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.
I wonder why this happened? I wonder if low/middle brow media has simply gotten more addictive than before.
TV Shows can be binge watched. Pop movies are part a universe that encourage the viewing of other pop movies. Videos games have loot boxes, level-up systems, and other crap that keeps people coming. Social media algorithms encourage us to argue about the latest popular work. I know nothing about music, but I wonder today's pop songs are more "earwormy" than the ones from 20 years ago.
I think something similar has happened with our food, which is why the latest CDC report on obesity was so scary.
I think, for me, this is something that I feel is too often missed. Art made for children can resonate through a lifetime because it teaches us a lot about what it means to be a human. I think, specifically, of the Zelda series of videogames. Yes, you can play it as a simple adventure game where you hit monsters with your sword and collect digital detritus, but the series is imbued with so much sorrow and melancholy, both for the future and the past.
In many ways, playing through Ocarina of Time as a child primed me for existentialism, for fatalism and futility, for the transient nature of joy, of life, for the ineffable beauty of friendship and what it means when it fades.
Art can be an escape, but even fiction people would describe as escapist in nature often deals with these big topics (Samuel R Delany's fantasy series is the first piece of fiction about the AIDS epidemic, for example).
Of course, I agree with Freddie's point here. It's fine to live at Hogwarts for a while, but you really need to escape past those gates too.
You're dead-on about the importance of consuming different types of art. I do it all the time, and it gives me life. I enjoy Marvel and videogames as much as the next guy, but I also seek out plenty of independent movies too to balance the pallette. I just saw the new James Bond movie last night and thoroughly enjoyed it, but this weekend I'm going to check out the French movie Titane, which I hear is absolutely gonzo and in no way shape or form for mainstream viewers.
Though I will say Logan left a stronger impression than many superhero movies because it too stared the inevitability of aging and death right in the face.
I think about this often when I think about what books or movies to expose my children to. Whether or not something is overly violent or sexual is easy to determine, but I'm more concerned about whether they're discerning enough to understand its value. My 11 year old is precocious and often asks for more adult things, but I worry that if she doesn't understand something I'll simply sour her on it. She's too young for Clockwork Orange, but what about 2001? Will she just find it boring? What about Wes Anderson? She'd like the aesthetic of Royal Tennenbaums, but would she grasp the tragedy of it? I wouldn't want to show her Veerhoeven or Lynch, not because of the sex and violence per se but because she wouldn't understand how they use sex and violence.
I can't tell to what extent you are endorsing realism as the only means to access adult concerns through art (in which case I disagree) or whether you're just reacting against the dominance of YA culture (comics, Stranger-Thingsy nostalgia) in contemporary culture, in which case...ok. I think that a distaste for realism can be rooted in the crushing boredom of adult life...as H.P. Lovecraft put it: “I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.” And non-realism of various types need not be escapist in the way you seem to be condemning. A good example is Cronenberg's "The Fly" (1986), pretty explicitly dealing with the inevitable tragedy of aging and death (a paraphrase of how Cronenberg explained the film). There's an awful lot on the horror and science fiction side of literature and film that deals with many of the issues you find adult. I don't know...I just absolutely cannot watch people caterwauling about inheritances or divorces or childrearing. There's a profound stupidity in so much of what is deemed to be "adult" topics. There's so much more real and interesting going on in "Alien" than there is in the mundane horrors of "This Is Us", "Succession", and the like. As Lovecraft wrote elsewhere, "Adulthood is hell."
As a teacher, I worry about how the growing number of adults who don't consume grown up media is affecting expectations for our young adults, too. I had a whole classroom who couldnt explain a reference to the Book of Job or what it was about--these are bright, motivated teenagers, not slouches at all, but most foundational world literature isn't on their intellectual map at all. They aren't expected to know anything about Shakespeare or Homer, and we have to scaffold the shit out of the most elementary parts of these units. Again, my students are smart--but it seems like the expectations for what they should know about history, art, literature, etc. is shrinking all the time. I wonder where that leads.
Very excellent points. I'm not a big consumer of art myself, but I do see this problem in the general culture that is reflected in immature takes on art, when I see adults discussing a Disney or superhero film in ways that make me feel embarrassed for them. For my young adult family members, daughter, nieces, nephews I'm the curmudgeon who will insist they more realistically cast themselves as Peasant #3 when watching the latest hero flick.
I fairly regularly put out calls for book recommendations to groups of friends. I always, always, ALWAYS have to loudly specify "no YA" if I don't want a list that's 75% YA fantasy, and I'm still guaranteed to get at least a couple of "ok I know this is YA and you said no YA, but--" recs. I'm thirty. Drives me insane.
There's something you've briefly touched on, but I don't think given enough attention to: that area of adult-focused middlebrow fantasy. Let's take... Doom 2016. (Haven't gotten to Eternal yet.) Incredible game, surprisingly clever writing, brilliantly executed mechanics, burning with style... I strongly recommend it to anyone. I love it.
But while it's absolutely great at what it is, and definitely not "child-appropriate art" I'm not going to pretend it's doing for me what, say, reading Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is doing. That book is hard to read; a raw and uncompromising portrait of an American making his way in an unjust world, his ideals slowly disintegrating in the face of prejudice and betrayal. (It's also quite unkind to socialists, but I'm not in the habit of only experiencing art that flatters my preconceptions.) Doom is way more "fun" than Invisible Man, but what's the more challenging and meaningful experience? The latter, no doubt.
And at least Doom's pretty honest about what it is. I haven't been watching TV, but I wonder from conversations overheard, literally and online: How many of those brilliant "adult" dramas are really as "adult" as they think they are?
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.
I agree with what you're putting forth here. One of my biggest gripes about movies these days are that there are so few films made for adults, versus what seemed like many such films that were released while I was growing up in the 80s and 90s.
One unrelated question to the gist of the essay - in your first paragraph you wrote "god." I know you're an atheist and that's cool - I'm not but my point isn't that I think you're wrong or anything. What is the reason for the lower capitalization though? I usually assume it's because the writer believes He's not real, but to use an example related to the essay, Tony Stark isn't real yet he still gets a capital T and S.
Not trying to pick nits or sound like an ass. You're a smart person and I'm sure you have a reason; that's what I'm curious to learn.
This is also a problem in adult genres. I write romance, and lately everyone wants fluffy comfort reads, to the point where little else sells. My publisher returned my latest manuscript to me and asked me to rewrite it because it’s “too depressing” – because the character is sad at the beginning of the book. It all ends happily, but readers want the beginning to be fun too.
My publisher is right, though. Serious books don’t sell, especially since the pandemic. Many people are hanging by a thread and don’t want to consume anything that isn’t soothing.
Are you saying Freddie that you are not shedding tears at every new Star Wars trailer?
I am aghast. May the Force be with you.
I wonder why this happened? I wonder if low/middle brow media has simply gotten more addictive than before.
TV Shows can be binge watched. Pop movies are part a universe that encourage the viewing of other pop movies. Videos games have loot boxes, level-up systems, and other crap that keeps people coming. Social media algorithms encourage us to argue about the latest popular work. I know nothing about music, but I wonder today's pop songs are more "earwormy" than the ones from 20 years ago.
I think something similar has happened with our food, which is why the latest CDC report on obesity was so scary.
If anyone wants to read a children's book that deals with very adult themes in very adult ways, I'd recommend Duck, Death and the Tulip: https://bookshop.org/books/duck-death-and-the-tulip/9781877467141
I think, for me, this is something that I feel is too often missed. Art made for children can resonate through a lifetime because it teaches us a lot about what it means to be a human. I think, specifically, of the Zelda series of videogames. Yes, you can play it as a simple adventure game where you hit monsters with your sword and collect digital detritus, but the series is imbued with so much sorrow and melancholy, both for the future and the past.
In many ways, playing through Ocarina of Time as a child primed me for existentialism, for fatalism and futility, for the transient nature of joy, of life, for the ineffable beauty of friendship and what it means when it fades.
Art can be an escape, but even fiction people would describe as escapist in nature often deals with these big topics (Samuel R Delany's fantasy series is the first piece of fiction about the AIDS epidemic, for example).
Of course, I agree with Freddie's point here. It's fine to live at Hogwarts for a while, but you really need to escape past those gates too.
You're dead-on about the importance of consuming different types of art. I do it all the time, and it gives me life. I enjoy Marvel and videogames as much as the next guy, but I also seek out plenty of independent movies too to balance the pallette. I just saw the new James Bond movie last night and thoroughly enjoyed it, but this weekend I'm going to check out the French movie Titane, which I hear is absolutely gonzo and in no way shape or form for mainstream viewers.
Though I will say Logan left a stronger impression than many superhero movies because it too stared the inevitability of aging and death right in the face.
I think about this often when I think about what books or movies to expose my children to. Whether or not something is overly violent or sexual is easy to determine, but I'm more concerned about whether they're discerning enough to understand its value. My 11 year old is precocious and often asks for more adult things, but I worry that if she doesn't understand something I'll simply sour her on it. She's too young for Clockwork Orange, but what about 2001? Will she just find it boring? What about Wes Anderson? She'd like the aesthetic of Royal Tennenbaums, but would she grasp the tragedy of it? I wouldn't want to show her Veerhoeven or Lynch, not because of the sex and violence per se but because she wouldn't understand how they use sex and violence.
I can't tell to what extent you are endorsing realism as the only means to access adult concerns through art (in which case I disagree) or whether you're just reacting against the dominance of YA culture (comics, Stranger-Thingsy nostalgia) in contemporary culture, in which case...ok. I think that a distaste for realism can be rooted in the crushing boredom of adult life...as H.P. Lovecraft put it: “I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.” And non-realism of various types need not be escapist in the way you seem to be condemning. A good example is Cronenberg's "The Fly" (1986), pretty explicitly dealing with the inevitable tragedy of aging and death (a paraphrase of how Cronenberg explained the film). There's an awful lot on the horror and science fiction side of literature and film that deals with many of the issues you find adult. I don't know...I just absolutely cannot watch people caterwauling about inheritances or divorces or childrearing. There's a profound stupidity in so much of what is deemed to be "adult" topics. There's so much more real and interesting going on in "Alien" than there is in the mundane horrors of "This Is Us", "Succession", and the like. As Lovecraft wrote elsewhere, "Adulthood is hell."
Disney/Pixar have hooked people on liking the same things they did at twelve for the rest of their life. RIP.
As a teacher, I worry about how the growing number of adults who don't consume grown up media is affecting expectations for our young adults, too. I had a whole classroom who couldnt explain a reference to the Book of Job or what it was about--these are bright, motivated teenagers, not slouches at all, but most foundational world literature isn't on their intellectual map at all. They aren't expected to know anything about Shakespeare or Homer, and we have to scaffold the shit out of the most elementary parts of these units. Again, my students are smart--but it seems like the expectations for what they should know about history, art, literature, etc. is shrinking all the time. I wonder where that leads.
Very excellent points. I'm not a big consumer of art myself, but I do see this problem in the general culture that is reflected in immature takes on art, when I see adults discussing a Disney or superhero film in ways that make me feel embarrassed for them. For my young adult family members, daughter, nieces, nephews I'm the curmudgeon who will insist they more realistically cast themselves as Peasant #3 when watching the latest hero flick.
I fairly regularly put out calls for book recommendations to groups of friends. I always, always, ALWAYS have to loudly specify "no YA" if I don't want a list that's 75% YA fantasy, and I'm still guaranteed to get at least a couple of "ok I know this is YA and you said no YA, but--" recs. I'm thirty. Drives me insane.
There's something you've briefly touched on, but I don't think given enough attention to: that area of adult-focused middlebrow fantasy. Let's take... Doom 2016. (Haven't gotten to Eternal yet.) Incredible game, surprisingly clever writing, brilliantly executed mechanics, burning with style... I strongly recommend it to anyone. I love it.
But while it's absolutely great at what it is, and definitely not "child-appropriate art" I'm not going to pretend it's doing for me what, say, reading Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is doing. That book is hard to read; a raw and uncompromising portrait of an American making his way in an unjust world, his ideals slowly disintegrating in the face of prejudice and betrayal. (It's also quite unkind to socialists, but I'm not in the habit of only experiencing art that flatters my preconceptions.) Doom is way more "fun" than Invisible Man, but what's the more challenging and meaningful experience? The latter, no doubt.
And at least Doom's pretty honest about what it is. I haven't been watching TV, but I wonder from conversations overheard, literally and online: How many of those brilliant "adult" dramas are really as "adult" as they think they are?
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.
I agree with what you're putting forth here. One of my biggest gripes about movies these days are that there are so few films made for adults, versus what seemed like many such films that were released while I was growing up in the 80s and 90s.
One unrelated question to the gist of the essay - in your first paragraph you wrote "god." I know you're an atheist and that's cool - I'm not but my point isn't that I think you're wrong or anything. What is the reason for the lower capitalization though? I usually assume it's because the writer believes He's not real, but to use an example related to the essay, Tony Stark isn't real yet he still gets a capital T and S.
Not trying to pick nits or sound like an ass. You're a smart person and I'm sure you have a reason; that's what I'm curious to learn.
This is also a problem in adult genres. I write romance, and lately everyone wants fluffy comfort reads, to the point where little else sells. My publisher returned my latest manuscript to me and asked me to rewrite it because it’s “too depressing” – because the character is sad at the beginning of the book. It all ends happily, but readers want the beginning to be fun too.
My publisher is right, though. Serious books don’t sell, especially since the pandemic. Many people are hanging by a thread and don’t want to consume anything that isn’t soothing.
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!