'Life's a ball, so learn to throw it'

Miss Trunchbull's subversive message for 2024

Look at these trophies
See how my trophies gleam
In the sunlight, see how they shine

What do you think it
took to become English
Hammer-throwing champion
Nineteen-sixty-nine?

Do you think in that moment
When my big moment came
That I treated the rules
With casual disdain?

-Miss Trunchbull, ‘The Hammer’, from Matilda the Musical (2010/2022)

To really understand society, it is important to pay careful attention to what children are being taught - not just in school, but in the culture at large. This gives you an insight into the way adults see the world, of course, but it also gives you an idea about the likely shape that the future will take. And in both of these respects Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin’s Matilda the Musical (a stage production that has recently been made into a Netflix film) is a very rich text. It tells us an awful lot about the dominant discourse of childhood in the cultural mainstream. And it also manages, I think quite unwittingly, to critique itself so thoroughly as to reveal the deep rot that has seeped into the very roots of our culture.

Roald Dahl’s original Matilda (1988), of course, also had quite a bit to say about childhood. For those unfamiliar with the story (can there be such a person?) it concerns a small girl who is being raised by two appalling, TV-addicted parents in an English village. Matilda, who is extremely precocious and able to read adult books by the age of three, receives no encouragement from her mother and father, and is also forced to attend the local school, run by the brutal Miss Trunchbull - a middle-aged, hammer-throwing spinster who enjoys inflicting all manner of torments onto the children in the name of ‘discipline’. Matilda, however, eventually discovers she has telekinetic powers, uses them to oust Miss Trunchbull, and is finally adopted by the kindly Miss Honey - the only adult who has ever really understood or appreciated her.

Anybody familiar with Dahl’s own life story (particularly those who have read his first memoir, Boy (1984)) will understand Matilda to be in part a working out of various ‘issues’ the man had. He clearly had a problem with authority figures, and he in particular had a problem with the harsh discipline which he had been subject to, and witnessed, at various British boarding schools growing up in the 1920s and 30s. The scenes involving the cane are some of the most vivid in Boy, and those experiences obviously deeply affected Dahl. But, more generally, an abiding fear of larger-than-life adults comes through very strongly in that book’s pages. Matilda has elements of a revenge fantasy, of course, but it also taps into the profound sense of powerlessness that small children throughout history have felt when confronted by a domineering adult, and which has only very recently begun to give way.

The original Matilda’s context is therefore important to understand. Most adults in 1988 - and particularly the parents and teachers who would have been reading Matilda with children - had grown up in a world of clipped ears, barked orders, and speak-when-you’re-spoken-to. And the children of that era (I was one of them) knew that world too, if in highly diluted form. The shared experience wasn’t universal or uniform, of course. But it was common enough to make Miss Trunchbull a familiar type. And part of the book’s thrill obviously derived from the fact that it cocked a snook at that kind of adult and that kind of approach to child-rearing.

If Dahl’s book had any kind of social message, then, it was something along the lines of what my own father once said to me. He had been raised in dire poverty in a council flat in 1950s Paisley, on the outskirts of Glasgow, and had been subject to violent and aggressive discipline throughout his schooling. He told me that as a boy he had been ‘terrified’ of grown-ups - so much so that he and his peers dared not even speak around adults if a family member was not close by. And he said that he had been determined that his own approach would be different. People might nowadays complain about kids being raised too leniently, he said, but as far he was concerned ‘we should never go back to what it was like in the old days’. This seems to be roughly the sentiment underlying Dahl’s work.

Matilda the Musical, though, has much grander ambitions. Although the basic story is the same, Matilda herself is forced to cede a large part of the limelight to the rest of the boys and girls at the school, who are, frankly, more interesting, and take on the aspect of a crew of rebels-in-waiting. And the climax is much more decisive. In the book, Miss Trunchbull faints after having been convinced she has seen a ghost, and then mysteriously disappears; she is replaced by a new headmaster who makes the school nicer and more focused on learning. In the musical, Miss Trunchbull is overthrown by a revolution amongst the children (led my Matilda’s psychic powers) and the result is a kind of utopian, anarcho-syndicalist commune, wherein teachers and pupils alike are joined together in play, learning, and discovery, and everyone comes and goes freely as their mood dictates.

If Matilda the book’s (understated) social message was that the bullying way with which many adults treated children in the past was not conducive to learning and that it was a jolly good thing it had ended, Matilda the Musical’s is a Rousseauian manifesto. We need children to take charge, it seems to be saying, to lead us to a brighter, more tolerant future; and a revolution in education will be the tool with which we usher in our new tomorrow - all laid on very thick with set designs, lyrics and motifs that are clearly meant to evoke what might be called French Revolutionary kitsch.

The defining moment comes fairly early, in the catchy tune ‘Naughty’, whose lyrics summarise the argument succinctly:

Just because you find that life's not fair, it
Doesn't mean that you just have to grin and bear it
If you always take it on the chin and wear it
Nothing will change

Even if you're little, you can do a lot, you
Mustn't let a little thing like ‘little’ stop you
If you sit around and let them get on top, you
Might as well be saying you think that it's okay
And that's not right
And if it's not right
You have to put it right

And the writers pick the ball up and run with it from there: what we need, in order to ‘put it right’, is to ‘be a little bit naughty’. No more ‘taking it on the chin’, no more ‘grinning and bearing it’; we want change - and we’re going to fight for it, and undermine (and ultimately tear down) any authority figure that stands in our way.

Matilda the Musical is in this respect, of course, firmly within the cultural zeitgeist - at least within educated circles. Future cultural historians will scratch their heads and wonder how it was that the establishment in the West came to define itself as being anti-establishment: ‘hypocrisy’ doesn’t seem like strong enough a term for the sheer strangeness of our current moment in this regard. We live in an age in which the middle-to-upper classes cement their status precisely by flaunting their own faux-rebelliousness even while enforcing strict conformity of thought and belief. And, indeed, adherence to the trappings of the ‘old’ establishment (in Britain, this would be the Church of England, the monarchy, the Union Jack, etc.) has become the ultimate signal of déclassé status, even while a new set of cultural attitudes and priorities has rigidified as the markers of a successful bourgeois life.

These markers are of course all on display in Matilda the Musical, as they are in almost all children’s cinema, TV, and fiction of our age. The musical’s message is unrelenting, and unrelentingly correct. It tells us, in rough summary, that authority is inherently illegitimate and bad; that rules are a tool of oppression; that the basic problem with our society is that it is not tolerant enough; that the values of the old world have essentially nothing to recommend them; and that (this is by far and away the most important) the purpose of life is to be who you really are, as though who you really are is a discernible feature of your psyche that can be made actual if only reality can be forced to bend sufficiently to your will.

It posits, in other words, a view of the human experience essentially as one of individual struggle to realise one’s ‘real’ personhood. As ludicrously nicey-nicey as is the film’s ending, the human character it postulates is rivalrous and abrasive. This character knows ‘who it really is’, demands recognition from those around it, and sees anything that stands in its path - teachers, rules, parents, etc, - as mere barriers to be cast down. And it follows that it sees the role of adults as being basically to facilitate the means by which the process of being ‘who you really are’ is realised by the child. Parenthoood, and the role of the teacher, are legitimate insofar as they do this. But where they don’t, they have can have no claim on loyalty or sentiment and must be made to stand aside.

Miss Trunchbull’s crime, therefore, subtly alters. In Dahl’s Matilda, she was bad because she locked children in the ‘chokey’ and threw them around by the hair. In Kelly and Minchin’s Matilda the Musical, she is bad because she prevents her young charges from self-actualising. The book’s Trunchbull is a brute. The musical’s is oppressive. This is the nub of the distinction. The problem to the modern eye is not really the violence (much toned down from the source material). It is the fact that Trunchbull enforces rigidity and hierarchy, and thus stands for everything that our age recognises to be wrong.

But this of course brings us to Miss Trunchbull herself. Because despite her fundamental odiousness, the writing team behind Matilda the Musical do make an effort to humanise her - or, at least, explain her motives. This comes through chiefly in the song, ‘The Hammer’, in which Trunchbull imparts a kind of philosophy of education, drawing on her own experience in the England hammer-throwing championships of 1969. She attributes her success, in effect, to discipline:

As I stepped up to the circle
did I change my plan? Hmm what?
As I chalked up my palms
did I wave my hands? I DID NOT!

As I started my spin
did I look at the view?
Did I drift off and dream
for a minute or two?

Do you think I faltered or amended my rotation?
Do you think I altered my intended elevation?
As the hammer took off did I change my grunt
From the grunt I had practiced for many a month?

Not a jot, not a dot did I stray from the plot
Not a detail of my throw was adjusted or forgotten
Not even when the hammer left my hands
And sailed up, up above the stands

In other words, she was focused, she was dedicated, she did what she had to do, and in the end she achieved. Hence, the simple lesson follows:

If you want to throw the hammer for your country,
You have to stay inside the circle all the time,
And if you want to make the team,
You dont need happiness or self-esteem,
You just need to keep your feet inside the line

You need, then, to learn what to do to succeed, and then do it. She closes with a flourish:

Apply just one simple rule -
To hammer-throwing, life, and school -
Life’s a ball, so learn to throw it
Find the bally line, and toe it
And always keep your feet inside the line

This is presented to us by the writers almost, I think, to elicit sympathy for the poor benighted woman and her weird obsession with such a ludicrous sport. We are meant to try to grasp her strange worldview as an anthropologist might wonder at the religious eccentricities of an uncontacted tribe, and rationalise her evil as the product of some monstrous flaw in her character, which cannot possibly be her fault. What could have scarred her so deeply that she has come to see life in these harsh and uncompromising terms?

The punchline, though, of course, is that Miss Trunchbull is the only character in the entire film who has actually really done anything of note. Being English hammer-throwing champion 1969 (and, indeed, competing in the Olympics, as she does in the novel and the 1996 film version) is after all a darned sight more than Miss Honey has ever achieved. You might have thought this would entitle her to at least some attention when it comes to career advice.

And the fact of the matter is that, as career advice goes, her ‘one simple rule’ actually makes a great deal of sense. For the vast majority of children, picking a skill (plumbing, flower arranging, cooking, waiting on tables, etc.), focusing on it, and getting very good at it, is a much surer way to make a decent living and provide for a family than is pursuing who they ‘really are’ in a world without rules. And ‘finding the bally line and toeing it’ is a message that young boys in particular need to hear, given that the alternative is far more likely to be a life of low-status drudgery punctuated by mind-numbing bouts of video game-playing and porn-watching than it is self-actualisation in a rural commune surrounded by butterflies and flowers.

This makes Miss Trunchbull an unlikely bedfellow for the only career advice guru I have ever had any time for, Cal Newport. For Newport, too, the big idea is not, as Steve Jobs famously had it, to pursue your dreams. Most people don’t even have dreams, and for those who do, the likelihood of success is minimal, making the pursuit almost certain to end in disappointment. No: the way to succeed in your career is to find something that you are useful at doing and just make sure you get really good at it - indeed, to get ‘so good they can’t ignore you’. Forget passion, in other words; the trick initially is just to excel in something that people want. Passion comes later when you become genuinely good at it. The first thing is to try to be a craftsman, and eventually financial security - and the freedom and autonomy to pursue dreams that financial security bring - will follow.

Matilda the Musical, then, would have us believe that a happy life means being unleashed from the drudgery of rules and discipline in order to be able to run free after whatever dreams and passions one holds in one’s breast. But it undercuts this central message by unconsciously offering up Miss Trunchbull - a comparatively high achiever, who has made the best of her modest talents by following rules and disciplining herself - as a more appealing alternative. Indeed, the musical/film in fact suggests to us the existence of two competing life strategies. You can hope to some day be able to gad about in the country all day long like a lotus-eater with a bunch of grinning mediocrities. Or you can work hard and succeed, and some day make a name for yourself. Kelly and Minchin thing it self-evident which of those the audience will naturally sympathise with, but there will I think be many adult viewers who find, looking around at the society in which they find themselves (in which nobody appears able to do anything) that they can rather see Miss Trunchbull’s point.

The final irony, of course, is that, for all that she is supposed to symbolise the oppression of a prevailing authoritarian orthodoxy, the point she is making is, for our current moment, radically subversive. The idea that one should toe the line as a route to success in life has been almost entirely abandoned by mainstream culture. Instead, adults and children alike are encouraged at every turn to imagine their lives as something akin to the story of a beautiful creature emerging, nymph-like, from a chrysalis so as to soar gloriously into the sun. That is what the meaning of modern life seems to be: to find one’s true self, one’s innermost desires and impulses, and discover ultimate bliss in merging one’s consciousness into those desires and impulses totally.

This is, obviously, the source of much of our social atomisation and the origin of much of the narcissism which fuels the culture war. But, more importantly, as Matilda the Musical implicitly shows us, it is also the reason why everything around us looks increasingly shabby. A society in which everybody aspires to live in a rule-free, hierearchy-less utopia of self-actualisation is one in which nothing very much gets done, and much less gets done well. And the vision which the film presents in its closing scene would - as anybody with an ounce of sense can see - not last five minutes if it was writ large across society as a whole. We actually, in other words, have an acute need for more Miss Trunchbulls, to keep the show on the road and get things done. But our ‘thought-leaders’ - at least on the evidence available to us on our screens and in our books - seem to still be wedded to the daft notion that we need fewer. We await the results with interest as the coming generation grows up. They have been imbibing all of this nonsense practically from birth; our best hope may be the natural rebelliousness of youth and the resurgence in Trunchbullism that it might bring.