1955: THE WHEEL ON THE SCHOOL by Meindert DeJong with illustrations by Maurice Sendak
To start with there was Shora. Shora was a fishing village in Holland.
When I was in junior high and my mom was still working at my local public library, I obviously spent a lot of time in the children’s department checking out the various Newbery medalists and reading them. As I said in the introductory essay, I’ve been obsessed with the Newbery medal since childhood, and this newsletter is, in a way, me finishing my original fifth-grade commitment to read every medalist in my search for the greatest children’s books of all time. That phase in fifth grade led me to buy some of the paperbacks that are still on my shelf now, like Walk Two Moons or The Westing Game or From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I still read these books every couple of years, even when I’m not writing a newsletter, and now I get to read them with my children.
But, to write something so obvious that reading it will probably give you a migraine headache, you can get all kinds of stuff at your local public library. So, around the same time that I had my Newbery obsession, my family had Hitchcock Summer. I don’t know what started us on Hitchcock Summer, but that was the summer where, basically on a whim, we checked out every Alfred Hitchcock film from the library and watched them, as a family, one by one. I was in junior high and my sister, who is two years younger than I am, was probably too young to see Psycho. I don’t know why we did this. We never did it with any other director. But we all remember it; I was re-watching an old Hitchcock movie earlier this year and when I brought that up in conversation with my mom, she replied “oh, do you remember that summer when we watched all of the Hitchcock movies?” It helped fuel my love of suspense movies, as well as my love of "getting very into a thing unexpectedly and becoming an insufferable completist as a result". I feel like doing these idiosyncratic cultural deep dives for no reason is part of what growing up in a family is about; it’s about deciding to do something together and just kind of going with it, so you can look back and be like “oh yeah, remember when we all did that together?”
But enough about that, here’s the real question: what’s the best Hitchcock movie? Well, it’s hard to pick, the different films are good at different things. The best one, the one where everyone is absolutely at the top of their game in terms of directing and acting and writing, the one where you can’t find a single flaw anywhere, would probably have to be Rear Window. Were there a gun to my head, or if my neighbor called me to ask what the best Hitchcock movie was and I hastily picked up the phone thinking it was Grace Kelly and accidentally gave away that I had been spying on my neighbor for weeks and then slowly realized that he was going to come across the alley to kill me and that I was near-powerless to stop him, I would probably go with Rear Window. I also have a soft spot in my heart for Rope, both for the showiness of making the entire film look like it was done in a single shot, and for the historically accurate depiction of all University of Chicago grad students as homicidal sociopaths.
But let’s be honest, they’re all great. And part of what makes them all great is that Hitchcock knew how to have fun, and he knew what to put in a film that would make the audience have fun as well. Even when he did something completely absurd and ridiculous - which he did absolutely all of the time, intentionally - he did it because he knew the audience had fun with it. North By Northwest is a classic example of this: Cary Grant is a wisecracking jackass the entire way through even though his life is in danger, he’s literally chased on foot by a low-flying prop jet in Indiana, the last fight scene involves him almost falling off of one of the noses on Mount Rushmore, and the final scene, honest to God, is an unironic shot of a train going into a tunnel to imply that the two main characters are having sex. Then Hitchcock followed this massive cinematic sweep up with Psycho, which was a fraction of the budget, shot in black and white, released with no previews or hints about the storyline, opened with a very not-symbolic shot of two people having sex (which would have been jaw-dropping at the time), and killed off the supposed main character like 20 minutes in. That’s fun! He was playing a joke on us and we all had fun with it!
But there are more examples. The final fight in Strangers On A Train is set on an out-of-control merry-go-round at the carnival. Even Rear Window has Grace Kelly throwing herself at Jimmy Stewart, who just keeps ignoring her so he can mutter about his weird neighbor, which is funny, and then Jimmy Stewart breaking his other leg at the end of the film, which is funnier.
One Hitchcock film, to be clear, is not fun at all, it’s just pure straight unalloyed horror. It still terrifies me to this day. There is no adequate tension release or moment of “fun” in this film, it is just absolutely terrifying. I’m sure you’ve already guessed what it is.
Oh, are you familiar with The Birds? Let me summarize the plot - which is taken from a short story by Daphne duMaurier - in case you’re not familiar: the birds - as in all of the birds, across species, working together, everywhere - have decided to attack and kill us, so they do. There. You’re filled in.
“Tony,” you may say, “what about the backstory on The Birds? What’s the reason they give for why the birds are doing this?” Oh? The reason? There is no reason! They never tell you why! Do you have any idea how horrifying that is? The birds just decide to start coming for you, you never know why, and soon you're dead. Apart from one very funny scene where Tippi Hedren gets absolutely beaned in the head by a seagull1, there are no laughs, no fun releases of tension in The Birds. Even the initial laugh lines early in the film are colored by the knowledge that birds are going to suddenly start attacking people for no reason, and we don't know when it's going to happen. Could it happen to me, in real life? I don't know man, maybe! They have about as good a reason to attack me here as they did in the movie! We know they're smart! As we examined in an earlier essay, pigeons are the only non-primates who can solve the Traveling Salesman Problem, so they're at least as smart as I am and they can fly!
This is what makes things scary: not knowing why the bad things are happening. We don't know why the birds attack, they just do; if we don't know why it's happening, we can't anticipate it, or avoid it, or end it. Hannibal Lecter of Red Dragon and Silence Of The Lambs isn't scary because he kills and eats people, he's scary because he kills and eats people for no apparent reason other than he likes doing it2. A more recent example would be David Tenant in the 2015 Marvel Jessica Jones series, depicting Kilgrave, a man who can psychically control people and chooses to, not to pull off any heists or control the world, but just because he likes tormenting people. That is scary. That is scarier than someone trying to take over the world, because it's something you can't know or understand. It is so easy to find pop culture today, especially in genres like fantasy or sci-fi or horror, where you spend so much time explaining why and how things work, and why and how people behave the way they do. There's not nearly enough that uses the absence of an explanation to create a sense of dread and fear of the unknown. But while I think all of that is very interesting, I'm really just taling a very long route to get to this question: why the hell would you ever choose to bring more birds to your town?
The Wheel On The School is the 300-page (300-page!) saga of some six-year-old schoolchildren in a fishing village in Holland who decide they want to attract some of the migrating storks to nest in their village. As it turns out, there haven't been storks in their village for decades, mainly because the roofs of all of their buildings are too pointy for any bird to nest in. So, the children drag their hinga dinga durgen asses all over town, dealing with and helping and meeting the colorful cast of characters in Shora, all in search of an unused wagon wheel that they can mount perpendicularly to one of their pointy roofs before the stork migration passes by.
If you're thinking "wow, I don't know if that can fill 300 pages," you are correct. The schoolchildren are all kind of interchangeable as characters, and honestly there's only so much time a reader can be expected to give to "can we find a wheel here? No. Can we find a wheel here? No. Can we find a wheel here?" There's no reason for the book to be nearly as long as it is, and Sendak's illustrations aren't anywhere near Peak Sendak Level.
Not that Wheel is without its charms. The kids do befriend their curmudgeonly old neighbor and learn not to judge people. Their journeys through town do lead them to help out other families in need. And, to be honest, it's very sweet, at the very end of the novel, when the whole town comes together to (spoiler) see the pair of storks nest in the wheel, the first storks to come to Shora in decades:
“Down in the road nobody said a word. The little group stood silent, staring up at the roof of the school. Then Janus whispered, ‘They’ve shown us they’re grateful. They’ve shown they’re going to stay and build their nest. Now let’s all quietly get away from here and leave them alone.’ They tiptoed away, solemnly turning to look back at the storks, and Janus rode in their midst. ‘You can’t believe it,’ Janus kept whispering. ‘You can’t believe it - storks in Shora.’ ‘Not since I was a little child,’ Grandmother Sibble III said softly to herself.”
You can kind of see where this is going: the town came together for something, and now they're always going to have this to look back on and share. They're going to look back on Stork Summer and remember it, remember that weird thing they did for no real reason where the schoolchildren all scrounged up a wheel because they wanted the storks to come back to Shora. Doing weird specific things like this for no reason, well, that's what families and communities do. It happens here, and it takes too long to get there, but it's nice when it happens. As long as you're not raised on a diet of movies where you are expecting the storks to suddenly turn around and start killing everyone the second the book ends.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 2001 medalist, A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck.
We read DuMaurier's short story in my high school English class and watched the movie; my teacher rewound that moment over and over and had our class watch it like five times because it was so funny. Also the Oscar-nominated visual effects for this movie were done by longtime Walt Disney collaborator Ub Iwerks.
My understanding is that Thomas Harris wrote more justification for Hannibal's actions, in terms of those actions developing out of childhood trauma, into his later Hannibal novels and the corresponding film adaptations, but those, of course, don't count.