Hook

Annotation for KRRR! 2017 by Filip Šula

Peter Pan is a notorious fairy tale character in Great Britain and the United States. In the play by James Matthew Barrie, the flying boy in ragged clothes represents a sense of adventure, bordering on childish irresponsibility and the desire to forever remain a playful child who struggles with fairies, Indians and pirates. After all the adventures they experience with Pan in his mythical Neverland, the child heroes of the story are faced with a difficult choice - to stay with Pan forever and participate in further adventures with him, or to return to the real world and grow up. In our country, Peter Pan is partly known from book retellings, but mainly from various film adaptations (e.g. the Disney version of Peter Pan from 1953).

Paradoxically, one of the first major encounters of Czech viewers with Pan was mediated by Steven Spielberg's film Hook. Paradoxically, because it rather continues the key themes and plot motifs of the original and even inverts them. The film depicts the former cheerful adventurer Peter Pan (Robin Williams) as an adult man who is fully dedicated to work, neglects his family, does not want to hear about children's games and adventures and has long forgotten about Neverland. However, someone who has not forgotten him is the pirate captain James Hook (Dustin Hoffman), Pan's iconic enemy, who kidnaps Peter's children to Neverland. The frightened father must thus remember not only his old life and skills, but also become a child again. While in the original material it was crucial for the characters to mature and "grow out" of the adventure, Hook presents excessive maturity as limiting and killing. Pan is a neurotic lawyer with a family crisis and the elderly Hook is tormented by depression and suicidal tendencies. However, both find their meaning in life again through contact with children and a gradual approach to children's games. Spielberg's film does not place childhood adventures above adult life, but encourages a balance between both approaches to life.