Ain't Gettin' Any Older: The bizarre triumph of youth - recent spate of youth-oriented movies reflects a culture that refuses to grow up - Critical Essay

National Review, Nov 8, 1999 by James Bowman

Mr. Bowman is American editor of the (London) Times Literary Supplement, and film critic of The American Spectator.

That America invented both the teenager and youth culture is not new information, but it is conveniently documented by Thomas Hine in his new book, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager. Hine shows that the American teen was a product of the Depression, when, for the first time, partly as a result of laws reserving jobs for heads of families, high school became an all-but-universal experience. But if the first teenagers were to some extent the product of national poverty, those of today are the product of national wealth, which in the latter part of the century has become so great that young adults expect to prolong the teen experience into their thirties and beyond.

In fact, as Robert Samuelson has pointed out, "our culture is quietly erasing the idea of age. All ages are blurring with all other ages. Children shall become grown up as soon as possible. Young adults shall remain children as long as possible." Newsweek asks about the "Tweens"-kids between 8 and 14-"Are they growing up too fast?" Of course. But where "growing up fast" once meant going to work and assuming adult responsibilities in the teenage years, now it means acquiring a facile sophistication about the adult world-especially sexual matters-while holding on to a child's economic dependency and emotional immaturity for longer than ever.

One result is that what used to be known, often pejoratively, as "the youth culture" has become the culture of an increasingly larger segment of the population. In fact, it is in the process of becoming culture tout court. This is particularly noticeable to anyone who sees, as I do, a lot of first-run movies, all but a few of which seem to be made to suit the tastes and sensibilities of 13-year-olds. This is only to be expected. The demographic profile of those who pay full price to see first-run movies (often more than once) is skewed towards those who are old enough to want to meet friends, including those of the opposite sex, at places away from home, but who are not old enough (or rich enough) to go to restaurants, bars, and clubs. Grownups tend to think it's not worth the trouble just to go out to a movie. They prefer to wait until it comes out on video.

You might think that soon they would be finding, if they haven't already, that there isn't even anything to rent. Their taking themselves out of the market for first-run films must produce a vicious marketing circle, guaranteeing that the entertainment industry will cater even more to kids, which will make their parents even less likely to want to go to the movies. Yet it also seems to be the case that adult tastes are undergoing a process of juvenescence. When the boy-man Adam Sandler has had two monster hits in the last year (The Waterboy and Big Daddy), both of them holding up for admiration the star's trademark case of arrested development, you know that something essential but not very complimentary is being said about our culture. And on television, we have shows like Seinfeld and Friends-now joined by Oh Grow Up and others-that celebrate the long twilight of adolescence, lingering like the midnight sun into middle age; we also have a plethora of frank celebrations of the teenage sensibility, such as Dawson's Creek; Sabrina, the Teenage Witch; Freaks and Geeks; Popular; and Manchester Prep, to name only a few.

As a result, we have by now become so accustomed to the bias toward youth of popular entertainment that we have almost forgotten what grown-up movies look like. Or so I conclude from the outpouring of critical praise that has greeted American Beauty. Written by Alan Ball and directed by Sam Mendes, this is a movie that has been widely praised for its seriousness and intelligence, but that is saturated with the peculiar ethos and aesthetics of the youth culture-not only in its enthusiastic embrace of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll as a tonic for the over-forties, but also in its easy self-righteousness, its programmatic romanticism, its pose of perpetual disillusion and psychic scarring, and, above all, its huge appetite for self-pity.

Kevin Spacey plays Lester Burnham, a middle-aged man who has a job he hates and a wife and daughter who, apparently, hate him. He no longer enjoys a real marriage with his wife and is hardly spoken to by his daughter, who becomes even more hostile when she sees that he is attracted to her best friend and fellow high-school cheerleader. There is more than a hint here of Death in Venice, particularly as we are told from the beginning by no less an authority than Lester himself that he is going to die soon. The young blonde cheerleader, whom he imagines in a bath of crimson rose petals, becomes the image of life and liveliness that he is soon to leave behind-once, that is, he has quit his job, gone to work in a fast-food joint, bought a late-1960s-vintage muscle car, and taken up weightlifting, pop music, and pot-smoking again.