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.