Peter Pan. (2003)

Bart: "I thought I was your arch-enemy?"
Sideshow Bob: "I do have a life outside of you, Bart." -The Simpsons

Where the world lets us -and the heroes of Kafka- down is in its provision of arch-enemies. Opposition to our hopes is sprawling and decentralised; the entire world can be mobilised to thwart our every dream without a single person in it feeling any personal hostility towards us, or even knowing we exist. Like Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, we wait our adult lives in vain for someone to screw us over simply because they hate our guts rather than because it's their job. But it was never so in childhood. Youth so readily compacts all our grievances, antipathies, prejudices and fears into a single person that loathing them is a pleasure we could not do without, perhaps because we do not then know enough about hate to be very proficient at it. Hatred remains one of the few activities which does not really become more enjoyable with time and practice. I am thinking of the recent, live-action movie of Peter Pan. The scene in which Hook watches Wendy and Peter dancing in the forest is more than reminiscent of Satan spying upon Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, with all that that entails of jealousy and darkness encroaching upon innocence; and yet we sense that Hook's envy is of Wendy, not Peter, that the unique binary of his relationship with Peter is being usurped and he relegated to the status of third wheel. (Which is why the alliance between the green-eyed monster Tinkerbell and the red-eyed monster Hook is so obvious.) In short, Hook is betrayed; in a realm of eternal, timeless boyhood, his unspoken union with Peter is broken and he finds himself somehow being left behind. For Hook is no less a boy than Peter. Indeed, it is the the very dynamic of their enmity which keeps them both children forever; their roles are given meaning only in their mutual recognition of each other within the rules and spirit of the game. Each finds the realisation of his will only in the acknowledgement of the other. This is why Peter's final flight to Neverland is so sad a sting, for it is no longer a return to perpetual, idyllic childhood. What is youth without pirates to fight and Lost Boys to lead? A girl may often come between best friends, but it is an infinitely sadder thing when she comes between two worst enemies.

Thomas Clark