Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 18, 1991                   TAG: 9103180233
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BETTELHEIM & HOLLYWOOD

Toto, too?

Toto, too.

Back when I read Bruno Bettelheim's "The Uses of Enchantment," I asked everyone I knew if he or she remembered a particular fascination for some story in their youth. That's Bettelheim's theory, you know - that children latch onto particular stories, usually fairy tales, that explain for them thorny emotional choices. How to relate to wicked stepmothers, for instance, or how to defeat a giant. (From a child's perspective, giants populate most of the world.) That's the usefulness of enchantment for children, Bettelheim posits: It eases their worried minds. Without the stories, the children muddle along, their worries unresolved.

Bettelheim also asserts that if, once we've grown up, we can remember the story onto which we latched, then we can also discover something important about our psyches.

The story I needed to hear over and over, or so my mother tells me, was "Nurse Nancy." In this story, the boys refuse to let little Nancy play with them. She is greatly outdone. But then! The boys start falling down and skinning up their knees and Nancy - armed with the bandages that came in the back of her book - flies to their rescue. She saves the day! Of course, the boys let her play after that.

I could go on for tomes and tomes about the usefulness of that particular enchantment.

But however many times I made my mother read "Nurse Nancy" to me then, I don't really remember it now. (Someone else had to remind me of the plot.) No, the enchantment I remember, the one I cherish, the one I repeat over and over in my mind is Hollywood's 1939 version of "The Wizard of Oz."

The one in which a plucky dark-haired girl saves herself, three bumbling fellows and one ridiculous dog from two witches, a humbug wizard, a tornado, hordes of winged monkeys, talking trees and palace guards. And then she finds her own way home - with just a little help from another plucky woman.

Yessirreebob. I like that. There's plenty in that sack for me.

Last week, I decided I ought to read the book, too. After all, references both veiled and obvious to Dorothy and her companions pop up in nearly everything I write. I ought to know the true source.

But the book, I discovered, is a horse of a different color. It is, in truth, a real snore. Maybe if I'd read it first . . . or when I was 8 . . . But I didn't. So, apart from noticing the movie's departures from Baum's text, I latched onto only one passage: Baum's introduction, in which he wrote that his book "aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out." Tell that to Margaret Hamilton.

I'm sure it's not really a bad book; it's only a bad movie script. I'll be forever grateful to those who knew how to draw the distinction. But imagine me - a writer! - preferring the movie to the book. Oh, what a world! What a world!

AUTHOR NOTE: Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.