Pinnochio Learns Legalism

I watched a documentary about Walt Disney today. (A girl in my creative writing course asked if we could study him, so I'm getting them something.)
  The part about the making of the movie Pinnochio really struck me.  I don't think I ever actually watched Pinnochio before I watched it just now.  Despite this, seeing all the footage of it in the documentary, I was struck by what a strong influence Pinnochio had on me as a child. Like Star Wars, the Muppets and so many other things, I never got to actually enjoy Pinnochio first-hand.  But it's not like we live in a world where it wasn't "sold" to me in the form of toys and lunchboxes and books, and by my friends. I grew up steeped in all of that stuff anyway, without ever enjoying it as it was originally intended.

   We didn't have a TV, but we had Walt Disney books, and some of them had records or cassette tapes with the songs and so on.  When watching the documentary, I realized I knew the words and the melodies to most of the Disney songs anyway.  Even Pinnochio. ("Hey, diddle dee dee!  An actor's life for me!" "When your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme")

  Now, the man Walt Disney had a very corn-fed, conservative American view of things.  Pinnochio presented a view of the world that my parents and uncles and aunts really approved of.  In fact, I even have dim memories of them infusing my experience of the audio versions of the story with their stamp of approval, and the moral message being underlined by them as I listened.

  Even gotten across to us only in children's book form, that message was very clear. It was, as interpreted by me and my relatives, puritanism, pure and simple: the virtues of hard work, study and abstinence from pleasure; going to bed early, going to church and staying home with parents.  The evils of going out after dark, and pleasures like entertainment, theatre, beer, cards, pool halls, bars and smoking.

Pinnochio's Overt, Intended Message

Well, there is another message in Pinnochio:
   If you wish upon a star, your dreams come true. 
Geppetto kneeling down, clasping his hands and wishing to the wishing star.  As a child, this seemed to me very much like a Disneyfied representation of prayer. It still does.

   But I'd been taught about prayer a little bit differently.  I mean, the Disney message is really that, if you want something, you don't necessarily have to do something, or pursue it, or earn it.  If you wish for it (hard enough, long enough, is the subtext) and live a good life and wait, eventually you will get it.  

  Now, I'd been taught quite differently.  If I really wanted something in my heart of hearts, I knew because I'd been taught, that no doubt this was certainly my sinful heart wanting sinful things.  What my job was, usually, was clear: to sacrifice my own wishes and dreams to what God/my parents envisioned instead.  Because I could pray/wish all I wanted, but if God didn't like what I was wishing for, as hard as I wished, my dreams were never going to come true.  He wasn't about to deliver that.

   I don't believe in changing the world, or my life, through wishing, any more than I believe we do good in the world by "raising awareness," which is almost the same thing.  When I was a kid and I was reading after bedtime in my room, my mom would call upstairs "It's after your bed time..."  I'd be well aware of that, and call "I knooooow."  With no intention of changing my behaviour at all.
  To me, this Wednesday when we're supposed to wear pink t-shirts at school to "raise awareness and take a stand" about bullying and intolerance, it reminds me of that.  It's like someone told us "There's bullying and intolerance going on" and our colour-themed t-shirt response is, essentially "We knooooow!" with no loftier plan in place to actually make any change.  It's like raising awareness of AIDS, or there not being enough clean drinking water in Africa, and just wearing a t-shirt or something.  I don't think saying "We're awaaaaare!" actually counts as actively effecting change.  But that's just me.
   Every year when we have this, when kids start to comment on some kid not fitting in and complying with this display of support for difference, I always say "Ya!  He's different! Get him!" I think it raises their awareness.  At least of the fact that something odd is going on.
  I do pray, sometimes rather guardedly.  I don't try to change my life by making wishes, though.

Puppet Child

The puppet Pinnochio springs from the workshop of  Geppetto, a man with no woman in his life; an old man who always wanted a child, has not been able to have a child, and so has immersed himself into his work, looking for satisfaction there.  Geppetto makes a puppet and wishes he had a child.  He wishes the puppet was his child.  And in the world of Disney, rather like the bible, no one wishes for a child and never gets one.  Even an old man or woman can hope. I live in a very different world.

   A puppet is like a child, but it not only obeys you, it does nothing at all unless you direct it.  That's no good.  Very time-consuming and unrewarding. What Geppetto wants is a child who does everything he wants, is exactly what he wants, and grows up just as he formed him and designed him to be, but without needing to be told what to do.  Without needing to have his strings pulled.  When Geppetto decides on the name Pinnochio, he asks his cat and his fish if they like it, and they don't, so he "asks" the inanimate puppet/child he has created. Pulling on its string, Geppetto gets a nod, affirmation that his puppet/child "likes" what Geppetto himself likes.

   But then Geppetto kneels by the window and prays/wishes for his puppet to be a "real boy."  Just like my father knelt down and prayed/wished that in me, he'd get a boy who grew up to be a "real Christian."
  Geppetto doesn't get his wish immediately, but the Blue Fairy ensures that the puppet will take on a life of its own.  And so Geppetto gets a Chucky-like little sociopath with no conscience.  Apparently Disney struggled with making Pinnochio look likeable and uncreepy.  Eventually, as with the cricket, they just drew a human-being and decorated it very slightly with puppet-looking bits, and animated him to move as if made of flesh.  "The cricket," the animators say in interviews now, "is a cricket because we say it is."

   For his part, Pinnochio wants what his father wants.  He decides he wants to grow up to become a real boy, too.  To do this, he  must obey his father, and go to school, and obey his teachers.  (If there had been a church presented in the film, Pinnochio would have had to go to church and obey the priest/minister too. It being Italy, though, the church would have been Roman Catholic, and Catholicism and mainstream American cinema weren't about to work very well together in 1940.  About a decade later, the mother superior character singing "Climb Every Mountain/seduce your boss if you really think he's hot" in The Sound of Music would present a view that may or may not be very distinctly unCatholic.)

   So Pinnochio's mission is clear.  In fact, the Blue Fairy (a heavenly figure, a star come down to earth) explicitly states what Pinnochio must do in order to grow up right and be a real person: he must, despite temptation, prove that he is brave, truthful and unselfish and able to tell right from wrong by listening to his conscience. 

   Just like me.  (Except I wasn't raised to be brave.  Fearing things is at the heart of my culture.)

An Externalized, Pre-existing Conscience

Despite being made of wood, Pinnochio gets a conscience of sorts, alright.  It's a cricket named Jiminy, a person utterly separate from Pinnochio, provided by heavenly forces, which tells him not to do things he wants to do, and not to succumb to peer pressure.  Jiminy Cricket got this "conscience" job simply by leaping onto a matchbox soapbox and starting to spout off about "what's wrong with the world today." These are his qualifications. Judgmental conservatism. Rhetoric.

   Oddly, Pinnochio's "conscience" was walking around with opinions and judgments (To Geppetto's wish: "a very lovely thought, but not at all practical")  since before Pinnochio himself even existed.  It's a set of standards and expectations and outlooks that Pinnochio inherits without understanding or participating in them.  When Pinnochio asks "Why?" about the course of his life, the answer is "because."  Pinnochio says "Oh," clearly not understanding.

   Pinnochio's conscience is not internalized, and it's not about understanding, virtue, wisdom or empathy.  It's only about compliance.  There really is no positive element to it.  Pinnochio isn't going to be unselfish because he cares about someone else.  He's not going to be a giving person, so much as he is going to obey the externalized voice telling him not to do selfish things.  Important that he be truthful, so when he is caught doing wrong things, he doesn't lie, and his behaviour can be adjusted.  "Truthful" in this sense simply involves not lying when one is being questioned about wrongdoing.

   Jiminy decides to lecture Pinnochio about The World.  The World, he explains, is full of fun things that seem right, but are wrong.  Pinnochio is delighted to hear this, and says he's going to grow up to be someone who is "right."  That's his self-image and his life goal.  I was like that, too.

   But there is Temptation, Pinnochio is told.  Pinnoccio is an innocent, and he's approached by guys straight from the pages of Charles Dicken's Oliver Twist, only instead of turning Pinnochio into a pickpocket, they want him to work as an actor, in entertainment (rather like the child doing the voice of Pinnochio in Pinnochio is).  Honest John the Fox and his feline companion Gideon are right there, temptation personified.  Offering fun.  The nightlife.  Entertainment.  Smoking, beer, cards, pool, music and dancing.  Everything that strikes terror into puritan hearts.  How can church compete with all that?

  In Geppetto's world, Geppetto goes to bed when his clocks tell him it's nine o'clock, even though he's having a grand old time, ruling his little wooden kingdom with no peers in it.  Because nine o'clock is bed time.  No going out and enjoying, well, anything.
  Pinnochio's conscience Jiminy is then enraged by any noise, once it is bed-time, yelling at even the ticking clocks to be quiet.  (And they dutifully fall silent.)  Everyone needs to be quietly asleep. It's nine o'clock. Bed time.

  Strident Brethren voices are imprinted on my memory, and like something I'm possessed by, they ring out still in the back of my heart, saying things like "The World and its seductive entertainment.  These things, which are not wrong in and of themselves of course, may seem enticing. They may seem harmless.  They may seem attractive. They may seem like just a bit of fun. But they're HOW SATAN GETS YOU!  They will bring you under bondage!"  

   I don't know if anyone but me has those voices, anymore.

   Pinnochio's conscience, standing in a floral (jack in the pulpit) pulpit, teaches him that Honest John the Fox, with his offer of entertainment at the theatre is, Jiminy explicitly says, Temptation himself.

  Pinnochio is aghast, but Jiminy says "That's him."  And Pinnochio is told what to say.  He's told to say "Thanks, just the same," but that he can't go to the theatre, because he's got to go to school.

   With us, it was evening church instead.  Evening church was why we couldn't act in school plays, go on band trips, go to sports meets or even go see, say Pinnochio, at the movie theatre.  "Thanks, just the same" we were to say.  "But I've got church."

Pleasure = An Evil Trap

But of course Pinnochio goes off to the theatre  anyway.   He gets all wrapped up in the seedy world of entertainment, becoming a performer, just like the kid doing his voice.  All of the things my church didn't approve of are depicted: Smoking, drinking, pool, cards, music and dancing. 

   The second part of Pinnochio, after his first resolve to never backslide into the life again, has a similar adventure, but one with more clearly drawn lines of distinction between right and wrong.  A cockney coachman (who's made a deal with the Devil at a crossroads) offers to take boys to Pleasure Island, from which they will never return (as boys, anyway).  In my church, the word "pleasure" was a wholly evil word.  Pleasure was the bait.  (Pleasure was our life-long sacrifice to the Puritan god we worshipped.)  We didn't do pleasure.  Life wasn't about that.

   What happens with Pinnochio's friends who want to go to Pleasure Island, is they start to transform.  They miss their potential to become decent, hard-working, upstanding adults, having taken what the movie refers to as the "easy way," over what it calls "the straight and narrow," quoting scripture.  They become subhuman.  They turn into asses, donkeys, fools.

   It's like Adam and Eve all over again.  Only this time, it's not a fruit God has forbidden them to eat. It's nightlife.  Pool, cards, smoking and beer. And Pinnochio's friends reach out for it and are now fallen.  Donkeys.  Ridiculous, stubborn beasts of burden.

   This is exactly how we felt about church people who stopped going to church and enjoyed This World and its seductive pleasures.  They weren't really even the same species as we were, anymore. They'd been had.  They'd been made fools.  They were captive, enslaved.  Unlike us, freely sitting in our church, in our church clothes, beside our parents, listening as someone taught us about how to stay free like his own good self.  Christ had died to win us the Christian liberty from pleasure.

    Because Pinnochio is, our church would have taught, not actually really having a grand old time, out in the World. He's not free, you see.  He's in bondage and servitude. He gets stuck in a wooden cage from which he cannot escape, his conscience of no help to him.  He is forced to dance nightly for the entertainment of the various subhuman figures in the Dante-esque horrorshow that is the life of an entertainer. He sings "I've got no strings to hold me down," proclaiming his freedom, while actually, he's in bondage to the nefarious gypsy boss Stromboli.

    My own life was supposed to be the opposite of that.   Very obvious strings tied to every part (and I do mean every part) of myself, which supposedly made me freer than other people could hope to be.

   When modern technology was suddenly giving us the chance to actually sit in our own living rooms with our parents of an evening, and yet still somehow enjoy Worldly Entertainments, without even needing to go to a movie theatre, pool hall or video arcade, our church was all aflutter.  It had, at that point, positively no idea what to do.  The whole "staying decently at home" vs. "going out and being entertained" line of distinction had been made obsolete.
  To this day, there are still Brethren homes with iPhones, iPads, laptops and desktop computers in them, but no television.  Because televisions are, well, entertainment.  Something we're raised to be unthinkingly superstitious about.

What Pinnochio Learns

Pinnochio, like any of us who were caught, for example, watching television (some were bolder, and sneaked alcohol, or went out to a bar or concert), is asked to explain himself by the maternal Blue Fairy.  Still in his cage.   She's the only maternal figure in his life. And she waits until he's screwed up, so she looks most right, and then she makes her appearance.  And Pinnochio lies.

  What he learns then is something my parents certainly wanted me to learn: real people do work. They go to jobs and school and so on, and at night, they are at church or at home, not out entertaining themselves with the lower life forms.  

   If you instead indulge in All That Stuff, you will invariably find yourself in bondage, in servitude to said Stuff.  You find yourself a single-mother, an alcoholic, a compulsive gambler, a drug dealer, a prostitute, a convict.  And if you try to pass yourself off as a decent, proper person, discerning church people will see right through you.  And if you try to lie about it, you will never fool anyone either.  Your deceit and your attempt to maintain the reputation you are so unworthy of will be as plain as the tree on your face.  If you go out and try to join in the fun, you will get caught.  Big Mother is watching you.  Big Blue Fairy Mother.

   The only hope for Pinnochio upon his first infraction is to tell the truth, own up to his own foolish, self-indulgent disobedience, repent and resolve to never make the same mistake in future.   My church was actually very forgiving of first infractions by innocents. So long as it was the first time, and we were innocents and we knew we'd done wrong and that they'd been right in their warnings.

  But as with Pinnochio, repeated infractions were paid for by one's parents' shame.  Geppetto, Jonah-like, is trapped in the belly of a whale awaiting solitary death, entirely due to trying to put a stop to his jackass, shameful son's self-indulgences.  The beer, the cigars, the cards, the pool.  Creepily, Cleo the goldfish uses her snout to tip up two little "tombstones" in the bottom of her bowl, and Geppetto is wearing all black. (well, his red vest is coloured black, because it's dark in the belly of the whale.)

  This 1940s reversal of the prodigal son story has Pinnochio, still wearing his badges of jackass shame, heroically lower himself to his father's shamed position, and bring him out of the belly of the whale at great cost, reaching the stage of having finally learned his lesson, leaving behind things like beer, cards, cigars, and pool, and being ready to spend time where he belongs, at home with his father, going to bed by nine o'clock.

   And the externalized "conscience," now internalized and proven to be unquestionable wisdom, is given divine approval, legitimacy, a medal and is free to move on, feeling good about himself.
   I remember the first time I went to a (movie) theatre.  I remember the first time I sat in a bar and heard live music. I remember the first time I tremblingly took the stage to entertain the other people there.  I remember my first beer, my first cigar.  I remember the first time I played pool.  I was not an innocent.  And I wasn't overdoing them, so I could get full "enjoyment" out of them prior to repenting of doing them later, and regaining church approval, having had it "both ways." I did them when I was ready, when I felt okay about it, when I was about to make them a small part of my life, enjoyed in moderation, permanently and without shame.  I never "got" cards or gambling, and don't really like smoking either.  But I do occasionally drink alcohol in moderation, go to movie theatres and pool halls occasionally and have even, every decade or so, been known to dance.  And I don't think I'm doing anything wrong.  So there has been no forgiveness for me from my culture.

An afternote:
Some of my favourite secondary story characters are basically Pinnochio.  Trying to understand what it is to be human, and failing to do it quite right.  Spock and his replacement Lt. Cm. Data from Star Trek.  C3PO on Star Wars.  Castiel on Supernatural.  Frankenstein's creature.  I like how the Doctor on Doctor Who can play the entire gamut from that, to actually knowing how everyone around is "doing human" wrong.  Everyone wants to be human/a real boy, apparently.