Peter Pan and Suicide

Posted on February 21, 2005 in Bipolar Disorder Suicide

There’s something noble about suicide, if we’re to believe P.J. Hogan’s Peter Pan and perhaps also in the book and stageplay by Barrie. “To die will be an awfully big adventure,” says Peter Pan when he lies under Captain Hook’s blade. This is often recited as optimism, but I read into it a morbid fascination with death. Pan is a risk-taker, constantly putting himself in the way of danger. His ability to fly and the limberness of his young body allow him to take on a whole ship of pirates (all of whom would be dismissed from the Piracy Guild for incompetence). When he succeeds in catching his shadow, he brags “Oh the cleverness of me!” Can this behavior be called anything but manic?

But what of those of us who grow up? The film suggests that what we should do is die. Give in to that crocodile of time which pursues us sooner rather than later. Hook’s evil stems, it seems, from his realism: people suffer. He desparately seeks to inflict the world on Peter Pan, but the latter will not cooperate. If Pan is mania, then Hook is depression. And like the alcoholic who drowns his sorrows in his booze, like the heroin addict who turns to the narcotic so that she will feel euphoria and a loss of pain, Mania wants Depression dead dead dead.

The tragedy is that we bipolars don’t separate so neatly. If we kill the Hook in us, the Pan, too, must go.