I recently started reading Michael Chabon’s memoir Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, and his chapter on “The Splendors of Crap” completely put down my own formless fears for Miss P going forward. In it he talks about the “crap” in his kids’ lives, first being sure that we know he has “nothing against crappy art and the ancillary crap…[he] saw alot of lousy movies and watched a ton of crappy television and read a bunch of forgettable books and comics and listened to hours of junk music as a kid. And [he's] still drawing profitably in [his] own art on some of the tawdry treasure [he] stored up in those years.” Ok, so we’re all on the same page: Chabon is not being a high-brow snob about mass culture, and neither am I here. There should be a stench trailing me from all the junk culture I’ve glommed onto since childhood. But what struck me was his identification that the junk today is different than the “junk” we grew up with, and not just in production values. First is that there’s just “so damn much of it now.” Second is that it used to have a very important element that seems missing today:
“…it had…to my theory of what makes great mass art, the powerful quality of being open-ended, vague at its borders…There was room for you and your imagination in the narrative map of the show. The CGI animated movies that dominate in the theaters today don’t work that way. With their fixed sets of characters, each giraffe or squirrel resembling in its carefully designed variation not a recognizable person or type so much as a brand identity, these films operate more like classic sitcoms than like the parodic-adventure stories for which they try to pass. The contours of the worlds they depict feel as backless as painted scenery flats.”
I would add that to me what feels so off about the animated movies they make for kids today (or rather for adults but with cartoon characters), is that the truths it pretends to reveal only make sense if you’re an adult and you’ve gone through all the other motions and adventures in order to finally arrive at an understanding of why that particular circumstance is funny. I feel like instead what they do is tell the child that something is implicitly funny or revealing without the child ever understanding the why. It skips steps. I worry about that in particular because it creates a kind of institutionalized sense of humor, which just seems like an oxymoron. But Chabon goes on to articulate another reality that worries him and gives me indigestion:
“I wouldn’t worry about it so much, I guess, if I felt like my kids had the space in their own heads and, especially, in their own physical worlds to lay it all out and make it their own. Sometimes they don’t seem able to operate in an imaginative world. When we go to Maine in the summer my wife and I open the back door and step aside and wait for them to fly out into the grass and the sunshine. Acres of woods and wildflowers, butterflies and streams, a tame waterfall. A waterfall and hours of freedom from rules and parental control. And they stand there on the doorstep, eyeing one another, shuffling from foot to foot.”
Can you imagine? If that had been offered to me as a child I would have run and built forts and explored and forgotten the time and come home late…Were we different? Were the tools available to enhance our imaginations different? Were there just less of them? Was it that we didn’t sense that our parents were scared to let us out of the house unsupervised? Miss P isn’t at this stage yet, but I so badly want her to look at the world and see it as one big jungle-gym adventure, physically and mentally. I want her to feel that the world is unknowable but discoverable. But I worry about the cartoons and the movies and the toys and the commercials. If she gets trapped going from one fad to another, is she merely going on one big pre-planned egg hunt?
Do any of you guys with children older than Miss P who are more exposed to this stuff than me have any reservations about it? Have you made peace with it?
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