Issue 2: Old Favorites
Hey there!
Welcome to issue two of Hey, Kid!, the newsletter celebrating children’s literature, film, and culture two micro-essays at a time. If we caught your attention with our introductory issue, welcome back. If you’ve just discovered us, we’re delighted to have you!
For our first themed issue, we’re tackling old favorites—the stories we’ve been obsessed with since we were kids, that have stuck with us through thick and thin. For Alex, it’s Treasure Planet, a sci-fi retelling with some impressively knotty found-family dynamics, and for Claudia it’s Peter Pan, a classic steeped in themes of childhood power and control.
Alex on Treasure Planet
I’ve already written myself into a corner with Treasure Planet. It’s one of my perfect movies; it’s my favorite Disney movie by far; it checks off all my favorite tropes and narrative obsessions; it cracks me open every time. Objectively I know it has its flaws and weak spots. Subjectively it’s the best thing I or anyone else will ever see. We should all be grateful we live in a world where this film exists.
Stripping Treasure Planet to the bare bones of what makes it so great, it’s about meeting that one person who truly believes in you, who understands you so much better than you understand yourself, and then realizing they’re a complicated person with their own selfish agenda. Then choosing to love them anyway. Treasure Planet is about messy, selfish, complicated love.
Jim Hawkins (a delinquent with abandonment issues) and Silver (a cyborg pirate with a lust for treasure) assume that sailing to the long-abandoned planet will make them whole. Jim will get proof that he’s accomplished something great and isn’t a dead-end screw-up. Silver will get the wealth and security that’s eluded him his whole life. They’ve both got an impossible dream and they’re both sore losers; it’s about as perfect a recipe for betrayal as you can get. But along the way, Jim and Silver begin to genuinely care about each other.
Early in the expedition, Silver figures Jim’s dad wasn’t “the teaching sort” from a single sullen expression and plays up the mentor role for all it’s worth. Mostly this keeps Jim from getting too suspicious of Silver’s actual motives. Still, Silver understands Jim’s been hurt and that he sees himself as alone and unlovable. In his worst moments, Jim is hard to love—he takes orders badly, he picks fights, he’s moody and withdrawn. At first Silver comes across as his exact opposite, cheerful, expansive, and effortlessly in control of his own emotions. He’s also the exact opposite of Jim’s absent father, teaching Jim, comforting him, and most of all giving him a new view of himself: Jim has the makings of greatness, Silver says. He’ll go his own way.
Silver’s uglier side shows itself midway through the movie, when the mutiny that’s been simmering since day one finally boils over. If he’s seen greatness in Jim, Jim sees Silver’s cunning and disloyalty, his conviction that he’s owed the mythical treasure whatever the cost. Just like Jim’s dad, Silver abandons him for his own dreams, and Jim is left to literally chart a different course.
Until Silver comes back.
For better or worse, Jim gets the chance to invite the man into his life again. There’s the sense that, at best, Silver will flit in and out; he’s still an unrepentant pirate. They’ve both grown, though, finding a resolution to part of their impossible dreams in each other. Jim’s accomplished something great by holding his own against Silver and his crew, and Silver’s found a small piece of security in the fact that he’ll always be there for Jim—not always present, but always an irreplaceable piece of how Jim now sees himself. It’s imperfect, it’s incomplete, it’s not the resolution either of them dreamed of. It’s what they have. It’s enough.
The imperfection and incompleteness, and the genuine love, is what makes me think of Treasure Planet as the first truly young adult movie I ever watched, a story hinging on a teenager’s decision to forgive a wildly imperfect father figure who at least had the guts to turn around and face up to the consequences of his actions. Of course, you can also see it as the story of a teenager, abandoned by his deadbeat sailor father, who gets an infinitely cooler pirate mentor instead. The dozens of times I rewatched it in high school, tangled up in my own imperfect family, I took option B, not realizing yet that Treasure Planet was leaving me the space to ask, Are they here for me? If they are, can I forgive the rest?
Claudia on Peter Pan
“Wendy knew that she must grow up,” J.M. Barrie writes in the opening paragraph of Peter Pan. “You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.” Of course! I remember thinking when I read the book as a sulky preteen. That’s exactly what it’s like. I wanted to be grown-up and in control, but I was also beginning to suspect that adulthood wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I identified with Wendy, because Barrie understands, with a perception that can be painful, how important control is to kids, and how desperately they want to have a say in how their lives are run. He also understands what I was just beginning to grasp—that that control is an illusion.
In Neverland Wendy is able to mold a world in her own image. She lives in a house made of leaves, is the de facto mother to the Lost Boys, and acts out the traditional domestic fantasy she dreams of. Her brothers, John and Michael, become wild adventurers, battling with pirates and running with Indians. The imagery is dated, drawn from nineteenth-century domesticity and colonial rule, from the expectations that othered peoples and far-off locales are a playground for Europeans. But I can think of no better metaphor for the thoughtlessness of childhood. The Darlings haven’t learned to question the beliefs and power structures that give them privilege and withhold it from others. They are still the center of their own worlds.
Of course, you can’t talk about control without bringing up Peter. He’s the lovable, selfish, infuriating heart of the book, and he’s also the character who craves power the most. It’s easy to simplify Peter’s determination to stay a child forever as a charming quirk, but it stems from deep fear and tyrannical need to place his desires over others. According to Peter, who is less than reliable, he ran away from home on the day he was born when he heard his parents talking about what he would be when he grew up. “I don’t want ever to be a man,” he tells Wendy. “I want always to be a little boy and to have fun.”
Peter’s ideas of fun range from the whimsical—mistaking an acorn for a kiss—to the threatening, such as the revelation that he “thins out” the Lost Boys as they begin to grow older. He is capable of self-sacrifice and genuine love in his touching attachment to Wendy and his rescue of the princess Tiger Lily, but Peter runs Neverland on his own terms, assuming that everyone around him should share his loathing of growing up. As the book goes on, Wendy starts to chafe at Neverland’s preadolescent limbo. She takes her duties as the group’s mother much more seriously than Peter, and she wants a commitment from him that he can never give.
Wendy’s disillusionment reveals the chink in Peter’s armor. He may be able to rule over Neverland and lose himself in endless childhood, but his control isn’t complete--he can’t manipulate the minds and hearts of others to want the same thing. Wendy is able to make peace with the fact that Peter will never become the man she wants him to be, which confirms that she will grow up. Empathy and acceptance are, after all, the beginnings of maturity. But Peter can’t grasp this, and so he stays in Neverland forever, forgetting their adventures and the passage of time. When he visits Wendy as an adult, he wants her to come back with him, not realizing that she now has a child of her own.
The glorious thing about Peter Pan is that this conclusion is so much more joyful than it has any right to be. There is a melancholy to the last pages, of course, but despite the narrator’s arch comments, I can never convince myself that growing up is an entirely bad thing, or that Peter is selfish and stunted beyond repair. The book ends with Wendy’s daughter, Jane, leaving with Peter for Neverland. Letting go of a child may be the ultimate loss of control, but Wendy is able to free Jane to have her own adventures. She knows she has to. Jane is her own person. She needs to discover, on her own, who she wants to be.
That’s it for this month, folks. For our October issue, we’ll of course be discussing all things horror, and in the meantime, we’d love to hear from you, whether it be feedback or your own childhood favorites.
Till next time,
Alex and Claudia