Help for the Heelers

The benevolent butterfly effect in Bluey’s season finale.

From Mockingbird

Mockingbird is an organization devoted to “connecting the Christian faith with the realities of everyday life."

A cartoon dog family stand in their kitchen

Bluey and family.

Ludo Studio.

Written by Bryan J. This article first appeared in Mockingbird, 23 April 2024. By kind permission.

“Daddy, there’s no God in Bluey’s world, is there?” No joke, my precocious four-year-old PK [Pastor’s Kid] son asked me this question after watching the new Bluey season finale, titled “The Sign.” It’s a deep question, one that comes from a place of honest curiosity — “The Sign” is, without a doubt, one of the most spiritually significant episodes of a series that is known to offer big questions to little kids. The Heeler family is presented with a life-changing decision with no guarantee of a happy ending, and the whole of the episode features the family wrestling the unknown of the future. The fact that my son could pick up on the high stakes of the episode, the philosophical questions about the goodness of providence, and the impossibility of knowing whether the future was bright or not … let’s just say it justifies the tears that come every time I watch the episode with him.

Which is five times now. I have watched the finale five times and wept every time. Isn’t this show made for preschoolers?

“The Sign” reveals a family in transition. After offering a number of hints earlier in the season, we discover that the Heeler family dad, Bandit, has accepted a job offer that pays a lot more money, but will require him to move. Chili (aka Mum) agrees with the choice to move and take the new job, but she has sincere concerns about leaving family, friends, neighbors, city, and a beloved house behind. Bluey, of course, has trouble coming to terms with the idea, as any preschooler would, and Bingo remains blissfully ignorant of the big changes coming her way. The preparations to move coincide with preparations for Uncle Rad’s marriage to family friend (and Bluey’s godmother) Frisky, with the family’s four preschool girls joining in as flower girls.

Big changes bring big questions, of course. Nowhere is this more evident than in Bluey’s preschool classroom. Calypso, the teacher, models a zen-like spirituality for Bluey and her friends. At the end of story time, Bluey asks her teacher “Why do stories always have happy endings?” Her teacher responds, “Well, I guess ’cause life will give us enough sad ones.” (Is this a kid’s show?) This inspires a host of sad stories from Bluey’s peers: a guinea pig that ran away, a divorce, a lonely dad. It’s now that Bluey announces her not-so-happy ending, telling her friends that she is moving. To help the class cope with their sadness, Calypso reads her students a parable of a farmer, who approaches all of life’s good luck and bad luck moments with the simple attitude of “we’ll see.” It’s a story without a happy ending (or without any ending, really), and the kids don’t buy it. “Is that it?” asks one, disappointed. “What happens next?” asks another. “Everything will work out the way it’s supposed to, Bluey” says Calypso with kindness, which Bluey takes to mean that their family house won’t sell (which it does, in the next scene).

Big questions also mean big feelings. An enraged and fearful Frisky, dismayed to discover her fiancé expects her to move out west where he works, runs away the morning of the wedding. Chili hops in the car, with four preschoolers in tow, to track her down. A series of events, which can be only described as providential, take place along the way. Chili, Bluey, Bingo, and cousins run into just the right person, spill juice cups at just the right moment, and make pit stops at the precisely needed spot, to find Frisky in quiet reflection at a local hilltop park. Groom-to-be Rad shows up, too. Frisky and Rad talk through their concerns and move on with the wedding, announcing there that they’ve chosen not to move west as planned. It’s a lovely wedding, with dancing and family and fun and a host of easter eggs for eagle-eyed viewers to enjoy. “You’re having a happy ending!” announces Bluey to her godmother, before turning to her mother and asking “Do you think we’ll have a happy ending too?” “I don’t know,” replies Chili, “But I’m done trying to figure it out. I just wanna dance.” Queue the happy dance montage.

Still, providence has not finished working with the Heelers. On moving day, a whole host of minor events from previous episodes collide to cancel the sale of the Heeler’s beloved house. It’s hard to describe every little flap of the butterfly’s wing that impacted this outcome — a combination of stuck coins, romantic encounters at the drugstore, inchworms saved from being squished on the slip-and-slide, and overzealous real estate agents all played their part. In a moving montage, Bandit takes the call about the canceled sale of the home, changes his mind about the new job, symbolically rips the for-sale sign out of his front yard, and is tackled by a loving family who realize they don’t have to move anymore. The family sits on boxes in their empty kitchen floor eating takeout cheeseburgers, relieved of the anxiety of moving, while the show rolls to credits. The song playing in the background is called “Lazarus Drug,” sung by the same voice actor who plays preschool teacher Calypso. It’s a song about love drawing someone back to life, perhaps a nod to the love of Bandit’s family drawing him back to the reality that they may already have a great life, and money wouldn’t make it any better. The Heelers get their happy ending, too.

The Greeks were the first to use the storytelling tool we know by its Latin name: deus ex machina, God from the machine. In Greek drama, at the climax of a seemingly unsolvable problem, a machine (usually a trap door or crane) would lift or lower an actor onto the stage portraying one of the gods of the Greek pantheon. These gods would step in and provide a solution to a drama’s seemingly unsolvable and complex problem. Nowadays, the term is derisive, an insult that implies lazy writing or poor storytelling. At the time, however, the audience loved these deus ex machina solutions. At the risk of psychoanalyzing the past, one imagines they would have been quite happy to imagine that the Gods cared enough in the affairs of humans to intervene for a happy ending.

Deus ex machina is a criticism that can be leveled at this season finale. After all the adults tell the precocious preschooler that life gives out happy and sad endings, we are not given any sad endings. The only way to navigate change, according to the wisdom of the world, is sit back, embrace a sort of desireless “zen” regarding the future, and say “we’ll see,” but everyone nonetheless gets a happy ending. After bending over backwards to lay out how the future is fickle and unknowable, the show still insists on showing how everything lined up just perfectly for Bluey’s “prayers” to be answered. It’s not just her either. Aunt Brandy’s desire for a child comes to fulfillment, after we are told numerous times that it is not meant to be (S3E31). Winton’s divorced and depressed father meets the mother of the terrier triplets (S3E45), and the two come together and form a new family. The shaggy hair dogs get their house with a pool. Everything works out just fine. Despite the look of a Greek tragedy, in which everything ends poorly for the protagonists, things end up turning out fine, just like every Greek comedy. Or, to put it in Elizabethan terms, what starts out like Hamlet becomes A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream.

In Bluey’s world, the happy endings are real. The parents always muster enough energy to play with their kids. The right parenting lesson is always on hand, and handed down with pithy aphorisms. Hurt feelings are acknowledged and reconciled with emotionally intelligent strategies. The love shown between friendships and family members is realistic and optimistic. Moreover, in this square dog world of Brisbane, Australia, when parents and grandparents are at the end of their ropes, providence steps in to help guide the way. Happy endings are not so much earned in Bluey’s world as they are a given, or perhaps gifted, sometimes by tired and exhausted parents, but also, by an unseen benevolence watching over them. What is grace, after all, if not an unexpected happy ending?

So how did I respond to my son’s question? “Yes,” I told him, “there is a God in Bluey’s world. Who do you think made all those happy endings come true?” It’s not an answer I should have come up with so quickly. I’m not usually one to offer a succinct one-liner that sums up decades of media study and theology in a bite sized nugget for my four-year-old. Perhaps, instead, it was providence that gave the answer for me.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Justice

18 September 2024

6 min read

Rebel Ridge switches the code on corrupt coppers and body counts

An action movie tackling the all-time low trust in public bodies.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Two men stand off against each other, one holds a holstered gun.

Don Johnson and Aaron Pierre.

Netflix.

I wasn’t expecting to emotionally connect with this straight-to-Netflix action movie but Rebel Ridge is not a normal action film. It may be sitting at the number one position on the Netflix film charts, with its echoes of a classic Jack-Reacher-style thriller, but where it surprises and stands apart is in its challenging and nuanced handling of race, violence and corruption.

Race

Like Lee Child’s character Jack Reacher, Terry Richmond played by Aaron Pierre is a former US military officer. He is a private person, self-confident, respectful, comfortable with his own company and willing to go the extra mile to help a cousin who has got himself in a mess. Despite his lowly job in a restaurant, Terry happens to have financial means as well as expert survival and hand-to-hand combat skills. He is also Black.

The opening sequence shows Terry cycling into a small town when he is accosted by two local – white - police officers. Suddenly the dynamic changes. The determined, self-confident, resourceful man becomes the downtrodden object of a series of abuses and injustices. Terry tries everything to deescalate the problem, without success. Nevertheless, he remains polite, referring always to the officers who deal with him as “Sir”, and finding things to thank them for.

I found myself relating to this, remembering times that I have had to deal with abusive power and hoping that if I remain calm, polite and respectful, I could win the other side over. Some have called this “respectability politics” – the pressure on marginalized groups, particularly Black people, to behave in a manner that aligns with dominant cultural norms - including being overly-polite or restrained - especially in the face of abusive power or injustice. Another term for this is "code-switching," where minority groups feel the need to adjust behaviour, language, or appearance to fit into a different cultural context, often in response to systemic power imbalances.

Terry tries everything to get out of his situation with minimum disruption. But things deteriorate so far so quickly that Terry realises that nothing he can say or do will allow him to extricate himself. Cornered in this way, he is forced to pursue justice by other means.

It is hard not to see this film without remembering the death of George Floyd. That terrible incident in May 2020 highlighted racial disparities in policing in the US: 13 per cent of the American population is Black, yet they account for about 25-28 per cent of police killings each year. According to the Mapping Police Violence project, Black people are up to three times more likely to be killed by police than white people - between 2013 and 2022, about 7,000 Black Americans were killed by police.

The UK’s police services have had to admit to similar disparities. Black people are seven times more likely to be stopped and searched compared to white people in England and Wales. In London, where stop-and-search powers are more frequently used, Black individuals make up around a third of all stop and searches, despite representing about 13 per cent of the city's population. From arresting, handcuffing, the use of taser, remanding in custody and more, data shows that racial disparities are evident across the service. These disparities undermine trust in the police service, which in turn can inhibit the cooperation and information sharing needed to reduce crime and protect citizens.

The racial tensions that permeate the movie give viewers a glimpse into what it is like to be mistrustful of those who are supposed to help and serve us. As such it is a masterpiece in raising awareness of racism wherever it is experienced, and the fear and injustice that go with it.

Violence

Terry is huge, athletic and highly skilled. Like most movies of this genre, I was expecting the protagonist to be pushed to breaking point, thereby unleashing a wave of violence so severe and overwhelming that he becomes an unstoppable killing machine.

In Taken, Bryan Mills, played by Liam Neeson, kills almost 100 people, mainly of Albanian nationality, by gunfire, strangulation and electrocution, on his quest to protect his family. In the more recent John Wick series of films, Wick, played by Keanu Reeves, a retired assassin, kills over 400 people in a wave of violence initiated by the theft of a car and the killing of a puppy.

But Rebel Ridge is different. A key thread in the movie is the use of Escalation of Force–Non-Lethal Effects (EoF-NLE), meaning the use of verbal warnings, warning shots, non-lethal explosives and physical restraint tools like tasers or pepper spray that are supposed to minimise the risk of injury and death. In the film, the corrupt police officers have not only illegally raised money to buy this equipment they have also profited from renting out their EoF-NLE to third parties.

Terry shows himself to be a different kind of hero, with a stronger moral compass than the police service as he uses their own EoF-NLE against them. On one occasion we watch as he loads and racks his gun, only to use it in self-defence. He is an avenging angel unleashed who refuses to kill people. There are plenty of showdowns, but the final total body count is one.

Corruption

Many action movies, Taken and John Wick included, contain little social commentary. Rebel Ridge, on the other hand, is prepared to tackle some significant social issues. The corruption around EoF-NLE and militarisation of local police forces is one example. The other questionable practice that gets much discussion is “civil asset forfeiture” - an anti-drug regulation that allows a police officer to seize cash and other valuables with no due process. Both issues as portrayed in this film highlight the wider question of accountability of policing, as well as the potential for corruption that comes with its absence.

Indeed, it's not just about ‘bent coppers’ – the whole justice system is shown to be at risk in this film. The local judge is implicated in the corruption, and the state prison, as expected, fails to protect. The impact is pervasive. We see a conflicted black female police officer, a court worker struggling to get court support, and many others who stand idly by because they don’t seem to know what is right or good anymore.

At a time when trust in public bodies is at an all-time low – this film, despite its non-violent and subversive tropes, presents to us a heroic rebel with a higher moral compass who goes against the flow and pushes back against the system to try and fix things. It may not restore faith in our society’s institutions – but perhaps it does restore faith in something else.

Although the director, Jeremy Saulnier, claims Rebel Ridge was not based on a true story, I cannot help thinking of a true story that might have inspired it. I am reminded of Jesus Christ, the most famous rebel in history, who was killed in a showdown on a ridge outside Jerusalem for speaking out – lashing out even - against the corruption in the religious institutions of his time, for taking an anti-racist stance, and for living in a way that went against the flow. It reminds me of the lengths he went to get those he loved freed from the mess they had gotten themselves into, and the price he paid to try and save them from certain death. Like Rebel Ridge, the ending to that story remains open: who will take up the call and will true justice ever be served?