What I Learned About Movies from a Well-Read Dog

Can I tell you a secret?

An embarrassing amount of what I know about classic literature comes from a kids' TV show called Wishbone.

Wishbone as Sherlock Holmes, a role he skillfully filled long before Benedict Cumberbatch.

You might remember the show. It aired on PBS in the 1990s and introduced young viewers (around middle school age) to the plots of great books. Each episode followed a familiar pattern: Wishbone—a Jack Russell terrier with, as the theme song put it, a "big imagination"—and his family encountered some kind of normal real-life situation to which the young viewer could relate. Maybe they went on a picnic, or worked on a science fair project, or encountered a moral dilemma and had to make a good decision.

Wishbone the pup had (somewhat inexplicably) read a lot of good literature and saw parallels between the real-life situation of his family and some story told in an old book. Then, in scenes that felt like flashbacks spliced into the present-day narrative, a band of players would dramatically act out the plot of the book.

The episodes were only half an hour long, so of course they couldn't act out the whole book. However, they were surprisingly good at capturing the main thrust of the plot and its major themes. And because it was set on top of a contemporary story, kids started to see how fictional tales about fictional characters could help them navigate real-life situations.

Wishbonewon four Daytime Emmys, a Peabody Award, and honors from the Television Critics Association, but more importantly, it remains firmly beloved by scores of people who were the kind of kids who came home from school to watch shows about book-loving dogs. (During graduate school, my friends and I could break into the theme song at a moment's notice. There's a reason we'd all been through at least seventeen years of school apiece, and were back for more.)

Anyhow, today I'm a college professor who teaches literature. The dirty little secret of English professors is that we haven't read all the books—anyone who claims they have is pulling a fast one on you. But I know the plots, at least, of a surprising number of books I haven't read, thanks to a Jack Russell terrier.

No, I'm not going to tell you which ones.

By now, Statler and Waldorf, those crochety old guys in the gallery from The Muppets, are yelling punny insults at me and wondering why I'm writing about a decades-old kids' show about books in a column about watching TV and movies. (Maybe you are too.)

Here's why: Wishbone didn't just give me an appetite for classic books along with a bit of wholesome weekday entertainment. By example—and, I might point out, on a TV—it taught me something important: stories that aren't "true" (fiction, in other words) matters, because stories (what they're about and the way they are told) become part of me. They begin to populate a sort of subconscious roadmap for how I live my life.

Wishbone as, apparently, a courtier from a French novel.

In other words, when I encounter a challenging situation, one way I intuitively navigate the choices I have to make is by relying on patterns and grooves and crevices my mind has already traversed through stories I've read in books and watched on a screen. They're "true" stories, in part because I've already experienced them. Some people talk about this in terms of the "moral" imagination. I learn how to live through stories.

That's a beautiful part of how we're created: we are the creatures with imaginations (apologies to Wishbone). We can see and create images of things that haven't happened precisely that way in reality (stories about mad scientists who create monsters that destroy them, or children who accidentally stumble on another universe in the back of a closet, or a family living in a big house in England as the twentieth century changes their way of life, or whatever). Jesus, knowing this, taught by telling stories about prodigal sons and lost pearls. Those stories don't just entertain us or help us pass the time: they teach us about the world.

Every great story, no matter how different the circumstances are from my own life, shows me something about myself.

There's more to this, though: it's not just that stories about good people teach me how to be good, and stories about bad people teach me how to be bad. In fact, I think stories about bad people can help me learn how to live well and can teach me about the seductiveness of badness. Part of what made Wishbone so good was that it didn't shy away from some of the more difficult themes in classic literature: death, disappointment in love, war, sadness.

But that's why I also firmly believe we shouldn't experience stories in isolation. I'd go so far as to say that if you're reading or watching stories by yourself and not experiencing and discussing them with others . . . you're doing it wrong.

We're beings who need to go through life with other people. We have communities and families and friends and stories and traditions handed down from person to person in order to help us make sense of this big, beautiful, heartbreaking world. So when we hear a good story with others and then talk about it together—passionately, excitedly, with a love for the craft—then we get to experience the story more fully together, and we also make a place for it in our internal roadmaps.

Similarly, when we experience a story about a person making bad choices that lead them down the path of destruction (can you tell I'm in the middle of Breaking Bad right now?), we might be seduced into experiencing it uncritically, the way we might look at a glamorous trainwreck celebrity or a friend who appears to "have it all together" and want to be like them, in some way. But our communities help us sort that out.

Wishbone, looking fancy as one of the Three Musketeers.

This is why we have book clubs. It's why film and TV buffs post incessantly about their favorite shows and movies on Facebook. It's why we have film festivals, and—importantly here—it is why critics write about these things: because we want to unwind the story into something more.

So that's where this blog comes in. It's called "Watch This Way," because I'm not really as interested in what we watch (though I'm very interested in that) as how we watch. And I'm interested in spooling out the stories we experience as a culture, exploring both how they reflect us back to ourselves and how they shape our collective imaginations, our roadmaps for living together—from families and neighborhoods to politics and religion and beyond.

So I'll write about specific TV shows and movies, and about wider trends that pop up between them. I'll talk to people who write and direct and produce these stories. I'll muse aloud on the ways we watch well, and the ways we watch badly. I'll write about myself a little, too, by way of giving you a sense of where I'm coming from.

I'm also hoping we'll be able to form a community around this pursuit. So often Internet comments devolve into shouting past each other, or complaining about whatever issue someone told us we ought to complain about. Movies and TV aren't monolithic; people respond in different ways because of who they are.

So here's a rule: as long as you're nice about it, you're free to not like a movie I love. And I might have had a totally different reaction to your favorite show than you did. That's great. Part of the fun of watching is disagreeing—and then understanding each other better that way. But let's challenge one another to articulate those disagreements with reasons behind them, not just platitudes. Let's respect good stories (and the hard work that goes into them) by taking them seriously, and by having fun, too.

So if you've got something you want to talk about, comment below. Or drop me a line over on Twitter (@alissamarie). We've got a whole big world to explore, and we're going to need big imaginations for it.