Searching for Treasure Island

TREASURE ISLAND (1883), Robert Louis Stevenson Searching for Treasure Island PERRY NODELMAN Trnorur" Island. was my favorite book when I was young. Or so I've always believed-for when I sat down to reread it as an adult I found I was reading it for the first time. The pirate I'd loved, the one with the parrot on his shoulder and the evil glint in his one open eye, was Robert Newton's Long John Silver; it was the Disney film of Treasure Island (1950) I'd been recalling with such pleasure. Now that I've really read, Treasure Island,I still admire it. In it, Robert Louis Stevenson not only sets up the conflicts that govern all adventure stories; he cleverly refuses to resolve them, so that Treasure Island never tells us how to think about anything that happens in it. More exactly, it insists that we think two opposite things at once. The older Jim who tells the story of his youthful adventures is a hypocritical, sanctimonious, and decidedly undeserv- ing recipient of ill-gotten gains. He believes that pirates are thoughtless and unhygienic, and that people like his younger self who seek adventure are just plain foolish. Since Jim learned these very proper attitudes on his own advi:nturous treasure hunt, we shouldn't be surprised that he ends up speaking ofthe place they happened as "that accursed island."1 But we can doubt his honesty when he insists that "from the frrst look onward, I hated the very thought ofTbeasure Island" 1p. 83). In fact, he clearly enjoys not just the frrst sight but much that follows it. For readers thrilled by the events the older Jim describes with such distaste, the younger Jim's un- rTreasure lslozd (New York: New American Library, 1965), p. 2L2, All further references are to this edition. 58 TREASURE TSLAND (1883) 59 deniably less sensible attitudes ring truer. At the beginning,"and bored by his quiet life at home, he has "sea dreams the most charming anticipations of strange islands and adven_ tures" 1p. 48). And later, his enthusiastically unthinking ac_ tions undermine his older selfs priggish caution both by Jaus- ing all the excitement and by eventually saving the day. For ,,delightful readers, Treasure Island is the dreair" (p. Sli) ,lim expected because it allows us both to realize why we shouldn't lust after our own adventures and to neverthele-ss enjoy.limt; tp both hate Long John silver and to enjoy him ro" e*"ctly the same reason-his charming self-indulgence; to both under_ stand the usefulness of Jim's thoughtlessness and to see how dangerous it is; to both enjoy the eiciting danger ofthe island and to be thankful for the boring safety of our own ordinary lives. Almost everyone who talks about Treasure Island. sees it as a combination of something and its opposite. But whatever the terms_ 9f tlre oppositions, the distinguishing quality of Treasure Island is that it doesn't resorvelhem, Joesn,t c"ome down on one side or the other, doesn't even compromise. And that happens because ofthe vast difference in attiiude between the Jim who tells the story and the Jim the story happens to; it is a trick of narrative-technique that makes us come away from the novel feeling only the same delicious ambivarence we,ve felt all along. Films cannot easily duplicate such a technique. According to ,,the Seymour Chatman, in films dominant mode i- ;;;_ sentational, not assertive. A film doesn't say, 'This is the siate of affairs,' it merely shows you that state of affairs. The camera depicts but does not describe."2 Ljnless they resort to the clumsiness of a voice-over narration, firms cannot imply an ironic attitude to the things they show. so I wonderei"u"iiv if a film that contained the ru-" urr"rrt, as Treasure Island. could capture its ambivalence. MGM's 1934 version has none of it. Under Victor Fleming's direction Jackie Cooper's Jim Hawkins and Wallace n""f," Long John silver are unambiguous caricatures of boyish inrio- 2"What Novels Can Do That Films Can,t,,, ia Critical Inquiry, 1980, p. 128. Autumn 60 CHILDRENS NOVELS Al,lD THE MOVIES cence and unattractive evil. Imperviously innocent, Cooper's Jim perceives a charm in Beery's charmless Silver invisible to everyone else, including the audience. The film has it both ways: it asks us both to despise Silver and to admire Jim's ability not to notice how despicable Silver is. Neither Jim's innocence nor Silver's evil is the least bit ambiguous. But Cooper's Jim is clearly better off in his innocence of Silver's evil than we are in our mature knowledge of it. Jackie Cooper, the ultimate cute, blonde, gnome-faced kid, makes Jim so insufferably loveable that we know we have to admire his determined blindness to the truth. The lighting helps him; he never appears without an angelic halo around his head. Johnny Lee Mathin's script helps him too, by asking him to ((LTpon squeak "Bless my soul" or my soul" every time something surprises him-and he is a surprisable child. But it's not just his cuteness that makes him adorable. He is an orphan; his father is already dead as the film begins, and he seems to seek the father he lacks in Silver. At one point, he endearingly asks Long John if he'd like to come and live with him, and soulfully adds, "We'll always be mates, won't we?" After discovering Silver's treachery he suffers terribly, and milks our sympathy even more terribly. And in an overlong sequence at the end of the film, he allows Silver to sweet-talk him into letting him escape, tries to talk Silver out ofbeing wicked, and dissolves into tears yet once more when he discovers that Silver is trying to make off with part of the boodle. "You promised you wouldn't," he says, but he ends up offering Silver the money so he won't starve. Only the hardest-hearted of moviegoers could fail to be wbn over by all this cute innocence; finally, the film implies that even Silver, Beery's charmless malevolent Silver, has been won over too. Disarmed as sentimental music swells and Jim cries, he gives the poor kid his parrot and promises that some- day they'll go dig for treasure again. This is not the sagacious Silver of the novel, who sees something of his own talent for evil in Jim and says, "Ah, you that's young-you and me might have done a power of good together!" (p. 175). But then, this terminally ingenuous heart-wringer is not the Jim of the novel either. But Cooper's Jim does have a boyish courage that belies his TREASURE tstAND (1883) 61 adorable softheartedness, an astonishing resilience in the face of terror. It is ftis idea to search Billy Bones,s body; later, his theft ofthe ship is a deliberate act, not the accideni it i, i'th. novel. He is playing a game of heroism. When Jim does that in the novel, he quickly discovers the ugly side of such adven- ,,sick, tures; after he shoots Hands, he feels faint, and terrified.,, (p. 162). But Jackie cooper's Jim feels none of that. satisfred at job a well done, he leaves the ship loudly singing,,yo ho ho,' as he heads for the stockade; while he condemns Silrr"" for being so violent, he seems to feel neither guilt nor revulsion for his own murders. This Jim is not an ambivalent mixture of innocent tenderheartedness innocently blind to the meaning both of his own actions and those of others; he is merely ro*Jti-"" tender and sometimes not, and he leaves Treasure Island as blind as he was at the start. Thig so depends _ film on adoration of Jim,s innocence, his vulnerability, his childishness, that it totally distorts the story to support it. what attracts cooper's Jim to silver isn't silveri evil, nor silver's dismissal of civilized values-the enticingly dangerous things that attract Jim in the novel. Instead, it i; ; nonexistent niceness in silver that he refuses to stop believing in. Since the whole point of the film is that Jim constanily misreads silver, wallace Beery doesn't have to be attractive; and with his eyes constantly tucked up under his eyebrows, he is anything but. The script supports his one-sided interpretation by con_ tinually making silver obviously bad, and Jim oblivioo" to hi, badness, so that the worse Silver gets, the more we are sup_ posed to admire Jim's obtuseness. Furthermore, the forces of good are as ineffectual and as boring as stevenson himself depicted them, but without that manly courage that grudg_ ingly allows us to admire them in the novel. Finally, ftemingh Treasure Island turns into just another cute story about u n[" kid and a nasty man, tricked out in the standard pseudo-gusto o_f MGM in its heyday-silly jokes about sharks ana pirots that bite, Merrie Olde England country dancing andJolity, pirates suddenly dropping everything piratical in order io sing lustily in unison-a story devoid of taste and deficient of mean] ing, but with a heart as big as all Hollywood. John Hough's Lg72 Treasure Island, with Kim Burfield as 62 CHILDRENS NOVELS AND THE MOV1ES Jim and a gargantuan Orson Welles as Long John, is just the opposite: it has no heart at all.

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