There are a lot of wonderful things that art made for children can do. We all have beloved books and movies that moved us as children that still move us, and I certainly would never want anyone to feel shame over continuing to access them. But there are also many things that child-appropriate art cannot do. Yes, there’s the obvious in terms of sex, violence, and language, but that’s not exactly what I mean here. I mean that there are themes and subject matter that are not typically found in art for children, even though precocious children can sometimes enjoy them. I am thinking of topics like infidelity, the meaninglessness of existence, loneliness, perversion, the pain of the absence of god, the crushing boredom of adult life, and so on. These topics matter, but both the culture and economics of art for children prevent them from being encountered there, at least in most cases.
There are aspects of the human condition that can be explored through art, that must be explored through art, that are not conducive to stories about superheroes, wizards, cyborgs, monsters, or similar. And, in those cases where such themes are explored with genre tropes, they are generally unattractive to (some would say inappropriate for) children. And so adults should look beyond art intended for children, in order to deepen their understanding of life and the world and grapple with what it means to live a mortal life in a universe without meaning.
Here I think of a film like Michael Haneke’s Amour. Among other things, it’s about the horrors of aging and the inevitability of death. These are heady topics, to be sure, and perhaps not ones that we want to expose to younger children, if only because they should probably enjoy the fact that they are blissfully unaware of these sad conditions. But adults need to access them; we need to process them, and art can help. Unless you’re unlucky, you too will grow old. You will inevitably die. So you have to do the emotional and intellectual work of coming to terms with those things, and for that reason you turn to a movie like Amour. You cannot find those things in Narnia, nor are you meant to. This is not an attack on CS Lewis or those who have adapted his work. But it is an attack on the widespread and deepening tendency of adults to never leave Narnia, on an entertainment media that is relentlessly focused on child-appropriate content, and on a social media-enabled assault on the idea that adults should consume more than art for kids, the omnipresent notion that any sense that adults should spend a lot of their cultural on adult themes and ideas is a type of bigotry.
Beyond the goal of art that is morally edifying is the goal of art to induce various kinds of pleasure. Different kinds of art impart different kinds of pleasure; it’s no insult to either to say that Carly Rae Jepsen and Merzbow intend to produce different feelings in their listeners. In life we have both cookies and kimchi, both lemonade and whiskey. There are, in other words, acquired tastes as well as obvious ones, and the former are some of the best stuff in life. This, again, does not in any way dismiss the pleasures associated with cookies and lemonade. The point is merely that very few people only consume cookies and lemonade, but far too many never access any movies or shows or books that deal in the bleaker, harder, subtler, quieter parts of life.
Now the common rejoinder is to say “do both!” And indeed - watch both, read both. I can’t complain about that. But the entire point is that people aren’t watching both. Do you know how many people consume literally nothing but superheroes, sci-fi, zombies, video games, and so on? Very, very many. And how could there not be? Any sense that we should feel embarrassed to remain fixated on art for children in existence that once existed - and I have never been convinced that it ever did - has long since been utterly obliterated in our current moment, a time when art populism manages to both be utterly commercially and critically dominant and yet cast as a perpetual underdog. Precisely because they need to be acquired, acquired tastes have a higher barrier to entry than others, and so their embrace by the public will always be more tenuous. But there are treasures there. Think of how much is lost for so many when there is no social pressure at all to try new things, new types of things.
It is no coincidence that we are all living in the digital world alongside a cadre of angry, embittered, activist nerds who rage out endlessly about all of the perceived slights against them. After all, there culture has told them to never leave their fantasies behind, so how can we be surprised that they react violently to the difference between those fantasies and their reality? That’s what all of this does, after all - it gives us an excuse to remain in the numbing bubble of fantasy, forever. Sometimes you have to force yourself outside of the comforting worlds you can find in fiction. There are people who spend their whole lives waiting for that letter to come from Hogwarts. And sometimes when that doesn’t happen, they snap, and that’s how you get the toxicity of online fandom.
In life you should want there to be an arc to your tastes. Just as you moved on from a mac’n’cheese and popsicle diet as a child, you move on to a more varied, more complex, more challenging diet as an adult. But in art, so many people like the same things at 40 as they did at 10. That can’t be healthy. But it is understandable, in a world where the likes of Stranger Things tells you to be 10 years old forever. I wouldn’t mind that kind of swan dive into nostalgia if it were coming in a culture that had a healthy attitude towards balance and variety in media consumption, one that wasn’t forever chasing a kind of childhood that may never have really existed in the first place. I have no objection to shows that mine childhood for pathos in that way, but I worry about what they mean in the context of a sclerotic and frightened culture.
Your tastes will be different than mine. Some of you thought that my Liz Phair thoughts were wrong, and your opinions are just as valid, of course. Some of you no doubt see deeper and more adult things happening in Stranger Things than I do. That’s the beauty of it all, the variety of artistic feelings and express. So knock yourself out. Just understand all that you might be missing, if you’re not careful, if you never challenge yourself to consume things that aren’t easy or casual or sweet. And watch Amour. I have no desire to watch it a second time, but I’m very glad I watched it once. Because at 40 I’m probably about as close to my end as I am to my beginning.
the Second Part of Life
Hi Freddie,
Just want to say that these kinds of topics -- culture and adult topics within culture -- are why I like reading you so much.
Cheers!
I agree with what you said, so I don't want any of my thoughts below to be seen as an argument against it. I just want to mention my experience.
I'm 32 years old now, so I'm not exactly old but it's safe to say that under no definition am I a child. One of the things that I have noticed about myself is that art that is bleak or pessimistic -- about death, about God, about relationships, family, love, etc. hits me far harder today than it did when I was 16. I was the kind of teenager who absolutely gobbled up pessimistic and challenging art..probably because I couldn't really understand it on an emotional level. Reflecting on the inevitability of death or human frailty is much more painful for me as a man in his 30s who is about to get married than it was as a 17 year old who had barely been on a date. I could yawn and accept the French existentialist perspective on God and authenticity and free will without really understanding the weighty implications of all of those ideas. With a movie like Amour, I absolutely loved it when I saw it at the ripe old age of 23 because I had yet to experience anything in the same universe as what the couple in that movie goes through. If I had to sit through it today, I would probably find it devastating.
So, at least for me, what happened is I started off with art/entertainment directed towards children, then I moved on to all of the staples of middle and highbrow culture -- your Italian neorealist films, Russian literature, whatever, and now that I've lived another decade, I find myself scared and shying away from some of those more challenging and frankly depressing works. I know on some level that this is "wrong" and I should fight through it, but it's hard. Especially when most of one's life is dedicated to a stressful job and other "adult" responsibilities.