#matilda*

[rosestarchild]

messy study of lauren byrne as miss honey for the 3 people who are going to see this 💘

[gylenhal]

What’s this trash you’re reading?

[softsnuper]

get yourself a girl who can do both 💫

[rosestarchild]

i think one of the things that really defines how i see the my house scene is something that's actually not made clear in the musical, which is the explicit implication made in the book that the reason behind miss honey taking matilda to see her house is very directly linked with the fact that matilda had just showed her something magical, moving the cup without touching it. it's not for no reason that these two things happen one right after the other. she had just moved an object with her mind, something considered impossible, and if matilda can make the impossible happen, then that opens you to the possibility that there might be a magical solution to a problem miss honey herself finds impossible to fix. this is not something conscious, miss honey doesn't rationally thinks this and then takes her there, it's almost like an impulse at first, but the implication is there.

the reason i'm saying this is because, since you don't have that made as clear in the musical, along with other contextual details, then my house becomes a bit of an ambiguous song, and you can tell that by the way different people draw vastly different conclusions from it. what i see sometimes is people taking the positives of the situation and running away with them, interpreting the song sweetly and rose-coloredly only as a sort of anthem on finding your own independence and happiness and peace, on choosing a life for yourself after hardship. but i find it difficult to call something a choice when you have no other choice, and it's not after hardship because she hasn't reached the after stage yet, she has taken a step that is unfortunately not enough to completely free her, just like matilda taking to "punishing" her parents is also not enough of a step to free her from them. there is an impossibility of moving forward by your own strength alone after a certain point.

it's a very fine line between acknowledging that a step was taken and there is value and bravery in that, along with an amount of pride and contentment and (resigned) optimism that comes with it, and also not ignoring that if this was not a problem, if this was not a situation that needed to be fixed in some way, if it was something she was completely comfortable with, then she wouldn't have taken matilda to the house in the first place. not in the circumstances that she did and not with the amount of shame and embarrassment she did it with, that even a child could think to be sensitive about it.

and i also think maybe people are more willing to take miss honey's words at face value than i am. she's not reliable when it comes to speaking about herself. you don't take her word for it when she sings about how weak and stupid she is, you don't necessarily need to take her 100% at face value when she tells you there's no place she'd rather be other than this run-down shed. matilda didn't. it's also not pretty when she tells you a place with no bed in it is enough for her, there's so many layers of resignation in there. what determines the severity of her situation is not necessarily the way she personally frames it, especially not when the only option she has other than being optimistic is to frame it negatively and be miserable every day. what determines the severity of it is the situation itself, and if matilda had taken her words at face value then nothing would have come out of miss honey taking her to the house, unconsciously hoping for a way out of a situation she could, by herself, find no way out of anymore.

[rosestarchild]

very big fan of how the stage musical introduced the revolutionary idea that the very things that make matilda seem different from other children are also the things that bring her distress, and they bring her distress because she has no control over them. "these answers that come into my mind unbidden, these stories delivered to me fully written" in the middle of a song about how overwhelmed and overestimulated she feels is one of my favorite lyrics in the show, i think, and when right afterwards she says she wishes the noise of her parents and of the television and of the shouting would stop, she also says she wishes the stories would stop. very big fan of that. this seems somewhat adjacent to how in the book she mentions more than once that she doesn't necessarily understand the meaning of what she reads, or how sometimes she doesn't completely understand a question even though she knows the answer for it, or she knows the answer but can't explain how she comes to it or how it comes to her. it's not the same thing, but it's similar in the sense that her intelligence doesn't guarantee she can fully grasp things and on the whole she doesn't have much of an understanding of what happens with her, and the musical seems to take this up a notch by implying that it can become something unpleasant to her, since she doesn't have much control of it. these answers that come into my mind unbidden.

i really like the acrobat & escapologist story even though it's very random and completely made-up lol, i like it because i enjoy the way it's told and the words they use to tell it and i enjoy the feeling of a child telling you a story, but also i like it because in a way it works as the extreme of that idea, as the extreme of matilda not having control over the things she knows, not understanding why they come to her in the first place, and that being a cause of distress. she's at her angriest and most distressed immediately after finding out that this terrible story that's been assaulting her mind without her wanting to and for reasons she doesn't understand, which would be bad enough in itself, is also attached to a real person she knows and cares about.

the whole story situation is very much correlated with her powers, which are first prompted by anger... but the telekinesis that at first appears without her controlling it & the stories that come without her knowing why & the answers that come without her knowing how & the books she can read without understanding them, whether it's magical or related to some cognitive skill, it all seems connected and linked to me... and the musical implies that they come with bad side effects for her. quiet is such a good song and there's so much you can take from it and different ways to look at it that don't necessarily exclude one another, and i think that's kinda the same with the implications of the acrobat & escapologist story. anyway, i'm sorry, this was all very messy?? i usually like writing these in a more organized way uuh but this seems very incoherent and i'm not sure i made myself understood

[rosestarchild]

whenever i see posts like "X character should be allowed to say fuck" i think of miss honey, she's number 1 character to me who should be allowed to say fuck and all other curse words she wants. it so happens that she's trapped in a children's story and so she'll never say them. i also think she should be allowed to have a gun and shoot people in the face, but that's another story.

[rosestarchild]

Fabi Bang as Miss Honey and Belle Rodrigues as Matilda in the 2023 brazilian non-replica production of Matilda. (x)