I watched La Cité des enfants perdus (City of Lost Children) yesterday. Not having seen it in a few years, it was fun to revisit such a wonderful film. Darius Khondji, one of my favorite cinematographers, shot it, the direction was great, as was the acting. It's like a fairy tale for adults. An evil scientist (irony at its best) is stealing children so he can extract their dreams and stay young. Miette is a little headstrong girl and the most mature character. She befriends a fun fair strongman and they rescue the abducted children. Along the way, you meet all sorts of grotesque characters in a dark, damp world of grays, greens, and browns. The film is similar to a combination of Terry Gilliam's Brazil and The Adventures of Baron von Munchausen which are also like fairy tales for adults.
Several people I know really loved Forrest Gump and, when I told them that I thought it was horrible, they often defended it by saying something like, "But it was a charming fairy tale for adults!". While I think I understand what they were getting at, I just couldn't see it in that light. To me, it was a gross over-simplification of reality. There was no magic to it. Fairy tales show life, including its darker elements, filtered through an enchanting, childlike world of imagination.
As Richard Zacks pointed out, all of the classic fairy tales that parents read to their children or Disney puts on the big screen were originally much more sinister. Sleeping Beauty was raped was while under the spell that made her unconscious. Goldilocks became a young girl only in 1918 - she was an old woman prior to that. In a 19th century version, the bears impale her on a church steeple. The original Little Red Riding Hood was emblazoned with sexual tension and a dirty pun. In the end, she was eaten by the wolf.
Scholars attribute what we now consider the "darker" elements of these stories to the fact that, a few hundred years ago, they were told to children and adults. Today, at least in America, these stories are emasculated. I wonder if this is an American phenomenon. As one person here pointed out, it seems like American want to shelter their kids from reality. One upshot of this is that, upon turning 18, they are suddenly thrust into the real world.
In the mid-1990s, 10-12% of male school children in the United States was on Ritalin. How many of them really had Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder? Add in the girls and you have - what? - 12-15% of all school kids in the US hopped up on amphetamines? Doesn't this seem even a little askew if not downright ludicrous? How about kids on Prozac? We give such anti-depressants to kids as young as 4 here. 4 years old! In one year, the number of children on Prozac went up 5 times. Around the same time, the number of kids under 18 on Prozac or an equivalent was moving up towards a million.
These numbers scare me. Not the least because no one really knows the long term effects of these drugs on brains that are still developing. There is no doubt in my mind that there are kids out there with mental maladies that really benefit from these drugs. Are kids in general really that fucked up? Hell, maybe they are. But could we also be screwing with kids brains that are screwed up enough by virtue of being teenagers?
Now, I don't mean to insult teenagers - I just know what a weird time of your life it is. Saying it is an awkward period is like saying that the evacuation of Dunkirk was a bit disorganized. I probably have greater sympathy now for teens than I did when I was one myself. This is because I know just how genuinely fucked up many adults are. One day things are all hunky-dory and the next thing you know you start getting hair in various spots where there was none before, your voice drops or your breasts grow, girls hit menarche, etc. Hormones are raging rendering you a complete knob end. The adult world doesn't seem so far off suddenly and peer pressure kicks in. Hey, it's a crazy, mixed-up time and you have little experience to draw on for reflection. Hell, teenagers generally don't wanna reflect - there's all these distractions like memebers of the opposite sex, drugs, and just going out and being stupid.
And it's not that teenagers are necessarily stupid - many tack the windy seas of teenagehood and become fully-functional adults. But adults are supposed to help kids. You know, be active in their lives. When I was having some particularly nasty problems at 16, a couple teachers stepped in lent a hand and an ear. Teenagers can also be kept on the right path with the foot, namely, in the ass. That's where my dad came in.
It seems like the hands-off approach is much more prevalent now than when I was a teen. This is a whole lotta anecdotal evidence, I admit, but talking to teachers and social workers, I get this picture that American society expects kids to figure everything out themselves. Got a problem? Take a pill. Parents are too busy working or just don't give a shit. My friend who got married last month is a teacher and he has countless horror stories. A parent of a 12 year-old came up to him and basically asked him how to be a parent. Ya know, they don't give teachers these Dr. Spock-like manuals on how to be a parent. And, because of a fear of lawsuits, teachers have limited abilities to handle disciplinary problems.
Not every kid is on Ritalin. Not every kids brings a gun to school and shoots up their classmates. What's their secret? Why do some kids play violent videogames and not become violent themselves? What does it mean to be a boy or a girl? How should this affect how society treats you? What does TV do to kids? Questions, questions, questions. At least on that last one, I can look towards an old college professor.
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