"I’ve got no strings / To hold me down / To make me fret / Or make me frown /
I had strings / But now I’m free / There are no strings on me."
Sound familiar? Pinocchio, the puppet, sang this on stage as he escaped the burdens and responsibilities imposed on him by his father. Seduced by a devil disguised as a fox, Pinocchio doesn’t need school because he will be a star in Hollywood, maybe even go viral! As author and YouTube phenom Jordan Peterson asks in his lectures, Why does this children’s classic endure? And we can ask why movie directors are still drawn to the story, the latest being Guillermo del Toro’s reimagining of the 19th-century novel.
Suppose you were to read the original by Italian author Carlo Collodi, who was escaping the consequences of his own escapades in the fleeting world of money, pleasure, and debt that would later land his fictional creation in puppet master Stromboli’s cage. In that cell, you might begin to find the answer. Disney softened the harsh tale with some deus ex machina tricks—blue fairies and magical moments—but maintained the core story arc of a wooden boy who turns “jackass”—and must save his father to become a real boy, but only through rescuing him (like Job) under the sea in the mouth of Monstro, the whale that somehow breathes dragon’s fire.
You don’t have to be Peterson or his intellectual mentor Carl Jung to understand that a boy (less of an issue for girls given their seeming natural gifts in reading social cues) must rescue his father from death to transcend his own life. Only by doing so will he emerge from the dragon waters to find himself. Pinocchio is just one in a fictional continuum of father–son dynamics. In other words, whether turbulent seas, mirrors, ghosts, or God, the pattern is eternal. Hamlet, Star Wars (“Luke, I am your Father”), The Lion King, and Blade Runner all confront questions of mortality and, in doing so, enable sons to transcend a child’s life.
In Blade Runner, for instance, the frightened turned pathological replicant Roy Batty breaks into the corporation that created him (his “Garden of Eden”), where he confronts his “maker” to discuss the facts of life.
Tyrell: I’m surprised you didn’t come here sooner.
Roy: It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker.
Tyrell: And what can he do for you?
Roy: Can the maker repair what he makes.
Tyrell: Would you like to be modified?
Roy: Stay here—I had in mind something a little more radical.
Tyrell: What—what seems to be the problem?
Roy: Death.
Tyrell: Death. Well, I’m afraid that’s a little out of my jurisdiction, you—
Roy: I want more life, Father.
Batty kills his father brutally when he learns Tyrell cannot erase his mortality. But he cannot remove the angst of living with the knowledge of death. Suffering is essential in finding his purpose.
In our current world—filled with tragedies, war, plague, death, and terror—we are reminded of these evolutionary arcs. However, as a species, when we reach a level of leisure or luxury, we are lost. We escape suffering by turning to idols, money, fame, and technology—our golden calves. Those outmoded adult tales of character no longer matter to the young, who seem to live in a perpetual adolescence that has rejected its legacy and is crippled by a belief that one can live without “strings”—family, honor, ownership, commitment, purpose, and the personal tools to persevere.
Outside forces—whether money, pleasure, or political power—are the “strings” that control a puppet but not a real boy. Nature provides a boy’s father with an early mirror to face himself. Still, at some point, every wooden individual must confront the imperfections of his own father. Shakespeare’s Hamlet reminds us he is “one who will also die” or must die metaphorically—psychically—to continue on to a healthy life and not just target the fathers of generations past (symbols of boundaries) as the reason for existential pain. Gepetto was imperfect, filled with flaws. He did not, however, cause Pinocchio to escape to Pleasure Island, shoot pool, smoke cigars, or play video games.
As Peterson would add, story archetypes about a wooden boy confronting fire-breathing whales and growing donkey ears to save a father to restore his place of responsibility are absurd. None of it makes rational sense. But in thinking about it, at its unconscious core the son must embrace (even save) the father in order to transcend him and complete his journey to a new life. It’s also true for Simba, who sings “Hakuna Matata.”
"Hakuna Matata!
What a wonderful phrase
Hakuna Matata!
Ain’t no passing craze
It means no worries
For the rest of your days
Yeah, sing it, kid!
It’s our problem-free philosophy
Hakuna Matata!"
Simba learns, as did Hamlet, via an apparition of the betrayal of his father. Hell, these coming-of-age stories are older than the Bible. They delineate evolutionary patterns of development. Even animals shorten their offspring’s length of dependency and ween young from mother. To thwart these archetypes means a Faustian pact with the unreal, only to break down traditional life further while inviting state tyranny, crushing the independent soul in the name of a utopian world to come. As Peterson (and Jonathan Haidt) warn, those protected from suffering will undergo significant delays in maturity and will be traumatized—even paralyzed—when finding real evil in the world.
For Pinocchio, it comes in the form of the sinister Stromboli, who locks him in a cage of his own making. Yes, the wooden boy lives without worries or strings for a while, but also without money or pleasure—even freedom. A real boy free of strings does not do what he wants but what he ought to do. He learns from Jiminy Cricket (initials J.C., same as Jesus Christ) that he should “always let his conscience be his guide.”