Marianne Dreams

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Adam: But this is what we were saying about the dream logic of the film, if you want to be charitable. I’d want to call it dream logic. While suffering from glandular fever, 11-year-old Anna Madden draws a house. When she falls asleep, she has disturbing dreams in which she finds herself inside the house she has drawn. After she draws a face at the window, in her next dream she finds Marc, a boy who suffers with muscular dystrophy, living in the house. She learns from her doctor that Marc is a real person. A ladder that’s not long enough. So there’s this whole strange business in the book and the film about their inability to draw a long ladder. Did you notice this, Ren? Mark also has the same homeschooling teacher as Marianne, Miss Chesterfield (Patricia Maynard) although the two children have never met. Ali: She’s like ‘What’s that?’ ’It’s a radio’ ‘It’s too big!’ That’s not what you say when your child has drawn a radio: ‘it’s unrecognisably large’.

Marianne Dreams - Catherine Storr - Google Books Marianne Dreams - Catherine Storr - Google Books

Adam: Yeah, the walls look really like they’ve got mildewed, and rotten and slimy and stinky. So what was your other (half-singing) Texture of the Week? Coming of Age Story: Marianne Dreams is this trope in pretty much every way. Ironically, getting caught up in the escapism of a fantasy world is what leads to Marianne's maturity developing.

The book contains examples of the following tropes:

I liked the book and the film, but I don’t know if the film works as a successful adaption of the book. I think it works on its own merits. Adam: And then an odd thing happens in the film, which is that Mark’s voice in the imaginary voice-over then morphs into the voice of Anna’s mother. Ren: Which leads to some very strange sets, the room filled with all these bizarrely proportioned objects. Adam: — the radio is helping the not-father, and blares out (Adam does a malevolent robotic voice) ‘They’re under the stairs! They’re under the stairs!’ It’s a children’s book, as you said, but we haven’t mentioned yet that the film, at least by BBFC is 15 rated.

Marianne Dreams | Faber Marianne Dreams | Faber

Adam: It reminded me of rewatching Big with my sister, the Tom Hanks film in which he’s young and in the body of a boy, and there’s a whole relationship scene where me and my sister were going ‘Oh ho ho, wouldn’t it be awful if something actually romantic happened’, and it does, and we were both quite horrified. Quite a lot of it is about her frustration at not being able to get out of bed, and her being grumpy and upset about having to spend this time in bed, and how she feels about the people around her and things like that. Ren: So I have two textures of the week, they’re both from the same scene in the film, and they’re both great. So my first one is the huge industrial-looking ice-cream machine — As I’ve said before in this podcast, the 1980s just seems like it was this special decade, particularly when it comes to making films. I mean, I like Paperhouse, but who is it made for? Adam: I think it becomes a bit more about abandonment anxiety. More about her frustrations at his absence than any violence? I don’t know. It does feel like an odd choice, and then it does then put the rehabilitation of the father, and the restoration of the father-daughter relationship, to the forefront of the narrative.Adam: There was a beach. It did remind me, reading the book, how much better board games have got. They have chess, and they’re like ‘we could draw Monopoly’ and then play two games of Monopoly in a row. I was like, God, two games of Monopoly in a row! I felt sorry for them. Adam: NHS green ice-cream. And she kind of says to herself, ‘Oh, I forgot to draw some cones’. As though a cone would make it all better. There’s some danger in the book, which you don’t see in the film when they come up with the idea of drawing a helicopter that the helicopter will turn out as a horrible winged insect monster.

Marianne Dreams | Bedlam Theatre Marianne Dreams | Bedlam Theatre

Ren: I think they wanted to rehabilitate the image of him after the horrifying dream father sequence. Because he seems pretty decent. Ali: But then he’s actually… I don’t know. It definitely felt like from that point onwards, the film didn’t seem to be positioning the real father as being threatening? Which I was slightly surprised by. She draws a face in the window of the house, and when she goes into the dream, there is a boy there, named Mark. It turns out that he is a real person, who is being taught by the same tutor as her, and he can’t walk because he’s suffering from polio.

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Ren: So one of the main differences between Marianne Dreams and Paperhouse, is that Paperhouse introduces this whole thread with the father and the storyline about Anna’s family. Whereas her parents are fairly irrelevant to Marianne Dreams, her mum just brings her things. It's not just the stones that make the story so unusual, it is also the fact that it is about two children who are ill in bed and are trapped by their circumstance, finding a way of escaping through dreams. For a child, being confined to bed rest is so restrictive and feels never ending. This series captures that feeling perfectly. One of the things that children will think about when watching this is how to cope if the ability to walk is taken away, really mixing up the emotions. The action switches between Marianne’s dream existence and her bedroom where her mother, doctor and teacher are concerned by her strange behaviour, nightmares and obsession with Mark.

Marianne Dreams | Faber

What happens when a recurring dream becomes so lucid and involving that it feels more like reality than the everyday? Does the dream – unsettling as it is – become a more valid state of existence than the dreamer’s waking life? Ren: Yes, because it’s like — is it part of her illness, or is it because she set her bed on fire? You don’t know. Ali: To be fair, if it was just a ladder that was propped up against a cliff, that would be quite dangerous to climb down. Marianne (Vikki Chambers) is confined to bed after falling from a horse. Out of boredom she doodles an imaginary house in her notepad – and is subsequently transported there in her dreams. Marianne is a twelve year old girl confined to bed for months with a debilitating illness. Tired but restless she plunders a keepsake box handed down from her great grandmother to her mother and finds amongst the shiny trinkets a nice pencil, 'It was one of those pencils that are simply asking to be written or drawn with.'Adam: So in the book it’s a pretty strained relationship for most of the book, by the end they’re friends, but —