without humans, which is to say adults, set in a reality far from ours. These were both directed by Jim Henson, of course, whose only touchpoint with Dreamchild is his Creature Shop’s role in bringing the Wonderland supporting cast back to delirious, disheveled life. The fantasy narrative at the heart of Dreamchild does not function as a gift to the exceptional child, a framework from which to work out the trauma of having to grow up and assume responsibility for her power, but rather as a cover for a shadowy experience burrowed deep in her subconscious and a reckoning with it courtesy of the frightening unraveling of reality now that she is old.
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I have been thinking about Lewis Carroll again this year because of the Beatles. Stay with me here. (There is even a tangible connection between Carroll and the Fab Four: There he is, on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, nestled Mad-Libs style between guru/yogi Lahiri Mahasaya and T.E. Lawrence! But that’s not what this is about.) “Many great satirists and moralists have shown us the world upside down,” Virginia Woolf wrote on the occasion of the complete works of Carroll being released in 1939, in a missive that makes a brief argument for, at the very least, Carroll’s extremely stunted emotional development, “and have made us see it, as grown-up people see it, savagely. Only Lewis Carroll has shown us the world upside down as a child sees it, and has made us laugh as children laugh, irresponsibly.” In the animated Beatles film Yellow Submarine, where rough collaged snippets of Liverpool and London intrude on the fantasia, further blurring the lines between what is real and what is imagined, Pepperland—the world upside down as adults see it—is spiritually far from Wonderland, not savage, all gauzy innocence to the latter’s sharp suspicions. I had re-watched Yellow Submarine and other such cinematic trips in preparation for a conference panel on the anniversary of 1965’s Rubber Soul, with an emphasis on its influence on psychedelic cinema. Of particular interest to me are the points at which the psychedelic jostles against childhood, both imagined and real. The real adult Beatles’ mind expansions inspire a fictional romp, with innocence and love triumphing over tyranny; the real child Alice prompts a sinister web of bewilderment, demands, and death sentences amid all the nibbling and sipping and hash-smoking caterpillar commentary. Generations on, the fictional child Alice shapes adult Grace Slick’s 1967 bombastic ode to “following your curiosity” with a beat informed by Ravel’s Boléro, which I can’t think of now without thinking of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (which is outside the scope of this essay, and yet, aren’t I also entitled to my own excursions into the liminal?) whose score by Fumio Hayasaka was similarly influenced by that beat and tune, in which there are no reliable narrators to be found in the story of a woman’s violation disguised as a riddle about a murder trial. Where there is no known truth, something else will grow in its place. (“I don’t understand. I just don’t understand!”) That Boléro beat resurfaces in the 1998 adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s extended bad trip, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, directed by Terry Gilliam (whose gloriously chaotic animations clearly show the influence of Heinz Edelmann’s visuals for Yellow Submarine), with a cartoonish Dr. Gonzo (Benicio del Toro) in the bathtub soundtracked by Jefferson Airplane, demanding Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) throw the radio into the water and fry him when “White Rabbit” reaches its climax. (“So you know something about this strange story?”) Child Alice inspired one of psychedelia’s foundational texts, a fact which most likely would have blown the very proper Mrs. Hargreaves’ mind.
But by now we all know kids’ stories dwell naturally in the spaces where reality and fantasy collide, because childhood is inherently surreal. Things are always happening to you for the first time, upending your preconceived notions of how the world works. So many classic animated Disneys, for starters—Fantasia, the drunken pink elephant scene from Dumbo, the animated Alice in Wonderland itself, which Walt Disney hated, did you know? Groused that it was “filled with weird creatures” (Walt, you should see what they became in 1985) and vowed never to put it back out it after it flopped at the box office in 1951. In the Seventies, after the old man’s death, the studio cashed in on the growing young-adult appetite for getting high and watching movies with a planned reissue for 1974, promoted with ads winking to the Jefferson Airplane heads: “Should you see it? Go ask Alice.” Ironically, in a lead-up retrospective at the Lincoln Center, the only screening out of five that played to a crowd under a thousand was the 11 a.m. matinee aimed at children.
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Dreamchild pushes the elderly Mrs. Hargreaves, very much a starched adult, back into the anarchy of Alice’s childhood, accompanied by the monsters Dodgson dreamed up to distract her, now moth-eaten and disintegrating, sordid in appearance and disreputable in affect, interspersed with memories of Dodgson’s “pained, barely concealed longing,” as film critic Stephen Holden described it for his New York Times review, which he overall deemed a “lovely, wistful little fairytale for grownups.” (On the film’s PG rating, the review states, “Since the film lacks nudity, profanity and violence, the rating could only refer to the theme of repressed pedophilia, which is handled with unerring good taste,” which, pardon?) We know Holden was on the money, though, about this fairytale being for grownups, because the movie concludes with the notion that innocence—that is, adult innocence, willfully wielded—must emerge intact from any skirmish with darkness. The curdled Wonderland puppets (you can almost smell them) remind us of the cost.
About the nagging question of Charles Dodgson’s specific relationship to children in general, and Alice Liddell specifically, Lewis Carroll experts have not agreed. The real-life speculation about him picked up in the mid-1930s, soon after the semi-fictional events of Dreamchild, with Freudian interpretations of Alice’s elongated neck and insinuations about Dodgson’s unmarried status and predilection for hanging out with kids swirling, and persisted through the decades. There were letters, photographs, even some nudes. Biographies levied accusations. A competing theory came out that it was an affectation, a cover for him to be considered by Victorian society to be harmless enough to hang around unmarried women, his real interest. There are incomplete collections of diaries and letters. There is Nabokov weighing in. But a movie is a point of view, even one chiefly concerned with the fallibility of memory and the places where reality and invention collide. The most consequential revelation of Dreamchild, given the meta-mystery of what kind of man, exactly, Dodgson was, happens entirely off-screen. Again, point of view. Despite what the film appears to be building toward wanting to say aloud about its biographical source material, it swerves at the end.
Throughout her New York odyssey, Alice is being helped by Jack Dolan, a brash, unemployed American journalist played by a slick yet somehow sincere Peter Gallagher, who is romancing her hired orphan companion Lucy (Nicola Cowper) while he makes a commission off selling Alice’s endorsements of products. In the middle of the night, Mrs. Hargreaves rings Jack around to her suite at the Waldorf-Astoria (Columbia’s obviously footing the bill) to help her write the speech she is scheduled to give at the ceremony. “She didn’t really want to talk about Lewis Carroll,” Jack tells Lucy, who wants in on the conversation because, as she complains, she can’t sleep. “That’s because you’re in love,” Alice tells her. “It’s an emotion which has always frightened me. But I can always recognize it when I see it.” She doesn’t want to talk about him. A horrifying sort of love, the film suggests, is a reason. Cut then to Alice as a child, watching Dodgson mix chemicals to develop a portrait of her, his yearning for her just shy of being explicitly stated, Holm’s performance quietly terrifying. Cut again to the following morning at Columbia, to Jack and Lucy watching Mrs. Hargreaves from the crowd. “Just as long as she sticks to her script, she’ll be all right,” Jack says.
After being tormented all week by disorientation, intrusive memories, and straight-out hallucinations, we know that Mrs. Hargreaves is about to speak, and we intend to hear what she has at last remembered, or made sense of, about where the real and fictional Alices diverge. Cut back to the Victorian Thames, to Dodgson improvising the lyrics to “The Lobster Quadrille” on one of those boat excursions, to little Alice laughing meanly with the other kids at his stutter, to Dodgson apologizing while staring holes in her suddenly remorseful face. Cut back to Columbia, Mrs. Hargreaves in cap and gown, the band and chorus performing a stately, collegiate arrangement of the quadrille. Close-up on Mrs. Hargreaves’ face, resolute. Will she, won’t she? Will she, won’t she? Dodgson’s face on the riverbank. Child Alice looking up at him. Her mother looking down, her sister reading an admonishing passage. Child Alice approaching Dodgson, kissing him on the cheek, embracing him. Everything is insinuated and nothing is conclusive.
Mrs. Hargreaves addressing the assembled: “At the time, I was too young to see the gift whole, to see it for what it was, to acknowledge the love that had given it birth. But I see it now, at long, long last. Thank you, Mr. Dodgson.” Is this exoneration, forgiveness, something else entirely? Anything she told Jack and Lucy the night before that informed this script remains a secret from us. Cut again to Alice placing the kiss on his cheek. Cut back to a standing ovation from the Columbia crowd. Cut over to Mrs. Hargreaves, impossible to read. Is this really where her voyage across the sea brought her, to a point of sincere gratitude? Or has she decided to give those gathered to celebrate the great man what they came for, to let them keep their childhoods in exchange for hers?
In the closing scene of the film, there is no Mrs. Hargreaves. Only Alice, cast back to the desolate coast of her dreamworld, dressed in the pinafore and dress of her fictional counterpart’s illustration, the make-believe girl once more. The time-ravaged Mock Turtle and Griffon are there, cracking wise. Dodgson is there, too, and she takes him by the hand. The little troupe erupts in maniacal laughter, which turns to something like a sob as it’s swallowed by the waves breaking on the rocky shore. Is this prison or refuge? What are we to make of Mrs. Hargreaves’ speech? Of this exile of, and back into, Alice? Of the story of a dead man whose fictions were also the fantasy the public adored? The film leaves Alice’s secrets, whatever they may have been, with the creatures: in their glitching whiskers, their shredded feathers, their ghoulish voices only she, all those decades later, can hear clearly.
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Erin Keane is the author of Runaway: Notes on the Myths That Made Me (Belt Publishing), one of NPR’s best books of 2022; editor of The Louisville Anthology (2020, also from Belt); and three collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Demolition of the Promised Land (Typecast Publishing) is now back in print. She is chief content officer at Salon and teaches creative nonfiction and poetry in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University.
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