I recently watched Disney’s Pinocchio with my daughter, seeing it for the first time since I
was a small boy. It confirmed my memory, and my wife’s complaint, that it is a
creepy film. There is something about early animation: Dumbo is creepy in a similar way. But with Pinocchio there is lots more than just the look of the picture.
Pinocchio is a cautionary tale for
children. This is so obvious it is a platitude. Everyone knows how it
discourages smoking and drinking. Typically bourgeois American, easily
dismissed. But what struck me watching it again was how sharp and on point the
film is in arming a child against the dangers that threaten childhood. In fact,
Pinocchio holds up well as a
cautionary tale, and above all against one thing: human trafficking.
It is startling how well the film knows what it
is about. All the elements are there.
We have two principal forms of human trafficking.
The first is sexual exploitation: sexual abuse, prostitution, pornography. We
think of this as a danger for girls — and a real danger it is, even in North
American suburbs* — but of course boys are targets as well.
This whole world of exploitation is present in Pinocchio as Stromboli’s theatre, the
stage/puppet show where Pinocchio is first enslaved. How does he get there? He
is lured by Honest John the Fox, an overly-beneficent yet unsavoury stranger. Honest
John tempts Pinocchio with all the enchantments of the stage and screen — fame,
wealth, pleasure. Listen to his song:
Hi-diddle-dee-dee, an actor’s life for me
A high silk hat and a silver cane, a watch of gold with a
diamond chain
Hi-diddle-dee-day, an actor’s life is gay
It’s great to be a celebrity, an actor’s life for me!
But fame above all, “your name in lights, lights
six feet high!”
Now it seems to me as an outside observer that
this is a pretty accurate presentation of a sinister element in the whole world
of acting and modelling. Boys and girls with attractive looks (“that physique!”
says Honest John) are lured in at a young age and then exploited for profit by
their older masters, to be at some point spat out and left in the gutter. And
now the pornography industry has its tentacles out there. For years (I don’t
see them so much anymore), there were crudely-printed bills posted all over
downtown Toronto soliciting ‘young hot’ male models for ‘solo’ pornography
films. Plainly, lures to entrap young men.
The other form of human trafficking is
enslavement for forced labour. In Pinocchio
this is the Coachman, who takes young boys to Pleasure Island to be turned into
donkeys (‘jackasses’) and then worked in the salt mines.
Here the lure is not an appeal to vanity and the
desire for fame, but alcohol, drugs, and forbidden pleasures. Again it is on
point — drugs and alcohol are frequently used to draw people in or entrap them
in slavery. And here we have a warning against associating with bad seeds, in
the form of the boy Lampwick. Lampwick is a characteristic bad young hood: he
is self-important and boastful; he presents himself as your friend while
revealing little actual affection for you; he delights in fighting and
destruction; he talks in a show-offy slang (“oh boy, a scrap!”). Above all, he
says you’re a sucker if you listen to your parents or your conscience — “you mean to tell me you take orders from a
grasshopper?!”
The whole Pleasure Island sequence of the film
can stand with Goodfellas as a picture
of the attraction for men of organized crime and thuggery. It holds out the
offer of a world where you are your own master: the rules don’t apply to you. You’re a wise-guy, everyone else is a sucker.
But like in Goodfellas, a fall comes
sooner or later. No one who saw Pinocchio
as a child can forget the horror when Lampwick is transformed into a donkey.
These are portraits of specific dangers. But there are three good lessons for children
that crop up again and again in the film.
Obedience
to your father. All
the dangers Pinocchio falls into involve separation from his father; all of
them could have been avoided by obedience. The first thing Honest John does is
turn Pinocchio away from school, where Gepetto had told Pinocchio to go. (I can’t
forbear from pointing out how this unwittingly reveals that sending kids to
school is itself an occasion of danger.) Stromboli cackles when Pinocchio tries
to go home at night, and locks him in a birdcage. The first concern of all the
villains is to keep Pinocchio separated from his father.
I am not sure the filmmakers intended it this
way, but Jiminy Cricket’s scruple about snitching plays into this. When Honest
John first leads Pinocchio off, Jiminy asks himself what to do and says “I’ll
go tell Gepetto!” but reconsiders: “no, that would be snitching. I’ll go after
him myself!” Wrong. If Jiminy had told Gepetto right away, disaster might have
been averted. There is wisdom here: follow what your father tells you, don’t
keep things from him, tell him before you go somewhere.
Listen to
your conscience and intuition about a person. It was rather ingenious
making Jiminy Cricket into a separate character so that we can see him debate
with Pinocchio and then the consequences of being ignored. Jiminy spots Honest
John as a crook right away, he picks out Lampwick as a bad seed. Throughout the
film, his good advice could’ve saved Pinocchio if only he had listened.
Tell the
truth. Everyone
knows this one. If you get into danger, be honest about it. Don’t lie. Don’t lie out of fear, or shame, or injured
pride. Don’t keep secrets, especially from your parents.
The great thing about these lessons is that they’re
not just rules, they are protective. The film shows, pretty
accurately I think, how disregarding them can get one in trouble.
A child who absorbed all this would have a pretty
comprehensive protection!
* ‘The Evils of Human
Trafficking’ Pamela Alderman and Elise Hilton, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_LnQyhm5jw
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