Movie Review of “Peter
Pan”
ictorian
England is the embarkation point, rather than the
destination, for the characters in “Peter Pan”
(2003), but, of course, it remains the destination for
the audience. The same golden syrup of nostalgia
flavors our experience of these two movies, except
that, in “Peter Pan” it sweetens a
wholesome meal that has rich thematic, ethical and
aesthetic content, whereas, in “Harry Potter
[III]”, it sweetens cleverly painted cardboard.
(One might also favorably compare “Peter
Pan”, as a pirate movie, with another recent and
cynical counterfeit, last year’s “Pirates
of the Caribbean”.)
This “Peter
Pan” came on the eve of the hundredth anniversary
of the first staging of the play (1884), which author
J.M. Barrie adapted from his novel, The Little White Bird (1902). Subsequently, he turned the play back
into a novel with Peter and
Wendy (1911), which is now
sometimes titled Peter Pan.
(The life of Barrie
forms the basis for a movie, “Finding
Neverland”, starring Johnny Depp, to be released
in November of 2004.)
At first glance,
“Peter Pan” seems to be pre-eminently
lightweight fare, with its fairies and flying and
picturesque pirates – almost a meringue. It
celebrates the power of make-
believe to lift us out of the
mundane. But there’s a weightier substratum to
the story, a shadow of the tragic, in its lesson about
growing up: that, in between childhood and adulthood
lies a gulf as wide as the one between London and
Neverland. Barrie, I think, is probably drawing our
attention to this darker dimension with the early
episode of Peter losing his shadow in the Darling
household and going to great lengths to regain it, as
if to say: “I will not have you sanitize me and
steal my dark side.”
Rachel Hurd-Wood is
quite adorable as Wendy, who, when we first meet her,
is squeezing the last drops out of her childhood with a
kind of frantic glee. She shrinks from the prospect of
iron adulthood that is coming to replace it. When we
leave her, she has come to an understanding of the
choice facing her, and she has made it and made her
peace with it. She has taken the first steps with which
she will pass over into the next world. If this sounds
almost like dying, it’s because it is. Growing
up, the story tells us, means putting an end to your
childhood, “putting your dreams away in a
drawer”, as Mrs. Darling says about the sacrifice
Mr. Darling has made for his family.
Peter, likewise, has
come to an understanding of the same conflict and has
made his own, different, choice.
Underneath its
meringue of make-believe, “Peter Pan” is,
technically, a tragedy. Peter and Wendy are presented
to us as a potential romantic couple that, in a comedy,
would become actual. In this story they come to a fork
in the road and take different paths. They will never
become a pair, and, with time, will drift further and
further apart.
The divorce of Peter
and Wendy, and the concomitant divorce that must take
place within each person between his own childhood and
adulthood – these losses are set against the
gains we see at the end of the film: the bonds formed
between child and adult. The three Darling children
have come back home to a joyful, tearful reunion with
their parents; the Lost Boys have found new surrogate
parents; and even the prim Aunt Millicent has her heart
melted by the boy who gets lost on the way to the
Darling house and feels left out of the mass adoption.
The scene is a child’s version of the sort of
mass weddings that form the climax of some comedies.
This – the family – is the only way to
bridge the chasm between child and adult, innocence and
experience. But you pay a toll to use this bridge.
This is not to imply
that Peter, in refusing this path, remains a static
constant throughout the movie. As played by Jeremy
Sumpter, he bristles with uncertainties and
potentialities, principally in his relationship with
Wendy. Around Hook, he is fearless. Around Wendy he is,
by turns, utterly charming, laughably boastful and
touchingly terrified. When she approaches him with
romantic intent, he flees like a wild animal at the
approach of a predator. He is saddened yet undeterred
by the prospect of her return to England. It is the
death of Tinkerbell, his familiar, that devastates him.
Her death, and his grief, expel him from his paradise
of innocence. But the death throes of Tinkerbell are
for Peter the birth throes of love. The change is
heralded by a cataclysm in nature. The sky darkens and
the ocean boils and all-knowing Smee remarks from the
pirate ship, “Pan must be dead.” In that
moment when he redirects his love from all things to a
particular person, Pan surely does die as a figure of
eternal boyhood. With this first taste of love he
acquires a knowledge, not of good and evil, but of gain
and loss. The moment turns him into a kind of
existential banker, the profession of Wendy’s
father.
It is also a moment
that drops us right down to the bottom of that whole
ocean of mythology on whose surface sails the figure of
the original namesake of Peter Pan. Smee’s remark
is almost an exact allusion to a famous phrase in
Plutarch. In his second-century account, the Roman
historian recounted a story he had heard, he said, from
a usually reliable source. The passengers on a ship
that was nearing the island of Paxi in the
Mediterranean suddenly heard a voice cry out from the
island, addressing one of them, an Egyptian pilot,
telling him to proclaim to all, when he had reached
port, the news that “Great Pan is dead.” He
did so and this news of the death of a god struck all
who heard it like a thunderbolt.
It struck those who
heard its echoes down through the next two millennia of
western literature no less powerfully. For some, it
came to signify not just the death of a god but the
death of an era, the classical world, an omen
announcing the birth of the Christian world. A frankly
elegiac response to the phrase took root in the
Romantic period but flowered most fully in the
Victorian. In going to seed there, mourning made way
for desire. In that period when so many were listening
to the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the sea of
(Christian) faith, not to mention the roar of factories
that were drowning out nature during the industrial
revolution, the piping of Pan took on a more and more
seductive tone. It promised an anodyne for those
losses. Perhaps, it seemed to whisper, with the death
of the Christian god, the pagan one would return to
take his place and defend his woodlands.
During a fifty-year
period that spanned the turn of the century, the figure
of Pan provided writers of English literature with an
extraordinarily fertile source of symbolism. In poems,
plays, essays, short stories and novels, Pan appears
over and over again. After almost two thousand years of
being frozen behind one or the other of his classical
masks, Pan became a living character again, with the
power to move and change and interact with the
contemporary world. Schiller and Coleridge and Gautier
had helped to re-establish the potency of the
Pan-is-dead trope as an appeal to nostalgia for lost
mythologies. But the Victorians took that nostalgia and
made it grow. The Romantics as a group wrote perhaps
200 lines of poetry featuring Pan as a peripheral
– if imposing – character. Two poets alone,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and William Savage Landor,
writing a generation later, produced nearly twice this
amount, with Pan as a leading character. According to
Helen H. Lake’s 1955 Bibliography
of Greek Myth in English Poetry (quoted in Patricia Merivale’s useful
1969 study, Pan the
Goat-God), Pan was by far
the Greek god most often alluded to, with the bulk of
this popularity reflected in a rush of poems written in
the period from 1895 to 1914, the same period in which
Barrie’s Pan figure emerged.
Some of the key
stops along the way to the enthronement of Pan were
Coleridge’s translation of Schiller’s Die Piccolomini (1800), Browning’s “The Dead
Pan” (1844), Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay
“Pan’s Pipes” (1878),
Swinburne’s “Nympholept” (1891),
Arthur Machen’s The
Great God Pan (1894),
Byron’s fragment “Aristomenes” (first
published in 1901), G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), E.M. Forster’s short
story collection The
Celestial Omnibus (1911),
James Stephen’s The
Crock of Gold (1912), as
well as works by Saki, E. F. Benson, Barry Pain,
Sarban, Richard Garnett, Kenneth Grahame, Eden
Phillpotts, David H. Keller and Algernon Blackwood, one
of the handful of best writers of supernatural fiction
in the first half of the 20th century. The whole of
Blackwood’s corpus is shot through with a sense
of the terror and divinity of nature, exactly the thing
that is occasioned by the presence of Pan, whether he
is glimpsed or not. Dunsany’s early stories are
imbued with that elegiac sense of lost divinity summed
up in the phrase, “Great Pan is dead.” His
later novel, The Blessing
of Pan, explores the
energetic ambiguity contained in the thought that he
might return.
The Pan that appears
in these works represents either the draining of numen from
the world, the death of divinity, of innocence, of the
old gods; or its miraculous restoration. When Pan lives
in these stories, his presence is felt as an incursion
of divinity, an invasion that may cause sheer terror
(“panic” is rooted here) or comic upheaval
or anything in between. Pan becomes a force of
disruption and renewal, with some portrayals
emphasizing one and some the other. This moral
ambiguity becomes a key characteristic and places us
worlds away from the seductive but clearly evil Byronic
hero. Pan and his avatars shy away from the categories
of good or bad as if they were cages. There is always
something slippery about Pan. That slipperiness gets
expressed also as a propensity for him to wear
disguises, to inhabit or possess characters that seem
further and further removed from the shaggy goat-god of
the Arcadian woodlands. But, if we know what to look
for, we can see Pan at work in the novels of Thorne
Smith (1920s and 30s), celebrating the mayhem wrought
by sex and alcohol in post-WWI America; in Charles
Finney’s The Circus
of Dr. Lao (1935), whose
mysterious proprietor of a traveling circus is a
distant relative of Prof. Henry Hill, the traveling
salesman hero of Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man. Hill is a morally anarchic figure who brings
upheaval and renewal to the hinterlands of America in
this musical, which, though written in 1959, is set,
significantly, in the same frothy turn-of-the-century
when Pan came back to life. And we can see Pan at work
in the little boy who lures children away from their
homes to a world of pagan mysteries and excitement, who
refuses to be bound to the wheel of time that will
bring him to maturity – and death. Peter’s
classical (and divine) ancestry is hinted at when we
see him playing his pan pipes, or riding a goat (a
scene in Barie’s The
Little White Bird), and, of
course, it is plainly stated in his name. But sometimes
the best way to hide something is to put it in full
view, and most critics and interpreters have
steadfastly refused to see what was right in front of
them.
