LITERATURE II: RELIANCE

When you were younger, I’m sure you watched cartoons.

Of the many films that Disney have released, Pinocchio is often voted to be one of the best. On review aggregation websites it achieves 100%. The film enchants kids because it’s relatable. All kids are bad sometimes. How a kid acts next is important.

Pinocchio tried to lie his way out of trouble when caught, which made his nose grow longer and every lie became more apparent than the last. It’s at the end of the film, when Pinocchio rescues Geppetto from inside a whale that he made amends for the mischief caused.

This week we look back at the original influence for that film – a darker story serialised in a newspaper across 1881 and 1882 by Italian author Carlo Collodi – but we also put aside our main protagonist to take a look at someone often overlooked.

Geppetto.

A kind but foolish man, with a knack for creating things with his hands, Geppetto carved wood with ease and soon began puppeteering. Geppetto relied on these creations to earn a living.

Geppetto began to carve a block of pinewood into his newest marionette, Pinocchio. Though the rest of him was still to be carved, as soon as his feet were carved the puppet kicked Geppetto, and once completed and able to walk, he ran away. He was caught by the police, who believed him to have been mistreated and arrested Geppetto. In his absence, Pinocchio accidentally burned off his feet on the stove. Although he promised to try harder when Geppetto eventually returned and carved him new feet, he misbehaved straight away, skipping school to attend a puppet show. He met a fox and a cat who eventually attempted to ambush him for money, but when Pinocchio bit off the cat’s paw, they hanged him with a noose from a tree.

If you take away Geppetto’s kindness you can draw many parallels with the man I face this week. For he too relies on creations made of his own hand. He too believes he can use this skill to live his life, but instead is often held back by them. He too will fall victim to his reliance on these gadgets.

The Doctor relies so heavily on these gadgets that since Gameboy warped into his computer system and deleted the plans for them, he has become even more deranged. Of course, he could invent new gadgets, but that was his life’s work, deleted in an instant. He’s gone from depending on his gadgets like Geppetto to watching them hang from a tree, gone and useless. And whilst the publishers made Collodi extend his story for a happy ending where Pinocchio is rescued by the Blue Fairy, there is no such salvation for the Mad Scientist. His inventions are doomed to reside on an eternal scrapheap.

The obvious lesson is not to put all your eggs in one basket. Both Geppetto and The Doctor learned this the hard way. Always have a plan B, class. We’ll see if my opponent has one when he steps into the ring this week.

Class dismissed.