Self-Analysis Addict is an essay series examining the pop culture, books, and music that have shaped me as a person.
Some of my fondest childhood memories are the afternoons I spent at my grandmother’s house, whom I referred to as my Nanny, on the days when my mom worked evening shifts and my dad worked a nine-to-five.
Between preschool age and the start of first grade, I would spend several afternoons a week at Nanny’s house where, depending on how many televisions she had in her house at any given moment (her home had something of a revolving door for temporary and permanent co-habitants), we would watch The Oprah Winfrey Show together. The years where there was a separate TV room for us grandkids usually meant my afterschool hours were spent with Clifford the Big Red Dog and Arthur, but it was the quality time spent with my Nanny and Oprah that stick out to me the most, mostly because of the unique thrill I remember experiencing at the thought of getting to watch something made for people older than me.
At one point during my years of afterschool visits, one of my aunts began living at Nanny’s during the week, since it was closer to her job. With me she shared her love of Cher and her coveted Swarovski crystal collection that I wouldn’t have dared touch, a fact she knew and never had to say. She also introduced me to one of the films that would define a large portion of my childhood and deeply influence my passion for storytelling: Jim Henson’s Labyrinth.
Labyrinth is something of a Gen X touchstone, so it’s never exactly been one of the cult films that my fellow Millennials and Zoomers have particularly identified with. One thing about the film is true regardless of which generation you hail from: to have watched Labyrinth at a young age is to explore realms of the psyche children aren’t always naturally taught to follow. It’s the type of fairytale-esque narrative that would please someone like Bruno Bettelheim, the famous psychoanalyst who argued that children need the dark material of certain fairy tales to make sense of the rage and misunderstanding that largely define their inner worlds. In other words, who else was traumatized by Labyrinth from the age of six?
There is a certain level of necessary trauma that comes from being a child trying to make sense of a world you don’t yet understand and have not yet been given the right tools to navigate it properly. Stories like Labyrinth are the unique kind that not only teach kids life could be worse and will one day get harder, but that they possess the skills to overcome the anxieties and roadblocks that will continue to appear throughout their lives. Or at least that’s how it should be, in a perfect world.
Labyrinth revolves around the story of fifteen-year-old Sarah, a teenage girl who, it strikes me now upon rewatches in adulthood, acts a bit young for her age. She reenacts her favorite scenes from her favorite book in the park with her dog. Her room is still full of all her childhood possessions. She has toys and costumes and stuffed animals, keeping a close eye on the inventory of the latter when her baby brother Toby steals a bear named Lancelot. The only characteristic that seems realistic of an average fifteen-year-old girl in 1986 is her flair for melodrama, turning every inconvenience into that of the plight of a fairy tale princess trapped in a tower. So imagine her surprise when, after unassumingly uttering the magic words that will prompt the Goblin King (David Bowie) from her favorite book to come and take her baby brother far away, Toby disappears and is being held in the King’s castle. Now desperate for her brother’s return, the only way to reach him is to solve the eponymous labyrinth.
I watched Labyrinth as a kid because I enjoyed it, but also because it spoke to something deep within me that I didn’t yet have the language to comprehend. I introduced it to my neighborhood friends, who loved it for exactly what it was and nothing deeper. Clearly this cult classic from the eighties that my Cher and Bowie-loving aunt introduced me to was only prompting incomprehensible emotions in me and me only. I remember rewatching it for the first time in years as a teenager and feeling even more weirded out by it — not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because I still didn’t understand it, or at least the feelings it brought about in me.
When I was in university and had started collecting vinyl records, I happened upon a repressing of the Labyrinth original motion picture soundtrack at my local record store. The LP came with a digital download coupon to access the soundtrack online, which was not yet available to stream anywhere. I bought the album without a second thought, feeling very close to it from the moment my eyes spotted it. Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen the Labyrinth film in years. It had been packed up, figuratively and literally, with the rest of my childhood belongings and shipped up to the attic.
After procuring a Blu-ray copy of the film on the same day, I put it on late one weekday night, lacking a need to get up early for class the next morning. It was nothing I didn’t remember, and yet it was as if I was watching it for the first time. Every unexplainable detail of Labyrinth that resonated with me as a child, from the love of fairy tales to dancing dreamily with an androgynous David Bowie in a glass bubble, made so much sense to me now. It was as if it was my future self who loved this film when I was growing up, and I hadn’t yet met him. He was inside of me somewhere, but he had yet to make his entrance.
I wouldn’t be formally diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder for another three years at that time, but that stage in my life was heavily defined by my penchant for big feelings that didn’t always have a place to go. Rediscovering a childhood favorite at that point in my early twenties was the comforting, warm hug I needed to quell my ever-present and ever-growing existential anxieties and, as a result, tendency for depressive episodes. I might not have had a firm grasp on who I was supposed to be yet when I was twenty-one, but listening to “As the World Falls Down” from the Labyrinth soundtrack as I walked from the commuter train station to my university campus on cold and snowy days made me feel, if just for a moment, that I didn’t have to have everything figured out yet. Since these moments were rare back then, I held on to them for dear life.
What continues to resonate most with me about Labyrinth as an adult is the very blatant fact that Sarah is growing up at her own rate. She strikes me now as the kind of character who probably didn’t have many friends, who most likely ate lunch alone. And maybe she was fine with that because she had such a rich inner world filled with all the things she loves that, for the time being, she didn’t need more friends because she already had enough. That wasn’t my own precise experience, but something close to it. I didn’t “grow up” in the conventional sense as a teenager. I still clung to the childhood belongings that continued to mean something to me, even at times when they might have been holding me back.
In my case, I would later learn, those weren’t so much character traits of mine but symptoms of a recognized and treatable mental illness. While I don’t look back on my younger years and think that I was held back from certain experiences by my anxiety and depression, I realize now that my dependency on the childhood belongings, like my own stuffed animals and books and movies, that made me feel safe were merely a coping mechanism for control in a world where I had lost all of it. And I wouldn’t trade that experience for the world, because it taught me that we don’t always grow out of the things we love as children. Sometimes those things grow with us and, if we let them, can continue teaching us lessons and nourishing us in ways we didn’t know possible. That was my exact experience with Labyrinth.
I wouldn’t have yet known as a child that I would grow up to become someone like Sarah, yet a part of me must have felt a connection to her that I couldn’t yet articulate. There’s also a large amount of discourse surrounding David Bowie’s performance as Jareth the Goblin King, which has left an ineradicable mark on pretty much every child that grew up watching Labyrinth. (And if you felt nothing watching Bowie as Jareth when you were a kid, well, I’m not sure how to talk to you.) Internet memes still circulate today, mostly on social media pages dedicated to Gen X nostalgia, depicting how Jareth was something of a sexual awakening for people when they were kids watching the film. I mean, Bowie’s bulge in that costume is pretty hard to forget.
My favorite Jareth memes are the ones recollecting the queer experience of growing up watching Bowie the Goblin King, since one only need look at a single shot of the singer in that role and understand the queer sexual confusion he brought out in us during our formative years. “Your sexuality isn’t determined by a book you read in kindergarten,” reads one that I’ve had saved on my phone for years. “It’s determined by the way God intended — by watching Labyrinth, starring David Bowie.” Jareth the Goblin King: making queer kids sexually confused for the first time since 1986.
But the burgeoning queer desires that Jareth would stir in me were an added bonus to my resonance with the film. Indeed, I identified with Sarah more so than I knew was possible, more so than my six-year-old self on Nanny’s living room couch would have been able to understand. Only in my twenties did it occur to me when, having solved the labyrinth despite Jareth’s endless mind games, Sarah must remember the line from her favorite children’s book in order to free herself from the Goblin King’s grasp — echoing the film’s opening scene when she kicks herself for always forgetting that part. It’s only when she stares Jareth dead in the eyes and proclaims, “You have no power over me,” does the entire game end and she’s returned to her house, and I realized that the line Sarah always forgets is the line I’d been trying to say to my anxiety for years with little success.
I watch Labyrinth now in a different headspace than all those years ago, allowing grace for my younger self who wasn’t able to recognize how powerless he felt in the face of his mounting anxieties. As Sarah sees baby Toby returned safely to his crib, she retires to her own bedroom, where she begins putting away the childhood toys and belongings that have made her who she is. That’s when her friends from the labyrinth appear in her mirror, reminding her that they’re there if she ever needs them. Finally she laments that she does need them: “I don’t know why, but every now and again in my life, for no reason at all, I need you. All of you.” This time Sarah has learned the magic words to say when she wants something good to happen, and all of her labyrinth friends return for a party in her room.
I’ve learned that, in real life, there aren’t always a set of magic words we can say for something good to happen. But I do know that locking away our younger selves in a drawer or the attic isn’t going to solve anything, either. We turn our backs on ourselves so early on in this life that we don’t always learn that sometimes we have to look back in order to move forward, and the only way out is through — just like a mythical labyrinth.
Jeffrey Reads 