If you watch almost any form of children’s entertainment made over the last half century, you will come away thinking that the world is a wonderful place, full of beauty and magic, where life is fair, and light always triumphs over darkness. There are villains, of varying degrees, of course, but they are always vanquished in the end.
There is a near perfect karma to modern children’s stories, at least in America. Heroes are beautiful, honest, and kind. Villains are ugly, greedy, and cruel. The message we tell our children is that good always triumphs because life is ultimately fair. If you work hard and do the right thing, you will succeed, and villains always get what’s coming to them.
This is a dreadful lesson to teach our children, bordering on malpractice. Why are we lying to our children, especially at this point in our sordid history, when we know it’s not even remotely true? What do we hope to achieve by this? We know this sort of positive reinforcement doesn’t work, since we all grew up on Mr Rogers and didn’t build a society based on kindness and curiosity. We built a society based on Amazon, Google, and Disney, then elected a greasy-fingered mad king to burn it all down.
Young people are not inherently less critical of others than adults. They quickly learn who and what they are expected to be critical of by watching us. We teach them to be judgmental of those who do not follow the rules of society. It’s how we survive as a species, but also how we pass along prejudice, bigotry, and fear.
We don’t have to start teaching young children about the worst of humanity right away, but we could be doing a better job of relaying the real lessons we would like them to learn, so they aren’t so shocked and appalled when the real world ends up resembling nothing like their deluded childhoods. We need to explain our ideals, but not have them confuse that with reality. What we have is not the same as what we want.
The truth we don’t teach them, is that good people suffer, bad people succeed, crime pays, winning is everything, and life isn’t even remotely fair. Our legal system isn’t fair. Our laws aren’t fair. School isn’t fair. Nothing about life is fair. Fairness is merely a figment of our collective imagination. Personally, I blame the hippies who thought they could change the world and then sold everyone out for early retirement and a condo in Palm Beach. It’s probably a bit more complicated, but maybe not.
The reality is, if you aren’t almost supernaturally beautiful, talented, or intelligent, and you work really hard, you might get lucky—but don’t count on it. The harsh truth is that it’s mostly a crapshoot of geography, economics, and genetics. You have almost nothing to say in the matter. It’s why luck was so often a factor in the original fables, or at least some level of craftiness and wit, and not simply great beauty like we see in the fairy tales propagated by Disney. They were more likely to be active participants in their own success, but not always.
“You can’t always get what you want.”
—The Rolling Stones
The original Cinderella story was an ordinary girl who gets lucky and becomes a princess. The story has nothing to do with her earning it. It’s not her looks, her charm, her wit, or her cunning. She goes from being a pauper to a princess out of sheer dumb luck, which meant it could happen to anyone. It was a simpler tale. The moral: You never know, you could get lucky and marry a prince.
Compare that to the Disney version, where Cinderella is extraordinarily beautiful, talented, and kind, but who finds herself in difficult circumstances. To right this terrible wrong, the universe gifts her a fairy godmother with magical skills to grant her everything she needs to go to the big fancy ball where she meets the prince, and because of her great beauty, they live happily ever after. If she’d been plain or ordinary, nothing would have happened. She succeeds because she is beautiful. The moral: If you’re beautiful, you can do anything.
Chris Rock once said, Beyoncé could be just some chick who works at Burger King, and she’s so beautiful, she could still marry a billionaire like Jay-Z. The other way around is never gonna happen. Beauty is currency. If you don’t possess it, you better find something you can do that pays really well to level the playing field.
In Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts is an incredibly beautiful woman who spends a week with a rich guy, gets some new clothes, has her hair done, and is suddenly transformed into a princess suitable for a king. It’s not because she’s smart, clever, or otherwise gifted. She’s just a pretty woman, who needed a better wardrobe. If Pretty Woman had starred Sandra Bernhard, rather than Julia Roberts, you’d have a very different movie.
Hollywood is just the name of a neighborhood in central Los Angeles, not a cabal or comprehensive organization. There isn’t even any such thing as Show Business. But when we blame Hollywood, we’re blaming the entire entertainment industrial complex for its corruption. Because of the people who green light movies and television, we have developed a skewed view of society, such as, but not limited to:
Political leaders are moral human beings who just want to make the world a better place. Cops may break the law and kill indiscriminately, so long as they’re fighting the bad guys. Military veterans are all expert marksmen who can kill you with their bare hands. Serial killers and hitmen are both alarmingly common. You can be pretty but dumb and still manage to be a successful lawyer. Space aliens mostly want to kill us. There is someone for everyone. Big romantic gestures solve all previous sins. All forensic laboratories are lit by Gordon Willis and have tech budgets that rival Google. Crime doesn’t pay. The good guys always win.
Many of these tropes are derivative of much older stories, but it’s the absolutes of western culture that don’t allow for failure in story. One of the few who broke the rules was the original Rocky, who in case you’ve forgotten, loses the fight. He’s still a winner because he went 12 rounds with the Champ and got the girl, but he’s sort of the lovable loser, another trope. It’s not because he’s a good fighter, clever, or even physically gifted, which he’s not. It’s because he can take a beating to the head and not fall down. This isn’t your traditional American movie, to be sure.
Another thing we tend to avoid in American cinema is the concept of uncertainty. Studios really seem to hate this, or at least think that we, the public, do. They don’t like loose ends or ambivalent endings. They want to see clear consequences for the villains. Happy endings for the hero. That’s what they want, so that’s what we get.
One of the worst endings to an otherwise great movie—one of my all time favorites, in fact—was an adaptation of a Stephen King short story called, “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.” You know it as “The Shawshank Redemption,” and starred Tim Robbins (Andy) and Morgan Freeman (Red) as inmates in a New England prison. Andy famously escapes by tunneling out of his cell and crawling through a sewer pipe, steals a ton of dirty money from various banks, then skips town and crosses the border into Mexico. Years later, Red is paroled, and goes to find Andy.
The end of the book reads, “When I get to McNary, I guess I’ll have a chance to find out if an old crook like me can find a way to float across the border and into Mexico….I find I am excited, so excited I can hardly hold the pencil in my trembling hand. I think it is the excitement that only a free man can feel, a free man starting a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope Andy is down there. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.”
That’s the end.
He hasn’t even bought his bus ticket yet. He’s in the process of writing this story down in his shitty hotel room. That’s why he’s holding a pencil. He’s telling us what happened and what he’s going to do next, but we don’t know if he’ll go through with it, whether he can make it to Mexico, or even whether he’ll ever find Andy. In the movie, however, we see him do all the things, which is fine—it’s a movie. We see him buying his ticket, and riding on the bus with his arm out the window—a little smile on his face, then we watch as the bus drives off into the distance.
That is where the movie should have ended.
The producers, in their infinite wisdom, felt that the audience had to see Andy and Red reunited on a beach in Mexico, in a glamorous helicopter shot, no less, or they’d be despondent. There couldn’t be any uncertainty or there would be no happy ending. They couldn’t accept that Red had already gotten his happy ending, and with him, us. This was a movie for adults, mind you, but we’re still being infantilized.
What a travesty of imagination.
As someone who has already raised three children and has moved onto the grandchildren stage of life (seven as of this writing), it’s easy for me to be dismissive of children’s entertainment, because I no longer have to entertain children on a daily basis. You might accuse me of pulling up the ladder after me, but I know something else. It’s entirely possible to eliminate saccharine children’s programming and still raise functioning adults, and my entire generation (not to mention anyone older) is evidence of this.
We had Saturday morning cartoons, which were mostly violent or sarcastic: Bugs Bunny, Wiley Coyote, Tom & Jerry, The Jetsons, and The Flintstones. These were all dysfunctional idiots, many based on adult comedians of their day. They were not morality tales. They were animated situational comedies. Scooby Doo was about a bunch of hippies in a van who drove around taking drugs and unmasking evil old men. I’m sure most of the people making these programs were high as kites. There wasn’t a child psychologist on staff, that much I can assure you.
Most of what we watched were reruns of old programs. Bewitched. Adam-12. Dragnet. Beverly Hillbillies. Gilligan’s Island. Hogan’s Heroes. These were mostly bizarre premises set for comic effect, with terribly untrustworthy adults. The message was clear that adults were not to be trusted. They were just overgrown children.
There is no question that our children need heroes to look up to, but they don’t need to be superheroes. Just the old-fashioned kind, where the hero’s powers are rational and attainable, not magical or supernatural. Resilience, persistence, courage, wit, and the sharpness of a well-read, educated mind.
Show us how the hero uses their cunning to defeat a foe, or works out the problem by doing research at the library, not by calling on their magical chicken or talking sword to solve a problem. If we’re going to lead by example, let’s give them an example they have a chance of following. Be brave. Be smart. Be resourceful. More Harriet Tubman and less Harry Potter.
I’m not suggesting that magic and mystery and even a little fantasy can’t be a good time, but for the same reason you don’t feed a child dessert at every meal, even though they would be thrilled if you did, you know they need nutrition as well.
A little more wit and a lot less wand.
The problem with our current approach, along with the recent trends in helicopter parenting and child safety, is that we’re not preparing our children for the world they must eventually enter one day. They have no way to evaluate risk because they don’t know what danger looks like. It’s why everyone walks around in disbelief at the state of things, wondering when a wizard, or at least an adult, is going to show up and straighten everyone out. The problem is, momma never told them there’d be days like this. They were expecting rainbows and butterflies and found unemployment and student debt instead. It’s like watching ET and it turns into Alien.
No wonder they’re pissed.