Lions and Tigers and Men - Oh My!
By: Joe Lawrence
Tags: Film, Parenting, Masculinity, Family, Men

Alan’s relationship with Peter provides another illustration of the struggle between boy and man. The boardgame gets stolen by a pelican, and Peter saves the day with real daring. Again, Robin Williams captures a lot without dialogue. His first reaction is elation, his face showing childlike joy at Peter’s achievement.

This morphs into something dark, as he realises with shame that this boy looks up to him, and that he has no idea how to even congratulate him, let alone show him affection. His natural instinct is thwarted by the narrowly defined role he must perform as an ‘adult-male’, a role he is utterly ill-equipped to play.

Faced with this discomfort, Alan retreats to the only model of masculine authority he knows, and tries out some of his father’s old teachings on a distressed Peter:

‘You don’t cry alright? You keep your chin up … You have a problem: you face it like a man.’

Due to the boardgame’s mischief, Alan gives this little pep-talk while Peter is gradually transforming into a monkey. Perhaps the lad’s increasingly simian features remind Alan that this brand of masculinity is a backwards step down the evolutionary chain, perhaps he just has a change of heart. Either way, he apologises, and makes the subtextual conflict explicit with the line, ‘Twenty-six years buried in the deepest darkest jungle and I still became my father’. From this point, Alan rejects harsh masculinity. Having understood the pain his father felt, believing he’d caused his son’s disappearance, Alan is determined to avoid making the same mistakes. He becomes relentless as the guide, defender and comforter of Judy and Peter. He’s tactile and affectionate with them, learning to hold their hands and hug them when they’re scared. Alan finds a softer, kinder form of fatherhood that also includes being strong and protective, in the patched-together family he’s become one quarter of. He wouldn’t get far, however, without his other half; an unsung cinematic heroine: Sarah Whittle.

Sarah’s journey from traumatised neighbourhood-weirdo to fearless adventurer, and a kind of emotional compass for Alan, is a compelling character-arc of its own. As a child, no one believed her account of Alan’s disappearance, and now she’s a reclusive fortune-teller who’s spent thousands of hours in therapy. She’s the archetypal truth-telling woman cursed with a story no one believes. While the film never quite suggests Sarah is an actual prophetess, she does articulate some of the film’s key insights, including an almost throw-away, off-camera line in which she suggests one way Alan and Van Pelt might resolve their conflict: ‘Have you ever thought about just sitting down and talking about your differences?’. The line functions as little more than a set-up, and Alan dismisses her advice on the grounds that ‘the man has a gun’. Later on though, Alan will remember Sarah’s wisdom, when he returns to the ‘real’ world and his real father.

At the film’s climax, we see the extent of the division the row between father and son has caused, as an earthquake from Jumanji literally splits the house in two. Adult-Alan swings through the collapsing mansion to retrieve the game, landing on the floor in front of the fireplace — the exact position he was in when he started the game as a boy. With the thrill of being one roll away from winning, he picks up the dice, and then, right when we’d almost forgotten about him, Van Pelt arrives. He catches Alan on his knees, in front of the fire, playing the game. Alan looks and feels ‘just like a child’.

The frightening man has caught the boy. Playtime is over, it’s time for humiliation and punishment.

Van Pelt taunts Alan, forcing him at gunpoint to drop the dice, one of which rolls out of reach among the ruins of the home. It seems now there’s zero chance of finishing the game. ‘I’m terrified’, Alan admits, acknowledging fear but refusing to run because ‘my father always told me you should face what you’re afraid of’. In facing Van Pelt, a distorted reflection of his father, Alan goes some way to redeeming him: his father had his faults, but he was real. He wasn’t a cruel, violent, scarecrow-parody of a man, only able to exert authority over frightened children because he carries a comically oversized gun, and hides under the mask of Alan’s father’s face.

‘You’re finally acting like a man’, Van Pelt sneers, ‘Any last words?’. At that moment, the die rolls to a stop. Alan has done it: his piece slides magically into the winner’s position. To undo the damage of twenty-six years, he needs to utter one word: ‘Jumanji’. When he does, Van Pelt makes a fantastic face, and an even better noise. It’s not a ‘What?’, it’s not quite a ‘Huh?’; the best I can transcribe it is ‘Ung?’, which says it all really.

It’s the noise of toppled authority, impotent incomprehension, the sound of a hyper-aggressive buffoon faced with everything about the world he’d rather shoot than try to understand.

And shoot he does, firing one last bullet at Alan and Sarah, who stand united. It’s too late though: the bullet, the gun, and Van Pelt with them are all sucked back into the nightmare world of Jumanji. Van Pelt’s fate is as Sarah unwittingly prophesised earlier in the film, when she tried to explain Alan’s emotionally stunted behaviour to Judy and Peter:

‘When you carry around so much repressed anger it attracts a lot of negative energy, and … things happen, like ending up in the jungle’.

For Van Pelt, and anyone for whom anger is the only emotion they’re comfortable expressing, fate is sealed: things happen.

We return to 1969, and the child Alan baffles his father with a hug, repairing a conflict that has only lasted five minutes from the father’s point of view, but which Alan says ‘feels like a lot longer to me’. Alan apologises for promising never to talk to his dad; the wall of silence comes down, and Alan’s father admits, ‘I was angry. I’m sorry too’. They’re both rewarded for apologising: Sam instantly becomes more flexible, stating ‘You don’t have to go to Cliffside if you don’t want to’, before making the offer: ‘Let’s talk it over tomorrow: man to man’.

Sam’s on the right track: he’s offering his son a conversation with equal status. Gracious though this offer is, it’s a distortion of their relationship, and Alan recognises this. As Peter showed him in the future, the truth is what’s needed, even if it’s not as comfortable as the fantasy. In the face of a man not threatening you with a gun, ‘sitting down and talking about your differences’ is a pretty good idea, but it starts with acknowledging that those differences do exist. Alan doesn’t want to be equals, he wants the relationship to be what it truly is, so he asks for a different conversation: ‘How about father to son?’

Sam instantly agrees, with Jonathan Hyde conveying a beautiful warmth, as the man begins to be released by the boy from a distorted reality, and a distorted version of masculinity.

It ends at Christmas, as we go back to the future in the now-repaired timeline. Alan and Sarah are happy and expecting a baby. Alan’s father is alive; the town has continued to prosper, and after twenty-six years of waiting, Alan and Sarah meet Judy and Peter again, and slyly continue to protect them — not by becoming their parents, but by preventing their real parents from taking the skiing holiday that led to their deaths in the alternate timeline. Broken things are put back together: all is well.

Jumanji suggests, in a very entertaining way, that with patience and the right kind of conversations, lives can be saved if we broaden what it means to be ‘a man’. To be a man, or an adult of any gender, should include much more than strength, silence, and reliance on anger as the only emotion worth expressing. You need to be able to cry, to express joy, to hug, to play, be scared, be elated, and to know that all of these are OK. Above all, you need to be willing to stand up for, and value, those smaller and more vulnerable than you.

In the end, Van Pelt is a fantasy of masculinity that wants to silence women, and trap men and boys in cages. We can begin to set ourselves free by embracing the more vulnerable parts of our nature. If we do this, Jumanji suggests, however frightening it may be, we can change the game from one where so much is lost, to one where, if we just keep playing, everybody wins.