Charles Schulz, author of the Peanuts comics, had this to say about his creation Lucy in 1985: “She is annoyed that it’s all too easy,” he wrote. “Charlie Brown isn’t much of a challenge. To be consistent, however, we have to let her triumph, for all the loves in the strip are unrequited; all the baseball games are lost; all the test scores are D-minuses; the Great Pumpkin never comes; and the football is always pulled away.”
Like most of Peanuts, in my view one of greatest contributions to visual art in the 20th century, this sentiment that can be reapplied and extended to cover large swaths of human existence. All of us strike out in the ninth or arrive at the party on the wrong day, and nobody ever really works up the courage to talk to the little red-haired girl. The reason Schulz’s strip lasted for 50 years and is now a feature film grossing more than $110m, fully 15 years after its parent strip’s demise, is that Schulz was unswerving in his commitment to incredibly harsh answers to the kinds of existential questions eight-year-olds are not yet afraid to ask.
Schulz is hard on Charlie Brown. Though he is the butt of every joke, he also remains the one with the most to learn: in A Charlie Brown Christmas, he laments the commercialization of the holiday only to have Linus explain to him, using a passage from the Bible, that the point of the whole exercise isn’t just against commercialism but totally uninterested in it.
It’s not that we feel our smallness in relationship to the larger forces of the universe with too much sensitivity, according to Peanuts – it’s that our suffering indicates that we don’t yet feel small enough. Charlie Brown, Schulz seems to be saying, kind of deserves it.
The 30-minute TV special, a mainstay on American TV during the holidays, is technically very rough – much more so than the movie – and succeeds largely on the merits of voiceovers from actual kids (as Schulz insisted) and Vince Guaraldi’s gorgeous score. But it’s also one of the few times in the long history of Peanuts in which the strip’s anxieties made it with full force on to the screen. The people around us are rarely going to validate us – the best Lucy can do is to observe at the program’s tenderest moment: “Charlie Brown is a blockhead, but he did get a nice tree.” Linus’s reading from the Bible is encouraging, but it’s not very personal; perhaps that’s the point. From the right perspective, Schulz taught us, it is not just our persons but our problems that seem insignificant.
This is also why I didn’t much like The Peanuts Movie.
From the moment the film was announced, I think everyone who loves the strip felt a certain trepidation; the first trailer featured a shot of Charlie Brown’s head with Also Sprach Zarathustra playing in the background, the kind of cultural reference that is troubling both because Peanuts was fairly light on lazy reference humour (which has become inescapable in children’s films) and because it’s a callback to an arty 47-year-old sci-fi flick in an ad for a kids’ movie. Then there was the CGI itself, which was worrying. If Peanuts is anything, it’s handcrafted, and if computer-animated children’s films are anything, it’s increasingly slick and branding-driven.
Visually speaking, the movie is beautiful – stunningly, improbably beautiful in its perfectly orchestrated compromise between the world of modern animated movies and the excruciating craftsmanship of Schulz’s comics: the characters’ bodies are rendered by computer as a kind of ersatz stop-motion (The Lego Movie did this to great effect, too), solid but not fleshy; the faces recreate Schulz’s astonishingly expressive line with simple two-dimensional animation, which is perhaps the most impressive feat of all.
The problem turns out not to be aesthetic, exactly, but philosophical: at the end of The Peanuts Movie, Charlie Brown is carried on his oft-destroyed kite up over the heads of the heedless kids who are between him and the little red-haired girl, a recent transfer student with whom he has fallen in love and who is about to leave on the bus for summer camp after only a few months in Charlie Brown’s presence.
Miraculously, he catches her before she leaves (a first) and she tells him that despite his many extravagant mistakes, she believes he’s a good person and she’s been impressed by his kindness over the few weeks she’s known him. They’ll see each other again; hope isn’t crushed, it’s validated and briefly deferred, and all the football-snatching in the world can’t kill it.
One of the many odd things about Peanuts is that you can’t separate that distinctive line from physical and existential pain. Schulz lived with a condition called “essential tremor”, which caused his hand to shake whenever he tried to hold it still; it’s probably one of the most recognisable characteristics of his style. There’s a slight waviness to his drawings that becomes distinctive and then overtakes his work as the condition grows worse and the artist’s mastery of his craft becomes more complete.
By the late 1980s, Schulz had incorporated his affliction as fully as possible into his linework, and you can often see drawings in which the tremor is barely evident, when a quick line perfected by decades of practice (Charlie Brown’s head, for example) is executed in a single flawless stroke, while other, finickier details (the shading on Lucy’s hair, Snoopy’s constantly evolving nose) wobble like a footfall on a seismograph. He got the effects with a single nib, a Radio 914; when Esterbrook discontinued the 914, Schulz bought its entire unsold stock so he’d be sure he had the tools he needed for the job.
In all his comics, Schulz seemed to be trying to tell us something about himself; often it was something audiences would have preferred not to know had he expressed it in a more direct way.
Perhaps it took some of the magic of Peanuts away to know that behind the carefully honed facade of midwestern niceness, Schulz was as flaky and temperamental an artist as any, an angry depressive in a bad marriage who sent his 25-year-old mistress Tracey Claudius love letters filled with cartoons. In them, he drew himself as Charlie Brown, sometimes using the drawings as punctuation (expressive round heads dot the correspondence), sometimes as full illustrations. At the time of the affair, he gave Snoopy a simultaneous affair with “that girl beagle” who “has the softest paws”.
The letters to Claudius were expected to sell for between $250,000 and $350,000 at auction through Sotheby’s. Instead, in a perfectly Schulzian dashing of high hopes, they went unsold.
So if Schulz had trouble conceiving of his namesake or indeed himself as a success (and by all accounts, he considered himself a failure even at the heights of the strip’s popularity), he had Snoopy’s fantasy life to sustain him; and he had Schroeder’s undeniable genius, which no one except Snoopy appreciates, and to which Lucy, though she loves Schroeder, is blind. When Schulz got divorced, Charlie Brown kicked Lucy (who missed every fly ball) off the baseball team. Lucy always wins, as Schulz said, but in a very cruel way, Charlie Brown was constantly getting his own back.
If the Peanuts movie, sanctioned by Schulz’s own children, seems to gloss over some of the strip’s harder realities, surely it’s because they’re so obviously reminiscent of Schulz’s own flaws. But those flaws are as crucial to the strip as they were crucial to the man himself; fix them, and we let Charlie Brown off the hook. It’s no accident that everyone who reads Peanuts sees him- or herself in the strip’s constant punching bag – Schulz understood the aches and pains of the human condition, and he might even have understood his own culpability in them, in a roundabout way.
Peanuts was the way a difficult man dealt with a world that didn’t want to look at his imperfections, and for many readers, it was the way they did the same thing. In children’s entertainment, especially bad children’s entertainment, imperfections are presented as proof of essential goodness. That’s the trap The Peanuts Movie falls into at the very end, but it’s one Schulz himself never found even slightly attractive in his own work.
“Good old Charlie Brown,” observes Shermy in the very first strip to ever see print, on October 2, 1950.
“How I hate him.”
