Exploring Self-Awareness

Through The Lens of the Film Little Man Tate

Like millions of other Americans born in the 1980s, I took up martial arts as a child due to the influence of the film The Karate Kid. In that movie, the outcast beat up the bad guy, got the girl, seized flies in his chopsticks and earned the adoration of an elderly wizard man. Yes please, sign me up. It was in tae kwon do class where I met a boy named Adam, who became a friend of mine due to yet another shared hobby of ours: acting. I used to audition for and occasionally perform in television commercials, and Adam had recently gained an interest in this festival of feigning as well. One day, it was announced to me that Adam would be playing the main character in a major motion picture, alongside the girl from Bugsy Malone, my favorite movie at the time. I broke a board out of envy.

I can remember sitting in the theater and watching my friend becomes these two new people: A movie star named Adam, and a genius named Fred. Watching Little Man Tate was honestly infuriating, yet somehow simultaneously gratifying. Vicarious experiences can be quite meaningful, and it was with blind guile that I allowed myself to pretend that the experiences I was witnessing, both Adam’s and Fred’s, were mine as well.

As a child, I was often curious about the nature of my identity, and from a very early age I struggled to accept the notion that my name was the answer to the question “Who are you?” As a male child raised by a single mother, I often had an easier time understanding who I was based on who I was not. I highly valued anything that could be used as a tool with which I could distinguish myself from others, and I rarely seemed to experience a shortage of these treasures. And yet, what I sought most fervently was a true reflection, some glimmer of resemblance of myself within another, which could confirm my existence and worth in an external manner. If it existed, I didn’t want reality to only be mine, I wanted it to be shared between myself and my match, whomever that might be. This is a desire that has yet to wane as I’ve aged, as I am indeed still quite fascinated by what it means to be ‘me’. The movie Little Man Tate explores this notion rather intricately.

Is Fred Tate a man in a boy’s body? No, he is purely a child. Does he have the intellect of an adult, but a juvenile disposition and physical makeup? The answer to this is also no, because although he is smarter than other kids his age, his intelligence far surpasses that of the average adult as well. Fred Tate is not simply a fish out of water, but is perhaps more comparable to a mermaid swimming capably, though comfortlessly and conspicuously, amongst fish. The character of Fred Tate is mythically appealing, but realistically unfathomable, as child prodigies and the adults who awkwardly orbit them are rarely as two-dimensional as presented in this film. Though the characters of Jane and DeDe are clearly meant to represent polarized archetypes, the Hollywood simplification of their roles does somewhat demean the complexities that adults encounter in reference to children for whom they care. Fred himself is generally presented as being either blissfully at ease or entirely enraged from one moment to the next, whereas in reality the nuance of a child’s experience, particularly that of an exceptionally attuned child such as Fred, is far more pervasive.

It was a few years after seeing my friend Adam star in Little Man Tatethat I began attending a new school. I sat down one night early in the year and flipped through the Middle School Directory, in which the kids’ names, parents, addresses and phone numbers were listed. Using this, I began what would unintentionally become a September tradition of mine: Finding the other kids in my school who had single parents.

I sat at my kitchen table, lights dimmed, directory laid out in front of me, glossy-eyed and determined to discover my companions. With whom from this list of anonymous classmates could I share my condition of having that glaringly blank space beside my name where my second parent ought to reside? Who of this compilation of Brooklynites would join me in my visual representation of otherness, accompanying me in my experience of lack due to loss? I flipped through the pages in a daze, not reading the assortment of characters and words, but simply seeking out the blank spaces, counting them by grade. If not actually aiming to distinguish the names and identities of the individuals I could declare as my partners in parentlessness, what was I doing?

I was simply looking for conviction that the possibility of such an affinity existed at all. Without an indication that I could find a reflection of myself, a clear vision of who this self of mine in fact was became that much more evasive. I was not a martial arts master, despite the dark shade of my newly acquired belt. I was not a child prodigy, nor was I even qualified to pretend to be one in a film. Like Fred, and like all children, I was much more than Hollywood could successfully present in 90 minutes of exposition, conflict, climax and resolution.

We are all reflections of one another, and therefore in order to be adequately observed we must also be sufficiently observant. Education is a form of communication. We as teachers must practice self-awareness in attempts to reach the impressionable mind of a child, for there is no way to speak to another if first we cannot hear ourselves. If we expect a student to learn from us, we must also expect ourselves to be able to do the same. Becoming aware of who we are, and who we are not, is an ongoing process, but it almost always begins with accepting limitations, both our own and those of others. Attempting to apprehend a definitive understanding of who we are is as difficult as capturing a fly using chopsticks. Our limitless sense of self does not want to be ensnared, and all that we can do to satiate our desire for comprehension is lean into the nuance. It is only with acceptance of gradation that we will discover truth and enact growth.