A Girl With a Sword

go on then, go home, and take your feelings with you

I saw Peter Pan today. All singing, all dancing, all Freudian messes popping up around every corner. Actually, there was no singing and dancing, which made me very happy, but there was cool eighties music at just the right moments. What really captivated me in this movie was how much it reminded me of my own childhood, in the same way My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away do. And it used the beautiful lyrical words of J. M. Barrie that are left out in the Disney cartoon version (but don't get me wrong, I love it anyway, probably because my brothers and I watched it almost everyday when we were little). These words flow so nicely and make Mary Martin's Peter Pan tolerable.

Jason Isaacs was splendid as Captain Hook, but suprisingly the character who I liked the most was Wendy. Maybe I was just in a good mood today, but she really made me happy, especially when she admitted a secret desire to be a pirate, "I wonder what Mother will think of my becoming a pirate . . ." Brilliant, brilliant I tell you. As a girl who spent much of her childhood practising sword fighting with sticks so that she might be ready when adventures arose it is very gratifying to see this happen to some girl at least. Tinkerbell, always a rather obnoxious character to me, was played as a sort of Spice Girl. I was amused to find that the actress who played her was Mlle Naked-Girl from Swimming Pool (part of the fall's Independent Film Series at the Bijou), Ludivine Sagnier.

Right then, on to the jolly Freudian stuff. Barrie wrote Peter Pan (the play first, then the novel) when Freud's ideas were first becoming popular, and it is a bit unnerving to see these ideas clearly played out in what we all expect to be a children's story. These ideas do seem to fit better into a child's psyche than a grown up's, though. A twelve year old doesn't believe that the idea of her kissing should be repulsive to anyone, to use a rather innocuous example. The sexual tension in this movie between Wendy and Peter and, interestingly enough, between Wendy and Hook, and then Tinkerbell's furious jealousy really add to the richness of this charming story. Wish they could've made Tinkerbell more charming though . . . do I believe in fairies?