No Shell, Just a Ghost

I cried at Snoopy Come Home. This might have been in or around its release year, 1972, though I was a very young boy then. More likely it was a few years later, sometime in the mid-’70s, in some sort of revival showing. Though I can no longer recall the specific theater, I vividly recall its textured velvet seats and their crisscross pattern under my hands—hands which I might have been keeping warm under my thighs (a habit I have always had). I was with my cousins, likely only two of the three girls, and my sister: four smooth-skinned, round, brown, ingenuous faces—four sets of eyes. My sister Kim’s eyes were kindly, receptive, engaged. Terri, my eldest cousin’s eyes: inquisitive and skeptical, made even more so by her glasses and her demeanor, which often fell somewhere between pensive and grave. The eyes of Gayle, the middle cousin, were always exuberant and alive. My own eyes were most likely wandering about, pretending to look outward, but actually looking inward, never settling. I have the feeling we were unaccompanied by an adult—perhaps fittingly, given the absence of adults in Charles Schulz’s child-world. We’d been dropped off to be picked up later, and this may have exacerbated my sense of unease. Indeed, the overarching feeling from that day, at least as I now re-create it in my mind, is an anxiousness that teased me through the entire movie.

I remember almost nothing about the film. I know I didn’t like what was happening on-screen, and also that I kept it to myself. The film seemed too linear to me, too confined. The characters seemed shackled within the story; the movie didn’t project the freedom of the comic strips. It lacked the silence, and the curiosity; it lacked the beautiful multiplicity of magic and everyday moments from which the comic’s heart sprung. My second feeling, the more specific and wrenching one for me now, and the one I have nursed and monitored most closely for these many years, was a cocktail of fear, anger, betrayal, and the deepest puzzlement. These feelings all mingled together when, at some point in the narrative, Snoopy leaves Charlie Brown and goes to live with a little girl. I think it was at that moment that I started to cry, gently and furtively in my seat, but my recollection may be faulty; it may have been when Snoopy and Charlie Brown reunited at the film’s end. It seems wrong to revisit the film to test my recollection—I’m a little afraid to do it. But I quite remember the tears. I quite remember the confusion and dread of being in those moments, and I quite remember my cousins, at...