Matteo Garrone (director). Pinocchio. 2019.
Jordan Peterson. The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. “Maps of Meaning: Marionettes & Individuals,” parts 1–3. 2020.
Vasiliy Rovenskiy (director). Pinocchio: A True Story. 2021.
Guillermo del Toro (director). Pinocchio. 2022.
Robert Zemeckis (director). Pinocchio. 2022.
Jordan Peterson is sitting in a room. Behind him are indistinct images, partly obscured in the dim light and cut off by the camera’s frame. (Perhaps they are the Soviet propaganda posters purported to cover every wall of his home — a constant reminder of the dangers of ideology.) Today he is being featured on the Rubin Report, a podcast hosted by the conservative commentator Dave Rubin. In the YouTube clip — described by its original poster, ManOfAllCreation, as “absolutely incredible” — Peterson recalls the moment in Disney’s Pinocchio when Geppetto “wishes on a star.” He stops, overcome with emotion. He starts again in a quavering voice, now speaking as Geppetto.
“What I want more than anything else,” he says, “is that my creation will become a genuine individual. It’s a heroic gesture.” He is getting all worked up. He is gesticulating with great force. “And that catalyzes the puppet’s transformation into a real! being!” he shouts. “We start as puppets. And so the trick is to get rid of your goddamn strings!”
When I was a little girl, I was uninterested in Disney princesses but obsessed with Disney’s animated Pinocchio. I slept under a Pinocchio bedspread, kept track of the days on a cloth Pinocchio calendar fastened to the back of my bedroom door, and, when so moved, hauled a three-foot-tall stuffed Pinocchio doll from my toy chest, bound its feet to mine with rubber bands, and danced frenetically around the living room to the Beatles until I collapsed, exhausted, on the rug beside my beloved puppet. I was an only child bullied mercilessly in school, and Pinocchio was a reliable friend in the absence of real boys.
I loved other characters in the movie, too, especially the Blue Fairy, the gorgeous blonde in a glittering dress who gives Pinocchio life. But I was equally entranced by one of the movie’s villains, Honest John, an effete talking fox who tries to lure Pinocchio to a place called Pleasure Island. No wonder: this hairy fairy and his bedraggled, soft-butch sidekick, Gideon the cat, embodied something far more thrilling than the Blue Fairy’s domestic purity. Danger and deviant indulgence? The thrill and horror of making the wrong choices? I was repulsed and enchanted. I regularly dragged my parents to Blockbuster to rent my favorite Disney’s Sing-Along Songs VHS, and sing along I would: “Hi-diddle-dee-dee, it’s Pleasure Isle for me!” That Pleasure Island was a place where lazy boys went to be turned into donkeys and sold to the salt mines only added to the allure. (Once, when I was about 6, I threw my mother into a panic when I told her how much I longed to be kidnapped. It would have been so exciting.)
As is the case for so many queer adults, it’s tempting to interpret these childhood preoccupations as flamboyant indicators of my future queerness. But I didn’t know anything then. Like Pinocchio, I was still so radically unformed. I knew nothing about boy-meets-girl and had barely accrued any gender yet.
Also like Pinocchio, I was desperate to be lovable, and somewhere along the way this yearning became bound up with a fearful obedience to rules and dictates, an absolute fixation on doing right, that persisted into my adult life. In graduate school, reading Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, I realized with horror that every word of Kant’s ethics felt simply and naturally true to me, that the austere, abstract sense of duty he described was the North Star that guided my life. Desire and sensuous pleasure had so little to do with how I made choices. Then again, I was the daughter of a philosopher who would one day declare to me that Kant’s categorical imperative was simply correct. It’s no wonder that at some point Jiminy Cricket and Immanuel Kant crawled deep into my psyche and never left.
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