SPECIAL FRIENDSHIPS: AN AWFULLY HONEST FILM
One of the many enjoyable aspects of Freeman's book is that one can swing so effortlessly from whole-hearted agreement to fierce opposition -- without ever endangering the good humour and enlightenment he offers. I was startled, for instance, earlier on when he mentioned in passing he loathed the term "male-bonding". Now I admit the term has a tendency to be bandied about by those embarrassing bear-hugging types, but the term itself I'd always thought blameless and benign.
But his views here on "The Lost Boys" are bang on the money, I reckon. An extraordinary production that managed to illuminate the enigma that was J.M. Barrie and his boys, without ever man-handling it into some gross Hollywood trope or other.
Freeman says Barrie had a "wistful veneration of boyhood", and was "completely in thrall to a romantic view of boyhood". I think that's a fair description of Barrie's emotional core, but it's equally significant that Barrie was quite sarcastically scathing of his own boy-infatuation. In fact this was the quality that fired the sharp, often dark wit which his boys found so attractive. Un-riddle me that!
Barrie certainly didn't romanticise his eccentric, somewhat marooned existence in Neverland. The paradox of his boy-love, an unarguably sexual phenomenon, being deeply and fundamentally celibate--well, that's a mystery beyond anyone's ken, even the subject's biggest thinkers such as Plato. But Barrie accepted it, and lived it with admirable courage, dignity, honour--and the all-important humour. A boysexual of any era, fraught or free, can't aspire to much better.
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