it's saturnalia, charlie brown

[sanpaku_backup]

Near the beginning of the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special, one of the characters says something like, "now here's another holiday we have to worry about." And I thought, hey, that's my line.

With my kids watching this and the Christmas special obsessively, I'm seeing the Peanuts oeuvre through different eyes these days. I'm wondering what kids as little as mine get out of it, exactly. Many of the jokes will go over their heads.

Yet they mesmerize at this young age -- as they did for me. I had a shock recently when I realized that the reason that autumn weather always seems to me to be accompanied by warm, jazzy seventies music. For our generation, hearing those Vince Guaraldi songs is as close to Proust's madeleines as most of us are likely to get. I remember being heartbroken when David Sweet's mom told me at age 5 or so that I couldn't really be a psychiatrist like Lucy. And what did I even know from psychiatrists -- or, similarly, what does Jo even know about what a psychiatrist is?

Of course it was this very layer of anxiety verging on dread about the world that I identified with so strongly in Peanuts. I read the books incredibly closely growing up, and to this day I think of myself as Charlie Brown, even as the archetype no longer remotely fits. Now, many parents' books on childhood emphasize the terrifying anomie of a child's existence, so it's tempting to say that Peanuts appealed to kids because it expressed that feeling so well. But then this was also the aspect of Peanuts that was leached out of it over time -- in fact, right at the moment of our childhoods, when this weird angsty strip was turned into a consumer behemoth. As a grownup who's been exposed to his share of glossy Hollywood children's entertainment, the TV specials strike me as curiously incoherent because they really show the cutesiness of the presentation competing with the dark night of the soul content.

So I wonder if that was part of the hold of this stuff had on us and has on our kids -- that the cuteness sucked us in and then we stayed for the anomie. And whether in turn, because the shows said that the world was contingent and dissatisfying, with few triumphs and a lot of problems, we learned from them that this was what we should expect. And sure, it seems that life is really like that. But I wonder if Peanuts isn't a big part of why it does, as well.

Comments

[shirei-shibolim.livejournal.com]

What you're seeing is a lot of Charles Schultz's original intent. He saw all sorts of cartoon strips about adults behaving like children, and countered them with a strip about children who are secretly neurotic adults.

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Oh, definitely. My question is more about why kids find that so fascinating. It's so much less bells-and-whistles than most children's media. It's like a wood block truck next to a Diego electronic see-n-spell. But darnit if the kids don't like the truck.

[shirei-shibolim.livejournal.com]

Maybe because childhood is a scary and insecure time. As adults we tend to re-imagine it as this carefree time, but it's obviously not so. Charlie Brown's frustrations have a lot more in common with real life than whatever it is Dora and Diego do when they're not decorating lunch boxes.

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Again, totally agreed about the nature of childhood. But I don't know that most kids actually think of setting up a psychiatrist booth -- they don't consciously experience their lives as an anxious set of aspirations and failures. As you said before, this is an entertainment that's really by, for, and about adults. And generally, for adults and for kids, entertainments that remind us of the joyless ennui of existence don't necessarily do that well. So if Peanuts is pretty depressing, just to say that life is too isn't really explaining the phenomenon, I don't think.