The Complete Peanuts Part 2
In the second of two extracts from The Complete Peanuts, we feature Hal Hartley’s foreword to the 1965-1966 volume.
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When approached to consider writing an introduction for this volume of The Complete Peanuts, I asked if I could have a collection of strips to ponder from the early-to-mid seventies; that is, from when I was an adolescent and young teenager. I wanted to see if there was evidence in those daily strips of the world I remember trying to get my bearings in.
There is. It’s subtle, but it’s there. Perhaps it’s the very sparseness of the Peanuts world — the anywhere at anytime simplicity of its universe — that allows us to see the world we ourselves actually move through. It provides a mirror into which we can pour our preoccupations and memories. The characters are types at once perennial and contemporary. When i read these strips now, I sense the times in which they were written and drawn. I sense the characters to have been shaped by an awareness of the real world that Charles Schulz moved through as well. I’m sure one can read through all of Peanuts and see nothing more than a continuing insight and feeling about kids and people of all times in all places. And that, in itself, would be fine. But I’m afraid I can’t see them as simply that. These kids are American and the world that is palpably moving around just outside the frame of the panels affects and adjusts things they say and do.
For instance, Lucy and Peppermint Patty are hanging around and Lucy suggests that they both go get their ears pierced. Patty turns to her friend and calmly explains that she has no doubts about her femininity — in just those words, that simply. The complete lack of an attempt to loosen up the language into something mroe natural is, for me, terribly funny. Buy maybe also there’s a hint of exasperation, an honest fatigue with one’s efforts to come to grips with the issues of the day — in this case the daily application of a feminism that was still new in the seventies. (I remember my own urgent conference with my pals about whether we should call our new teacher “Miss” or the new “Ms” and what, after all was “Ms” an abbreviation for, if anything…)
I know little about Charles Schulz. But reading through these stacks of strips from the early and mid seventies now, in 2007, I definitely hear his voice. The author behind the scenes I hear seems a modest, hardworking, sharp-witted, observer of human nature, probably more conservative than not, but hard to pigeonhole. His is an independent sensibility; polite, but unflinching when it comes to illustrating our common foibles, quietly demonstrating the hollowness of much conventional wisdom, capable at times of what I can only call absurd realism and which I could easily convince myself I decided to steal and use for my own purposes fifteen or sixteen years later on.
He is sometimes harsh. But then the victims are so durable.
I’m a filmmaker whose films are often referred to as funny, depressing, thought-provoking, poetic, shallow, stylish, or just plain bad. One learns to live with being categorised. But after twnety years at it, I’m still surprised that the mix of humor, critical thinking, dramatic structure, formal play, and philosophical musing that characterize films like mine is still seen to be so unusual or idiosyncratic. As if there were no precedent for it. But, there is: Peanuts.
I had a writing teacher in college, Howard Stein, who used to say that as we get older we acquire rust and that children see and feel everything more immediately before the rust sets in. He urged that in our writing we try to hold on to some of that childishness that allows for these unmediated impressions. This made sense to me right away and I began writing in earnest for the first time in my life. And almost immediately I felt the excitement and potential of arranging childlike observance alongside mature, adult, consideration.
Because certainly, as a kid, I learned that people almost never say what they mean, at least, not exactly. We learn, if out of nothing else but kindness, to circumnavigate painful topics; divisive issues are flirted with by saying something seemingly unrelated that, however, when heard under the right circumstances, reveals its true meaning. All this I was taught to call irony and it was once considered the height of wit. These days it is often frowned upon and suspected of being anti-social and the disdainful expression of someone who thinks he or she knows more than anyone else. Personally, I still believe irony to be one of the most valuable and generous exercises of an engaged intelligence eager for a good laugh.
Peanuts was ironic and kind. And I knew this at thirteen.
Growing up in the seventies, I laughed and sighed a good deal at the cryptic, curiously ambiguous wisdom of the Peanuts comic strip. These little kids, who were somehow also not little kids, said what they meant, exactly. Charlie Brown so acutely expressed in words a self-esteem so low, I was often amazed Schulz left him standing at the end of four panels. Frankly, I was often puzzled. I didn’t know whether to laugh or sigh.
And so I wonder now to what extent my sense of humor, my thinking about life, and my storytelling inclinations might have been influenced by my regular and casual contact with Charlie Brown and his world at the age of thirteen or fourteen. The Peanuts gang were as regular a part of those days for me, sitting there on my front step with the newspaper, as were John Lennon and Yoko Ono being castigated for one thing or another, as much as Watergate or Nixon’s trip to China. I was just as intrigued and confused by some of these strips as I was by Jane Fonda visiting North Vietnam and Salvador Allende’s overthrow in Chile.
The world pours over a thirteen-year-old’s head like so much water. The big picture is hard to see. But the details stick, and the questions remain. And the stark admission in Peanuts of not knowing really all that much at all was its own sort of wisdom.
It’s hard to say exactly how Peanuts may have influenced me. No one had to explain to me why it was funny. I laughed wuthout guidance. It came naturally.
