The Gnostic Pinocchio

One of my tasks this summer was to complete a paper begun many years ago (I first presented it at the SBL Annual Meeting in 2003!). As I often do, I committed myself to finish the paper by agreeing to contribute it to a special volume of the journal Religious Studies and Theology in honor of my doktorvater Michel Desjardins, who recently retired. The origins of the paper go back to Michel’s 1995 Gnosticism class at Wilfrid Laurier University. He casually asked the class about analogues to the gnostic cosmogonies that would help readers understand and appreciate them. Eager to impress, I came up with the Pinocchio analogy and presented it to the class at our next meeting. I have used the parallels in my own Gnosticism classes ever since. Gnostic parallels to films are somewhat de rigueur these days, with lots of examples appearing in the past few decades (e.g., The Matrix, The Truman Show), but back in 2003 this one was somewhat novel and I have found that it works really well in my classes—it’s the one thing the students remember! What follows is a shortened version of the submitted paper (notes and citations have been removed also for ease of reading).

Disney famously said, “We just make the pictures, and let the professors tell us what they mean.” He was adamant about keeping religion out of his films. True to Disney’s word, except for occasional christening and wedding ceremonies, there are few explicit religious elements in his early films. In Pinocchio, Gepetto kneels as if to pray, but wishes on a star; Snow White’s title character lives in an Eden-like state before encountering an evil witch with a tempting apple; and the protagonists in both films experience a death and resurrection. Religious iconography is absent, but the films do draw upon theological vocabulary—faith, belief, miracle, blessing, sacrifice, and divine—and contain components of Christian ethics. The “professors” who tell us what the films mean have found much in them useful for showing how they reflect Disney’s Christian ethics, changes in American culture, and, sometimes unintentionally, a variety of religious texts and traditions—including Gnosticism.

Disney’s Pinnochio, like many of his studio’s animated films, is based on a previously existing story—in this case, the Adventures of Pinocchio written by Carlo Collodi (1826–1890; born Carlo Lorenzini). The adventures appeared in serial form in the Giornale per i bambini from July 1881 to January 1883 and became an immediate success. The original story is a somber morality tale intended to tell its readers how to be “proper boys,” but proper in the sense of obedient, of conforming to a polite or civilized social code. In the story, Gepetto seeks to carve a puppet out of wood so that he can use it to tour the world and earn his bread, thus elevating himself out of poverty. Unbeknownst to Gepetto, the wood he purchased could speak, and the puppet he created was ill-behaved. Gepetto wants to send Pinocchio to school, and like the Italian lower classes he represents, sells his coat to buy him an alphabet book. Otherwise, Gepetto is not kind to Pinocchio; the hot-tempered man is even imprisoned for fear that he would hack the disobedient puppet to pieces. Pinocchio, like most children, is in no hurry to take on the responsibilities of adulthood, so he runs away from home and gets into a series of misadventures. The lessons he learns along the way take their toll on the puppet: his feet are burned off, he is chained, and he is even hanged. He is aided at times by an unnamed talking cricket (one of many talking animals in the story, including a chick, a fox, other puppets, a white blackbird, a cat, and a falcon). At their first meeting the cricket wants to tell the puppet “a great truth”: “woe to those children who disobey their parents and willfully leave home” (ch. 4). Pinocchio eventually gets angry and smashes him against a wall with a mallet, but he mysteriously reappears at several junctures in the book. He is aided also by a blue-haired fairy who, originally introduced as the ghost of a little girl who haunts a house (ch. 15), becomes a surrogate mother to the puppet.

Disney, reportedly, was not aware of Collodi’s book. His staff brought it to his attention when he was looking for a subject for a new feature after the success of Snow White. Among the changes made to the book were the creation of several new characters (including Figaro the kitten and Cleo the goldfish), and the revision of others, such as Gepetto who becomes a kindly, lonely (and no longer abjectly poor) craftsman. But none are changed more radically than the talking cricket, who was given a name (Jiminy Cricket), a more defined role (Pinocchio’s conscience), and takes centre-stage in all of his scenes. The name was given to him by Disney from a substitute expletive for Jesus Christ that, according to the OED, goes back to at least 1848.

Disney’s Pinocchio is simultaneously considered an adaptational travesty and a cinematic masterpiece. It was not well-received in Italy, particularly by the surviving members of the Collodi family who felt that the film misused the strong social satire of the original book. Changes were made also to reflect new conceptions of childhood, and the violence, such as the burning of Pinocchio’s feet and the killing of the cricket, was reduced. These changes were received positively by children’s book author Maurice Sendak. Reflecting on the original stories, he commented, “Children, Collodi appears to be saying, are inherently bad, and the world itself is a ruthless, joyless place, filled with hypocrites, liars, and cheats. Poor Pinocchio is born bad.” Expressed this way, Collodi’s world sounds, surprisingly, gnostic.

The opening scene of Disney’s Pinnochio bears a number of similarities to the gnostic creation myth. The film begins with Jiminy Cricket coming into town, his path led by the Evening Star. He comes to the cottage of Geppeto, the woodcarver. To cure his loneliness, Gepetto has created a puppet that looks like a boy. Before going to bed, he makes a wish on the Evening Star that his wooden boy would come to life. The associations with the gnostic myth up to this point are fairly easy to spot: Gepetto is a craftsman (demiurge); he makes a creature on the pattern of a human and wants to make it “real”; and he wishes on the star to make it happen (which implies some awareness of the heavenly realm as a location of power). While Gepetto sleeps, the Evening Star transforms into the Blue Fairy and descends into his home to make his wish come true. The Fairy is similar to Sophia, who dwells in the heavenly realm but sends a series of helpers to bring awareness to humans trapped in the world below. Part of the Blue Fairy’s power goes into the puppet, but he receives only a semblance of life; the full transformation is in the puppet’s hands. To become real, Pinocchio must prove himself brave, truthful, and unselfish, and be able to tell right from wrong; in other words, he must obtain certain knowledge for his salvation. Jiminy Cricket is recruited to be Pinocchio’s helper. He is to be Pinocchio’s conscience and is bestowed the title “Lord High Keeper of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong.” Jiminy Cricket thus becomes an agent for Sophia, and appropriately enough, his name has the same initials as Jesus Christ and, as noted earlier, “Jiminy Cricket” was used as a substitute for “Jesus Christ” to prevent blasphemy.

There are several distinct pedagogical advantages to using Disney’s Pinocchio to teach about Gnosticism. First, it helps students understand and retain some essential elements to an otherwise overly complicated myth; they come out of the class remembering at least that the world is governed by a lesser, oblivious deity, that a spark of the power from the heavenly realm dwells in humans, and that to achieve salvation, humans are aided by a helper appointed to them by the higher realm. Second, they get a sense of what an early Christian may have felt when first hearing gnostic interpretations of stories from Scripture. The early Christians knew Genesis and the Gospels’ portrayal of Jesus, just like modern viewers know the story of Pinocchio. But along comes someone who encourages them to see the story a different way, to perceive truths hidden in their cherished traditions. Jiminy Cricket revealed as Jesus Christ is a “Eureka!” moment that they will not soon forget. For Christian Gnostics, there was no going back to conventional interpretation of scriptures, and students who become acquainted with the “Gnostic Pinocchio” will no longer view the Disney film as merely an “inspiring tale about the magical power of believing your dreams” (as the packaging for the original pressing of the video cassette states). Third, students may be able to view Gnosticism with more sympathy and not be so ready to reject it as weird and heretical. There must be something universal about the plot of the gnostic creation myth if it somehow connects second-century texts like the Apocryphon of John with an animated adaptation of an Italian children’s book by a twentieth-century Christian filmmaker.

And certainly these commonalities are accidental. Except for Collodi’s cynical worldview, there is nothing gnostic about the original tale of Pinocchio. And there is no reason to suspect that Disney and his collaborators drew upon gnostic literature in crafting their story of the Blue Fairy’s animation of the puppet. But these facts only underscore how religions continually re-interpret and adapt texts, even the texts of other traditions, for new purposes and new situations. No other analogy of gnostic myth in modern film—The Matrix, Bladerunner, The Truman Show, among many others—works as well to illustrate that lesson than Disney’s full-length “silly symphony.” As Michel Desjardins demonstrated to all of us who were lucky to be his students, with a little magic a gifted teacher can make the ancient world come to life. It makes no difference who you are.