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Peter Pan
Directed by P.J. Hogan
Starring Jeremy Sumpter, Jason Isaacs
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In the Western canon, boys symbolize lots of things. There's winged Cupid, with his quiver of arrows, who stands for love's sting and arbitrariness. There's Endymion, the beautiful passive lover-object, and Ganymede, the lover who might be taken for pleasure. Also reaching back to the Greeks-- this time to the god Pan-- there's that 20th-century entry into the canon of puerish archetypes, Peter Pan: the perfect boy: eternally young, in active flight from adulthood's harms and idiocies.

Yet oddly, since the first performance in 1905 of J.M. Barrie's famous play, the role of Peter has been taken by a mature women. Nina Boucicault originated the part in London, and in the US, such noted stars as Maud Adams, Eve LaGallaine, Jean Arthur, and Mary Martin have filled Peter's shoes-- as well as Sandy Duncan and Cathy Rigby. In the new movie rendition, Australian-born director P.J. Hogan (who earlier gave us Muriel's Wedding) breaks the mold and casts 13-year-old Jeremy Sumpter in the part-- a real boy playing the eternal boy.

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It's not just that California-born Sumpter is developed enough to look extremely sexual, while young (and made-up) enough to appear pre-pubescent-- Hogan also infuses the entire production with a generalized eroticism that, whether you approve or not, is sexy. Peter and Wendy continually make eyes at each other and exchange kisses, and Wendy has taken to drawing pictures of herself in bed with that strange boy-child hovering over her. The Lost Boys of Neverland join in the general scanty-clad frolic. Looking like a cross between a soft-core porn version of The Lord of the Flies and a cheesy nudity magazine that's been forced to cloak its models in a few leaves and vines, Hogan's Peter Pan is visually and thematically arresting.

De-Disneyed

Forgive audiences and critics for feeling shocked, for Peter Pan had devolved, over the past century, into a sweet, edgeless children's tale. Mary Martin's famed 1955 Broadway version (filmed for television in 1960) and the 1954 Disney cartoon rendition (wretched beyond description) kept the play popular, but also domesticated it, eroding its hard truths and ideas. A look at the original script-- much of which Hogan's screenplay restores-- shows that Barrie gave us a stark-eyed meditation on the horrors of growing up-- and the equally harsh difficulties of failing to.

In Barrie's play, the lives of the adults are stifling and repressive. Peter has, by one measure, done the right thing by refusing to ever join their ranks. On the other hand, Barrie makes no bones that Peter is a miniature monster: heartless, self-centered, and without empathy (though he does, on whim, save Tinkerbell's life). "To die will be an awfully big adventure," says Peter when it looks as if he may fall at the hands of the evil Captain Hook (who himself is no mere cardboard cutout of monstrosity). Peter's is a boyish boast, but also eerily moving. For as eternal boy, even if his present is captivated with play, Peter has no future.

These were issues in which James M. Barrie was neck-deep. For the full story, check out Andrew Birkin's account of Barrie's life and his erotic relationship with the five brothers who inspired his most famous character. It's in Birkin's 1979 book James M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Love Story that Gave Birth to Peter Pan, just re-released by Yale University Press.

Hogan's restoration of Barrie's original intent shocks us today because the eternal, amoral playfulness that Peter trades for growing up is also fully erotic-- something comprehensible to the Greeks, for whom the god of love was a boy, but heretical today. Culturally and politically we've moved away from the laid-back easiness and personal and sexual freedoms of the 1960s and 1970s-- when feminism was making great strides, the ideals of brutal masculinity were fading away, and gender roles were relaxing. Particularly in US and Anglo culture-- masculinity is becoming, again, a highly praised commodity defined by winning wars rather than seeking peace or play. In this context the idealized boy-- Peter Pan-- looks and feels like a palliative to masculinity's current sorry state.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com