Lions and Tigers and Men - Oh My!
How Jumanji plays against toxic masculinity and wins
In 1969, young Alan Parrish has an argument with his father. He resolves to run away from home, but not before playing a boardgame with his friend Sarah. Unbeknownst to Alan, the game Jumanji releases wild creatures, and other dangers from its jungle world, into the world of the player with each roll of the dice. On Alan’s turn, he’s sucked into the boardgame. He can only be released when another player rolls a five or an eight. Unfortunately, Sarah is alarmed by the sight of her friend being vaporised into a boardgame, not to mention by a swarm of jungle-bats that attack her, and she runs away. The game lies unfinished, and Alan remains trapped inside it, for twenty-six years.
Jumanji (1995) will be twenty-six years old in 2021, and it’s well worth a rewatch. Beneath its surface, it’s a poignant allegory with real wisdom about the trauma of growing up, centring on broken families that need putting back together. In particular, Jumanji explores the need for boys and men to overcome the darkest sides of their masculinity.
It starts with Alan’s father. Sam Parrish is a very important man. He runs a shoe company, lives in a massive mansion, and every day his son rides his bicycle past a towering statue of his ancestor General Angus Parrish, a man so monumental he’s now an actual monument. The problem is, Alan’s father appears to model himself, and men generally, on a stone edifice: strong and powerful, cold and remote. We hear an excerpt of the speech he’s rehearsing to give as Guest of Honour at some fancy function that evening, in which he reels off: ‘attributes that have exemplified the Brantford spirit since our forefathers first settled this town: hard work, determination, and a cheerful outlook’. Oh Captain, my Captain.
Meanwhile, his son, having been violently assaulted by five boys earlier that day, eats one of the saddest-looking meals in cinematic history alone at the dining table. In an attempt to comfort the boy, Alan’s mother and father inform him that, since he took his beating ‘like a man’, he’s ready to go to the Cliffside School for Boys, where Parrishes have been going for generations, where the main dormitory’s named after Alan’s grandfather, and where the curriculum presumably includes Marching, History (written by the winners), and Taking A Good Thrashing.
Alan is understandably reluctant, even saying, ‘Maybe I don’t want to be a Parrish’. This would be hurtful for any father to hear, but we’d hope an important man like Sam Parrish could resolve the situation without escalating it. Not this guy! ‘You won’t be’, he snarls, ‘Not until you start acting like one’. He storms out, huffing and puffing that Alan’s going to Cliffside whether he likes it or not, ‘And I don’t want to hear another word about it!’. Out in the car, Alan’s mother attempts to intervene, but the agitated Sam swiftly silences her with a barked dismissal, and they drive off.
Faced with overbearing masculine anger, Alan responds the only way a child can, with the vow ‘I’m never talking to you again’. Later, when playing the boardgame with Sarah, Alan attempts to put the dice away, spooked by the ominous sound of approaching bats. He’s then startled into dropping them, which the game counts as a roll, and which leads to his imprisonment in the jungle for twenty-six years. What startled him? A Grandfather clock. A symbol of patriarchal mastery of the universe, roughly the height of an adult male, causes all of young Alan’s problems. Perhaps I’m reading a bit much into it, but the images don’t lie. A supernatural boardgame is one thing, but that much oppressive masculinity looming over you every day is quite another. Alan never had a chance.
The drama picks up in 1995, with a new family at its centre. After Alan ‘disappeared’ that night, rumours abounded that his father went one step further than being a bit of a jerk, and brutally murdered the boy. The town has degenerated into a grotty wasteland, littered with thrift stores and discount porn outlets. Aunt Nora decides it’s the ideal spot to raise two recently orphaned children, and moves into the Parrish house with Judy and Peter. These children have different coping strategies in the face of their parents’ death. Judy gains a measure of control making up incredible stories of glamorous, globe-trotting parents, while Peter hasn’t spoken a word since they died. Like Alan, Peter reacts to frightening emotions by not talking. This, the film suggests, is what boys do.
They find Jumanji and begin playing. Peter rolls a five, releasing Alan from the game after twenty-six years. He’s pushing forty, utterly bewildered, covered in hair, and portrayed quite brilliantly by Robin Williams.
Casting is interesting here. Robin Williams’ stardom was central to getting the film made, though other actors were considered. It’s easy to imagine the film working well enough with Tom Hanks or Harrison Ford in the role; Jumanji doesn’t make much use of Williams’s unique comic genius. But in its approach to masculinity, he brings a different quality to the material, one that’s perhaps in even shorter supply among cinematic leading men today. There’s nothing conventionally, rigidly macho about Robin Williams: his whole persona is more fluid. The fact that young Alan grows up to be him is all the information we need to sense that Alan is becoming a different kind of man to what his father is used to, comfortable with, and expects him to be. This conflict over what kind of man Alan will become plays out through one of the film’s weirdest, most brilliant ideas. Among the obstacles released from the game is Van Pelt: a psychotic hunter intent on adding Alan to his collection of trophy-kills, for some reason. He’s played by Jonathan Hyde, the very same actor who portrays Alan’s father.
The Wizard Of Oz gets a hat-tip in Jumanji, when the jungle-monkeys watch through a TV-store window, admiring the flying monkeys’ attack on the Tin Man. In both films, characters and actors from the ‘real world’ return with different identities in the ‘fantasy-land’, a device most effectively used in stage versions of Peter Pan, where traditionally the same actor portrays both Mr Darling and Captain Hook. So, in both Peter Pan and Jumanji, emotionally brittle fathers are punished by being reincarnated as violent monsters: Mr Darling and Sam Parrish become Captain Hook and Van Pelt. Van Pelt is the only thing to emerge from Jumanji which adult-Alan fears, and the message of warning the game reveals before the hunter’s arrival strikes a personal note, as if it’s intended for Alan alone: ‘A hunter from the darkest wild, makes you feel just like a child’.
In these stories, children have to confront frightening spectres of manhood, before they can face their real fathers, who, it turns out, need saving themselves from such rigid versions of masculinity. Alan will have to face Van Pelt if he has any chance of facing his father, and going home.
We see just how much the 1995 world is ‘no-place-like-home’ in a sequence where the grown-up Alan roams the town in search of his parents. Not even General Angus Parrish is unscathed: his statue is coated in graffiti, a monument to collapsed masculine authority. Unsold shoes litter the grounds at the abandoned factory, and a homeless man inhabiting Sam’s old office tells Alan the truth about his father: Sam poured every resource he had into finding his son after he disappeared, but when all proved fruitless, Sam collapsed, and the town collapsed with him. ‘I don’t think anyone loved his boy more than Sam did’, the homeless man tells the unrecognisable Alan, and the look of regret Williams captures is beautiful: Alan realises he was too scared of the dark side of his father to see how much he truly loved him.
Alan discovers that his parents are dead in this timeline, and Peter and Judy briefly take on parental roles for this newly orphaned lost boy. ‘Our dad was in advertising’, Peter confides, cutting off another of Judy’s fanciful stories. Peter leads by example here, encouraging Alan to see the truth. Peter and Judy’s parents weren’t that exciting; Alan’s father was flawed, but he wasn’t a murdering monster. If Alan hadn’t disappeared, perhaps the son could have released the father from behaviour that caused them both pain.
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.
