Puss in Boots. A kids movie. A cartoon. A sly opportunity for a tired parent to shamelessly indulge in some on-duty kip whilst the munchkins are entertained by Puss’ inane antics, right? Wrong.

This is a tale with a message. An important message about difficult subjects such as the fragility of life, the fear associated with losing this life, and the certainty and yet unpredictability of death, all broken up into palatable chunks that slip down easily alongside the popcorn and haribo.

At the beginning of the film Puss is your archetypal hero, though it must be said rather  obsessed with his own image, his brand. He oozes arrogance and boasts of being fearful of nothing. But then after one brush too many with death, Puss goes through what might be thought to be a typical, if rather clichéd, mid-life existential crisis. 

What for us humans might be triggered by reaching middle age, and the realisation that we’re over half-way through our one life, for Puss this is triggered by realising he’s down to the 9th of his 9 lives. This confrontation with his own mortality leads to the appearance of death which shows up in the form of a red-eyed wolf that haunts him for the rest of the film.   

This fear that we see in Puss as he literally runs away from death throughout the film is a stunning metaphor for our youth-obsessed, death denying, medically-reliant, modern society. 

This fear is experienced by some people to the extent that they are so afflicted by intrusive thoughts and intense anxiety about the idea of one’s death, that they can think of virtually nothing else. For most people though this fear is more subconscious and is experienced by virtually all human beings to some degree. It arises due to a basic psychological conflict that results from having, on the one hand a self-preservation instinct, and on the other hand, an awareness that death is inevitable.   

In order to cope with the stress and anxiety that comes with this realisation, human beings have developed a number of psychological ‘defence’ mechanisms.  One particular thinker, the American anthropologist Ernest Becker, writes of these mechanisms in his Pulitzer prize winning 1974 book ‘The Denial of Death’. He has a particular angle on this which I can’t help being struck by as my eyes are glued to the screen and my lips to the straw in my diet coke.

He writes of the idea of the hero as a reflex against the terror of death. He argued that, as humans we have a deep and unconscious motivation to strive to immortalise ourselves and one of the ways we do this is through convincing ourselves of our uniqueness, our specialness. We appear as the hero in our own special story; the story of us.  We defend ourselves psychologically from the threat of death by clinging to the idea that, whilst illness and accidents and death are things that unfortunately happen to others, at some level we believe that we ourselves are indestructible, invincible. Immortal.

And so it is with Puss – his vanity and his narcissism is shown up for what it really is – a cover to mask the underlying fear of his own mortality. In Puss we see our Donald Trumps and Boris Johnsons, our Jeff Bezos’ and Elon Musks - mere mortals relying on their enormous egos as a defence against this crippling fear of death. As well as attempting to immortalise themselves through becoming ‘legends’ in their own lifetimes, they strive to defeat death through building great monuments (or corporations or walls or spaceships), or scheming to manufacture a situation in order that they can leave their own political legacy.

Sitting alongside my children in the darkness of the cinema I’m suddenly paying attention. This is important stuff. I can’t help but link these themes that Becker writes of to what I’m seeing in this movie. It’s also got me wondering, was this intentional on the part of the writer and directors of this movie?  Have they read Becker too? Perhaps it was; perhaps they have. Or perhaps they are simply reflective human beings who have tapped into and uncovered profoundly deep and meaningful themes that are a common part of our humanity across cultures and over time. For tens of thousands of years, human beings have told stories and developed myths in order to express unconscious ideas in a more accessible form. Is Puss simply a modern-day fairy tale that is doing exactly that?

And so back to Puss. That he has this one life remaining is a theme we come back to time and time again throughout the film. And over the course of the film he matures and is able to let go of his self-obsession, becoming a wiser, more grounded version of himself, a Puss who prioritises relationships and connection with others. 

He was reckless with his lives – he frittered them all away in his courageous and heroic endeavours. But now that he has this one remaining life, it’s preciousness comes into focus and he is terrified of losing it. 

Only towards the end of the film where Puss actually turns and faces death does the fear lessen and eventually death gives up and walks away. But in this moment it turns out that it wasn’t death itself chasing him, but the fear of death. Death itself doesn’t give up when you turn and face it. As mortal beings that is something we have to accept is simply a ‘given of human existence’, as the renowned existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom called it. Death isn’t ever going away. But the fear of death? That is something that, when we turn and look it in the eye, we acknowledge it and we open up to it, we can dispatch it with its tail between its legs.