The Problem of Camazotz

I enjoyed the Disney movie of A Wrinkle in Time, directed by Ava DuVernay, reasonably well at the time. But as it has sat with me for a few days, and I think it through more, I'm finding it less and less satisfying, for one reason: Camazotz.

In the movie, Camazotz is a series of psychological tests for Meg and her friends. We see a giant tornado out to get them and the movie's effects budget. We see kids creepily bouncing balls in rhythm, and their mothers calling them in in rhythm, but when Meg resists them they fold up into nothingness. There's a man with red eyes setting them up, but he turns out to be a marionette.

In Madeline L'Engle's book, Camazotz is a real society, full of real people. Those kids bouncing balls are real kids. The man with the eyes is a real man, controlled by IT, but somewhere in his past a real person. Not only are these people who have been enslaved by IT's society, but they're people who will face real consequences from Meg's actions as seen in this quote from her first confrontation with IT:

      If that great brain were cut, were crushed, would every mind under IT's control on Camazotz die, too? Charles Wallace and the man with red eyes and the man who ran the number one spelling machine on the second grade level and all the children playing ball and skipping rope and all the mothers and all the men and women going in and out of the buildings? Was their life completely dependent on IT? Were they beyond all possibility of salvation? --Chapter 9

Of course the "men and women going in and out of the buildings" weren't included in the movie. It's basically a flat description of any downtown rush hour in the United States, with repetition to make it more obviously creepy:

      They stood very still, side by side, in the shadow of one of the big office buildings. Six large doors kept swinging open, shut, open, shut, as people went in and out, in and out, looking straight ahead, straight ahead, paying no attention to the children whatsoever, whatsoever. Charles wore his listening, probing look. "They're not robots," he said suddenly and definitely. "I'm not sure what they are, but they're not robots. I can feel minds there. I can't get at them at all, but I can feel them sort of pulsing. Let me try a minute more."
      The three of them stood there very quietly. The doors kept opening and shutting, opening and shutting, and the stiff people hurried in and out, in and out, walking jerkily like figures in an old silent movie. Then, abruptly, the stream of movement thinned. There were only a few people and these moved more rapidly, as if the film had been speeded up. One white-faced man in a dark suit looked directly at the children, said, "Oh, dear, I shall be late," and flickered into the building.
      "He's like the white rabbit," Meg giggled nervously. --Chapter 6

The implication here is clear: Camazotz isn't some mystical obstacle for Meg to overcome. Camazotz is very, very close to being us. It's a warning that the darkness represented by IT is very, very real in Earthly society. This is what we could be, if not for the heroism of these characters.

It's left out of the movie because it's now way to close to what we actually are. Those ball-bouncing kids? They're not just there to be creepy. In the book, one of them drops his ball:

      "I think your little boy dropped his ball," Charles Wallace said, holding it out.
      The woman pushed the ball away. "Oh, no! The children in our section never drop balls! They're all perfectly trained. We haven't had an Aberration for three years."
      All up and down the block, heads nodded in agreement.
            --Chapter 6

L'Engle's Camazotz is a warning about the perils of authoritarianism, and not a subtle one. In contrast DuVernay's is a Hero's Journey obstacle course, an American Ninja Warrior built to make Meg feel better about her problem-solving ability. Its imagery can be a bit creepy, but it's clear that the ball-bouncing children, the people on the beach, even the Man with the Eyes himself aren't real people. This isn't something that could happen to real people.

And yet, is it being left out specifically because it's already happening to us? The makers of this movie must have been aware going in that many people were going to form firm opinions of the film before ever seeing it, a Camazotzian approach if there ever was one. Their marketing, their plan to make money from it, has relied on the half of those people who were sure to like it no matter what they did, because they had been politically primed. And their fight with the other half, those politically primed to hate any movie with a multiracial protagonist, continues to keep the movie in the popular consciousness without relying on any quality of the actual film.

They've come in to profit off of the Camazotzification of our society, and in order to do that they have to remove the messages from the film that fought against that very concept. Where the book is extremely anti-authoritarian and subversive, the movie has replaced that with personal challenges for Meg to overcome. In some ways what DuVernay avoids perhaps says more about the real dangers of our society than the explicit criticism of L'Engle.