aging / acting like an adult: the gravest offense in 21st-century American culture

per Frances McDormand, 57-year-old film actor and social critic:

“We are on red alert when it comes to how we are perceiving ourselves as a species,” she said. “There’s no desire to be an adult. Adulthood is not a goal. It’s not seen as a gift. Something happened culturally: No one is supposed to age past 45 — sartorially, cosmetically, attitudinally. Everybody dresses like a teenager. Everybody dyes their hair. Everybody is concerned about a smooth face.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/arts/frances-mcdormand-true-to-herself-in-hbos-olive-kitteridge.html

getting old sucks.

"Grave-est."

No one is supposed to age past 45

only into 30s so far but the state of my body tells me this may have some truth.

"There’s no desire to be an adult. Adulthood is not a goal. It’s not seen as a gift."

Being closer to death is an awfully strange goal/gift.

cf the verbing of adult, as discussed in some other thread

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/510VK8Q1dbL.jpg

boomers are the worst (pt. 241038579376470137431 in a series)

tunnelvision, Eric. xp

Adults dressing for Halloween is a particularly dispiriting spectacle.

i.e. you need a layer of protective irony in order to even approach the subject these days (xp_

Adults dressing for Halloween is a particularly dispiriting spectacle.

― this horrible, rotten slog to rigor mortis (Dr Morbius)

how do you know those are costumes?

well i don't go to Williamsburg that often

Thought for sure this was going to be the inevitable Zellweger thread.

“I have not mutated myself in any way,” [McDormand] said. “Joel and I have this conversation a lot. He literally has to stop me physically from saying something to people — to friends who’ve had work. I’m so full of fear and rage about what they’ve done.”

Looking old, she said, should be a boast about experiences accrued and insights acquired, a triumphant signal “that you are someone who, beneath that white hair, has a card catalog of valuable information.”

xxp Yes, what kind of insane grownup enjoys costume parties, o tempora o mores, etc., etc., etc.

I mostly get bummed out by comic book movies, mostly because they seem to be growing in number at the expense of other types of films.

http://livinginmyownworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/dont-grow-up-its-a-trap.jpg

I long for the days of the early 90s, when grunge was full swing and i was in middle school and all the cool kids dressed like grandpas and grandmas.

no beef w/ adulthood but do i have to start tucking in my shirt when i'm not wearing a suit?

Also Fran McDormand should mind her own business. The sort of roles that she's sought out and been cast in throughout her career have not been those that the kinds of actresses who feel under pressure to get lots of surgery have gone after. And for that, she's fortunate.

Didn't we already go through this with Kim Novak?

I had the kind of depressing thought recently that adulthood might consist of the acceptance of and resignation to the fact that life is disappointing, whereas deferring adulthood is the anxious process of distracting yourself from and avoiding that ultimately inevitable conclusion. Sometimes I'm not sure which is better.

I've recently made the move from "life is disappointing" to "life is a disaster."

I really don't care much about the showbiz angle of FM's remarks, more the perpetual-adolescence angle re the general population. Really, you're going to Comic Con, and you've had pubic hair for how many years?

Wow, comics and sci-fi and fantasy are only for pre-teens, what an original line of argument. Why can't people focus on more adult things like big-boy stickball, I ask you?

Believing life is disappointing or a disaster can spring from a shitty childhood spent thinking things will get better as much as having dreams dashed. Either way it's a pose. I need to ask my parents' dog if life is a disappointment.

lock thread

Whats an adult

Lol @ big boy stickball btw

are you a big stickball boy or a little stickball boy?

let's not indulge someone who doesn't understand one of the most profoundly original and metaphorically rich manifestations of American culture ANYWAY ---

You are referring to comics there right

Morbs I sincerely high-five you for that post

Comic con is objectively horrible but not for the reasons you think imo

I hope when the Coens were involved in writing a screenplay for The Yiddish Policemen's Union they lectured Michael Chabon on what a juvenile he is.

I hope they lectured him on what a shitty writer he is

maybe i should've stuck with people making s'mores and having spelling bees in bars, huh

And then he fled to his room, cried and read "Superman" all afternoon.

xp. Maybe.

Gettin' paid big boy advance monies to write novels = adult, whatever they're about.

anyway a big part of my discomfiture with contemporary 'adult fun' is how all of it seems to be in quotation marks (like those!^), which is why the geekout over Twin Peaks v.2 reminded me that I very much liked but could never love v.1. A copy of a copy of a copy, despite all the surrealism / nightmarish modernist touches.

A bunch of men discussing a woman discussing ageing: Oh joy!

oh GOOD, the police are here

let's talk about men things then. sports, beer.

anything but PRIVILEGE

I would actually be very interested in anybody, even Morbius, coming up with a well-reasoned argument -- given their histories, places in American culture, the impetus of their creators, their usefulness as wish-fulfillment proxies for people of all ages, and associated spectacle -- of why baseball is "adult" and comic books are "not adult."

One that does not rely on "I like baseball but do not like comic books" btw.

Cosmetic surgery, Comic Con, big boy stickball...they're all just, like, the in-flight entertainment as we ride this plane called life into the void, man. Who am I to say that this dude in the seat next to me is ignoring oblivion in the wrong way, know what I'm sayin'? (smokes a marijuana joint)

puffs big boy joint

baseball is 'adult' because it is boring

lock board

A bunch of men discussing a woman discussing ageing: Oh joy!

― Jacques Lacan let me rock u; let me rock u, Jacques Lacan (Branwell with an N), Wednesday, October 22, 2014 3:43 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What a coincidence, I was thinking the exact same thing. But I kinda like the irony when anything related to privilege ends up as a conversation among like 5 white dudes and it's not worth anyone's time to get in between them.

baseball is 'adult' because it is boring

― sleepingbag, Wednesday, October 22, 2014 3:50 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

True tho.

FWIW my parents were kind of political, admittedly - but it seemed more common in the Vietnam era, esp. if your folks opposed the war. I'm grateful for that. being exposed to that culture is worth more than Barbie's Corvette. YMMV.

Parents I encounter today are downright paranoid about exposing children to anything "negative".

haha perhaps this belongs on the "judge other people's parenting" thread but I know one kid whose mom literally never tells her "no". Like, the mom has expressed this to me as one of her principles of parenting. (I have watched as kid has grown into a whiney slack-jawed weirdo fwiw)

On visits, I'm not allowed to watch the TV news (even the NewsHour) when the niece (almost 8) is in the room. I had a toy pistol and watched Vietnam news when i was her age.

Also the parents have somehow kept the Sandy Hook shooting (20 miles away?) a secret from her (or so they tell me).

xp

i have heard one acquaintance (unchilded) consistently espouse this view to a friend of mine (twinned) and idk how you don't just brain someone like that with the nearest fucking manhole cover or something

Also the parents have somehow kept the Sandy Hook shooting (20 miles away?) a secret from her (or so they tell me).

my kid listens to NPR sometimes so she picks up some stuff but this... I don't blame the parents for this. I'm p bummed I have to decide what age is appropriate for me to tell my child that she might get randomly murdered when she goes to school.

I mean how would you convince your child to keep going to school after that

'odds are low, the risk is worth it'

'here let me show you an actuarial chart'

don't recommend quoting from

generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

My mother would always let us stay up if we wanted to watch the news, but only if it was the news. Seriously cannot fathom parents who put news blinders on their kids. My mom also put the dictionary under the TV in case a new word (like 'rape', for example, which I remember hearing for the first time when I was eight) needed to be defined, so she could avoid an awkward conversation. She was also very good at WE CAN'T AFFORD IT. We couldn't. This is why I started baby-sitting for neighbours when I was 11.

lol TV news is garbage why would I let my child watch that

now that she can read a whole new range of info is available to her, which I am excited to share

well in my day we had Cronkite

apparently kid asked what happened to Martin Luther King not long ago

mom: "a man shot him"

child stares

(i'm sure that's the digest version)

oh look: http://www.sfgate.com/local/article/2-dead-several-injured-in-school-shooting-in-5845525.php

xp TV news was brilliant in the '70s.

My sister was an eighties kid and by that time the talks on Vietnam or genocide had been replaced with cable television cartoons. Sis turned out okay, but she is less aggressive and competitive than her older sibs.

Everybody dyes their hair? How is that a problem?

Seriously cannot fathom parents who put news blinders on their kids

I do this; what's so unfathomable about it? As far as I know, my 9-year-old doesn't know about school shootings. We talk about things that I don't think will feel personal to him; like, he knows Russia is invading Ukraine. I don't think he knows that ISIS beheads people, or what rape is, or the details of what happened in the Holocaust, and I'm OK with that for now. I don't think it'll make it impossible for him to be an adult.

Obviously I don't think this is what everyone should do with their kids, but it's what I do.

Yeah you gotta draw lines about what will traumatize them vs. what they are capable of treating as an abstraction

like yeah my daughter knows who Hitler was and that he hated Jews (thanks art history books about Marc Chagall lol) but she doesn't know people were shoved into ovens

I think she's a little young to grasp that there was a whole culture of people who happily mass murdered people like her

and if you said people were shoved into ovens it would just sound like a fairy tale

One thing about getting older (I am not yet 30 btw) is beginning to see things detach themselves from the age brackets I think they should be in, floating off, and reattaching to points in people's lives where I wouldn't expect them. Clothes, ways of talking, music, have been doing this weird dance for the last five years now.

Maybe that's always been going on, or has it sped up recently?

I used to be freaked out by adults with braces but i guess invisalign fixed that?

Parents I encounter today are downright paranoid about exposing children to anything "negative".

fuckin kids today -- when i was their age we went to bed each night in fear of soviet first strikes amirite

actually i do remember taking comfort from the fact that where i lived was probably within vaporizing range of a likely target and thus no 'on the beach' bullshit

I guess it depends on how much violence your child will be directly exposed to - something tells me that people who live near gang shootings can't exactly shield their children.

There are gang shootings in my neighborhood. My children are not aware of them because of when/where they tend to take place (v late at night, close to major thoroughfares like Mission St) also there are no gang members in our family.

there was a hs student killed by another student recently but that is p rare. She heard about it because the victim had recently graduated her school and had siblings still going there. So there were assemblies/discussions about it w the student body.

I know one kid whose mom literally never tells her "no". Like, the mom has expressed this to me as one of her principles of parenting. (I have watched as kid has grown into a whiney slack-jawed weirdo fwiw)

http://static.tvgcdn.net/MediaBin/Galleries/Shows/G_L/Lit_Lp/Louie/season3/louie-30.jpg

Sorry if I seemed judgmental - I'm not. I think most of my peers raise their children that way. It's just so different from my own childhood. My Dad worked in Gary, Indiana and we often had to drive through there so we had to have frequent talks about why there is inequality, why so many black people were poor. It was important to my parents that we didn't get bad ideas from the media. Something I'd like the next generation to learn. I think my parents were exemplary people but I don't expect everyone to be that way.

we had to have frequent talks about why there is inequality

I have those talks with my kids too! But I want it coming from me, not through a story in the paper or god help me TV news that he comes across without me.

In other words, "news blinders" doesn't mean "raising kids to think nothing is bad in the world," but it does mean "kids don't have to know details about beheadings and rape." I did go into a lot of detail about Curt Schilling's mouth cancer the other night, though, because I really do kind of want him to be scared of tobacco.

By the age of 8, I had enough historical perspective to understand exactly what it meant when one of my classmates called me a nigger, so it kind of baffles me to see that others in my putative peer group aren't making sure their kids understand at a young age how America is and how they can make it a better place.

i have nothing to do with anything & have no children but, yeah: i think blackout is a weird angle on this, given that kids won't be blissfully ignorant or sensitively primed of what's what but exposed to the crazy creative writing interpretation & storytelling of other kids, non-stop, w/o factchecks. i am e-mailing everybody's kids my own personal wikipedia playlist of the worst ten things that happened in the twenty first century, if you want to opt out hit me up at my inactive ilx webmail address asap

Well, in my case, the eight-year-old who had to look up 'rape' in the dictionary because of the news became the 12-year-old who, when told about a possible local prowler/rapist, suggested that maybe the answer to that was not 'women and girls, stay inside' but 'if a man is this possible local prowler, why not tell all the men to stay indoors instead?'

Granted, the news ran under some kind of fairness doctrine at the time...

Well, I just got back from dinner with my brother & his two kids, where we wandered into exactly this discussion. Kids are seven and four and a half. Of course our adult convo turned to the news, and we were talking about a woman I knew who got shot, then I apologized because kids were present. Smart eight year old goes, "I heard that! Strangers are bad people!" Then his mom told me 7 year old insists on watching the news, he esp follows the Malaysia flight story. Of course his mom is a flight attendant & they fly all of the time so they have to think about aircraft disasters.

I asked his parents if they let him watch news and they said he insists, but they're indulgent sort - again, afraid their kids will be the goody two shoes at school. Being Italian that's kind of a no no. Kid is so well-versed in the headlines I can understand why some parents would be alarmed. Have to admit, I laughed my ass of at how street smart and sassy he is.

it kind of baffles me to see that others in my putative peer group aren't making sure their kids understand at a young age how America is and how they can make it a better place.

dunno how personally I should take this but a) 6 and 8 are v different ages and b) racial epithets and their relationship to mass murder are things that are framed by a historical perspective that is a bit different from "random people may murder you at school for no reason at all", which is what I specifically took issue w re: tailhook and talking about it w my daughter.

I've definitely been thinking for a long time about having my kids learn less/later about the holocaust than I did. I think it's perfectly understandable why a generation that was closer to it felt it so important to emphasize so much, but the effect is an outsized sense of insecurity in the world that probably doesn't match up with what it's like to be Jewish in 2014 in America.

We've covered slavery, racism, ww2, the palestinian/israeli conflict, egypt, benghazi, russia invading the ukraine, FDR/the great depression, mlk/malcolm x/civil rights movement, gandhi, police brutality.. I am ok w leaving some of the grislier details of hiroshima, the holocaust, lynchings, etc for a later date

how does one explain benghazi to a little kid

It was on NPR all the time for awhile so we looked up where it was on a map, I explained what an embassy was and how diff't groups were fighting to be in charge of the country etc.

did you teach the controversy

Kids are so smart, we forget what a seven or eight year old is capable of! Vietnam and kids is such a unique subject, it was a national trauma in a way today's wars aren't - for whatever reason. It was discussed in the churches!

weren't they sending kids not that much older off to vietnam to fight?

wonder when original topic will resurface

have you noticed a change of subject?

yeah im not that far gone

Thought this might be the appropriate thread but not sure
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/books-and-culture/william-shakespeare-culture-war-highbrow-lowbrow-94733/

bummed that this thread wasn't bumped because the Star Wars thread has almost 1000 new answers

pointing out that shakespeare has for hundreds of years been an essential part of mass/pop/whatever culture in the english speaking world to make a something something something point about sneering intellectuals is on some _trenchant social commentary_ shit

life is too short to read the stuff that noah berlatsky writes