The animated series, “Spongebob Squarepants” which I predominantly watched as a child and a film called “The Matrix” are representative of how I’ve grown as a person. Being a child means staying overwhelmingly naive and ignorant which is blissful in the moment, but eventually turns sour when our intellect and wisdom naturally develop and we don’t evolve along with those changes. Spongebob is representative of my younger years where I was easily entertained as most children are and spent a lot of time just trying to have plain fun, especially considering that when I was younger I was unable to identify the subliminal underlying adult themes of the series which I only started to recognize years ago. The Matrix represents my shifting away from solely looking for innocent enjoyment and fun as ends on their own. The film symbolizes how I have come to terms with navigating the unpleasantly truthful revelations of life. Although pursuing truth can take a toll on happiness, it is possible for truth and happiness to coexist.
Spongebob Squarepants is overall an example of a text that is designed to be easily digestible for children who generally lack higher intellectual capabilities because of the developmental stage that they are in. This show is also an example of content designed for those who primarily seek enjoyment and entertainment. Certainly, those are not the only elements that can be derived from the show, but this intention is made clear by what typically takes place throughout the series. As a disclaimer, there are lines and scenes that are highly ambiguous, therefore leaving plenty of room for interpretative creativity, but oftentimes these moments go beyond what a child could possibly think the show to mean. However, these short-lived moments of thorough complexity are few and far between. The constant action animations with light-hearted music paired with a slew of comedic lines along with other elements which create entertainment completely overshadow any rare attempt to deliberately imply for the viewer to act a particular way. It is still not clear to me to what extent my preference for consistently watching Spongebob Squarepants was grounded in lacking the sophistication to potentially watch something more meaningful or if it was more about chasing short term satisfaction from the joy I would receive from watching it. For this reason, Spongebob Squarepants is representative of who I was as a child because around that time, I did not have any ability or value of pursuing something beyond simply entertaining myself.
The television series Spongebob Squarepants is generally viewed as a children’s show which although in many ways is true because it does not feature any explicitly adult themes or content, it is not entirely true in that it often makes implicit references to ideas that only a full grown adult would likely understand. For this reason, the show represents my childhood because it is a text that superficially appears to be one made for children, but that is only true as a result of the nature of children to be naive and ignorant. For example, the setting of the show is underwater and one week a bunch of fishermen drop their hooks into the water with cheese on the ends of them for use as bait. The introduction of these hooks intrigues the main characters into skipping school so that they can receive the reward of the cheese bait on the ends of the hooks at the expense of risking that they get stuck on the hooks and get turned into canned fish by the fishers. Looking back on this particular episode, it stands out to me that there is this double entendre employed in the label of the hooks as such. The hooks are literal ones made of metal designed to hook fish onto them, but they could also be seen through a metaphorical lens which labels their implication to also mean what we have colloquially understood what it means to get hooked on something. According to this alternative metaphorical meaning, a hook could be something that rewards us and creates an addictive feedback which is a way of interpretation that would be completely overlooked by a child who simply lacks the intellect to understand the deep implicit meaning in that episode. On a general level, it would be fair to say that a child could understand that they should not be addicted to things because it is bad, but a child would likely lack the analytical abilities of an adult to inquire upon why this would be bad, how do I define good or bad and what is the fundamental distinction good things and bad things.
In contrast to how Spongebob Squarepants represents who I was as a child, the film called The Matrix is representative of a text which portrays how I’ve grown as a person since my childhood. When I described Spongebob Squarepants, there were references to how the text seldom contained moments where the viewer had the opportunity to find deeper truths and meanings that were not typical to the show. The Matrix is the converse of Spongebob’s routine because although it contains moments designed for entertainment that have the traditional components of an entertaining scene such as advanced special effects and action scenes, it primarily attempts to be analytical and inquisitive of reality itself and of the elements of our reality that are often larger than life. It is well documented within the professional literature that children are very egotistical in the Freudian meaning of the word ego and even if they in theory have the ability to analyze something larger than themselves and their independent existence, they will choose to remain self centered. This provides an explanation for why a child is unlikely to enjoy any part of a text such as The Matrix other than the entertaining parts of it because the intellectually stimulating scenes in the movie are geared towards someone who is certainly thinking beyond themselves and even beyond the general human experience at times.
The main character Neo wakes up from what appeared to be a nightmare, but then wakes up again from another alleged dream and the implication clearly becomes for us to question what is reality and how can we be sure that our reality is not just one big dream or simulation? This is a question a child would never ask not only because of how they would probably be unable to analyze the implications of a scene like this, but also because on a practical level, a child does not naturally desire to understand something beyond themselves. A child’s desires, especially if they are younger, are very predictable because their desires are grounded in animalistic desires which are natural such as when a child gets hungry, they want to eat unless they are taught to behave in a different way. The greatest and most fundamentally distinctive feature of humans compared to other animals is that we have a significantly higher level of intelligence than that of any other species. As I have grown I have come to question why humans are so much more intelligent than any other species to the point that it is absolutely not essential for our survival to be anywhere near as intelligent as we are. This is how I have grown as a person. Instead of being a child that immediately chases after my natural desires without questioning the implications of acting upon those desires in a given context, I have become more cognizant of my desires in a way that I do not feel that I am repressing my true self. Rather, I feel that I use my ability to reason in order to better myself and others around me, even if that sometimes means that I have to delay doing something I would rather do because I have an obligation to school or my family which are more important than simply what I want.