As early as 1984, critics and media-watchers dubbed Steven Spielberg “the perennial Peter Pan,” cinemas ur-child who will not grow up, gifted with a child’s eye and childlike wonder, or, alternately, the worldly movie mogul driven to reproduce, compulsively, in film after film, an unresolved Oedipal conflict.1 There is reason to believe that Spielberg consciously manipulates these opposing images, recognizing himself in the protean boy-child as well as in Pan’s wily alter ego, Captain Hook: the pirate/businessman, the counterfeit father, distinguished by his sinister signature, his iron claw. I agree with Marjorie Garber that the story of Hook is “the dark dream narrative” (179) behind Barrie’s fairy story, and Captain Hook is also a version of the shadowy father who has had such significance in Spielberg’s enormously popular films, and thus, in our own cultural Imaginary.2 Drawing on the works of Freud, Lacan, and others, this essay reads Spielberg’s imitation of Peter Pan as a contemporary fantasy which pretends to celebrate childhood, but instead, uses the image of the child to recuperate a longed-for, if mythic, masculine authority.
It is not far-fetched to say that Lucas/Spielberg films of the seventies (the Star Wars trilogy and the Raiders series3 initiate a deluge of boy-films culminating in the early 1990s with the elaborate masculine psychodramas Dick Tracy, Batman, Robin Hood, and even the blockbuster, Dances with Wolves). Each, of course, features a male hero, and works to construct a vision of social reality in which “males appropriately dominate the public sphere” (Ryan and Kellner 77). Not only are these films nostalgic for genres gone by (the Western or the cliff-hanger); most of them are literally remakes, situated in some anxious proximity to an “original” text, director, or leading man. In their masculine role-playing (cowboy soldier or Robin Hood), and in their derivative commodity form, these films implicate masculinity as perpetual adolescence—that liminal zone first described by G. Stanley Hall as “the passionate stage of life,” a time of “moral idealism” and “intense emotionally.”4 Note that the qualities of idealism and emotion are traditionally assigned to women; the psychological or cultural “work” these films do is to attempt to reconcile the childishness and effeminacy of the idealistic son with the virility and power of the father. For Spielberg in particular, the conflict between emotionality, empathy, idealism (associated with the feminine and the private sphere), and the mythic individualism central to patriarchal public man, finds its imaginative locus in the contemporary family.
Distinct from those filmmakers who project masculine fantasies of aggression and violence, Spielberg’s particular vision, as Ryan and Kellner note, emphasizes “the family as an embattled sphere . . . threatened by ... the state, bureaucracy, science, rationalism, and capitalist greed” (259). The recurrent theme of “the child searching for his parents” (Gordon 211), replicated in various “origin” stories from E.T. to Close Encounters to Empire of the Sun, can be read as a liberal allegory, the quest for the good father, “indicative of the extent to which the public world [has] been purged of empathy, feeling, and community” (Ryan and Kellner 262). His is a narrative of transcendence, which moves to bind the public and the private worlds, the life of the individual to the larger mystery and meaning of the cosmos. However, in his evocation of the self as a metaphoric child and his reification of the lost but exalted father, Spielberg participates in and perpetuates ideological moves which privilege myth over history and personal liberation over social transformation, resulting in the contemporary consciousness Robert Bellah has explored in his work, Habits of the Heart.
Indeed, Spielberg’s Hook follows a chronology of events not unlike the series of “awakenings” detailed in the books of the Jungian men’s movement, and most often associated with Robert Bly, James Hillman, and John Rowan. This branch of the men’s movement may be distinguished from academic feminist and gender studies by its similarities to the growing self-help industry, a phenomenon Wendy Kaminer describes in her book I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional. The malady of today’s man, as Bly and others point out, is that society’s prescriptive roles for men, most often as providers for the family and competitors in the public sphere of business and enterprise, endanger men’s physical health and estrange them from nurturing roles within their families. Most importantly, the contemporary “domesticated” male is alienated from those images of primal masculinity which are sources of psychic strength. As a reparative measure, men are encouraged to integrate psychic archetypes by means of participation in a series of constructed ceremonies or rituals led by Bly and other therapists.5
Peter Banning, the harried, successful pirate-tycoon of Spielberg’s Hook, conforms to this characterization. He neglects his children, and his definitive identity, even to the perceptive Granny Wendy, is as “Mr. Chairman-of-the-Board Banning.” But the real crisis for Peter is a trauma of memory: Peter Banning does not remember anything before he was thirteen—he has forgotten that he is Peter Pan. In search of his children, who have been kidnapped by the evil Hook, Peter must return to Neverland, to (re)learn to fly, fight, and crow. Peter Banning is comic and ineffectual when he first faces Hook. Armed with a useless checkbook rather than a pirate’s blade, Banning is pronounced a “pitiful spy” not even “the shadow of Peter Pan,” too weak and afraid to scale the phallic mast in order to save his pleading children. Neverland functions as the pastoral world in which Banning as representative of modern man must descend to meet his archetype, “to heal [his] spiritual wounds and achieve a better life” (Clatterbaugh 85). Like the rituals Robert Bly organizes to initiate men into manhood, Banning can find his strength only in the company of other lost boys.
Spielberg’s film is replete with images indicating Banning’s imminent rebirth. When Tinkerbell returns him to Neverland, he is transported in a child’s blanket like a swaddled babe. His entry into a boy’s wonderland is filmically rendered as a veil or membrane opening. Shamefully banished from Hook’s ship, Banning is submerged in the ocean, tended by mermaids, then hauled out of the water in a womblike basket, into the honey nest of Tink and the lost boys. Gazing into a pool of water, Banning is confronted with the reflection of a small boy he does not yet recognize. His archetype is, of course, Pan, the “horned god,” his forgotten child-self, a modern revision of the primitive ancestor who offers wisdom and guidance.
In accordance with Jungian theory, he also contains within him the archetype of the female, the anima, in this case “Tinkerbell,” his feminine energy—in this manifestation, more like a nagging date. But the most important element in the ceremony of initiation and healing is that Banning must face and conquer, in the language of the men’s movement, “the silent sorrow,” “the father hunger,” “the wounded father within.”6 The wounded father represents, in Samuel Osherson’s words, “a conflicted sense of masculinity rooted in men’s experience of their fathers as rejecting, incompetent, or absent” (4). While I think there is some truth to this analysis of father/son alienation, and much sadness also, for this phenomenon Bly blames the “new age of feminine values,” wherein “instinctual male qualities [are] seen as inadequacies, and [mother] will make sure you are aware of them” (quoted in Clatterbaugh 96). This move, which is surely more political than psychological, undermines the transformational potential of the mythopoetic men’s movement, and is also central to Spielberg’s revision of Barrie’s Peter Pan.
If Captain James Hook personifies the wounded father within, as I think he does, then he is also the feminized, castrated father, the shadow-self to the plump and impotent Banning, who plays the father unable to save his own children, the harried male son who has been “blocked,” in Robert Bly’s words, by “too much feminine energy” (quoted in Clatterbaugh 100). Spielberg’s Hook, played by Dustin Hoffman of Tootsie fame, resembles a female impersonator, the cross-dressed Panto Dame of historical Christmas pantomimes (Garber 179). Hoffman’s Hook is all artifice; his pirate persona is artfully constructed, from elevator shoes to ornate waistcoat, with the aid of the equally effeminate Smee. At one point in the film, Hook’s elaborate wig of sausage curls slips to reveal a balding head, pathetically crowned by tufts of gray sprouts. Like a hysterical woman, he wishfully believes stopping the clocks will reverse the ravages of time; like a histrionic woman, he is given to threatening suicide. Hook, with his missing hand, is a figure “of and for castration,” incessantly pursued by the crocodile, as Garber notes, “a kind of ambulatory vagina dentata, [an] overtly gendered female” (178-80). Hook’s name, in fact, betrays the “anxious phallicism” (Garber 179) of Barrie’s original text, and equally, the threatened masculinity of our contemporary age.
In Spielberg’s metaphoric ceremony of manhood, Pan must defeat Hook, at once the rival father and the disturbing spectre of the feminized male. Banning’s “happy thought,” which allows him to conquer his “fear of flying,” is “I’m a father,” an appropriately “empowering” sentiment for our overly mothered and unhappily fathered generation. Banning is virtually ejaculated into the air and catapulted off to confront Hook, whom he now calls “old man.” In his duel with the Captain, Peter redeems himself before his kidnapped son (dressed as a miniature Hook), who exclaims of his father, “He has a bigger sword!” Swallowed within the jaws of the giant stuffed crocodile, Hook meets his death, and, this is the final humiliation, calls for his mother.
While the Oedipal content of Spielberg’s dream narrative is fairly obvious, it is more difficult to unravel the circuitous logic which concludes that “becoming a man” means “finding one’s child.” Banning, having survived his initiation rite and having proved himself a worthy father, returns to his Wendy-wife transformed into a mischievous boy much akin to Robin Williams’s own changeling persona. While Spielberg’s film insistently collapses the categories separating man and boy, Barrie’s Peter Pan indicates a category crisis between boy and woman, a crisis made explicit in the traditional casting of a woman as (the) Peter. Barrie himself instructed that Peter “must be the whimsical fairy creature that Nina Boucicault made him, or he must be the lovable tomboy of Pauline Chase. There is no other way” (quoted in Garber 167). “Why is Peter Pan played by a woman?”: Garber explains, “Because [only] a woman will never grow up to be a man” (168).
In this way, Barrie’s Peter Pan escapes the tyranny of the body, wherein all little boys, unless they are dead ones, grow into men. In her provocative analysis of Barrie’s play and novel, Garber also argues that the femininity behind the boy Pan figure serves to diffuse homosexual anxiety. Barrie’s much-documented love affair with the Davies boys, mirrored by the cult of the boy which formed around the Pan production, loses its forbidden aura because of the transvestite figure: love for the boy turns out to be love for the woman, after all (Garber 175). For Barrie, the femininity behind the boy allowed, in Garber’s words, “transgression without guilt, pain, penalty, conflict or cost . . . the boy who is really a woman; the woman who is really a boy; the child who will never grow up; the colony that is only a colony of the mind” (184).
That Spielberg suppressing the transvestite figure of Pan (who could be played so well by Jodie Foster) and replacing him with Williams in kiddie-drag, suggests to me that such transgression is intolerable for Spielberg. The femininity behind the boy Pan prefigures too clearly the castrated father—Mr. Darling in the dog house, Hook with his detachable part. Both Hook, and Barrie’s Peter, who “is never anything more than what [he] pretends to be” (quoted in Garber 177), are ominous signals portending that the categories of masculine and feminine are not essential properties of bodies, but merely performances. If Pan and Hook are woman-ish, women playing at manhood, might not Spielberg be only a (girlish) boy playing at being a man? Spielberg’s conflated Peter Pan, simultaneously father and son, not only rescues the child from the desiring Hook (who has, after all, pursued them into the Kensington Gardens nursery), but he also rescues masculinity from the discomfiting possibility that gender (and therefore power) exist only in representation. By creating a narrative which links the adult father with the boy-child, and recuperates both a naturalized masculine power and an emotional idealism, phallic anxiety is momentarily mastered and displaced by the spectacle of the eternal child.
To understand the image of the child in the text, as Jacqueline Rose instructs us, is not “an issue . . . of what the child wants, but of what the adult desires—desires in the very act of construing the child as the object of its speech” (2). Spielberg rewrites Peter Pan, the “ultimate fetish of childhood” (Rose 4), into a regressive fantasy peculiar to our age, where the image of the child is evoked to reassure us of a unitary identity, in which the contradictions of our felt subjectivity in relation to gender, and to the difficult politics of the contemporary family, are erased. Indeed, Spielberg’s Hook is a kind of nostalgic reimagining of our recent cultural history; beginning with a view of family life which is strongly reminiscent of the fifties (Mom as a scolding caretaker, Banning as the absent, bumbling sitcom dad), we move into a Neverland evoking the carnival of the sixties, where the lost boys are a Disneyfied, multicultural version of a Lord of the Flies tribe, and where Banning undergoes successful consciousness-raising. We end, unfortunately, in the kinder-but-gentler nineties, where our gender roles are firmly reinscribed in the nuclear family, but where the masculine has comfortably negotiated the private sphere, taking on exaggerated and infantile forms which are meant to redeem the father from the criticisms of (mother) feminism.
It is instructive to remember that Barrie originally entitled his play The Great White Father; as the benevolent sponsor of aliens and orphans, Spielberg seems to identify with this aspect of Barrie’s enigmatic personality, and has indeed cultivated a reputation as the consummate colonialist of childhood. As Robin Wood points out, his repertoire of films, from E.T. to its nightmare twin Poltergeist, position us all as “dependent children . . . to reassure us that it will all come right in the end: Trust Father” (174). Such infantilization of the audience is facilitated by the film medium itself, which situates viewers in a kind of “heterotopic space apart from the fixed demarcations of family and workplace, a phantasmagoric environment” (Hansen 53). Our leisure culture flourishes in a social space which blends class, race, gender, and generational status into one audience, so in spite of our wishes to the contrary, it disallows the preservation of a child culture distinct and segregated from the adult subject.7 Spielberg’s films would seem to reflect that disturbance; on the one hand, childhood is reconstructed as a primitive, sanctified state—a pure entity independent from history and culture; conversely, childhood as a commodity belongs to all of us, like Tinkerbell, if we only clap our hands and believe.
In the male world of Neverland, populated by all our lost children and poorly parented pirates, Peter Pan regains his ability to imagine, to play, to feel, and to fly. Banning returns to his rightful place as father in the family, having discovered, unlike the melancholic Hook, that “to live is the great adventure.” I take this to be the credo of the conspicuous (self-)consumer, for whom the issues of human duty, meaningful work, and public participation are replaced by “the nervous search for the true self” (Bellah 55). In Barrie’s Peter Pan, “all children but one grow up”; Spielberg, as present-day guru of childhood, encourages us all to remain (blissfully) children, looking back to a Neverland that never was, safe in the stronghold of the patriarchal family.
A version of this essay was presented at the Nineteenth Annual International Conference of the Children’s Literature Association as part of a panel chaired by Professor Jan Susina, titled “Imitations in Children’s Literature: The Children’s Text in the World of Mechanical Reproduction.”
For a helpful listing of popular articles on Spielberg, see “Steven Spielberg: A Celebration,” by Carol Green, Matt Johnson, Michael McHugh, Uma Magel, Susan Nance, Michelle Raine, in Journal of Popular Film and Television 18:4 (winter 1991), 172-78.
Lacan’s concept of the Imaginary refers to one of the structures of the human psyche, specifically, the process by which the child constructs an ideal of a stable identity (recognized as a complementary relationship between self and mirror or self and mother). By extension, the idea of the cultural Imaginary refers to a collective fictive identity which could be understood as nationality, group notions of gender and sexuality, or social class. Marjorie Garber uses this theoretical turn extensively to explore the figure of the cross-dresser in her Vested Interests.
For a prescient discussion of the effects and meanings of the mass-mediated folk and fairy tale, see Jack Zipes’s Breaking the Magic Spell, specifically the chapter “The Instruments of Fantasy.” Zipes finds in the Star Wars series “an apology for American imperialism” (118), but he sees a potential for “creative emancipation” (128) in the utopian nature of contemporary retellings of tales.
Eli Zaretsky notes that G. Stanley Hall “invented” the idea of adolescence in his 1904 publication of that title. See Zaretsky, The Family, p. 85.
After completing this paper, I was alerted to Fred Pfeil’s book White Guys. Pfeil’s provocative analysis of Hook aligns the movie with other films of 1991 which portray sensitive, wounded men who must go through a period of cathartic healing (e.g., City Slickers, Regarding Henry, The Doctor, and The Fisher King). His critique of Hook notes the story’s focus on the “protagonist’s recovery of his real Peter, the resumption of a Boy-self that, paradoxically, makes him into Pan ‘The Man’” (65). He does not analyze the movie in relation to Barrie’s text.
See Osherson for a comprehensive discussion of the function of the father-image and father-memory in male psychology.
For a historical analysis of the construction of the child viewer, see deCordova.
Barrie, James. Peter Pan. Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1986.
Bellah, Robert, et al. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
Biskind, Peter. “Blockbuster: The Last Crusade.” Seeing through Movies. Ed. Mark Crispin Miller. New York: Pantheon, 1990, pp. 112—49.
Clatterbaugh, Kenneth. Contemporary Perspectives on Masculinity: Men, Women, and Politics in Modern Society. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990.
deCordova, Richard. “Ethnography and Exhibition: The Child Audience, The Hays Office, and Saturday Matinees.” Camera Obscura 23 (n.d.), pp. 91-108.
Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York. Routledge, 1992.
Gordon, Andrew. “Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun: A Boy’s Dream of War.” Literature/Film Quarterly 19:4 (1991), 210-21.
Hansen, Miriam. “Adventures of Goldilocks: Spectatorship, Consumerism, and Public Life.” Camera Obscura 22 (n.d.), pp. 51-72.
Hook, Dir. Steven Spielberg. Tri Star, 1991.
Jung, C. G. Collected Works. 2nd ed. Ed. Herbert Reed et al. 20 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966, vol. 7.
Kaminer, Wendy. I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1992.
Osherson, Samuel. Finding Our Fathers: The Unfinished Business of Manhood. New York: The Free Press, 1986.
Pfeil, Fred. White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference. New York: Verso, 1995.
Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1984.
Ryan, Michael, and Douglas Kellner. Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Zaretsky, Eli. Capitalism, The Family, and Personal Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. New York: Methuen, 1984.