2023-11-18 00:17:25
Each era reads the literary classics in its own way and, in a certain way, more than reading them, it rewrites them, adapting them to the concerns of its time and creating texts with its readings. others. Pinocchio knows a lot about this, since three film versions of Carlo Collodi’s story have recently been released with significant variations with respect to the original text, but also between them. I am referring to the one from 2019 with Roberto Benigni in the role of Geppetto and directed by Matteo Garrone; the 2022 one, directed by Robert Zemeckis and with Tom Hanks as Geppetto, and the animated version stop motion by Guillermo del Toro, also from 2022.
It is not about calling these adaptations liars because they would supposedly be moving away from the truth of the text, but rather about recognizing, in their transformations, symptoms of a new ideological, radically historical unconscious (we would say with Juan Carlos Rodríguez) that writes a new work. Because, unlike what happens to Pinocchio, ideology does not grow a nose. Ideology does not lie and, when we believe it is doing so, it actually tells us, covertly, with its silences and hesitations, about the social and production relations that, although obscured or displaced, constitute it.
Of all the versions, that of Garrone and Benigni, and perhaps because it is an Italian production, is the one that most faithfully reproduces Collodi’s story. When a work is institutionalized, becomes a national symbol and consequently becomes practically considered part of the cultural heritage of a country, it is given an almost sacred respect that closes off possible new readings and approaches. This version, instead of offering us its own interpretation of the text, has chosen to transport us – and, without a doubt, it succeeds brilliantly – into the dark and violent universe, sown by death, of Collodi’s story.
When a work is institutionalized, becomes a national symbol and is practically considered part of the cultural heritage of a country, it is given an almost sacred respect that closes off possible new readings and approaches.
The adaptation by Zemeckis and Hanks, from the Disney factory, as a film clearly aimed at a children’s audience, sweetens the story, distancing it from the original. There is no space for violence or death in this footage. His Pinocchio is good, even too good. There is no trace of evil in his actions, not even in his innocent pranks, which are rather the result of clumsy accidents due to the difficulty of controlling the wooden body now alive, and not so much premeditated actions to do evil. Because he’s so good, this Pinocchio is naive. The others take advantage of his naivety to lead him astray. But it is not temptation, simply deception. If Pinocchio deviates from what is correct, it is not because the enjoyment of evil has been awakened in him, but because he has allowed himself to be manipulated. This is how he becomes part of the puppeteer show of the puppeteer Comefire, not for fun or out of vanity in the event of becoming famous, as happens in the original story, but because, if he were to become famous, his father would be proud of him. he.
Pinocchio makes wrong decisions that lead him to suffer adverse situations, but there is always a good cause that drives him. Fireeater’s kidnapping of him is one of them. This Pinocchio who never lies will only use lies to make his nose grow until he reaches the key to the cage in which he is locked and which hangs on the wall located at the other end of the room. He consciously lies to do good and free himself from the puppet master who wants to exploit him. Even on Pleasure Island, where there are no limits and children have fun destroying the school, looting stores, insulting and swearing, or drinking beer, Pinocchio remains in a discreet background, horrified at the chaos that these children bad people understand it for fun. Pinocchio only thinks about his father, about meeting him again, while he begins to transform into a donkey, like the rest of the children, before being taken to the salt mines where they will be sentenced to forced labor.
Different is the Pinocchio that brings us the stop motion by Guillermo del Toro. To begin with, the film is set in fascist Italy. A drunk and melancholic Geppetto builds the puppet with the trunk of the tree in which his son Carlo is buried, killed after the church in which Geppetto was carving a Christ was bombed during the First World War. Temporal displacement is going to be key in reconfiguring the meaning of the work. As in the original story, Pinocchio is disobedient, lying and capricious and, although he could not be considered bad either, he only thinks about playing and having fun. His lack of discipline leads him to the puppet theater for whose puppeteer Pinocchio will end up working – and will embark with him on a tour of Italy with his show – to pay off the debt that Geppetto has contracted with the puppeteer, due to a prank by Pinocchio. . Geppetto, angry, tells Pinocchio that he has become a burden for him and Pinocchio, after suffering the insult of being constantly compared to the exemplary Carlo, responds that he is not Carlo, nor does he want to be like Carlo.
Del Toro’s Pinocchio abandons his father not to pursue unlimited fun and pleasure, as in the original story, but to reaffirm his autonomous and differentiated individuality and to repair his relationship with his father. His tour leads him to perform before Mussolini himself but, after boycotting him from within as a form of rebellion against the exploiting puppeteer (disobedience is a way of confronting authority), they end up recruiting him into the fascist youth faction. Pinocchio is immortal and can become the perfect soldier, a hero of the country that any father would be proud of. He just needs to learn to obey.
In the original story of Pinocchio, as in Garrone and Benigni’s version, the disobedient and mischievous puppet is born with evil inside him and needs to undergo a series of correctives to discipline him. School and family function as devices that teach Pinocchio to obey – for his own good – his authority. Only then will the wooden puppet become a real boy. He Pinocchio by Zemeckis and Hanks completely inverts the structure and warns of the danger of society, capable of corrupting a good and innocent child like his Pinocchio. The vulnerable individual has to be protected by the school and family institution and take refuge in them to make the values they offer an armor with which to protect themselves from the ruthless and cruel world that corrupts them. The threat is external, it is not inherent to the subject, as occurs in the original story. With this displacement of the place of origin of evil, we can read the symptom of petty-bourgeois ideology, very present in the Disney universe. A hostile world pushes the subject to overcome all adversity, reaffirming his full individuality with every step he takes, forgetting where he comes from and who he really is, but the conflict will only be resolved imaginatively when he finds his fixation points in the social order and withdraws. in the certainty and security that family and home represent.
In the two previous films, obedience and discipline save the subject from evil (whether external or internal), integrating him into the symbolic and social order, into the world of rules, when he learns to respect the name – and the no – of the father. This is the lesson. The radical difference is found in the Pinocchio by Guillermo del Toro. In it there is a shift in the notions of obedience and discipline. Its positive and necessary function for the subject’s insertion into society now acquires a negative value: its maximum expression is embodied by fascism, which destroys the subjectivity of individuals by subjecting us to a military order that homogenizes subjects in the name of homeland. But the function of fascism – the film shows – is not very different from that exercised by the father as an authoritarian signifier that passes through the subject to discipline his behavior and integrate him into the symbolic order. Geppetto seems to learn this at the end of the film. The lesson drawn is radically different: unlike the other versions, where it is Pinocchio who learns to behave well, in Del Toro’s version the learning – and the transformation – occurs in Geppetto, who recognizes the girl at the end. puppet: “I tried to make you into someone you weren’t. I love you just the way you are”. Obedience and discipline are discovered as devices that annihilate the subjectivity of individuals, preventing their realization as full, autonomous and free subjects. This shift in the connotation of the notions of obedience and discipline responds to a bourgeois ideology that, in its neoliberal phase, does not conceive of any subject other than the one who, freed from all devices, can constitute his own individuality unanchored from any point of fixation that , in the petit-bourgeois ideology, provides security and certainties.
In the three rereadings that have been done in the same years of ‘Pinocchio’, three displacements are located: from internal to external evil, in the meaning of obedience and discipline, and the passage from conscience to the heart (or from duty be to be)
But there is something else. The significance that one of the central characters of the work, such as Jiminy Cricket, acquires in each of the versions, gives us an important key to reading. In it Pinocchio by Zemeckis and Hanks, the talking cricket represents, as in the original story, Pinocchio’s conscience: it defines the limits, points out the consequences of actions and teaches the sense of responsibility. Consciousness is the memory of the norm and, in a certain way, the image of authority integrated and internalized by and in the subject. The cricket shows Pinocchio the correct path that leads him to what must be. Your identity is previously given, you simply have to act correctly to find it. In Del Toro’s version, the talking cricket represents not Pinocchio’s conscience but rather his heart. It is not duty or responsibility, but emotion and sensitivity, and perhaps also unconscious drives, that determines its subjectivity. These should not be repressed so that the responsible and disciplined subject emerges, fully integrated into the symbolic order, that society needs. On the contrary, it is in the heart where one finds his true to be. In the displacement of consciousness to the heart, the conception that this new version has of the notion of the subject is read. If conscience returns us to the universe of duty of petty-bourgeois ideology, the heart is a metaphor for the freedom of the individual, who must not obey anyone but himself to choose the correct path, which is none other than are path, freely decided by him.
In these three readings or rereadings that have been done more or less in the same years of Pinocchio, Three displacements are located – from internal to external evil, in the meaning of obedience and discipline, and the passage from conscience to the heart (or from ought to be to being) – where one can read the symptoms of an ideological unconscious inhabited by contradictions, due to different ways of conceiving the world and being in it. Each era rewrites the classic works in its own way, but it does not do so in a single language, because there are competing ideological projects that are lived unconsciously and that are manifested in our texts and daily gestures. And until there is another alternative, another possible world that postulates other ways of being in the world, in freedom and without exploitation, in these two symptoms displayed by the ideological unconscious of the capitalist social formation that we inhabit, the narrow limits of our world: choosing between conscience and heart, between institutions that protect us while disciplining us or freeing ourselves from every device to sing a song to the full and autonomous neoliberal individual. This is how ideology speaks through these rewritings of Pinocchioand ideology – we have already said it – never grows a nose.
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