Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
You can make being forced to live in a comfy environment, where there
aren't much in the way of changes but where you feel protected and enjoy
fellow-feeling, seem greatly sad and perverse ... something to be broken out of
in a hurry. The way I would do it is to remind people that that what was part
of what living through 1930 to 1945 was like. This was not a time for
individualism, for breaking free of expectations into a realm where you
establish what life you might like for yourself; but rather for people
cloistering in packs against a menacing world. It was a time where all pronouncements
that every human life involves a process of individuation as children establish
themselves as adults, have to be put into question: you could be, potentially
-- and even very likely, for it's what the age wants of you --
pretty much the same person, as you orbit in your safe familiar routines, from
age ten through adult. You could be the person stunted into not making any
thrilling changes about yourself, as you basically stand in place, glad, at
least, not to be withered by the threatening outside world. And perhaps glad,
also, not to be pressured to be expected to make something of oneself and
experience the cataclysm of that further great scary unknown.
Question: How did you survive the Depression? Answer: Everyone
in my community looked after one another... and also, I was lucky enough to
have a job. Not much there, you'll find, of the human story as from
overseen child to individuated adult.
Miss Peregrine is the
matriarch of a home of "kids" -- defined loosely, as a number of them
are in their late teens -- that perpetually exist in the day where their home
is bombed by cascading German bombers -- they "loop" back to the
beginning of the day, just as the bombs are dropped. It's Britain, at the time
when, plausibly, Germans might yet conquer Britain, and the war and the
prospect of German rule had no end (mid 1943). They mean you to understand them
as very different from other Britains, in that they are good and soulful people
while the rest of Britains are bigot barbarians keen to see any new stranger in
their midst as a dangerous infiltrator to be strung up. Wonderful, it would
have been, to hint that that sense of belonging and warmth that you are meant
to feel as you experience Peregrine's home, is how Britains experienced their
own hearth at this time as well... it's really how they were experiencing their
pub culture, this delightful clinging to loyalty while they endure their
collective Britain-under-siege. That is, if you want to pick a group of people
who really would be distinguished from other people at this time, don't choose
those who, in their eager embrace of this cloistering environment, evidently
are those who'd be afraid of venturing off just now into an exciting new
post-war environment. Choose instead... well, the villains of this film, who
are distinguished by the fact that they took their given lot in life (an
ability to create time loops) and aimed not just to remain content but to
dramatically improve on it: those who'd defy the gods and demand more; Jazz Age
in an age of collective reproof and accepting of your lot. People like this
guy:
We are told at the end that what enabled the "kids" to triumph
over the scary hollowgasts was that the intruder into their realm, Jake, from
2016, gave them bravery. Well, if we are really watching the film rather than
indulging in its delivered beats, we'd note to ourselves immediately that the
kids really didn't need to discover that: we saw no hesitation in their
combined efforts to thwart the mob and rescue Jake when he first tumbled into
their stiffened, suspicious 1943 world, for instance. They acted in just as
coordinated a fashion there as later. All that seemed to be called for in this
latter instance is that governing matriarchs be disposed of. Miss Peregrine
gets locked in a cage; and the new head mistress gets eaten up, immediately
after she delineates how the children are to stay out of the way and do nothing
while she handles all the baddies herself. Apparently, they, gone, gives avenue
to growing new wings. Something was different this time out, even if their
actions were the same, like as if perhaps they felt that this time they were
doing it for themselves rather than as extensions of others' agency.
Actually Jake may have
played his part in their discovery of new bravery -- if perhaps innocently.
Unlike the rest of the peculiars, his primary attachment is to adult men. Not
just his grandfather, who in a sense doesn't really represent the complete
individuation attached to him for his previously leaving the 1943 loop and
experiencing "a life outside" -- including wife, kids, and
grandchildren -- because it turns out he spent much of his time as a kind of
servant to this time, going about the world hunting hollowgasts. His mind was
ever with them. Where it wasn't was with his own son, who complains at one
point to Jake about this. And it is he, Jake's father, the one who can't be
brought to believe in Jake's phantasms, and who seems a normal if beleaguered
dad -- one you might hope to eventually forge a better connection with -- who
is the real perpetrator Jake innocently brings into the lives of the peculiars.
The command in Jake, that is, is something they might smell off him, not owing
to his connection to the ostensibly individuated grandfather, but owing to his
having a connection to a father who can't be enticed into this world they're so
beholden to. Like a figure from contemporary literature brought into a fantasy
realm, he wouldn't want any part of it, no matter how real it ends up proving
to be.
In my judgment this isn't a stretch. Jake only gets to this past 1943
loop by taking a vacation with his father. So while the relationship between
father and son is not shown here to be in any sense ideal -- most of the
attention is put to how distant they are from one another -- attention is
nevertheless put to the very fact of their company. We think on it. Its
potentials, realized and thwarted. And we see out of this that the father
doesn't only display behaviour his son must learn to spurn. There's something
worthy in how his father handles outsiders. While alone Jake is shown to be
bullyable, his father is confident in situations where the son senses only that
he's likely going to be victimized. The father can change the
expectations of others, manage situations. The film ultimately uses these
instances to shortchange the dad -- getting the vagrant teen gang to show his
son around the island spares him time to write his book -- but not before we
notice there is something to learn from him, and even hope for more of
that. Or even just for improved interchange between them, kind of like we saw
when the dad, rather than scolding his son, accepts that his son might be up to
just teenage sort of stuff, and that that's not just a relief -- he's not a
psycho, than god! -- but actually, well, okay.
āØThis is a human being doing that, one alone before the world, without
any guidance. Not some member of a special collective, beholden to a
life-script of us vs. them, just like any other sad Depression and wartime kid.
In this film, it is the dad, in being so ontologically alone and still trying
to function, who bears traces of being enticingly peculiar.
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