The Chilling Peculiarity of Peter Pan

 It seems that Disney has decided that a new movie about J. M. Barrie's creation, Peter Pan, must be made.  I find myself wondering why; not merely why another movie (or TV special, or whatever) is being made, but why Peter Pan himself exists, as a character in Barrie's books and in the many derivations of them on stage and screen.

Their popularity can't be disputed, but I personally find the character and his story disturbing in several ways.  Am I alone in thinking them oddly repugnant?

Like many others, I've seen prior movies and stage productions, and when younger found them interesting enough, though even then I thought them to be particularly incredible, and not really in an engaging way.  The thought of pirates and Native-Americans cohabiting an island along with a group of white boys under the leadership of a sort of boy, also white, who can fly, was one I found difficult to countenance.  That, of course, is to focus only on Neverland itself, not on the sudden, equally inexplicable, appearance of Victorian (Edwardian?) era children from London, who for some reason are taken care of by a dog, on the island.  

None of it made any sense, and while this may be expected in any fantasy, the characters and elements combined so unusually and uncomfortably in Barrie's raised suspicions, even then, that the author was so insensible of the bizarre nature of the combination (pirates and obviously mischaracterized "indians" and fairies and a dog-nanny, etc.) or ignorant of the incongruity involved, or that he believed children's imaginations were utterly haphazard and without context even at the age of the children portrayed by him.  But this is only the skeleton of the story. 

Even more difficult to accept, or explain, is the stage tradition of having a petite woman play the part of Pan.  I'm uncertain how, or why, this tradition arose.  Was it thought too difficult a task to have a boy play the part, and too incongruous for a grown man to do so?  In any case, the woman who played the part was clearly a woman, regardless of the fact she had short hair and no matter how earnestly she tried to ape the movements and speech of a boy, and this created credibility problems, for me anyway.  More significantly, if neither a boy nor a man could be Pan, but a woman could, just what is Pan supposed to be?  Something seemingly inhuman, I suppose; something weird, in any case.  I can't help but think of Mr. B Natural of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame whenever I think of Pan because of this curious tradition.

The story itself is peculiar, even grotesque, particularly given Barrie's personal history.  His older brother died at an early age.  That death devastated his mother, and apparently Barrie would sometimes wear his old clothes and act like him to please her or get her attention.  Pan hated his mother and mothers generally, because, it seems, he found himself cut off from his family while they cared for another boy.  His gang of "lost boys" long to have a mother, however, and here Wendy comes in, acting as proto-mother or quasi-mother to them, and perhaps to Pan as well.  But her relation to Pan is complicated, as certainly in the old Disney movie she has romantic feelings for him and is jealous of his attention to the absurdly named princess Tiger Lily (why a Native-American "princess" would be named after an Asian flower is left unexplained, nor is it explained how Native-Americans would know what a tiger is).

Clearly, Barrie's relationship with his mother influences the characters and the story--something I think must be admitted much as I deplore raising Freudian concerns.  So, I would guess, did the death of his older brother, who became a kind of eternal boy thereby, one which became the subject of his mother's love and grief.  Thus we have a story of a boy who refused to and would never grow up to be a man, living in a preposterous place among preposterous other characters having equally preposterous adventures for all time, without responsibilities, without morals--Pan is blithely callous and even malicious in some respects--without the burdens of life and the decisions which they demand, without consequences, or at least the acknowledgement of them or care about them.   It's a juvenile if not infantile fantasy writ large.  The protagonist is the personification of selfishness.

Apparently, Barrie and others have thought that this kind of life, or anti-life, is something we all dream of, and perhaps they're right given the enduring popularity of the story and the characters.  Perhaps its our fondest wish to be sociopaths.  But if that's so it's a rather grim statement  about us and and a rejection of the life we all must live, its worth and importance, and discourages any participation in it or efforts to make it better, for us and others--better to escape into Neverland.

The new movie supposedly will correct the prior animated one in the sense that Tiger Lily, though still bearing that name, will be played by an actual Native-American, and there are to be other culturally sensitive modifications.  I'm not sure what could be done to counteract the image of woman as being at most and at best a devoted, loving caretaker of adventurous, thoughtless males, as that clearly is her place in Barrie's work.  Nor do I know why this aberrant  fantasy is being resurrected yet another time.  Surely the point of it, to the extent there is one, has been made more than once, and indeed ad nauseam.