2023-04-29 18:55:40
It may be that Peter Pan achieved the purpose of not getting older but, this is undeniable, over time he has been getting older. Since it was created by James Matthew Barrie a little over a century ago, the flying boy has inspired books, plays, songs, video games, TV series, erotic art – Alan Moore’s graphic novel ‘Lost girls’ (1991) – and even a clinical picture characterized by a emotionally immature masculinity.
It has also, of course, served as the basis for a handful of feature films, among which it certainly stands out ‘Peter Pan’, the animated fantasy that Disney produced in 1953. Indeed, given that this film is what secured the character and his universe a place in popular culture, and that the footage includes both stereotypical and racist portrayals of American Indians and caricatural depictions of women, someone has considered that it is high time to apply a corrective to this iconography and adapt it to the our inclusive times.
Directed by David Lowery, and just released on Disney +, ‘Peter Pan & Wendy’ is a live action ‘remake’ of that classic, and it distances itself enough from its model – and from that model – to to have arrived surrounded by controversy. For the first time in the story’s history, for example, the fairy Tinker Bell is black, and Peter Pan has also stopped having Caucasian features. Among the components of the Lost Children, moreover, there are not only girls, but also a disabled boy, i Wendy has ceased to have a submissive and motherly role to become the true protagonist. Finally, Captain Hook is no longer a one-dimensional villain, and the film consciously devotes itself to exploring what his past relationship with the titular hero was – here also more ambiguous than usual – and what made him become who he is. For all this, we say, ‘Peter Pan & Wendy’ has generated violent reactions on social networksbasically because it seems to be our favorite pastime these days.
A tragic origin
The film’s title matches that of the book Barrie published in 1911, after first writing about his unique character in some chapters of his novel ‘The little white bird’ (1902) and to do it again a little later in the play ‘Peter Pan, or the boy who didn’t want to grow up’ (1904). To him, this creature was something like an alter ego.
Barrie was the ninth of ten children, and many of his siblings died young. The death of one of them, David, had a special impact on his life: David had always been his mother’s favorite, and in an effort to cheer her up, little James got into the habit of dressing in his mother’s clothes. brother She said that, dying at just 13, David would be a boy forever; James, on the other hand, was forced by family tragedies to grow up prematurely, and writing Peter Pan and Neverland would allow him to experience the childhood he had to give up.
Despite the obsession with the idea of perennial childhood, in adulthood Barrie never had children. Instead, for years she spent much of her time with George Davies, a boy whose nanny she had met in Kensington Gardens and for whom she was very fond, and with his four younger brothers; the biopic ‘Descobrir el País de Mai Més’ (2004), starring Johnny Depprecreates this period of his life. Was there anything sexual about Barrie’s affection for the Davies? It would be unfair to assume that this was the case, and although he was married twice, Barrie was described by his contemporaries as asexual. In any case, Peter Pan was created soon after he met them.
through the screen
In his first incarnation, the boy who did not want to grow up was a tormented and merciless creature, who he killed both pirates and Lost Children without objection as they were reaching puberty. Immediately, of course, the character was transformed both with each variation that Barrie made of him and, subsequently, as his story was successively brought to the screen.
If the first film entitled ‘Peter Pan’ (1924) was criticized by the writer for excessive fidelity to the literary model – he should have been able to project the original story “towards a world of magic and illusion”, said -, three decades later the character was turned by Disney into a noble boy who tries to entertain children to keep them safe and sound from the bitterness of adult life.
A ‘Hook’(1991), Steven Spielberg made him a piece of man embodied by Robin Williams, and transformed the story into a meditation on what happens to adults, and parents, when they forget what it is to be a child; ‘Peter Pan’s Adventure’ (2003) tried to come close to Barrie’s original vision by portraying the pre-adolescent protagonist, a selfish boy doomed to loneliness due to eternal youth, and ‘Pan’ (2016 ), focused attention on the boy’s origins and his search for the mother who had abandoned him at birth. And as the title already indicates, ‘Wendy’ (2020) proposed a feminist re-reading of the most ‘arty’ myth than the one that ‘Peter Pan & Wendy’ carries to term me ara.
If anything is clear from the aforementioned evolution, it is that, 121 years after its first literary appearance, Peter Pan remains ageless. Perhaps because it touches on universal themes such as the passage of time and the inevitability of death, or perhaps because it allows for many different interpretations – is Peter an angel tasked with taking dead children to heaven? Are Peter and Wendy actually the same person?caught between the desire to grow up and to remain in childhood forever?–, the story promises to continue to remain valid through new adaptations and from different points of view.
This same year, by the way, it will see the light ‘Peter Pan’s Neverland nightmare’, a horror film in which, apparently, Tinker Bell is portrayed as a morbidly obese drug addict.
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