Men have to live with the hormonal burden that assumes you need to beget children. Our minds are calibrated around it, and it affects our approach to life. Men have to live with their aggression, that drive. Ensure the elevation of your bloodline in the present and its continuation in the future. It seems like a desperate need, a moral dictate.
We live with a voice inside constantly telling us to get out there, fight, strive, conquer, aquire, win status, win over mates, and have sex. The purpose of which is fathering children, but it’s easier for men to focus on the means than the ends, because they’re more immediate and compelling and have a greater biological urgency.
It’s entirely possible to have an incentive toward an ultimate desired end that doesn’t rely on the person pursuing it to have a full understanding of what it is they’re being incentivized toward, so long as the incentive effectively captures their immediate personal interest. This is not unlike the principals that underlie free market capitalism, in which the selfish goals of the individual ultimately serve the common good of society.
Of course one downside of this arrangement is that it’s easy to get focused on the means as an end in itself and never realize that there was an end and a purpose, and never let ourselves be led to it. In this way the unconscious mechanisms that are meant to push us toward paternity, into the waiting arms of women who will constrain and make use of that urge and balance it with their own power and own interests, can be subverted. Especially if we won’t allow ourselves to be led out of the comfort of adolescence, the safety of our same-gender childhood society, out of Neverland into the conflicting and dangerous and demanding world of adulthood.
I’ve always thought that it was very appropriate that, in the movie Hook, what finally drew Peter Pan out of Neverland was the desire to be a father. Staying in Neverland meant forgoing the pleasures of the kisses and esteem of women, the comforts of home and of mothers, but it also meant not being subject to the burden or work, specifically work that wasn’t for your own benefit. You could fight and play and win and gain treasure that was just for you and your friends.
It’s very clear that Peter Pan enjoys many enviable pleasures that other children, who must grow up, cannot. There is a special kind of freedom he has as a result of not being confined by the role of becoming a man, of not taking on those responsibilities. And to give them up would be a real loss. Wendy’s parents are essentially the most dangerous people in the story that must be avoided at all costs. They carry a weight, a burden of slavery and destiny and confinement. To belong to the mother, to be forced to become the father.
Captain Hook, for all that he represents the envy of youth that old age feels, is really just a degenerate Peter Pan. He is an adult who has attempted to return to Neverland. But Neverland is the domain of children, and so he hates and resents the youth and optimism of Peter that has soured within himself. Peter is still at the beginning of his life’s adventure, and Hook knows he is approaching the end of his.
Hook feels time chasing him down and has no protection against it, which all the other characters have. The children have the protection of youth, and the parents have the protection of parenthood itself; they have their children. In their own ways, both have their immortality secure. They both have incredible possibility in front of them, not behind. But Hook has already lost a part of himself to the ticking clock monster of time and is being relentlessly pursued by it. And so Peter can laugh at him. He is a joke. A man who has tried to live in Neverland, but can’t be happy within it because of the twin galls of his own pursuing mortality and the mocking carelessness of youth personified in Peter.
But the parents of Wendy are not a joke and cannot be treated as a game, even by Peter. A real mother is a serious threat to Peter and to his whole world. The promise of marriage and of motherhood and fatherhood are the only true threats to his kingdom. And they’re a constant risk that tugs at his friends and followers and games, threatening to pull them away and absorb them into their world.
So parenthood, a husband and wife, the whole marital institution, is a kind of existential threat to Peter’s world in a way Hook never can be. It’s one thing to be defeated or captured or even killed in Neverland. It is another thing entirely to be subsumed, converted, absorbed into the great mortal continuum of growing up.
Death in Neverland lacks reality because life is a game, and being killed in a game isn’t the same thing as being killed in the real world of children and responsibilities, or even living in it. To do that you must face and accept your own limitations and confinement within time, within a species, within the roles and responsibilities that the species life demands of you. You pay the price of subjugating your desires, goals, and identity, your play and make-believe, to the unfeeling world of work and responsibility. You can’t be whatever you want. You can’t do whatever you want.
There is a real sense in which, as the movie Hook seems to show, Peter Pan would die, would cease to exist, if he did this, if he left Neverland. And that does seem like a terrible loss. The journey he goes on in that movie is simplified. In the middle of his life he undergoes a reversion and goes back to being Peter Pan. And he begins to forget his adult life and even why he ever left; life in Neverland seems so sweet. But then he does remember, and the two parts of him come together.
Curiously, for all the celebration of childishness in Hook, it is the adult Peter that is actually stronger than anything in Neverland. Peter the father, not Peter the boy hero. The only thing that really changes in him is that he remembers what was great about Neverland and why he loved it, but he also finally remembers why he left it. What was more powerful than Neverland. And suddenly he’s unstoppable. He has a purpose beyond play and selfish pleasure, and he knows what it is.
By fusing the vitality of his youth with the purpose of his maturity, he stops being a pawn of either the childish or adult world and becomes an independent, purposeful, complete, mature human. He has essentially defeated both the unthinking adult world and Neverland. And then he can rescue his kids and defeat Hook and travel between both worlds at will, possessing the best of both, with a purpose and understanding that transcends both.
Making Nobody Happy 