Here's the good news about The Peanuts Movie: Charlie Brown is still a blockhead. Not a parents-toss-rocks-into-his-trick-or-treating-bag type of blockhead, or a too-depressed-to-walk-upright one. But there's nonetheless a dim aura of despair swirling around him, and in 2015, when Charlie Brown is more likely to sell life insurance than bemoan his friendless existence, that counts as a minor victory.
All the same, there's something unmistakably—I would argue unacceptably—different about this Peanuts Movie Charlie Brown. Consider when he makes his way, for the thousandth time in Peanuts history, to a snowy baseball diamond. "I may have had trouble in the past flying a kite, and I may have never won a baseball game," he mutters to himself, "but it's not for lack of trying." As he builds snowmen on the playing field, he gives himself an inspirational pep talk: "My pitching has to improve if I come out here to my trusty mound under the snow every day… Charlie Brown is not a quitter!"
Predictably, the snowball he hurls toward home plate is promptly rocketed back to the mound, leaving Charlie Brown, stripped nearly bare, flat on his back. "It's going to be a long winter," he moans.
The outcome is familiar, but the inner dialogue is different. It begs the question: Since when is Charlie Brown so self-aware?
I've always rooted for Charlie Brown to fail miserably. Does this make me a bad person? Okay, maybe. But at the same time, Charles M. Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, said that Charlie Brown could never be a winner because it would "destroy the foundation of the strip." At least in the first few decades of Schulz's groundbreaking comic strip, which ran from late 1950 to early 2000, Charlie Brown defied the classic American credo that children can become whatever they want as long as they believe in themselves and work hard enough. Charlie Brown's repeated stabs at success resulted only in soul-crushing defeat. Far from sympathizing with him, his peers frequently treated him with scorn or indifference, which led to further bouts of self-loathing.
So when Charlie Brown triumphs, even in minor ways, it cuts against the truly subversive nature of his character. Even after countless viewings of A Charlie Brown Christmas, for example, I still get annoyed when the Peanuts characters, through some magical hand-waving, transform Charlie Brown's pathetic shrub into a lush-needled Christmas tree. I wish that special would conclude with Charlie Brown slinking away in shame, convinced that he'd killed his tree and ruined everyone's holiday.
I often return to a storyline from January 1973, in which Linus decides to organize a testimonial dinner to celebrate Charlie Brown's role as manager of the neighborhood baseball team. Despite their skepticism, various members of the Peanuts gang mail out invitations, prepare food, and even reach out to Charlie Brown's athletic hero, Joe Shlabotnik, a last-round draft choice in baseball's lowly Green Grass League. But in the end, no one can go through with it. Walking to the event, they realize they don't really admire Charlie Brown as a manager at all, so the entire evening would be hypocritical. Charlie Brown, seated next to Woodstock in an otherwise empty banquet hall, his eyes ringed with sadness, says to himself, "I would have enjoyed even a hypocritical dinner."
Schulz didn't play this conclusion for laughs or offer a silver lining for his heartbroken protagonist. On the contrary, the unwillingness of the Peanuts characters even to feign appreciation for their manager deeply wounds and humiliates Charlie Brown. And that's exactly what sets him apart from his fellow cartoon losers. Daffy Duck can have his beak blasted off and emerge in the next scene with no lasting physical or psychic damage. Not so for Charlie Brown. He internalizes and carries with him every slight, insult, and thwarted ambition. Often, after an especially devastating setback, he shambles away in a slump-shouldered shuffle, his bulbous head nearly scraping the sidewalk. His premature hair loss seems entirely reasonable under these circumstances. The beauty—and tragedy—of Charlie Brown is that, amid an endless and repetitive string of cartoonish defeats, he suffers recognizable human pain.
For me, only this iteration of Charlie Brown resonates. Sure, I get that there are others. There's the mellow, contemplative, and rather dull version who sleepwalked through the strip's final decade. Then there's the cheery, somewhat bemused version who smiles tentatively at drugstore shoppers from all manner of plush and plastic products. Those are fine. I don't begrudge Schulz for going soft in his golden years, or for launching a mass-merchandising empire that will keep his great-great grandchildren off the bread line. They're understandable decisions. What I can't stand are the escalating attempts to turn Charlie Brown's failures into teachable moments, to insist that the greatest loser in American literature has been a secret winner all along.
Which brings me back, finally, to The Peanuts Movie, the first motion picture to feature the Peanuts characters in more than 35 years. It opens with a familiar scenario: Charlie Brown trying once again to fly a kite. It's a hopeless proposition, especially in the aftermath of a snowstorm. But Charlie Brown has rarely let hopelessness deter him. Watching the spectacle unfold, Linus yells out some words of encouragement: "Remember, it's the courage to continue that counts!" The kite winds up in its usual spot: snarled among the branches of the notorious kite-eating tree.
Charlie Brown's inability to keep a kite aloft or throw a decent fastball remains intact, but they're tempered by a newfound self-awareness. Charlie Brown's resilience has always been the most admirable aspect of his personality, but here's the catch: Neither he nor his peers had the maturity to realize it. No one patted Charlie Brown on the back after a lopsided loss and encouraged him to keep trying. His baseball team cancelled a banquet in his honor because they couldn't think of anything laudable to say about him as a manager! Consolation prizes are rare in the winner-take-all Peanuts universe. It's the outcome, not the effort, that matters.
But in The Peanuts Movie, the opposite is true. The characters' didactic pronouncements about perseverance at the start of the film signal to the audience the lessons they should learn from Charlie Brown's many setbacks. And these setbacks are either mild or not entirely his fault. He embarrasses himself frequently not because of any inherent deficiencies but because of his genuine if overeager desire to please. At times his klutziness and insecurities prevent him from flaunting his obvious talents. Charlie Brown most likely would have won both the school talent show and the dance contest had various unforeseen circumstances not arisen. In the end, Charlie Brown is rewarded for his sincere efforts with the admiration of his peers, who come to recognize a virtuous side of his character they'd previously overlooked.
The Peanuts Movie wants to have it both ways, keeping one foot in the past and one in the present by depicting him both as a loser and a winner, a blockhead and a hero. (Tellingly, the talking Charlie Brown figurine from McDonald's alternates between the phrases "Good grief" and "I can do this!") But by making Charlie Brown aware of his inner virtues, his anguish no longer seems so acute, and his disappointments don't cut so deep. What's more, the hard lessons he used to impart—endurance, stoicism, and empathy for life's losers, among others—are subsequently replaced by bland motivational trifles like "never give up" and "believe in yourself." And with that he becomes just another misunderstood striver in a kids' movie, swallowed up by the homogenizing, feel-good entertainment ecosystem that his character once defiantly resisted.
Which is why, I contend, we should root for Charlie Brown to fail. The failure wouldn't even have to be absolute (as much as I'd prefer it to be); a few notches below being carried off in triumph would suffice. Success strips away what made Charlie Brown memorable in the first place. He gains acceptance, and all it costs him is his sad, hopeless, unique soul.
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