Peter Pan & Wendy & Alfred Hitchcock
Gareth Higgins on Peter Pan & Wendy & Alfred Hitchcock
Watching Peter Pan & Wendy (above), the latest reimagining of a Disney animated classic, I was warmly surprised to find a dramatically rich, psychologically integrated, and morally hopeful vision. Director and co-writer David Lowery’s films take life seriously, and they’re all about the initiation of characters who are trapped somewhere before they break through (see especially A Ghost Story and The Green Knight). His earlier Disney film Pete’s Dragon is one of the best recent films for kids and adults to watch together. Peter Pan and Wendy is sophisticated enough to make compelling arcs for both its title characters and Captain Hook; and, frankly, responsible enough to the current moment where it is so easy for people to dehumanize each other, and to refuse to examine the fact that the motivations of our opponents may be understandable, not to mention the result of suffering. This is a compassionate vision of how Peter Pan and Wendy need to grow up, or they won’t ever experience life; and how Captain Hook isn’t just a monster without feeling, but a former Lost Boy whom Peter Pan exiled from Neverland because he missed his mother. I loved it.
In the days since watching, I was reminded of a nightmare I once had. I was being chased down the street by a monstrous figure with a horrifying weapon who was intent on annihilating me. No disrespect to the man’s work, but the figure chasing me looked a lot like a naked Alfred Hitchcock. We were both running faster than I felt able, and he kept trying to grab my shoulder to spin me around and kill me. Just at the second Alfred finally got hold of my shoulder, I woke up screaming. Brian had his hand on the center of my back, trying to gently wake me. Having himself been awakened by my cries, he wanted to get me out of the bad dream.
“You’re OK. You’re OK,” he said, tender, confident. “You have what you need.”
Immediately thereafter he turned over and went back to sleep.
I knew enough about how the body retains and resolves trauma to slow down my breathing. So I lay there awake for quite some time, consciously inhaling and exhaling at a pace that would regulate my heart rate and enable me to rearrange the disturbed furniture of my mind.
The next day, I pondered the dream. It seemed to me that the man who was trying to kill me represented something like the twin spirits of nihilism and despair, which have so often snatched at my mind when I’m awake.
Hitchcock’s work is paradoxical - much of it is about horrifying things ( Psycho, Strangers on a Train, Rope), and even the lighter works (North by Northwest, The Trouble with Harry) are brimming with cynicism. His most acclaimed film - Vertigo - is about the pure manipulation and exploitation of a woman who ends up victimized by both the villain and the ostensible hero. Yet the experience of watching Hitchcock’s films is thrilling to the edge of delight. The relationship between audience and character, the distance between character and action, and the interaction between the film in relation to our circumstances are at the heart of the meaning of whatever it is we’re watching. Of course that’s not all that makes the meaning - the Gus van Sant shot-for-shot remake of Psycho gives perhaps the most perfect illustration: I don’t feel the same things when I watch it as when I watch the original, even though - at a surface level - they’re exactly the same thing.
At any rate, it makes sense that when my subconscious decided to give me a nightmare about being chased by the twin spirits of nihilism and despair, that they showed up in the form of Alfred Hitchcock. I also think I was surfacing a longer-embedded memory of a nightmare Walter Wink writes about having that showed him the need to embrace his shadow. Sometimes dreams can be about dreams. Sometimes “bad” dreams are portals to something good waiting to be born.
In my case, this dream about the spirit of nihilism and despair triggered feelings that you may sometimes share: the sense that life is meaningless or that there is so much pain in the world that we are triggered into unbearable hopelessness. That’s a very ordinary feeling. As with so much in the realm touched by fear, that itself is the first good news. If such emotions are common, then none of us is alone. The second piece of good news for me with the Hitchcock dream was that it was a warning of what could happen to me if I didn’t wake up from a death-dealing habit. I needed to wake up from the habit of feeding the story of nihilism and despair in my mind through unconscious immersion in the patterns of “worse-ness” that permeate not just the electronic media but the way conversation is modeled in much of our culture, and the unintended consequence of how our brains have evolved to keep us safe from danger, but not easily tell the difference between a saber tooth tiger and a sudden burst of sunset orange.
There was even better news.
Another night I had a different dream, and this time I woke up laughing. It was a simple dream about something that really happened to me in 1986. In the dream, I was eleven years old and walking down a street, listening to music through what I called a “Walkman” but was a generic knockoff, much less expensive than the official Sony-branded model. The song was “The Power of Love” by Huey Lewis and the News. You may not previously have considered this song to be a profound psychological work, but pay attention and you may find at its heart a fair bit of wisdom. Huey—and indeed, the News also—wants us to know that love is free but costly, comes out of nowhere yet is seemingly everywhere, can overwhelm us, and can stimulate great pain, but if we give ourselves to it, what else could we possibly want or need?
I woke up dreaming the middle of the song, and I really was laughing. Because the feeling I had in my chest, listening to that song at eleven years old—the feeling of exhilaration, of possibility, of utter okayness with the world, or at least with whatever was happening in that particular moment—was suddenly flooding my forty-two-year-old mind as if it had never left. And it had left, you see, because I had made too many mistakes and taken on too many burdens to hold on to joy.
Anyway, innocence has to grow up before it can become wonder. And here I was with the very feeling I had known in my chest decades ago, with wonder enveloping me in a dream.
And I realized, everything that happens occurs in my mind. The perception I have of the world is all I have to go on. And I can consciously choose which lens to wear. The twin spirits of nihilism and despair exist in my mind; the spirit of innocence evolving into wonder exists in my mind too. I can choose what to do with my mind; with the story I tell. Just as the body keeps the score of the worst things that have happened to us, so it also retains the happiest! All the joys and hopes and passions and smiles and anticipations and glorious becomings that you have experienced still exist in my body. They are just waiting for me to remember them and to choose the ways that will bridge the gap between what my ego thinks it wants and what my truest self could never lose.
What I woke up to was this - as true for me in the inner recesses of my heart as it is for the folks reading this essay, and indeed the reason why I write and think about movies so much. The current global crisis is a crisis of storytelling. Tell the story in a way that exaggerates fear and separation, and violence will increase. Tell the story in a way that decreases the story of fear and separation, and violence will reduce.
It can be good for us to enjoy watching stories of terrible things, like that of a murderous pirate who turns out to be a traumatized fella whose initiating “crime” was to think that growing up must mean leaving wonder beyond. Sometimes such stories teach or warn us; sometimes they induce compassion for the suffering; sometimes they take us through a kind of catharsis for our own pain; and sometimes they’re just brilliantly told, thrilling stories about things that happen. The meaning we ascribe will be partly a function of what we’re watching, partly a function of our own story; and partly something that probably cannot be completely described in words, or which arises from somewhere beyond us.
But nothing can take away from the fact that we can transform our fear, danger, nihilism, and despair by the stories we tell. We must. Because if we don’t, someone else will do it for us.
Kathleen Norris’ THREE THINGS
I’ve been thinking about the necessity of reading poems aloud. It’s an oral art form that can die on the page, but isn’t always taught that way in schools. Reading poems out loud can make even poems that seem obscure and difficult much more accessible. When I first read John Berryman’s “Dream Songs” on the page I struggled to understand them. Once I began reading them out loud, they came alive.
I’ve been thinking about the pleasure of tasting great language in the mouth. In the King James Version of Jacob’s dream (Genesis 28:10-17) begins, “and Jacob went out from Beersheba.” When you’re reading the story aloud the phrasing slows you down in a good, and maybe even necessary way. Compare that “went out,” with the New Revised Standard version that states flatly, “Jacob left Beer-sheba.” This may be a updated version for busy people in a fast-paced world, but it’s not progress.
I’ve been thinking about how the best poets write poems that have great “mouth-feel” — they feel good when you say them aloud. Try George Herbert’s “Virtue” or “Discipline.” Or if you want a full-blown experience of evocative invocation, the fourth section of Kathleen Raine’s (above) “Northumbrian Sequence,” that begins: “Let in the the rain, Let in the wind, Let in the moors tonight.”