The Charm of Peter Pan

Family circumstances led me to visit both Disneyland and Disneyworld last summer, experiences I found less rewarding than I'd been promised. I took the Peter Pan Ride in both places, and since the same circumstances had led me to see the Disney movie Peter Pan during the spring, I naturally began to think about the conjunction of Disney and Barrie.

One's first thought must be how very badly Disney handles such stories, how crudely and clumsily he draws such figures and renders their charms. Of course, Disney is crude and clumsy in his handling of so many subjects; what can one say but "obscene" even to his drawing of animals and his photographing of flowers—those speeded-up blossomings which turn all of nature into a florist's shop stocked with prize blooms, fresh every morning from the cosmetician? But there is a peculiar wrongness in his choosing Barrie to work on.

Disney's humor is naturalist and primitive and seems to derive from the Southwest humorists of nineteenth-century America. He has their love of exaggeration, particularly of size and speed, and their obsession with aggression and violence—everything gets smashed into a pulp, everyone skids at top speed into a wall or over a cliff, or gets scalped or flayed or dropped into wet concrete. Like them, he also takes a sadistic interest in domestic animals, delighting to reverse the movement, the personality, even the physique of a vigorous animal like a cat or a bulldog with that of a feeble one, like a canary or a mouse. (His treatment of cats is especially unpleasant.) Allied to these traits is a Gothic strain I think of as more German—an interest in dwarfs and witches and castled crags and (as their correlative) dewy damsels.

Barrie is not interested in any of those. He treats animals with exaggerated respect—for instance, Nana in Peter Pan. Moreover, the fantasy of the children is far from naturalist or primitive. In Peter Pan it is firmly limited and located within a highly civilized social setting and is motivated by the parents' life, full of stresses and strains, and Wendy's incipient adolescence. This is conscious fantasy, designed by an adult who has a truly remarkable sympathy with children, quite exquisitely shot through with the ironies of a game both sides consciously are playing, though from different points of view. The island is made up out of a dozen books which the children know about, and is treated ironically—not, of course, satirically—by all concerned. The children are treated with great regard for their dignity, and there is a clear distinction between their reality and the fantasy of the island and its inhabitants—though of course we and they play at obliterating that distinction. But in his Peter Pan, Disney caricatures—and then sentimentalizes—everything equally. Nana, the dog-nurserymaid, is made to skid and smash just like every Disney animal, though it is essential to Barrie's scheme of ideas that she should be allowed her dignity. The point of Barrie's conception—in its way a brilliant conceit about the situation of employing servants—is that beneath the fond playfulness of a-dog-just-like-a-person lies the forbidden wickedness of a-person-just-like-a-dog. And Tinker Bell, that Cockney Ariel, a drop of waspish venom in the sweetness of faery, is dressed by Disney like a sex symbol and is given a Marilyn Monroe bosom and bottom and Marilyn Monroe problems in squeezing through keyholes.

Not that I feel any indignation on Barrie's behalf against Disney. What I feel is glee. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment; let the two great seducers of English-speaking childhood hold hands and simper at each other. Barrie is in his way an artist, but he is none the less disgusting for that. Probably he is more responsible than anyone else for the English disease of charm.

About 1900, it seems, the English began to cultivate charm—above all, the charm of childhood—with sinister intensity. Before then, as far as...