Pinocchio (21 page)

Or, I would suggest that it may be that young viewers respond most to the film's deeply frightening aspects that have something of the primal about them, as do classical fairy tales that enthrall kids over and over. I myself remember being haunted for a very long time by the wicked stepmother and the horrible witch of
Snow White
, and by the Wicked Witch of the West in
The Wizard of Oz
. I did not “identify with” Snow White or Dorothy, though; in fact I wanted to be a witch, and I now think that what I really wanted was her power over others and her deliciously transgressive way of life. It may be that something like this attraction to the transgressive pulls children into Pinocchio's story, not because they want him or themselves to be “real” but because they relish his brushes with danger and death, vicariously thrilling to experiences that are otherwise out of their reach.

In a richly informative book containing marvelous illustrations,
Walt Disney and Europe: European Influences on the Animated Feature Films of Walt Disney
, Robin Allan describes the less than sunny aspects of Disney's
Pinocchio
in a chapter called, appropriately enough, “The Dark World of
Pinocchio
.” Although I think that Allan is wrong when he calls Collodi's book a work of “homiletic Victorian values,” he is right on the mark when he writes that “the darkness of [a complex and frightening] world forms the central bleakness of the film and this is, for all its adaptation, the strongest link between Disney and Collodi.” By “all its adaptation,” Allan is referring to the ways in which Collodi's story had already been mediated by earlier bowdlerlized versions of the book (alterations and adaptations that had, over the years, shortened the tale and often removed some of its darker episodes), versions that in turn had provided the basis for a play by Yasha Frank that was performed in Los Angeles in 1937 and subsequently published in 1939. Frank's Pinocchio was an innocent, incapable of promoting mischief, unlike Collodi's puppet, who has a seemingly natural attraction to transgressive and delinquent behavior.

Disney followed adaptations much more than the original, as he modified the sadism and violence in order to bring to the screen a lovable, cuddly Pinocchio. Nonetheless, as Allan writes, “the film is dark in content and in presentation, with seventy-six of its eighty-eight minutes taking place at night or under water.” The Disney movie is an odd blend of its European origin and American elements—in the latter case, the most important of which is the Will Rogers–type hobo, Jiminy Cricket—and its Old World cultural referents dominate the ultimately unsuccessful Americanization of the tale: for example, Commedia dell'Arte characters upon which the Fox and his stupid sidekick Cat are based; the Dickensian Foulfellow who shanghais Pinocchio to Pleasure Island; and the setting itself, which has the look of a Bavarian or Austrian Alpine village, the result of the work of Swedish artist Gustaf Tenggren who came to the Disney studios a few years before the film was made.

One of the most disturbing Old World characterizations in Disney's film is that of the greedy puppet master Stromboli, who is portrayed as a curious hybrid, part gypsy, part Jewish, in spite of his stereotypically broad Italian accent. Collodi's puppet master, Fire-Eater “did indeed look scary…. But deep down he really wasn't a bad man,” nor does he have any sort of marked ethnic or racial identity. From an anti-Semitic perspective, Stromboli's gross facial features and his long black beard are recognizably Jewish, as is his excessive love of wealth. Critic William Paul has suggested that Stromboli is “a burlesque of a Hollywood boss…. Disney's own relationship to the Hollywood power structure was always a difficult one.” Richard Schickel was the first critic to bring a clear charge of anti-Semitism to the film in his 1968 book
Walt Disney
, although some of Disney's closest colleagues were Jewish and insisted that they were unaware of any prejudice on his part. Stromboli does disturb a viewer today, however, for it is simply impossible to ignore the anti-Semitic implications of his characterization. And it is all the more disturbing when one thinks of the period in which the film was made and the anti-Semitism that was being spread like a plague in Europe by Hitler's Third Reich.

Another queasy-making (to return to Denby's comment), if much less deeply disturbing, characterization is that of Disney's Blue Fairy. Like the few other female presences in the film—Cleo, Geppetto's flirty, long-lashed fish, or the dancing girl puppets in Stromboli's Marionette Theater, who wear various national costumes as if they are contestants in a Miss World beauty pageant—the Blue Fairy is an utterly stereotypical feminine figure whose role, although ostensibly central in making Pinocchio come to life as a puppet and again as a real boy, is actually quite marginal in terms of actual screen time and impact. Completely antithetical to Collodi's deeply mysterious and manipulative Blue Fairy, Disney's is a 1930s “glamour girl” who is a solid, shapely human presence rather than an ethereal apparition. She is a deus ex machina who enters the scene early on to grant “good Geppetto” his wish made upon a star that the puppet become “real.” She utters the magic words “Little puppet wake, the gift of life is thine,” and the already humanoid and very cuddly puppet Pinocchio begins to move and talk, thus completely eliding the line between the human and nonhuman, unlike Collodi's tale in which Pinocchio's emergence from a talking piece of wood emphasizes his nonhuman status (as do the earliest illustrations to the book). Nor does Disney's fairy function in any sense as a mother figure; she certainly does not look motherly at all but has the appearance more like that of a Hollywood starlet. Her sole function in Disney's version is as a magic presence that can get Pinocchio out of apparently hopeless fixes; this means that she flits in and out of the film with no deeper resonance than an inanimate magic wand or potion would have. Her single goal is to get Pinocchio to be a good, obedient boy, back in the warm protection of Geppetto's fatherly space, where mothers are simply not needed, just as femaleness in any form (Cleo the fish, the seductive marionettes) is shown to be primarily decorative, the equivalent of the dumb blond or “bimbo” of Hollywood manufacture.

If my comments on Disney's
Pinocchio
seem to be primarily negative, I wish to temper that impression by stating that in fact I find the film to be a remarkable technical achievement and a truly fascinating work. It is not only highly engaging and entertaining; it is also a rich cultural document, due mainly to its “hidden” or subtextual elements that reveal, perhaps unwittingly, artistic and social models, prejudices, and stereotypes of the period in which it was made that were both collective and specific to Disney. (This, I think, is also the case with Collodi's tale, indeed with any work that resonates more deeply than lesser works of merely superficial appeal.) If the subtexts generated by Stromboli and the Blue Fairy suggest the negative Jewish and female models that had thoroughly permeated American culture and society by the era in which Disney was making his film (the late 1930s), there is, on the other hand, an element introduced very early on in the film that I find charmingly yet not at all simplistically positive. It is one that in fact transcends historical and cultural prejudices and reaches into the heart of artistic creativity.

Just as some literary works are meta-literary—that is, they contain writing about writing itself, and about their own themes and structures—so too films can be and often are meta-filmic. A famous example is Fellini's
8 1/2
, in which a director is trying to make a film that ends up being the film we are watching. Animated features are not often thought of as meta-filmic, yet Disney's
Pinocchio
is just that. It is an
animated
film in which the main character is precisely a nonhuman who is
animated
, thus becoming a simulated “human.” This theme is highlighted very strikingly in the lengthy sequences in Geppetto's cottage that focus on the numerous clocks and toys that he has carved, which all depict simulated human animation, thus crossing the boundary between the human and the nonhuman. In Geppetto's workshop we see what is in effect a pre-filmic world of animation in which little carved mechanical figures are made to move, just as drawn figures will be made to move on the screen.

The anthropomorphic characterizations of animals—Figaro the cat, Cleo the fish, the Fox, and first and foremost, Jiminy Cricket—represent another crossing of lines, this time between the animal or insect and the human. Puppetry, the dominant technique of animation inscribed into the story, is, of course, embodied in Pinocchio himself, but in addition we have Stromboli's marionettes, which function as another layer of self-conscious commentary on the animation of objects in human form.

With
Pinocchio
, Disney and his team of dedicated artists were not only creating simulated humans on-screen; they were also revealing something of the fascination that such animation exercises perhaps as much on its creators as on those who enjoy the fruits of their labors. However, there is a dark side to this urge to create life (even if only simulated life). Geppetto is the artist as benevolent God; there are no more charming scenes than those in which his many humanoid creations come to life, or those in which we witness his delight in his “son,” Pinocchio, even before the puppet has been given independent voice and movement by the Blue Fairy. Stromboli, however, is the evil puppet master God who creates the illusion of life only for personal gain and glory. The ancient theme of the dangers of hubristic creativity hovers around this film, but there is also inscribed into it the sheer joy of creation that seeks to animate lifeless things and to endow all objects and animals with such “human” qualities as the capacity to love and to live with conscious pleasure and direction.

FUTURISTIC (AND FUTURE) PINOCCHIOS

The fascinating question of what constitutes the boundary between humans and non- or post-humans is central to Spielberg's 2001 film,
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
. At the beginning of this essay I quoted from a largely negative review of the film by David Denby in
The New Yorker
. Other reviews, however, among them Geoffrey O'Brien's in
The New York Review of Books
, were more positive and brought out issues related to some of those that I have discussed in my consideration of
Pinocchio
. In addition to the film's explicit references to the tale
Pinocchio
—the human mother reads the puppet's story to her robot or “mecha” son, who then decides he wants to be human and, upon his expulsion from the home, has a series of Pinocchio-like negative adventures as he searches for the Blue Fairy—it is possible to read the film, like Disney's
Pinocchio
, as another meta-film.

Thus O'Brien writes, “
A.I.
is a meditation on its own components; the technical means that make possible the mechanical child are as one with the means used to make the film…. Now that we have the technology what are we going to use it for?” This “technology” of creation generates some of the same ethical and philosophical concerns that now whirl around the advances in science that permit babies to be created in test tubes and animals to be cloned.

In the original Collodi tale, in Disney's film, and in
A.I.,
the puppet (or robot) is created by Godlike
fathers
as a child figure intended to serve the needs, material or emotional as they may be, of the parent. Collodi's Geppetto wants his puppet to help him make a living; Disney's Geppetto wants his puppet to give him companionship and love; and Spielberg's mecha, David, is created specifically and uniquely in order to love his human parents unconditionally. Geppetto is a craftsman, allied to the tradition of
poeisis
or creativity to which artists belong, while the mecha's creator, Professor Hobby, is a scientist (although a “poetic” one who wants to make a robot who can “chase down his dreams”). Nonetheless, they are, artists or scientists, all figures of the
male
creator who appropriates the procreativity of the maternal realm as they single-handedly “give birth to” their “sons,” effectively excluding women from their worlds except in highly idealized and symbolic, rather than active, roles.

In
A.I.
, when an associate of the apparently benign designer of mechas, Professor Hobby (a Geppetto stand-in), makes what critic J. Hoberman in
Sight and Sound
calls “an obscure moral objection” to Hobby's creation of “a robot child with a love that will never end,” Hobby's reply is: “Didn't God create Adam to love him?” Hoberman comments, “Yes, of course, and look what happened to him.” In fact, the mecha David is also expelled from Eden, and he futilely looks for the fictional character Blue Fairy to make him a “real boy” so that his mother will want him back. Eden regained is an impossible goal, however, and the most David can have is one perfect day with a reconstituted simulacrum of his mother.

In my reading of Collodi's tale and its many “heirs” in subsequent fictional and filmic works, I have sought to bring out elements that make of the story of Pinocchio much more than a simplistic lesson in the importance of obedience and conformity. The ever valid question of how and to what end human beings are created and shaped is rendered even more complex by a consideration of the role of the symbolic dimension of the feminine as it complicates what is and remains in most cultures and most eras a fundamentally patriarchal view of creation.

I believe that it is not insignificant that the most anodyne reworkings of
Pinocchio
elide the complex figure of the Blue Fairy, while the more thought-provoking uses of the tale (as seen in Manganelli's work or Spielberg's film) highlight the female principle in a worldview that is nonetheless still fundamentally patriarchal, be it the nineteenth-century Italy of Collodi or the futuristic West of Spielberg (and of Kubrick, of course). Human creativity, whether an art, a craft, or a technology, can yield astounding results, but the power to bring into being real or simulated versions of ourselves is fraught with dangers, not the least of which is the illusion of total control over the creatures we make. The anomalous, the abject, or the sheer excess of individual desire—all historically associated with the feminine sphere—cannot be tamed or repressed merely by admonishments to conform to the Law of the Father, to be “good little boys.” So, happily, Pinocchio goes on fleeing his destiny as a “good boy like all the others” until, sadly, that destiny catches up with him. Collodi enlisted the aid of the feminine in the taming of the puppet, but it is worth remembering that, at the end of the tale, the Blue Fairy only appears in a dream to Pinocchio, as the perfect mother
he
would wish her to be. What or who in fact she may truly be or truly desire is known only to her.