Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Peter Pan: The story inside the story

A couple of years ago, working with pre-schoolers in the favelas of a city close to Rio de Janeiro, Rita and I made a very strange little film: we recorded a young boy "reading" picture book based on the Disney version of Peter Pan.  In his telling -- living as he was in a favela controlled by gangs, where shootouts between dealers and cops often happened right in front of the day care center -- the story was about nothing but violence.  "Then he hit her, and she hit him, and then they all hit each other."

 

In general, I have watched the movie in little pieces, looking over Helena's shoulder in an airplane or in a bus, and... it is pretty easy to see the story as this little boy does.  There is a lot a fighting in the movie: Peter against the pirates, Wendy against Tinkerbell, Wendy against the mermaids, the Indians against the lost boys, Hook against Tiger Lilly, Hook against his crew, Hook against Snee...  Fighting is one of the two ways that people seem to relate to each other in the story.

It's the second way, however, that I find more interesting and production.  People certainly fight with each other in Peter Pan, but they also tell each other stories.  Wendy tells stories of Peter Pan to her younger brothers.  Peter Pan listens at the window to these stories, and tells them to the lost boys.  Peter invites Wendy to be a mother to the Lost Boys, where the essential aspect of mothering is to tell stories to them.  Once Peter makes peace with the Indians, they tell stories to the Lost Boys...  In the end, narrative is one of the fundamental ways that people relate to each other, and that reflects the fact that traditionally, parents have narrated the book to their children at bedtime.

What I find most interesting and subversive in the story, however, is that the characters of the story like to hear stories about themselves.  Peter Pan comes to the Darling house in London, just so he can perch on the window and listen to Wendy's stories about himself.  It's at that moment that Nana, the dog, is able to capture Peter's shadow, the event that brings together story-teller and story-told.

The way that Peter enjoys the story tells about him seems to me a good way to express the independence of fictional characters.  Once they have been invented in stories, they do have a life of their own, going in directions that their authors never planned.  In some cases, like that of little Alan who sees Peter Pan as a sort of uncontrolled vigilante, the character becomes a stand-in for the fantasies and fears of the reader, and in the process, goes far beyond what the author might have wanted.  Any author, however, may see that a personage that she herself created no longer obeys her.  As I have written fiction, I often want the story to go a certain way, but then I think, "But that character wouldn't want that, couldn't do that."  The story, supposedly mine, ends of obeying the character I created and (wrongly) thought I controlled.

Now whether, like Peter Pan, they like to hear those stories, I don't know.  I don't have a dog to catch their shadows at night.

Friday, August 15, 2014

Robin Hood: the social bandit as Republican hero

I always loved the Robin Hood story when I was a little kid.  The little guy struggling against injustice whatever the cost, the transgression of the formal law in service of a greater good, the critique of inequality and royal power.  I don't particularly remember when or where I saw the Disney version of Robin Hood, but the foxes and the archery contest are clear in my head, so my guess is that the movie was the start of a long passion for the story, one that would end even in the publication of a book on social change philanthropy, Robin Hood was Right.


Given this history, I certainly wasn't expecting the movie that Helena has been watching over the last couple of weeks.  Yes, it's the same movie it always was.  It's just that in the current political context, it seems to mean something very different than I ever took it to mean.

The movie, I saw only now, transforms the story into one only about taxes.  Injustice is not exploitation, repression, or the exclusion of the saxons by the normans.  Though Prince John, Hiss, and the Sheriff of Nottingham are clearly bad guys, the only way they express this evil is by charging high taxes.  The voiceover that tells and retells this story is a supposed "folk-singer" who "tells it like it is."

Though I was offended by the interpretation of the movie, it goes a long way to understanding the political confusion in the United States, where working class populism almost always ends up supporting exactly the people who want to screw the working class.  The Tea Party is the perfect contemporary manifestation of this problem, where (legitimate) anger at the way that the rich and businesses control the US government becomes a way for the rich and corporation to cement their control over government.  The supposed injustice of taxes (really lower in the US than in any other industrialized country) is the tool that the unscrupulous right way uses to engage in this political judo.

The movie first came out in 1973, a time when an honest movie about a social bandit (Eric Hobswawm's term for criminals who gain social legitimacy from their moral and financial support of oppressed or marginalized groups) would have been interpreted as support for communism.  Nixon was president (soon to be expelled).  But the film might also have worked in the 1950s or in the 1920s.  America has to re-interpret popular struggle as against taxes, and not against an unjust economic system.

Here, however, is the irony.  I don't remember the movie this way.  Helena doesn't seem to care in the least for the story line about taxes.  Kids, after all, don't pay taxes: that part of the story doesn't touch them.  What they like is the idea of cute animals and little kids standing up against oppression: not understood as the Tea Party or the John Birch society (mis)understands oppression, but as little kids experience it.  Helena likes the movie, and I hope that will be one little step on her way to care about making a world that is a little less unjust.  Just like it did for me.