You're A Good Man Charles Schulz (2007)

Like most any American whose childhood fell between about 1950 and 2000, I grew up reading Charles Schulz ‘Peanuts’ in the funny pages of my local paper. I watched “It’s Christmas Charlie Brown” nearly every year, as well other ‘Peanuts’ specials, and thought for a distressingly long time that the lyrics to “Hang on Sloopy” where “Hang on Snoopy”. But on the whole, other then greatly admiring the Christmas special, I thought Schulz work was very simply, and had grown uber-repetitive over the course of nearly 19,000 strips. However in late 1999 I caught part of a profile of Schulz on an episode of 60 Minutes (only a few months before he died), that completed changed my perceptions of the man, and has had me fascinated with him ever since.

Schulz was something of a psychic wreak, ‘Peanuts’ being in fact a kind of fifty-year session of self therapy, centered on events of his childhood and acted out by characters both arch-typial and representative of people from the creators past, and aspects of his psyche. Linus was named for his best friend at the art school where he taught, as well as his inner philosopher. Schroder goes back to a youthfull enthrallment with a friends mothers playing of Beethoven. Lucy was his first wife. Charlie his somber demeanor and insecure sense of self. The ‘little red-haired girl’ the women who got away. Snoopy, his fantasy life who came to dominate the strip during the aftermath of his divorce.

One thing that the PBS documentary really brought home to me was the cruelty that was so central to ‘Peanuts’ and which Schulz himself kind of acknowledged the strip was about. The passive aggressive punch line of the very first strip set the tone for decades to follow: “Good old Charlie Brown, oh how I hate him.” There was meanness, rejection, existential fear, and indifference. These are dark and deep things to grapple with in a four panel about big headed children, but they resonate, because they are formative. I myself remember a period as maybe a three or four year old child, waking up every morning and feeling my heart to see that I was still alive. Where did I get this fear at such a young age when I didn’t really understand what death was? It’s the kind of youthful experience you might think that you had alone, that no one else could relate to. Yet we all had childhood fears, we were all concerned about rejection, and death and loneliness, and Schulz recognized that, and it resonated, remarkably well. Just as he resonates to me, representative of the psychic struggles of a life time.