One of my absolute favorite films is “Finding Neverland.”
It’s a story based upon the part of the life of Scottish novelist and playwright, J.M Barrie, who, fresh on the heels of a disastrous opening/closing of his latest play, meets the Llewelyn Davies family and writes what ultimately becomes the play, Peter Pan.
Now, I’m absolutely certain that if I – as an Irishman – were the exception to Freud’s theory that we, as a race, cannot be psychoanalyzed – the poor shrink would diagnose me as suffering a mild form of Peter Pan Syndrome.
To analogize it to the autistic scale, I would probably be referred to as being somewhere “on the spectrum.”
I own that (missing?) part of my personality.
I was always in a hurry to enjoy the perceived freedoms that comes with adulthood, but did my very best at avoiding the responsibilities that provide for that freedom. A childhood of mischievous selfishness.
However, under the firm but gentle hand of my darling wife, I’ve managed to be a high functioning PP.
But, I digress.
I loved that the LD family, especially Peter, formed the basis for the characters in JMB’s fantastical story about a magical boy who refuses to grow up and leads a family of siblings on adventures in Neverland. Indeed, seeing this particular depiction of the play’s genesis freed my own imagination in a way that ultimately allowed me to incorporate so many real people I knew and loved into The Claire Saga.
Again, I digress.
In a transitional part of the film, we see JMB trying to encourage the imagination of young Peter, who has been wrestling from the outset with his fear of abandonment resulting from the recent death of his father. Peter has his siblings perform a play for JMB and their mother at the writer’s country house, while Peter acts as the narrator.
During the preface to the child’s play, the following exchange occurs between the child and the playwright:
Peter: This is just a bit of silliness, really.
J.M. Barrie: I should hope so. Go on.
And that is when it struck me. Fiction is always just a bit of silliness. It is, on its most basic level, a silly way for even the most responsible and productive members of society to escape from the pressures and obligations of their mundane lives to visit their own versions of Neverland. Freedom.
Whether its getting lost in the adventures of the cowboys and native Americans of Louis L’Amour, Larry McMurty, or even the much darker Cormac McCarthy, or the pirate adventures of Robert Louis Stevenson or Rafael Sabatini, all fictional characters that appear in Neverland – which taught me how to blend genres – literary fiction is a portal through which we all temporarily escape to somewhere else, where the focus isn’t on us. Life carried on our shoulders. Just a little bit of temporary silliness to recharge our batteries sufficiently to go back out and successfully engage full on in our realities.
In another pivotal moment of the film, just after the hugely successful opening of Peter Pan on the West End, we see JMB engage the boy Peter among the buzzing crowd of excited theatre patrons, and one of the women publicly surmises that the young boy is Peter Pan.
However, the child is far more perceptive than the remainder of London’s adult high society.
https://clip.cafe/finding-neverland-2004/im-not-peter-pan/
So, when I unexpectedly fly through the open windows of your imaginations with fanciful stories from my novels, or even in the isolated snippets about nothing important that I share most days in these blogs, I don’t do it to try and impress you on a professional level as a writer – I am admittedly a journeyman at best – but it is share stories that hopefully whisk you away for a moment or two and enjoy my little bit of silliness that I have conjured from the real people, creatures and adventures from my often mundane, but ever continuing life.
If you understand that, you may not be impressed, but you will never be disappointed.
But here we are again back in reality, Thursday, Friday’s handmaiden awaits us all, and that crocodile’s clock is ticking away. So we better get moving.
Go, wrap up your weekly realities before COB, so that Friday is available for the fun things, like escaping through a literary portal for a while. Maybe a whole weekend.
Can I shamelessly suggest Luke McCaffrey’s action and adventurous series, Lebanon Red and Bullet Proof,
for those more interested in a topical globe hopping Bronx version of Jason Bourne than the fanciful Peter Pan.
Luke is proof of real literary talent skipping a generation. Matthew 3:17.
But no matter what else we get up to, let us not take ourselves too seriously, and make today a great one.
One Response