When slapstick seizes you by the throat
What if Mr McGregor slipped Peter Rabbit myxomatosis?
Something to get him writhing good and hard in his little blue jacket, his wee heart pounding in his chest, as he gasps and fits his way to oblivion?
It’s a bit more Game of Thrones than Beatrix Potter, you might think, and you’d be right. Context matters.
And the context of the new Peter Rabbit movie is meant to be a slapstick chucklefest in which bunnies team up against a baddie who soon becomes less a personality than a pin˜ ata.
The problem that presents itself - or not, depending on which side you take - is that knowing he has an allergy to blackberries the bunnies fire them into his mouth putting him into anaphylaxis.
He uses his epi-pen and survives essentially unharmed.
It’s not hard to see why food allergy groups are alarmed at the thought of copycatting.
Like kids hiffing peanut-butter sandwiches into the face of a child with a serious, life-threatening allergy and doing so in the naive expectation that comedy will ensue.
Rather less compellingly, the complainants depict the movie as encouraging a more general and gratuitous let’s-bully-people-with-allergies approach.
One commentator calls the scene ‘‘heartbreakingly disrespectful’’.
Roll on the days when slapstick is respectful? Of course not.
But invoking the defence that everyone knows it’s fake doesn’t necessarily render any sense of caution redundant.
There are times when the the PC, and the anti-PC brigade can be equally facile.
Sure, say the harden-up commentators, you shouldn’t rain allergens on the vulnerable.
You shouldn’t drop anvils on them either, or set Home Alone-style mantraps, or doing inventive things with their entrails as Itchy does to Scratchy.
To which the concerned types can fairly remind us that to make the airy assumption kids automatically get the distinction between real and fake doesn’t always work.
Big brothers do, actually, poke little brothers in the eye, Three Stooges-style, expecting the result to be only a boink! sound.
And much as the Jackass movies carry the twee reminder that amateurs shouldn’t try such stunts, the fact remains in recent years defence lawyers have drawn that connection in courts in Hawera, Blenheim and Alexandra.
Less widely remarked upon is that in Peter Rabbit people are electrocuted, whacked in sensitive spots, hit in the face with rakes.
And bunnies have dynamite thrown at them - though of course that doesn’t work.
Look, this isn’t difficult. Kids need to learn about slapstick; that it’s to be enjoyed, not believed. Just explain the differences to them, good and clear.
To let kids be kids requires adults to be adults.
-Stuff