My daughter, soon turning five, has several imaginary friends. The ensemble has grown, in fact. It started with Larry; then she added Ealand; and recently she made room for Julia and Miriam. The family history on these imaginary offspring is a bit hazy: sometimes they’re cousins, or half-brothers and -sisters, or long-lost siblings. It changes from story to story.
This situation might make some parents feel concerned. But we’re not that worried about it. First of all, Isobel always refers to this one or that one as “my imaginary friend so-and-so” when filling us in on the latest caper of Julia or Larry or Ealand. So it’s not like she doesn’t know the real score.
And she is, after all, an only child. Forced to play around adults most of the time, I can see why she’d hanker for some younger companionship, even if it’s only cooked up by her imagination.
The characters all have elaborate back-stories. This, to us, suggests that Isobel has a rich and lively imagination; she can conceptualize and has a strong sense of time and narrative. Other parents might be reaching for the number of a therapist.
I thought about imaginary friends because I recently watched Dark Water, a Jennifer Connelly flick based on a Japanese horror movie that I fell asleep while watching the first time. So I understood the motivation of the Japanese ghost in Dark Water even less than I did, say, the ghost in Ringu (during which I only slept for a few minutes) or the Japanese version of The Grudge (which I shut off during the middle to watch The Fifth Wheel instead).
My point is, there are lots of ghosts in Japanese horror movies, and they are often called “imaginary friends” by the cute but oddly-catatonic kids in these movies, yet the adults never really believe that their kids are seeing ghosts; usually they just shake them roughly and tell them to stop talking about “imaginary friends.”
If I had the time, I might make up an imaginary friend for myself. Of course, the criterion for naming imaginary friends probably changes as you grow older. For female adults, names like “Clive” or “Jude” might be popular as imaginary pals; for guys, names like “Bambi” or “Tiffany” might pop up more often than “Larry” or “Ealand.”
Anyway, back to Dark Water. Jennifer Connelly plays a single mom who suffers from terrible migraines, a condition that leads her to sign the lease for an apartment that looks like the place where they found the decomposing bodies in Seven. Or maybe Jame Gumb’s dwelling in Silence of the Lambs. It’s such a miserable rathole that you can’t for a moment believe that she’d subject her daughter to such living conditions. (The excuse given is that it’s “only a few blocks away from one of the best public schools in the state.” Hey, take a bus!) Topping the “time to move” list is probably the water taps and toilets that overflow on a regular basis with murky, sludge-like liquid (hence the movie’s title, Dark Water — get it?). Also, the ceilings are always dripping and rotting, leading Connelly into a migraine-induced tailspin during which she keeps losing track of her daughter — and her sanity.
Now, under such conditions, I wouldn’t blame a kid for developing an imaginary friend. You need a reality check, especially when your mom refuses to pack the bags and check you into a Ramada. A kid needs some kind of pal to whom he or she can address such key questions as, “Have you ever seen that much black blood dripping from the ceilings before in your life?” Or: “Am I crazy, or is this place worse than that Turkish prison in Midnight Express?”
Imaginary friends are not the enemy. Look at another cinematic munchkin who befriended a kid from the netherworld: Danny Torrance in The Shining. Poor little Danny has to rely on his left index finger for company, because his mother is Shelly Duvall. When Duvall asks inane questions at the breakfast table, Danny does an unconvincing ventriloquist act, wiggling his index finger and saying in a scrunched-up voice, “No, Mrs. Torrance.”
Come to think of it, maybe he did need a therapist.
But it turns out that the imaginary friend was providing Danny with necessary and prescient clues all along about the evil lurking inside the Overlook Hotel, and about the mounting craziness of his dad, Jack Nicholson. So that little imaginary friend would be very useful in a place such as, say, Las Vegas.
Then, of course, there is The Sixth Sense, in which Haley Joel Osment plays a kid who “sees dead people.” That dead person (and I’m sure I’m not revealing any big shockers here) is Bruce Willis, a psychiatrist who got shot dead during a home robbery, but doesn’t seem to realize it. Some shrink he is.
Haley Joel’s friend isn’t exactly imaginary, he’s just ectoplasmic, but that doesn’t stop his mom from shaking him roughly and demanding that he stop talking to people who don’t exist. Of course, with one DUI arrest under his belt, it’s Haley Joel’s adult movie career that’s pretty much imaginary, not his friends; but that’s another matter.
To sum up: parents should be concerned about imaginary friends. Especially if the imaginary friendship is accompanied by blood-dripping walls, overflowing toilets and water taps, dead visitors popping up in pup tents, and axe-wielding parents. Other than that, though, I don’t see anything wrong with it. Uh-uh. Nothing at all. No, Mrs. Torrance.