House of Eratosthenes

I have this weird opinion floating around in my head, that as one surveys the fruited plain — or the junkyard full of wreckage — of American cinema, one can glean from all the items strewn hither & yon all the strengths and weaknesses of our dominant culture. In other words, my nutty opinion is that if you can show me what we’ve been watching to distract ourselves from the pain of life, I can show you our thinking as we’ve been going through that life.

Maybe I can even show you some of what brought about the pain. Oh, but that’s getting a little deep for this particular post…

…the point of which is, it seems to me that Sonic Charmer shares my nutty opinion about movies. Or, just pieces of it anyway. Our thinking is more eccentric than we as a society are willing to admit, and this shows up in our cinema:

Being a teenager is like being royalty. You have no responsibilities and virtually all your mental energy is focused on your personal entertainment and relative social status. This royalty is also perpetually declining, however; by definition and construction it has a finite shelf life: the royal status ends more or less when high school does, or at least college. And teens are painfully conscious of this expiration date, even if not explicitly in these terms.

This is why so many teen movies are tinged with nostalgia, sadness, and angst. In any event it should be possible to identify strong parallels between stories of ‘declining royalty’ and stories of ‘teen angst’. Are they really the same story? Crossover movies like Cruel Intentions made the link explicit. But the sense of a sadness for a lost royal age, and desperation to salvage something before the peasants storm the castle, is there in most teen movies, from explicitly nostalgic ones like American Graffiti to modern ones like Can’t Hardly Wait.
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If this is even partially right, society seems to have made something of a macro error in creating the life stage we call ‘teenager’, which is a relatively new phenomenon. Consciously it is a well-intentioned effort to shield young people from realities while they have a chance at an extended childhood and to complete their development, but in practice it seems to be a recipe for unhappiness while it lasts and regret/nostalgia once it’s over. To treat people like royalty only to set them up for an ouster from the royal house is not an unalloyed kindness. Worse, we seem to be going in the wrong direction; according to conventional wisdom, an ever-increasing percentage of young people are supposed to continue with more and more years of ‘school’ after age 18 – and the more schooling the better. This is a doomed attempt to extend the unsustainable stage of royalty beyond economic realities.

I’m having a difference of opinion with a certain family member concerning the leisure activities of a mutual relative who is junior to us. The discourse is a meeting of the minds between two worlds…one world in which the “down time” of lazy children is somehow sacred and sacrosanct — for reasons never clearly stated — and the other world, in which…well, kids get a “vacation” when their parents get vacations, not before. And that’s if they’re good.

I think, if memory serves, the first “Nightmare on Elm Street” movie starred Heather Langenkamp as the “smart girl who lives until closing credits” girl, and the killer robot from Six Million Dollar Man co-starred as her dopey ol’ small-dee dad who was the police chief or something…that fits the mold beautifully, maybe even defines it. The authority figures — parents & police — are entirely ineffectual in their attempts to deal with the supernatural threat. It’s all up to the kids.

Now interestingly, you go back before this “relatively new phenomenon” of the royal figure who is the teenager…and you enter an earlier time in which it really is all up to the kids. This twenty-year-old and that nineteen-year-old are going to strap themselves into a bomber, fly over Hitler’s troops together and let the bombs fly. Just like facing off against Freddy Kreuger, some come back and some don’t. Except, this was for real.

And teenagers weren’t royalty. Teenagers did what they were told…and later, they did what had to be done. Perhaps the latter would not have been possible were it not for the former.

When I was growing up (and yeah, even some today) my favorite story genre was the one in which one or more children were forced into a situation where they suddenly had to “make it on their own” … pretty much forced to “grow up”, and right quick. Or they die. Either the children got separated from their family, or the father or both parents die, or they run away — and there they are, faced with survival.

Some of these were made into movies. “My Side of the Mountain” & “Seven Alone” come to mind, and I’ve seen several made for TV (note on My Side of the Mountain … the book was good. I liked the movie as a kid, but it didn’t hold up well for me as an adult. I’m callin’ for a remake).

Other books I remember were Tillicum and The Thundering Prairie.

Is this why I was such a misfit in high school? 😉
- philmon | 06/05/2011 @ 07:27

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Teenage RoyaltySaturday, June 4th, 2011

Teenage Royalty
Saturday, June 4th, 2011