The Departure

In 1950, a cartoonist named Charles Schulz introduced a boy named Charlie Brown to American newspaper readers. The strip was called Peanuts. Charlie Brown was immediately recognizable as someone for whom things do not work out. His kite kept getting caught in a tree. His baseball team never won. The little red-haired girl did not know he existed, or possibly knew and declined to escalate. Every single autumn, a girl named Lucy held a football for him to kick. He ran toward it every single autumn. She pulled it away. Every time.

He understood these things happened to him. He could not explain why they happened to him specifically. Neither could anyone else. This is what made the strip run for fifty years.

He had a dog, though. The dog's name was Snoopy.

Snoopy did not behave like most dogs in comic strips of that era. He did not fetch things or bark at the mail carrier. He slept on top of his doghouse and imagined himself to be a World War I flying ace. He had a literary career. He rejected Charlie Brown's dinner bowl on the grounds of presentation. He once entered a ice skating competition and won. He was, by any reasonable assessment of the word, an independent personality.

He was still there, though. This is what I want you to understand. Through every kite, every baseball game, every autumn football, every academic difficulty, every social failure — Snoopy was present. Not supportive in any conventional sense. Not especially warm. Present.

A new Peanuts movie is in production. I am telling you this as news, because it is news.

The official description of the film is as follows: the Peanuts gang goes on an emotional journey to New York City after Snoopy runs away from home.

I want to draw your attention to the phrase "runs away from home."

Snoopy has been with Charlie Brown since 1950. This is seventy-six years. In seventy-six years of newspaper strips, Saturday morning cartoons, holiday specials, and one theatrical film released in 2015, through every category of failure that the franchise could generate — Snoopy was there.

In the new movie, he leaves.

The studio has described what follows as an emotional journey. (I want to be precise: the studio chose the word emotional as a positive descriptor. They put this in the official description. They did not follow it with context.) The gang travels to New York City. They find him, presumably. The word "presumably" is mine, not theirs. The description ends before the resolution.

I should mention that this has happened before.

In 1972, there was a Peanuts film called Snoopy, Come Home. In that film, Snoopy left Charlie Brown and returned to a previous owner. Charlie Brown was devastated. This is documented — the film exists, it has a Wikipedia page, it was in theaters. Snoopy ultimately came back. Charlie Brown did not update his understanding of what the relationship could contain, because Charlie Brown does not update his understanding of things. This is his defining characteristic. He has heard the update. He has rejected it on intuition.

The new film is the second time the franchise has used this premise.

I want to be fair to the studio. The first time was fifty-four years ago. There is an argument that sufficient time has passed. There is also an argument that Charlie Brown's situation has been exactly the same for fifty-four years, and that he is, if anything, slightly more vulnerable to the departure now than he was then. These are both arguments. The studio has made a financial decision between them.

The official description says the journey will be emotional. The 1972 film, by the same logic, was also emotional. Charlie Brown was inconsolable for parts of it.

He recovered. He always recovers. This is the other thing about Charlie Brown: the recovery is built in. He is a machine for absorbing loss and returning to baseline. Schulz discovered this early and the franchise has been running on it ever since. The kite returns to the tree. Lucy returns to the football. The dog, it turns out, returns to the road.

I watched the announcement this morning. The image showed Snoopy and Woodstock walking away from the house. The house is behind them. Charlie Brown is not in the image.

The studio described this as the Peanuts gang on an emotional journey. Both words are doing their jobs.