A Film Canon

One of the more unusual and unsettling family films of the 80s, Big centres on Josh Baskin (David Moscow), a dweeby thirteen-year old Staten Islander who makes a wish to be 'big' - and has his wish granted, waking up one morning in a thirty-year old body (Tom Hanks). This might be expected to produce a comedy of errors, an elaboration of all the differences and incongruities between the childhood and adult world - and, while there is a brief period of mild physical comedy, what's so striking about the film is how quickly and seamlessly Josh adapts to adulthood. If anything, his movement from Staten Island to Manhattan - he rents out a room, and sends his parents notes from a benign kidnapper, promising them that their son will be returned safely soon - is presented in a more supernatural register, as the lights of the city fuse with the lights of the fairground where he had his wish granted. Even this change, though, is quickly smoothed over by his employment at FAO Schwartz, where toys and technology, playing and techno-dexterity, converge to suggest that children have become the cutting edge of technology as never before. As part of an emergent generation of younger young professionals, then, Josh shows considerably more vision than his colleagues, continually striving for a post-Transformers Transformer, a toy fractallated enough to be in a state of continual, convulsive flux - and, as his disruption of his nemesis' pitch for a toy Chrysler building might suggest, this is as much a manifesto for urban planning as for toy-making, an attempt to make over Manhattan as just another fairground. Hence the apartment that Josh quickly acquires and decorates, which plays as the moment, in the evolution of the 80s bedroom, at which the tension between nostalgic insularity and multiplying technological interfaces finally bursts open under the weight of the latter. In this apartment, there's no distinction between inside and outside, while traditional Manhattan architecture is reduced to so much ornament - a photograph of the Chrysler building, an Empire State Building lamp. In the end, what Josh is creating is cyberspace; the frisson of jumping on a trampoline indoors, or standing in a car's sun roof. From one perspective, this is what prevents his sexual relationship with one of his co-workers ever feeling pedophilic - he's just playing at being an adult, adopting an avatar - but, on the other hand, it also glimpses pedophilia as something that could only come into visibility through cyberspace; a sexuality of vicarious experience, no different in kind from the narrative computer game that opens the film, or the nostalgia-image that concludes it.