The Exile's Bazaar
  • Home
  • About
  • Destinations
  • Book
  • Publications
  • Contact

Notes from a fascinating world.

The world is like a bazaar, full of interesting odds and ends, and I've been exiled into it. This is my all-over-the-map (literally and metaphorically) attempt at capturing some of the world's many wonders.

Parkland, Horror Films, and American Culture

3/26/2018

 
PictureTIME Magazine cover featuring the Parkland teens. Fair use.
It is by now a cliche that, since January 2017, parody in American life has died. That may be an exaggeration, but it certainly is much more difficult to tell these days what is an Onion article and what is real news coming out of the West Wing.

But now we are living through not parody but a horror film. Specifically, a teen slasher. Think Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, Halloween, The Faculty, and of course related works such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its explicit and oft-referenced antecedent, Scooby Doo.

In these products of pop culture, as a trope, the adults in authority positions are always craven and corrupt or simply clueless as to what’s going on. (OK, some exceptions, like Giles on Buffy as an ersatz father figure.) The teen protagonists, and some of their teen friends, are the ones who know the truth and who fight the forces of evil with what wits they can muster in spite of their hormones.

And now we have the Parkland teens leading their country toward a promised land where school children will no longer need to go through active shooter drills, while the adults in authority positions either dither or stand in their way. One adult in particular is too busy fending off lawsuits by porn stars.

It’s a quintessentially American moment.

Why is youthful heroism, as contrasted with the craven uselessness or even proactive evil of adults in authority, such a strain in the American cultural DNA? I should add here that it’s not just the horror genre that produces such works, although horror, meant to capture that most ancient and elemental emotion of fear, may be the most intuitive genre for this trope. In the Cold War classic Red Dawn and its remake, when Communist forces conquer the United States, a small band of teens lead a war of resistance against the occupiers. In another Cold War film, the very cringeworthy Iron Eagle, a teenager hijacks an Air Force jet to bomb a fictional Middle Eastern country and to rescue his father, for which acts of illegal warfare he is rewarded with admission to the Air Force Academy. And then there are The Hunger Games, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and so on.

America has been, after all, the New World, where humanity might begin anew. And people from all nations have viewed it this way. In world historical terms, a two-hundred-something-year-old nation is more or less the analogue of a teenager.

Statesmen from older European powers have been known to resent the childlike innocence of their American counterparts. Certainly after WWII, when Europe lay in ruins and the United States emerged as the world’s preeminent power, European ministers bitterly complained that the superpower was like a child raised on HGH, powerful and muscular but immature and unable to comprehend the intricacies of international politics. The British, for one, sought to “tutor” the Americans on subjects from spycraft to statecraft. In Europe, after all, the “Children’s Crusade” turned out to be no more than a cruel farce that ended with tens of thousands of children enslaved.

But America’s greatest achievements, both domestically and internationally, have often been the results of youthful idealism. When the Truman Administration proposed the Marshall Plan to fund the reconstruction of postwar Europe with no strings attached, European allies deemed it naive. Certainly youthful faith and energy fueled the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. When I attended college in the U.S., it often struck me how student projects that would seem unrealistic to those of us from older parts of the world seemed perfectly feasible to my American classmates.

It makes sense, then, that in American pop culture, Americans would identify themselves with high schoolers when opposed to adults with edges all worn off and the fires gone out in their bellies. Because pop culture is a reflection of the American soul, which intuitively sympathizes with the young, youth being a synecdoche of America itself.

At least that has been true for a very long time. Is it still true today? After Vietnam, and more recently Afghanistan and Iraq, and now Trump, America is no longer quite so young, quite so innocenet. Is it still a teenager, or is it old enough now to begin to take on the cynicism of age, to sympathize not with the plucky teens but with the politicians who tell them no?

Comments are closed.

    Author

    Writer, traveler, lawyer, dilettante. Failed student of physics. Not altogether distinguished graduate of two Ivy League institutions. Immigrant twice over. "The grand tour is just the inspired man's way of getting home."
    Follow me on Twitter (@W_T_Han) and Instagram (@wthtravel).
    ​https://www.scmp.com/author/william-han

    同是天涯淪落人,
    ​相逢何必曾相識?

    Updates Mondays.

     
    Want to be notified of new posts?
    Get newsletter
    Powered By Constant Contact
     

    Archives

    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016

    Categories

    All
    Afghanistan
    Africa
    Amazon
    America
    Antarctica
    Anthropology
    Archaeology
    Architecture
    Argentina
    Armenia
    Art
    Astronomy
    Books
    Brazil
    Buddhism
    Caribbean
    Caribbeans
    Caucasus
    Central America
    Central Asia
    Chile
    China
    Christianity
    Cinema
    Colombia
    Costa Rica
    Criticism
    Cuba
    Culture
    Easter Island
    Economics
    Ecuador
    England
    Essay
    Ethiopia
    Etymology
    Europe
    Family
    Film
    France
    Goths
    Halloween
    Hinduism
    History
    Huns
    Iceland
    Immigration
    Inca
    Indonesia
    Iran
    Iraq
    Islam
    Japan
    Kenya
    Korea
    Law
    Linguistics
    Literature
    Maldives
    Martial-arts
    Mathematics
    Medicine
    Mexico
    Middle East
    Mongolia
    Mythology
    Nepal
    New Zealand
    Pacific-islands
    Panama
    Persia
    Peru
    Philosophy
    Politics
    Portraits & Encounters
    Portugal
    Psychology
    Race
    Refugees
    Religion
    Rome
    Russia
    Science
    Sherlock Holmes
    Singapore
    South America
    Spain
    Sri Lanka
    Superman
    Syria
    Taiwan
    Television
    Travel
    Travel Advice
    Ukraine
    United States
    USA
    Uzbekistan
    Vaccination
    Voltaire
    Women
    Writing
    Zoroastrianism

    RSS Feed

  • Home
  • About
  • Destinations
  • Book
  • Publications
  • Contact