The Peanut Butter Solution

Unburdened by the childhood experience and thus the trauma and nightmares that evidently afflicted anyone who saw the film as a child, I find The Peanut Butter Solution to be a bizarrely amorphous film. On the one hand, it is fascinating with its completely unmoored narrative, which, with its boisterous chain of fantasy motifs, resembles a free stream of consciousness, or rather it could be said that it is governed by childish logic instead of adult rationality. However, the narrative is dramaturgically constrained and the result is rather inconsistent and mushy. This is partly due to the fact that The Peanut Butter Solution is not constructed according to a standard narrative in the style of Hollywood, but rather has more in common with Hong Kong films, in which the narrative also leaves the starting line, goes in completely new directions that do not develop the main motif at all and then returns in the climax to wrap up everything that had been alluded to earlier. Here, the subject of confronting one’s fears thus veers into escapades involving hair loss, a disgusting recipe, hair growing inexorably fast, and a magic-brush factory staffed by children kidnapped by a maniac posing as an art teacher. On multiple levels, The Peanut Butter Solution essentially expresses adults’ fear of exuberant imagination, which it also conveys to viewers. In addition to the described peripeteias and the character of the teacher who tries to suppress the children’s imaginations, this corresponds to the film’s central storyline about terror that is so intense that it causes hair loss, but which, as it turns out in the end, is only the work of a vivid imagination. (18.05.2014)