Peter Pan & Wendy Is Everything Wrong With Disney These Days

In Disney's effort to be more inclusive, they've missed the point of Wendy's story altogether, and an opportunity to make it better.

Wendy: Are none of the others girls?
Peter: Oh no; girls, you know, are much too clever to fall out of their prams.

~ J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

I miss the 90s’. I miss that decade for a whole host of reasons (many of which Freddie DeBoer lays out all too well in this surprisingly moving piece) but one of those reasons is just how effortless making the world a better place seemed to be at the time. Things were getting better for everyone, slowly but surely, and we just sort of accepted it as a common good. There were culture wars, but they weren’t quite as omnipresent and we weren’t quite as divided over every little thing. Crime was going down. Racism had never been more out of style. We had dial-up internet and Quentin Tarantino. The weird PC nonsense of the 80s’ was over and even though our fashion sense wasn’t great, our music was. The Towers hadn’t fallen yet, and we didn’t know Columbine was coming. Social media and smartphones were the stuff of science fiction; or diabolical ruminations in the minds of future corporate overlords.

One of my favorite films of the 90s’ was Steven Spielberg’s Hook, a wonderful reimagining of the Peter Pan story. Hook modernized J.M Barrie’s coming-of-age tale, and aged up its protagonist, played by Robin Williams (the titular Hook was played by Dustin Hoffman). This was no longer a tale of growing up, but of what happens when you forget what it’s like to be a child. It was about fatherhood and how precarious parenting can be when you lose your joy and wake up one day and realize you’ve become a pirate.

It was also a great deal more diverse than previous imaginings of Peter Pan. The Lost Boys were led by Rufio (played by Dante Basco, who would later voice Zuko in The Last Airbender) and were comprised of black, brown and white Neverlandian jungle urchins. But they were still boys. As Peter notes to Wendy, girls were much too clever to fall out of their prams (strollers) and be whisked away to Neverland. That is not good enough by today’s standards, it would seem. Girls must also fall from their prams and join the Lost Boys; they are not so clever, after all.

The 90s’ were not a bastion of diversity and forward thinking, but we were on the right track toward a more diverse era, where entertainment became more sensibly inclusive and, more importantly, the wider culture was largely onboard. This meant more and more TV and film with racially diverse casts, more roles with strong female characters and a deepening understanding and acceptance of equality, at least in entertainment and pop culture, which of course has a trickle down effect on the wider culture. It wasn’t deemed instantly problematic to have movies that were mostly white (or mostly black, for that matter) which is why, in the early 2000’s, Peter Jackson was able to cast The Lord Of The Rings and nobody batted an eye about the lack of racial diversity.

Perhaps all that success led to the state of affairs we find ourselves in now. Not because of any sort of ‘give an inch, they’ll take a mile’ consequences, but rather because when it comes to activism, no victory is ever enough. When the battle over gay marriage ended¹ we needed new issues to champion. Students of gender studies and antiracism began pouring out of the university system, landing jobs in business and government, in journalism and the non-profit sector, education, etc. and soon the language of the academy’s radical sect was everywhere, flooding the broader culture in the span of a decade. Not so much trickle down, now, either.

I call this the zeitgeist; some say ‘woke’ or refer to its adherents as SJWs (social justice warriors). In an era of vague language endlessly scrutinized for any misstep, it remains almost impossible to define. What do we call this seemingly sudden shift in our culture? You can pin it on the ‘radical left’ but the radical left didn’t look like this even a decade ago, at least not outside of the university system.

What it’s led to is a weird marriage of social justice and corporate greed. Bo Burnham spoofed one aspect of this in his wonderful Inside comedy special when he pretended to be a social brand consultant, with wonderful lines like "The question isn't whether you will support Wheat Thins. The question is will you support Wheat Thins in the fight against Lyme Disease."

But it goes well beyond how brands have co-opted social justice. Disney’s trailer for Peter Pan & Wendy illustrates exactly what I mean when I call this Diversity Inc—the weirdly hollow token diversity being pushed by Disney, Amazon, Netflix and other mega-corporations in the name of social justice.

In this version of corpo-inclusivity, we have some abstract quota to reach, at which point we are in the green purity zone and cannot be accused of discrimination or any other social sins. The Lost Boys cannot merely be racially diverse, they must now be Lost Children. “But wait, you’re not all boys?” Wendy asks, confused. “So what!” the sassy, boss-girl Lost Boy girls retort. Later, the fan-baiting continues when Peter Pan shows up, an East Indian boy now, and says “Were you expecting someone else?” (I don’t care at all that he’s not white, but I get approximately zero Peter Pan vibes from this particular casting choice).

The story of Peter Pan and Wendy has great potential for an updated retelling that really delves into more feminist ideas surrounding Wendy’s role in the story. The setup is already there, even if it’s a bit dated now. Wendy as mother to the Lost Boys contrasted with Peter’s fickle father figure, only works if the Lost Boys are boys and Wendy is truly unique as the one and only girl among them (Tink doesn’t count because she’s a fairy, and Tiger Lily isn’t part of their group).

In the below video I talk about the ‘useful idiots of Diversity Inc’. I am referring to the people championing these generic, soulless efforts at diversity and inclusion, the unwitting allies; the media critics and the influencers; the producers and directors. It’s my hope that the broader audience sees through the bullshit and realizes that actual inclusion and diversity requires more than just race and gender-swapping. That we should demand more diverse stories, not just remakes of old stories that replace a white Peter Pan with a brown Peter Pan and make smug trailers congratulating ourselves on a job well done.

Prey is a great example of how to go about this even if you are exploring existing franchises. The film’s protagonists are Native Americans in the early days of Western expansion, which works surprisingly well both because they are skilled hunters themselves, but also because the setting helps to draw parallels between the alien Predator and the European settlers who are every bit as ruthless—perhaps more so given the lasting consequences of European settlement on the Native people of the Americas.

Unsurprisingly, Prey was widely embraced by critics and audiences and almost nobody complained that the heroes were indigenous in much the same way that nobody complained that Arcane was diverse. Intent matters, I suppose, and with Peter Pan & Wendy, the intent seems clear enough. Disney is showing off, needlessly antagonizing a large portion of its fanbase with a holier-than-thou trailer that, if nothing else, shows that the House of Mouse has forgotten how to light a scene and, however diverse its casting, is intent on making colorless movies devoid of life and magic.

What do you make of this trend, dearest droogies? Is it much ado about nothing? Am I overreacting to the Peter Pan & Wendy trailer? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter or Facebook.

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1. Of course, with the composition of the Supreme Court having shifted so suddenly to the right, no culture war issue is truly off the chopping block these days. Just like abortion rights have come under the gun, gay marriage is less certain than it seemed even a few years ago. This, I would argue, is at least partly a consequence of the culture wars and their impact on presidential politics. I’ll save that for another discussion.