Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Onstage / Performing Arts More on Michael Jackson and Peter Pan
Posted by Albert Williams on Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 5:46 PM
Reader staff writer Miles Raymer posted a blog item this week concerning Michael Jackson's supposed Peter Pan syndrome. Raymer linked the item to an essay by Northwestern University professor J. Michael Bailey that speculated that Jackson "was a homosexual autohebephile [one in love with the image of himself as a child] whose erotic goals included resembling Peter Pan and having sex with pubescent boys." Certainly, Jackson's fascination with Peter Pan--right down to naming his ranch Neverland--is well known. When I heard of his unexpected demise, the first thing that popped into my mind was the famous quote from Peter Pan, the play: "To die will be an awfully big adventure."
It's worth remembering that Peter Pan was invented by Scottish playwright James M. Barrie, who himself suffered from a severe case of arrested development and may have been a repressed pedophile. Barrie was traumatized at age six by the sudden death of his 13-year-old brother David in an ice-skating accident, and by the devastating emotional toll David's death took on their mother. David was Mrs. Barrie's favorite, and young James tried endlessly to replace his dead sibling in his mother's affections. The trauma evolved into a fixation: dead David, forever 13, was the boy who would never grow up, and James became the boy who refused to grow up--at least in his heart.
Barrie did, of course, lead a more or less adult life, becoming one of Victorian and Edwardian England's most renowned writers. He wed actress Mary Ansell in 1894, but the marriage was said to be unconsummated and ended in divorce. Shortly after he married Ansell, he became friendly with three young brothers he met in Kensington Gardens. They were the children of Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, daughter of writer George du Maurier. Barrie often played with the boys, and created the Peter Pan story to entertain them--just as Lewis Carroll invented Alice in Wonderland to entertain little Alice Liddell. Though there's no evidence that Barrie attempted to molest any of the Davies boys, his attachment to them stirred speculation. But others have suggested that Barrie was asexual, locked in a state of permanent emotional prepubescence. The same has been suggested of Michael Jackson. If this is the case, then Jackson could well have been guilty of inappropriate behavior with young boys--not because he wanted to have sex with them, but because he wanted to be one of them.
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Well then I'll repeat it. Fuck you ASSHOLE!
That's what I have been saying. A child molester is still a child molester. Peter pan/arrested development what ever. Great entertainer in the 80's. How we all forget in his death, that he still touched kids. 50year old sleeping with kids? C'mon!!!! MOLESTER!!!!!!
Megan -- Thanks for the cogent, insightful commment.
Another perspective on Michael Jackson, from Paul Theroux in Britain's Telegraph.co.uk: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/5664968/My-trip-to-Neverland-and-the-call-from-Michael-Jackson-Ill-never-forget-by-Paul-Theroux.html.
A psychologist named Haley coined the Peter Pan Syndrome and for that matter the Wendy Syndrome. But in the more generous worldviews of sociology--if Marshall McLuhan counts as a sociologist--and of '60s advocacy we learn that the boomers were thought to aspire to Pan-dom (pandemonium?) and that many writers, facing the so-adult phenomena of war and racism, once thought Peter Pan a very good and healthy thing for a generation to aspire to. I suppose if there's any truth to that a specimen might possess an extremely diluted strain of the causes of Michael Jackson's alleged tendencies. Maybe not. But if Jackson's case outcropped what is burrowed into a large number of people we may collectively have to own up to some of that narcissism and see what's worth learning from it. Something other than the fiery hell wished by your initial posters.
In response to Houston's comment, let's recall James M. Barrie's profoundly ambivalent description of Peter Pan and all children as "gay and innocent and heartless."
Or was that William Golding's description? Thanks for the opportunity to correct myself above: The reputed coiner of those syndromes was Dan Kiley. Coiner or not, McLuhan wrote about this Pan business--tho maybe he called it something a bit different like the PP Complex--well before Kiley. Ah, the Sixties! We anticipated everything back then.
Thank you, Gary, for putting it so well. This sad narrative seems to fit the late Mr. Jackson better than anything else I have read. And if Barrie was any of those things, it wasn't in a vacuum--a whole encyclopedia could be written about the strange case of Victorian sexuality, hypersexuality, asexualty, etc. Every fifth public house was a brothel in a place where Gilbert and Sullivan had to withdraw the name "Ruddygore" because it would offend the gentle sex. What about other asexual heros? Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Dolittle, and several others may be found. So maybe Michael was a reborn Victorian gentleman of sorts, longing to embrace the innocence of childhood, not its hidden carnality.
Interesting comment, Lori L. You've stated EXACTLY how Michael Jackson saw himself. He identified so strongly with Peter Pan that he tried to reinvent himself in that image--"longing to embrace the innocence of childhood" while denying its "hidden carnality." As for Barrie, though his behavior certainly didn't take place "in a vacuum," it was odd enough even by Victorian/Edwardian standards to stir speculation in his day. While social contexts change--there's certainly a huge difference between Barrie's repressed era and our permissive age--the need for a parent's affection is a constant in human nature. Barrie and Jackson were both children of emotionally withholding parents.
Now you all judge him guilty, and trow stones.
In a mean while read this its all over the internet.
http://www.makli.com/jordan-chandler-admit…
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