Over the holiday weekend, I took four of the six children of my friends, the Wongs, to see Steven Spielberg’s delightful adaptation of Raoul Dahl’s BFG. I then offered them $100 to split between them if they could come up with the secret meaning—not “Big Friendly Giant”—of BFG.
Subsequent to seeing the Queen emit a “whizzpopper” after drinking BFG’s bubble down elixir, they had no trouble deciphering “Big Farting Giant.”
Child’s play aside, BFG has been politically decoded, to speak, by the National Review’s psychedelic film critic, Armond White. According to White, BFG is charmingly-disguised agitprop promoting yet again Spielberg’s Obama worship: “Sometimes hooded, BFG holds onto his dream-blowing trumpet/staff like an Old Testament prophet. He has Spielberg’s smile, but, when he’s excited, his large ears flap like fish gills. . . . . BFG mostly resembles our current president, the phantom figure behind Spielberg–Kushner’s Lincoln. BFG’s Big Daddy Obama ears hear all. He’s a figure of liberal dreams who provides citizens their own dreams. The BFG is the most extravagant send-off Hollywood has ever given an American president.”
Masterfully voiced over by English actor Mark Rylands who played Thomas Cromwell in the Masterpiece Theater Adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, the benevolent giant looks and sounds to me more like a fond conjuring of jolly old Tudor England (though Henry VIII—who ultimately executed his good servant Cromwell—was often far from jolly).
Admitting my own political predilections, I think White is spot on about the Spielberg-Kushner Lincoln epic as a transparent portrait of our sixteenth president and wartime supremo as a sort of precursor of Obama’s recent style of government by executive order in the public good. Lincoln had to maneuver the Thirteenth Amendment through Congress using some unsavory political maneuvering: ditto Obama and the Affordable Care Act! On the other hand, White has difficulty squaring Dahl’s—and Spielberg’s—palpable Anglophilia in BFG with Obama’s turning of Winston Churchill’s bust to the White House wall. Spielberg but maybe not Obama would have been uncomfortable with the Machiavellian pipe dream of Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward who fantasized about provoking a war with England to prevent the American Union coming apart in 1861.
Sadly but unsurprisingly, the Jerusalem Post has an article bringing up in connection with Spielberg’s BFG Abe Foxman’s 1990 op ed in the New York Times calling Dahl “a bigot” and “admitted anti-Semite” for his intemperate attack on Israel following its 1982 incursion in Lebanon when Dahl wrote: “There’s a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity. . . . I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason.”
Dahl’s defenders always point out his WWII service for the Brits in Washington helping to undermine Isolationist America Firsters who were often soft on Hitler.
In BFG, the child heroine Sophie uses a magic potion to implant bad dreams in the orifices of the evil Giants who are ultimately dispatched by an international helicopter task force using nets to a far-distant island where they can feed no longer on orphans but only horrible looking and tasting cucumbers.
Happy endings are still possible in Hollywood, and hopefully will be possible in post-Obama America provided he is not succeeded by his flatulency Donald Trump.
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