| Articles: Collage in Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat Books (1/5) | ||
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| by Rebecca Platzner Collage 1: an artistic composition made of various materials (as paper, cloth, or wood) glued on a picture surface 2: the art of making collages 3: an assembly of diverse fragments (a collage of ideas) 4: a work (as film) having disparate scenes in rapid succession without transitions. I am one of a band of women in a Young Adult Materials class at Rutgers who fell in love with Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat series. We are fans of Witch Baby’s struggle and snarlball hair, of the superman disguises that protect Dirk’s tender heart, of the way Block surprises and charms us with her poetic words and images. We love the stories’ romance and fairytale magic, but we appreciate the characters’ real-world difficulties and pain. We are amused by our introduction to funky Weetzie West-coast culture, yet leap with recognition at the familiar human needs and struggles beneath the foreign trappings. We want to talk about the books, to write about them, to share them. Yet so much is complex and compelling in these short little gems that it is difficult to find a satisfactory way to contain them. Somehow, it doesn’t seem enough just to discuss the fairytale allusions or the language or the use of color or the character development or any other single aspect of the book. Much of the charm and power of the books lie in the ways Block combines and brings that which was disparate together in new ways: how she uses collage. One of the more obvious uses of collage is as a technique of characterization, for some of Block’s characters make their own collages. In Baby Be-Bop, one of the ways we come to know Dirk is as a collage of the men after whom he styles himself. In order to try to define and protect himself, he takes on aspects of the dress and manner of his heroes — James Dean, the superheroes Slam and Jam, and a black-leather punker. Dirk’s grandfather, Derwood, an entomologist, makes collages. As a boy, Derwood loved the little fairies he saw in the meadows where studied bugs. He falls in love with Fifi, Dirk’s grandmother, who reminds him of a tiny human fairy, though she sees herself as a cricket. Together, Derwood and Fifi are each given a chance they thought they didn’t have, the chance to bloom in a life of love; and Block uses butterflies as a symbol for this love. But Derwood has a heart condition that he knows will end his life while he is still a young man. When he finds butterflies to study, he releases the living ones, but he keeps the ones he finds that have died and uses them to makes collages of beauty in death for Fifi to hang on the walls of her cottage after he is gone. When Weetzie inherits the cottage from Fifi, she continues to decorate it with collage. She covers pillows and lampshades with rose petals, glitter, stars, lace, feathers, and miniature plastic babies. (Block uses lists as a form of collage too; she lists objects, scents, foods, names.) Weetzie dresses herself in collage creations: she favors an Indian headdress and moccasins with the jeans and dresses she decorates with fringe and glitter. For Secret Agent’s movie, she dresses her babies in collage. Blond Cherokee wears fringe and feathers, and dark tangled Witch Baby gauze and tulle. When the "almost sisters" get older and share a room, Cherokee’s side of the room is decorated in Weetzie fashion, for like Weetzie, Cherokee tends to see what is colorful, pretty, light and happy in the world — that which pleases. Witch Baby’s wall, on the other hand, is decorated with her "pain game," a gray collage of newspaper clippings about disasters and tragedy and sorrow, for Witch Baby cannot help but see the dark side of life. The characters’ journeys will involve understanding and accepting the good and bad, the light and dark in each of their perceptions of the world. |
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