Nostalgia // Hook

Hook was much more of a punch in the nostalgic feels than I expected it to be. It’s hardly the film I watched all the time growing up (unlike Homeward Bound) but Spielberg is like the god of nostalgia so I should have known. Spielberg is an auteur whose authorship is marked by media featuring kids, usually kids with parental figure issues, blending of fantasy and reality, and hard hitting nostalgia. Hook is the perfect cocktail of this Spielberg syrup, featuring Robin Williams as an adult Peter Pan. A boy meant to never grow up grows up? Take a twenty two year old on the verge of college graduation and impending real life adulthood who forgot to take her anxiety medication that day and you have a bawling mess.

So let’s get academic: what made Hook so effective, almost formulaically effective, at eliciting such emotion? What is this film’s place in children’s media? Why is nostalgia worthy of study in our exploration of children’s media?

It starts with JM Barrie’s Peter Pan. Every western child knows the story: an eternal boy whisks a growing girl off to Neverland where she can live out her childhood fantasies without the interference of impending adulthood. Mermaids, pirates, Indians, Lost Boys, and fairies co-exist in a world of conflict made to look like child’s play. But then Hook asks the question “what if Peter grew up?” And Peter Pan becomes an absent father, successful lawyer, scared of heights, middle aged man. With this set up, we know we are in for a journey to return to Neverland, to return to Peter Pan, to return to childhood. Hook is about embracing the wonder of childhood, letting go of the adult world, and learning that even in becoming an adult, you don’t really have to grow up. It plays on a deep collective fear: the fear of growing old. My personal deepest fear, and I had forgotten until I saw Robin Williams in the iconic clothing of Peter Pan and was in some way disturbed.

Based on personal experience of this film affecting me more deeply as an adult than as a child, this film is not a film for children, but it is about childhood. I’m not sure Spielberg has ever made a film for children, but he sure has made a lot of films about children. And it’s made him an incredibly successful director. In a way, every experience viewing a film is an experience of nostalgia. By experiencing far away places, happy places, fantastical experience, we are in a sense longing for them, since we are unable to fully experience everything in our limited time and bodies. But what is worse than having never experienced something, is having experienced something you cannot get back. That’s the special brand of Spielberg nostalgia that is so gut-wrenching: a longing for childhood, a universally experienced place, that is long gone. Hook reminds us of this but also allows us to go back and experience that lost childhood again with Peter, allows us to get lost in Neverland again. This is the fundamental link between nostalgia and children’s media, and why this film holds a special place in children’s media. The ultimate peril of adulthood is nostalgia for what was experienced and lost.