Today’s review is based on the brilliant 2003 rendition of JM Barrie’s seminal work, Peter Pan. I’m just going to come out and say it - I unabashedly love this film to bits. Everything from the casting and score, to the screenplay and special effects, comes together in a beautiful self-contained bundle of movie magic. Not a single frame or word is wasted, and yet is bursting at the seams with world-building and the hyper-detail of children’s imaginations. This adoration in itself was enough incentive to write this review, but my most recent viewing made me privy to entire layers of interpretation that I must’ve missed before. So let’s get into it!

It’s the mark of a classic work of literature when it feels like its characters have long been part of human culture, as if Peter Pan is far older than the beginning of the 20th century when he was first captured on a page. Pan is the boy who decided not to grow up and ran away to Neverland, where he and his Lost Boys while away their time in endless adventures. As the story goes, Peter is smitten by a certain Wendy Darling, a beautiful elder sister who entertains her brothers every night with bedtime stories of dashing heroes and their daring adventures. He invites her and her brothers to visit Neverland, setting into motion a course of events that will change the fate of Neverland, one way or another.

This particular production of Peter Pan captures the sheer sense of whimsy in children’s imagination, depicting a detailed world that literally freezes over when Pan leaves Neverland and blooms into everlasting spring when he returns. In this detail alone, it is clear that Pan is in fact the narcissistic center of this pocket universe which revolves around him and for him alone. It is a world full of pirates and Indians, fairies and mermaids, and any other imaginary figments that the aventure du jour might demand. Peter Pan is cast brilliantly as a precocious brat, a golden boy whom the other Lost Boys cannot help but adore as their leader. Wendy is played to saccharine perfection, an adorable gentle soul on the verge of pubescence. Tinkerbell’s mischievous nature and Hook’s snarling contempt bound effortlessly off the screen without coming across as pandering or overwrought. In short, it is a visual delight that does justice to the original book and play.

Much has been written about the writer himself, JM Barrie, who had a childhood scarred by the loss of his elder brother, a trauma that not only hurt his relationship with his mother, but also other loved ones as an adult. In this light, it is immediately clear that the idea of Neverland, a land where no one ever need grow up, would be a very personal fantasy of the author himself. What’s so great about growing up, we might imagine JM Barrie asking. Why the rush? Weren’t things much simpler when we were children? Who, knowing what they know now, would wish for anything else? Isn’t this what George Bernard Shaw alluded to when he famously quipped that “youth is wasted on the young”? What I’m trying to point out here is that, intentional or not, Peter Pan is actually deeply psychological, and plumbing its depths gives us a window into how the voices in our head draw out meaning from the vagaries and vicissitudes that we navigate in our increasingly complex lives.

In my interpretation, the entire tale is a story told by Wendy-the-narrator, which involves Wendy-the-character and her brothers within the tale itself. In this light, there is no need for a separation between the real world that Wendy leaves behind or Neverland where she has her adventures with Peter. They are both fantasy worlds within a bigger story. This also means that Wendy is actually the main character, not the eponymous Peter Pan. Well, that’s not exactly correct. Let me rephrase. All the characters in Peter Pan are archetypes of Wendy’s psyche. To understand why this is the case, we have to dip our toes into Jungian theories of self.

According to Jung, our self-identity is constituted by complexes of multiple archetypes (of which one or a few may be dominant), each a highly personalised response to our interpretations of our world and our role in it, optimised through bias and experience to offer a subjectively successful cognitive-emotional strategy to navigate the world. I understand archetypes to be primordial concepts, intentionally fuzzy similes directly contradicting any theory of neatly categorized platonic forms. When we wonder deeply whether a sandwich is strictly defined by a selection of leaves, relish and meat of choice in between two slices of bread, or if one unlike thing stuck in between two like things is enough to warrant that definition, we are in essence debating about the circumference of the concept of a sandwich. Now apply the same dream logic to anthropomorphic concepts like warrior, monster, mother, son etc, and the notion of an archetype becomes a bit clearer.

Specifically for Jung, the following two archetypes are of chief interest in the study of an individual’s personality - namely the persona and the shadow. The persona archetype is a stand-in for the masks we wear and present to the outside world, usually in order to achieve certain outcomes in social situations, be it passively or actively. The persona is by definition not our true self, but we may end up identifying with it if we do not remain self-aware. In stark contrast, the shadow archetype is a stand-in for our repressed wild side, beholder of secrets, temptations and fantasies, very usually at war with the unwanted weight of societal expectations that prevent free expression of one’s deepest inclinations. The shadow isn’t exactly our true self either, but it is very much a part of it, and endless repression will only result in unconscious uncontrolled outbursts when pushed too far.

Clarification: I do not for a moment believe that Jung meant for these archetypes to be interpreted as literal entities occupying the mind of an individual like the characters in Pixar’s brilliant Inside-Out. Rather I see the archetypes as Jung’s attempt to deconstruct the complexity of the mind through a Fourier transform of sorts, with the archetypes representing the independent core-impulses that collectively result in superpositional traits and behaviours that individuals exhibit in their everyday lives.

In Jungian studies, the internal drama of these archetypes within the psyche form the foundation for our inner lives, and the goal of each lifetime is to fully integrate these inner archetypes - in all their colours and contradictions - into a fully formed self-identity. An individual who has done this can be said to be self-aware, a fully realised and individuated personality. Such an individual is neither impulsively reacting to happenings in life without any sense of cardinal orientation nor are they naively aping learned helplessness with no acceptance of the agency they have to direct their own lives in accordance with their own self-aware motivations.

Coming back to Peter Pan, we can thus superimpose the persona archetype upon Wendy-the-character and the shadow archetype upon Pan. Wendy is trying hard to be the ideal child, student, sister, Victorian lady-to-be, among the many other roles that have been imposed upon her whether she likes it or not. She claims that her dream is to become a writer who weaves tales about grand adventures, but her elders immediately poo-poo the idea as unworthy of the dignity of a woman in a class-obsessed gender-rigid Victorian England. Is it any wonder that her shadow archetype is Peter Pan, a wild and rowdy boy unconcerned with the demands of society, who ran away from home without a second thought, delights himself with endless adventures in Neverland, denies himself not a single whim, and would rather die than take on any real responsibility?

Viewed in this light, the events of the entire tale can be read as a vivid dream concocted deep in Wendy-the-narrator’s unconscious mind, to resolve the tension between her shadow and persona by playing out the drama generated by their essential impulses to its logical conclusion.

My celluloid guru, Alejandro Jodorowksy, refers to this form of dream-logic therapy as psychomagic. He recognises that our minds are not entirely rational, and we don’t have to pretend that our inner life is as rigidly bound to social constructs and conventions as our real selves in the real world. For example, Jodorowsky would fully endorse a feeling of angry frustration towards a superior to be metaphorically dispelled by a ritualistic stabbing of a watermelon. It’s obviously not meant as a practice run for a real stabbing, nor does the venting of anger on a helpless fruit objectively remove the source of frustration. But the human mind is not rational, and so our rituals don’t need to be either. It is in inventing and embracing such forms of psychomagic, Jodorowsky argues, that we can embrace our deeply human partly irrational selves instead of endlessly repressing these natural expressions. And in this way perhaps someday, art could become the most evolved form of warfare.

One brilliant improvement that has been added to the original play, and has since endured, is how the actor who plays Wendy’s father also plays Captain Hook, the pirate arch-nemesis, the yin to Peter’s yang in Neverland. Narratively, this has added additional layers of depth to the story. For one thing, it further supports the interpretation that the entirety of the tale is happening within Wendy’s mind, and her characters are deeply influenced by the people she knows best - herself and her family.

On a deeper level, Captain Hook serves as a template of what Peter Pan’s fate might be in future. You see, Wendy’s father, Mr George Darling, comes across in the film as a doting father but a timid man otherwise, book-smart but entirely under-confident in social situations. Wendy’s mother reminds her children however that Mr Darling is actually a brave man, because he has the courage to lock away his own dreams, always choosing the welfare of his family over the satiation of his own dreams. Clearly this attitude is in direct contrast to the brashness of Peter Pan, concerned chiefly with his own whims first and foremost, ready to cut ties with anyone who might rub him the wrong way for any reason.

But what happens when such a person inevitably grows older? In Captain Hook, we have an answer - a nasty cynical codger who sneers at the very notion of joy for anyone else, seeing it as a prize that he alone was entitled to but unfairly denied, not realising that joy isn’t a finite resource to be mined and hoarded but instead baked fresh each day with intention and camaraderie. As the Lost Boys chant towards the end of the film in the climactic fight between Hook and Pan, Captain Hook is “old, alone, done for”, and it was mostly his own doing.

In this sense, Pan’s greatest enemy is his own future self! Who could have guessed the boy who had all the time in the world to chase down every whim he ever had would still end up crippled with regrets?

So what do these Jungian insights add to the moral of the story, if any? I feel it is quite nuanced.

Wendy, while initially infatuated with Peter’s devil-may-care attitude towards everything and everyone, slowly realises that the other side of the coin is his inability to care or love anyone else. Peter is essentially the epitome of selfishness, thinking only of himself and his reputation. He is incapable of sympathy, let alone empathy, and cannot but instinctively reject the needs of others if they are not aligned with his own wants. He is more than content to receive the adoration of others, but less than amused to give anything of his for the benefit of anyone else.

And so, Wendy-the-character ultimately decides that while her adventures in Neverland have certainly not been disappointing, she must return to the real world, back to her parents and loving dog-nurse, and back to the social expectations that not too long ago she found constricting. This must be quite surprising right? Isn’t the usual cultural messaging we seem to receive from a century of Western story-telling quite the opposite: “follow your dreams (even if it hurts others in the process)”, “don’t ask for permission (even if your good intentions are ignorant of broader considerations)”, “stand up for what you think is right (even if your ethics are constrained by your biases)”, “question everything (especially only the things that are inconvenient to you)”, and so on. Should we pity Wendy or scorn her for not having the courage to follow through on her deepest wish to become an adventurer whose tales will shock and amaze the many? Should we judge her as weak for valuing family and accepting the roles that her gender and her class impose upon her in the society she lives in?

I think I’ve always chafed at the implication that “question everything” will inevitably result in an answer that must categorically reject the status quo from root to tip. That foregone conclusion seems ideological and dogmatic to me. What is more constructive, is to view the dictum “question everything” as a challenge to be naively open-minded, being ever-ready to learn new things, never making assumptions and remaining pliable enough to embrace change wherever possible and whenever needed, especially if more compassionate outcomes can be unlocked with disproportionately small inputs.

In the same light, the mantra “follow your dreams” should not in its literal pursuit veer into the realm of the unethical or the impractical, especially if the costs are mounting externalities to be suffered by others. A more stoic interpretation of “follow your dreams” might be to get inspired by the noble intentions embedded in the underlying vision and identifying potential collaborators to bring these intentions closer to reality, but rejecting the impulse to exactly recreate the specific aggrandising fantastical dioramas invented by the whimsical-egotistical mind.

Yes of course, let us not deny that compromising on a dream, to any extent, seems tragic. It is. But who says tragedy is a categorically bad thing or that endless pursuit of (selfish) joy should be the exclusive goal in life? Is there not deep meaning in making conscious sacrifices, imbuing even more significance to what is preserved? And consider that if a multiverse of unlived lives are a just a daydream away, what infallible metric could justify favouring one dream above all others?

So yes, Wendy must learn to live as a product of her time and spend some part of her life fulfilling the expectations that come from her family and her society. Yes, we live in a society whose unwritten customs can sometimes feel incomprehensible, inconsistent or inconvenient. We must learn to pick our battles after all, idealistic as we are, or risk waging endless war on too many fronts all at once with no support whatsoever from formerly-sympathetic-now-estranged allies. No one need live on an island of their making, forgoing the myriad joys of being with others for the sterile comfort of absolute rulership.

Being self-aware is most important. Perhaps one can be a bit more assertive in those domains that matters most to us, while remaining generous and agreeable in other areas where compromise is tolerable. Compromising with society need not be seen as a humiliating subjugation of the individual but instead, as an adroit adaptation to the emergent ecosystem of relationships we find ourselves born into. Live in your world like a jazz musician, improvise and experiment without spoiling the vibe if you can, bring in the notes that are missing while matching the beat that’s already playing.

As Wendy-the-character returns to her family with her brothers, she is joined by every last one of the Lost Boys. I interpret this as a clear suggestion that Wendy chooses human connection over the call to adventure for its own sake, and that investing in human connection will always pay out dividends of more connection.

The movie ends with Wendy and Peter having one final conversation at the window sill. Peter ultimately rejects Wendy’s offer to join the family like the other Lost Boys, content to stay the wild boy who has endless adventures in Neverland, even if he has to do it alone. Yet Wendy and Peter part as friends with a smile - signifying perhaps that the integration of one’s shadow does not mean that the shadow must be subjugated under the will of some other archetype (if such a thing were even possible)… it need only be acknowledged and accepted as a part of oneself, even if we are not especially proud of it or necessarily in agreement with its impulses. We must also infer that Wendy-the-character has not completely given up on her dream, because otherwise we wouldn’t be hearing this very tale from future Wendy, Wendy-the-narrator!

In other words, the entire tale is at its heart an exploration of Wendy’s mental metamorphosis from child to adolescent well on the way to becoming an adult. Here we must ask, what is the difference between a child and an adult, really? Is it merely a change in biological age, or physical height? No, the clearest difference between a child and an adult is that an adult is no longer hopelessly dependent on others physically, mentally or emotionally, and (legally speaking) is expected to take responsibility for one’s actions. I would extend this definition further in the spiritual sense, that an adult is capable of appreciating the exquisite cognitive pain of contradictions, paradoxes and injustices.

To be an adult is to know that the world is broken but that it can’t be fixed completely, immediately, single-handedly, and that’s okay. To know that one cannot hope to assert an identity and avoid any conflict whatsoever, justified or not, and that’s okay. To know that all the experiences of the world are open to experimentation but not all in one lifetime, and that’s okay. To know that we are trying to build an ideal beloved community but will remain forever flawed misguided individuals up till the very end, and that’s okay. And so on. This is the threshold that Wendy is at, as important a milestone in personal development as any other.

I hope this essay has made a good case for the Jungian interpretation of this film. I’ll say it again, I adore this particular visual rendition of Peter Pan because it achieves something quite rare - it understands the essence of the material deeply, but stages the scenes so faithfully that that very essence is not spoilt with the indignity of an outright explanation, while remaining transparent enough for the interpretation to be picked up by anyone.