On Media For Grownups
It began with a video released by (I'm going to guess) New Zealand Youtuber Echo Chamberlain, titled "Oppenheimer: A Film for Grown Ups" which you can watch for yourself and think whatever you like about the thesis.
If nothing else, it sold the film to me, indeed I haven't seen Barbie because I can't get past my impression that I am not, nor have ever been, a six year old girl. It may well be far more sophisticated than Oppenheimer turned out to be.
The point is more that it harked back to Stephen Fry's interview with Dave Rubin, which is a great interview marred by unfortunate 3rd rail comments Fry made making light of the molested by an uncle experience. So even when it was recorded, at a time when people were literally floundering as to what was happening in the culture, the most interesting aspects of that interview were lost.
I sit here writing, in admittedly a polo-shirt which is more grown up than the t-shirts I usually wear. But I'm also in brand Jordan basketball shorts and I just checked it is 10 degrees Celsius outside. I dress pretty much exactly as I did when I was 16. Something Fry called Infantilism, he also called out grown-men wearing baseball caps and drinking lolly-water by which I assume he meant soft-drinks or sodas or pop as carbonated sugar beverages are variously known.
Fry suggested there was some merit to eating food that required a knife and fork to eat, that there was something to do with the maturation process in cutting up your own food and feeding it to yourself, instead of processed foods like hamburgers and hot dogs that possibly could be consumed by someone lacking teeth.
I also believe he also said waaaaaaaay back in 2016, that adults didn't need to go see superhero movies. On that front, I'm inclined to agree.
Where I get unstuck, is trying to figure out what media for grownups actually is, it's harder to make a positive statement than it is to say what it isn't. For example:
Harry Potter is not for Grownups.
It's probably the butter beer. I believe JK Rowling originally intended a very interesting literary experiment with Harry Potter, which was a character that grew up as the readers did. She probably didn't foresee what an institution it would become, what staying power it would have.
The fact is though, that even though Harry Potter by "& The Deathly Hallows" is essentially a fugitive on the run from a murderous death cult, having witnessed first hand numerous deaths like Robert Pattinson and Dumbledore. Unlike many of his readers, Harry Potter has experienced Trauma of the unskunked variety where he was literally in danger.
Yet, Harry the character came across as immature for a boy somewhere between 16~18 entering his final year of school. JK never wrote in the porno, weed, getting black out drunk and munting, the fingering, the hand jobs, the felatio that is reflected in a UK series like "The Inbetweeners" even though it focuses on the kids not getting any action.
I would point out, that as ostensibly dangerous as curses, basilisks and litches are it's not as frightening as being an inner-city high school student in London or Baltimore. That classic line from The Wire after a girl slashes another girls face with a boxcutter in class and the teacher is informed of the "good news" that the student wasn't HIV positive.
There's something in that cocktail that says when Harry meets Dookie and they share highschool war stories and Harry's like "The Dementors were really scary but I learned to summon an expecto patronus" or whatever and Dookie's like "Man you grew up in fantasy land a girl at my school got permanantly disfigured today with a boxcutter for looking at a girl wrong!"
The Harry Potter series for some reason remains Enid-Blighton-Quaint. It is more in the world of scones with lashes of butter and fresh cream and strawberry jam with bottles of ginger beer than it ever becomes Harry in the trenches of global Wizard Warfare.
The presence of death and danger doesn't make Harry Potter grown up, and this should be evident given how much death and danger is traditionally present in fairy tales that have long been told to children: The Pied Piper, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Snow White etc.
The Disney animated features adapting old mostly European fairy tales also featured death, but these were sanitised for children.
Adults can enjoy the Harry Potter series, largely because JK Rowling is a good writer, a really good writer who excels at both plotting and character. But that doesn't mean they are for adults. Had she written the series in the 1920s, they wouldn't be too out of place given that by my recollection mobile phones, the internet etc. play no role whatsoever in any of the books.
What I expect would have happened had they been released early last century instead of mostly after the turn of this one, is they'd be treated like The Hobbit or The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe. You'd read them as a kid, then your tastes would mature and then you would have kids and you would enjoy sharing them with your kids. There would be some interim life phase of adulthood between child and parent where you read Thomas Harris, Steven King maybe even some non-fiction like The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins or Deterring Democracy by Chomsky or The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir.
The Name of The Rose is for Grown Ups
Now, when I decided to start reading books again, and decided to try and read content for grown ups, I started with "The Name of The Rose" by Umberto Eco. I had seen the movie fairly recently with Sean Connery and Christian Slater so I knew who did it.
It's interesting to contrast The Name of The Rose with Harry Potter because they are both works of fiction set in medieval castle-like places that do not exist, the unnamed Abbey and Hogwarts.
Both feature young male protagonists in Adso and Harry, yet Adso in one book matures and loses his innocence in a manner Harry doesn't achieve in six. Indeed, The Name of The Rose is an old man reflecting on a turning point in his life, in many ways a death-of-innocence incidence.
JK famously did not reveal Dumbledore's sexuality until after the Harry Potter series was concluded whereas Umberto Eco's work features homosexual love quite centrally.
Given that The Name of The Rose is set in a monastery, it is fair to describe it as erotic despite the inciting incident involving a homosexual love-triangle.
Characters in Umberto Eco's story have intellectual lives to boot, indeed what makes it unquestionably not a book for children, isn't the sex and violence, but the long theological debates and exposition as one is brought up to speed with the Spiritualist movements and the Minorities, or whatever.
William of Occam engages Jorge as to the question of whether Jesus laughed or not. By contrast, what evidence do we have of Dumbledore having any intellectual life at all? He was ultimately a high-school principle even if he was a war hero. His mind was occupied not by arguments or any real internal dialectic, but magic trivia like Pheonix Tears having healing powers, and Trelawney's one documented divination.
Perhaps most tellingly is that one must be able to handle feeling ambivalent in reading The Name of The Rose, because it is riddled with futility.
One of the great exchanges is between William and his former inquisitor colleague. William is rational where Bernard Gui is dogmatic, that being said through Adso's eyes we can infer that William knows Bernard Gui will commit injustices, yet it is futile, the innocents are doomed to burn as heretics at the stake. All William can manage is to express his contempt via carefully chosen doublespeak.
I have no doubt people wept at the casualties incurred in the final battle of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, just as I'm sure children and grown ups wept at the death of Bambi's mother and Mufasa.
I think this remains a qualitative far cry from the futility and disillusionment that makes The Name of The Rose truly gut-wrenching, and one need not cry at all. This is something else as an experience, simultaneous desolation and satisfaction at a story well told.
It is perhaps comparable to Akira Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai" final scene where the heroic Samurai are truly ambivalent in witnessing the happy peasants free of the threat of banditry after it exacted such a toll on the seven.
I think another aspect of maturation in media is Moral Ambiguity. Children tend to be spared this, Voldemort is a cartoon villain. Where even if Bernard Gui has no voice to commend his orthodox worldview, he is unambiguously sincere, a fanatic and we can certainly find in the cellarer Remigio a character to feel ambiguous about.
Some of Adso's struggles, these are internal conflicts born of a kind of sincere faith many could not relate to in 2024 yet it works, in the same way we can feel the pain of Huckleberry Finn who believes freeing a slave is theft and theft is a sin that will condemn him to hell but he has come to see Jim not as property but as a person and a friend.
In which regard, the adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a story for grown-ups where Harry Potter is not, even though it is told from the perspective of a child younger than Harry and filled with all kinds of shenanigans.
Joker and The Dark Knight Are Not For Grown Ups
I haven't seen the Joaquim Phoenix Joker and I have no plans to. I'm sure, much like Harry Potter books it is very well made, probably even a film I can enjoy, like I can enjoy Baloo singing "the bear necessities" from the Jungle Books movies. I also have no interest in seeing "The Batman" even though, based on what I've heard it may actually be the best film adaptation of Batman.
I did see "The Dark Knight" though and on that grounds I can state affirmatively that it is not for grown-ups. A lot of people's brains were blown out their arseholes by The Dark Knight, seemingly unthinking that a comic book movie could ever feel adultish.
Indeed, it probably marked a significant slip into infantalism, that I wouldn't understand until I watched some random Youtube video about Game of Thrones, and it got my gears grinding such that the picture would eventually fall into place.
I can't even remember the thesis of the video, what I was struck by was the Youtuber divulging that what he loved about Game of Thrones... were the dragons.
Here's the important thing, many of the most successful children's content has operated on two levels - the films of the Disney Renaissance Little Mermaid thru, It's debatable what killed it either Pocahontas or The Hunchback of Notre Dame...but certainly most would agree Little Mermaid kicked it off again, then Beauty and The Beast, Aladdin and Lion King are the heart of it. These movies parents could sit through without pain, without boredom. The same I'm told, goes for Bluey where parents can appreciate remarks from the parents that go right over their children's heads.
"If it's not Baroque, don't fix it" from Cogsworth is not a joke for the kids, but it's in there and the joke is on Cogsworth not within his joke itself. The Genie turning into Rodney Dangerfield might seem kooky but an early 90s audience is old enough to appreciate the reference.
A parent is not supposed to come out of the Lion King holding their sides and wiping tears from their eyes breathlessly remarking "Poomba farted!" The 40 year old mother isn't supposed to emerge from Aladdin thinking "I know what I want for my birthday: A Jasmine costume!" and by the time Jason Alexander's Gargoyle is doing pit farts and Danny Devito's satyr or faun or whatever delivers the big laugh line of "I've got a fur wedgy!" parents should be emerging from Disney films thinking "thank god that's over for another year."
You are supposed to latch onto the level pitched at you. Like if you take your kids to a play centre with ball pits and trampolines and signs saying "under twelves only" and there's an area where parents can buy a coffee and watch a 24 hour news channel or cooking program or something, you aren't supposed to "be one of the kids" even if the standard of journalism horrifies you, the grown up thing to do is not to escape into the ball pit. Grown ups are supposed to be running things.
I may sound prudish, and could be cast as the antagonist from Benny and Joon who needs some time in the ball pit to rediscover wonder and magic. I don't. I haven't lost it. It's not either or, infantilism is when you don't spend any time outside of the ball pit. It's where you can't take your medicine without a spoonful of sugar. When you are no longer capable of watching a crime drama without the good guys and bad guys wearing costumes.
I'm not even sure the dragons in Game of Thrones function as a metaphor, they are kind of functionally intercontinental ballistic missiles in a medieval setting. The impression I got though, and eventually came to understand was that GoT had different camps of fans.
I had naively assumed that what everyone recognized and appreciated as good about GoT was the character studies, the moral ambiguity arising from shifting perspectives that allow (particularly a reader) to dramatically change their opinion of characters like Jaime Lannister, The Hound and even Cersei Lannister when we learn her delusions of insight.
There was a basis for this assumption and this was the fans response to the latter seasons of GoT where the showrunners ran out of source material to draw from and forged ahead instead for the $$$.
The picture that clicks into place is that GoT's major achievement was to create a vehicle with broad enough appeal to put what I shall call "Nerd Shit" into it, it was a vehicle, or perhaps cover for CGI dragons.
Just as Stephen Donaldson proved an author could translate Wagner's "The Ring" into a space opera with his "The Gap" series, I'm sure an author could translate A Song of Ice and Fire into a non-magical setting, perhaps a World War I drama with grease guns and mustard gas instead of Others and dragons, and that story would work, without Nerd Shit. (Having recently watched Cinemax's "The Knick" I would actually describe that show as a close contender for nerd-shit-free GoT.)
But the inverse works as well, and certainly Joker does this. My understanding is that it borrows heavily, if not functions as a remake of, Scorsese's 70s movies, particularly "The King of Comedy" a box-office bomb that it directly references by having Robert De Niro who originally played the Joaquim Phoenix role, play the Jerry Lewis talk show host role.
This is using nerd shit to make grown up media financially viable. I may commit an appeal to personal incredulity, but I cannot imagine WB studios greenlighting the same movie, simply removing the DCU context. Similarly I understand "Andor" could have simply been made as a Cold War drama, removing any Lucasfilm Star Wars context, but I cannot see it being greenlit without the Nerd Shit.
I recently watched "The Marathon Man" a lesser known 70s movie that is testimony to how good the 70s was (for cinema, most of everything else seems awful. Columbo is the only piece of media that makes me think it might have been nice to live in the 70s).
To some extent, I'm not even sure the story of The Marathon Man works, though it serves to produce a number of engrossing scenes: Roy Schneider fighting off an assassin in his Paris Hotel room, Dustin Hoffman getting interrogated by Laurence Olivier despite having no information to give up. Dustin Hoffman's flight from his captors through the New York night. Laurence Olivier getting recognized by Holocaust survivors as he tries to determine the worth of his diamond fortune.
People used to go see these movies at the cinemas, many walking home through the very streets Dustin Hoffman was just chased through, maybe going home to the bad neighbourhoods they lived in. They didn't need sugar, salt and fat added to the movie to entice them to it.
The Dark Knight is broadly speaking an abridged adaptation of Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's "The Long Halloween" and like the showrunners of GoT, I feel "The Dark Knight Rises" demonstrates to what extent the source material deserves credit.
Being familiar however with both, we can see a paradox emerge, because "The Long Halloween" despite being a comic book, feels more like taking something for kids and forcing it to grow up, where "The Dark Knight" feels like taking something for adults (such as Silence of the Lambs) and processing it into chicken nuggets by adding Heath Ledger licking his lips to tell us, in an Oscar worthy performance, that the Joker is crazy.
The movie lost me, when Aaron Eckhart dies, perhaps this was the greatest explainer of why The Dark Knight represented infantilism, where The Long Halloween and even Batman the Animated Series two-part episode "Two Face" were vehicles by which children could mature.
Aaron Eckhart is "Two Face" for what? the better part of an afternoon? Maybe a few days at most. Almost nobody encounters him which is how James Gordon and Bruce Wayne can keep Harvey Weinstein's fall from grace under wraps, with Batman taking the blame. Harvey Dent even does a George Costanza in terms of suggesting his own nick name "T-Bone", that he mercifully doesn't live long enough to witness it not catching on.
Gone is again, the unsettling, gut wrenching tragedy of Two Face that a comic book team of two people, and a children's animated series managed to convey to much smaller and younger audiences. Jim Gordon and Bruce Wayne are haunted by their lost friend who crossed a line, a threshold more haunting than death, their friend lives on with horrific disfigurement further destroying his own life, torturing everyone who cares about him.
Perhaps part of the child so affected by the tragedy of Two Face, was somewhat prepared to grow into an adult that had to navigate caring about people with destructive addictions.
Where did The Dark Knight excel in its depiction of Two Face? The nerd shit, the CGI disfigured face, the shallow visual gimmick that captivates in its asymmetry, only differing from Tommy Lee Jones' characterization by downplaying the camp, however, functionally the Nolan rendition of Two Face is only slightly more substantial than the death of Gus in Breaking Bad, who having had half his face blown off, stops to straighten his tie before keeling over.
The Dark Knight and Joker I will say, are probably as grown-up as comic book movie adaptations get, if we set aside adaptations like "A History of Violence" and "Ghost World" and "American Splendour" etc as non-superhero genre. Comics, or sequential art I do not treat as de-facto for children. But the entire MCU is not for grown ups.
Robert Downey Jr, declaring "I'm iron man" before snapping his fingers to reverse Thanos' stupid Malthusian plan to halve the population of the Universe (instead of say, doubling the resources of the Universe, just as useless but likely would not have necessitated him being an evil space tyrant) might have brought you to shed a tear as Kevin Feigey had managed to arrest your development and extend you adolescence from 2008 to 2016, but it just isn't the same as when Barry Pepper's character gets killed in Saving Private Ryan, the movie I watched with Sarah M on the afternoon of my first kiss a decade earlier.
What's the difference? Apart from 14 movies building up to Tony Stark's death, vs Jackson's death coming after a mere two hours or so.
Where was the Avenger that got his teammates killed because of cowardice? Where was the nerd shit in Saving Private Ryan?
I really loved Dennis Villanueva's take on Dune, it almost felt grown up. He left so much unsaid as if to say "if you don't understand what's going on, read a fucking book you child." Where for Part 1, my only gripe, my studio note, were I producing it, would have been "When Jessica is reciting the admonition against fear, cut away sooner, that's nerd shit."
Nerd Shit, to be clear is the stuff Nerd's latch onto to form user groups, communities. It's the catchphrases they can repeat to each other, thinking Hogwart's Houses are legit personality science, the badges and symbols and crucially the barrier to entry is not a deep, critical understanding of the media being bonded over, it's at a superficial level.
An old but relevant example:
Fandom never seems to converge around say, reading Matt Damon's character in "The Departed" as a repressed homosexual, it's all around "You Know Nothing Jon Snow." and "Valar Morghulus" and "Live Long and Prosper" and "May the Force Be With You" and "I Shall Not Fear, Fear is the Mind Killer" and "Swear to me!" and "Why So Serious?" and dancing down a set of stairs or Barbiecore fashion.
Risk free relevance. Okay, my parents who are Boomers the age cohort likely driving the infantalism of society with their extended working lives and hoarding of wealth (the generation, not my parents specifically) got swept up in fads and trends like the painful weekends they spent dragging us kids along when the "in thing" was going to vinyards and tasting wines.
I'm sure, back in the day, discussing a dry Claret or a robust Chardonney you'd discovered at a lesser known place in regional Victoria was the equivalent of having a Pastel Stanley Cup or knowing that Elden Ring dropped its DLC is now, in an office place of working adults. Weekend winery tours though were a more grown up way to express the need for belonging and esteem when the economy allowed boomers affordable housing and a modicum of job security, as well as having access broadly to positions of responsibility, management positions that weren't prefixed with "middle".
As the boomers have aged into decrepitude, I notice the vinyards have come to the city as "Wine Bars" have proliferated, and indeed, some portion of Gen X have also grown up to not go to PAX but to sit in Wine bars and have the salmon.
The major point when it comes to media however, is that an adult doesn't instantly spit up anything that isn't laced with enough sugar, salt and fat. Nerds are throwing tantrums about their Nerd Shit "going woke" and to a degree they have a point, because Disney's strategy with the MCU and Lucasfilm has been analogous to taking "Fruit Loops" and making it "Broccoli Loops" and changing Ice cream to "Beet Cream" and basically all around trying the doomed strategy of "eat your fucking vegetables."
Neither side of this equation can cope with ambivalence like a grown up. Far more progressive than black heroines facing down white male villains, are situations where upon scrutiny you just see two parties in conflict with no idea who is good and who evil, kind of like, life.
The Bronte Sisters and The Old Man And The Sea are for Grown Ups
The theory was simple: If recent is more infantalised, older publications should be more grown-up.
After watching "The Equalizer" with Denzel Washington, I looked up the list of books his character was reading through. It worked for me and I was relieved that I had read some of the 100 books to read before you die. (The Ramayana is a painful slog, Essays by Montaigne took me 1.5 years, though it is worthwhile.) The first new book (to me) I read from the list was "The Old Man and The Sea" then on audiobook I downloaded the BBC radio play productions of the Bronte sisters novels.
So far I made it through Jane Eyre, and am two thirds of the way through Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is presently on the verge of succeeding in marrying his son to his aunt or cousin or something, so all that remains is for Heathcliff to lose his will to live and give up on the whole revenge plot and die.
I'm still confused on these points, but there's a hint of nostalgia for me listening to Jane Eyre. I struggled with literacy until grade three where I was put in a remedial program. Jane Eyre might be the first story I ever read, albeit I was reading an abridged version.
The production values on the BBC audiobooks are high and I don't know what liberties they have taken, there is certainly an actor for each speaking role, instead of having a narrator perform all the voices, and a sound engineer if not a BBC Foley artist, so they may have cut out a bunch of prose.
These stories certainly lack the "nerd shit" of the MCU and comic book movies that disqualifies those from being grown up, the moral ambiguity is through the roof, though morality is highly peripheral to "The Old Man and The Sea".
What can be said is that the stories work, there are beginnings, middles and ends held together by a spine of tension. I am not sure they conform to Aristotle's poetics, or three act structures or whatever.
The Old Man and The Sea is the most straightforward and is probably a good example of the antithesis of "Nerd Shit", because it is unavoidably a story about fishing.
The curious thing is, is that Hemingway's tale works as a story about an old man catching a fish. Not only is it a functional story, but it is a story well told.
I am not a big believer in subtext, I think we can deduce some autobiographical features from the text about Hemingway, but it isn't necessary. Again, I think a grown up could put the book down and marvel at its ability to engross you in the practice of low-tech Marlin fishing having known nothing about it.
It works on the level of being escapist in the sense that a data-analyst in Helsinki could escape into the world of a mid-century Cuban fisherman for three days and experience a life, realistic or not, wholly unlike her own.
Furthermore, a Danish fisherman could also escape into a life mostly unlike their own, and it is sufficient to be an old destitute fisherman and not need to save the world by carrying the ring of power to mount doom in Mordor meeting Goblins, Trolls, Ents, Giant Spiders, Balrogs, Elves, Wizards and Giant Eagles. So another clue might be that grown-up content doesn't need to bolster a childish egocentricity for the protagonist via having the council of Elrond meet.
Hemingway is also popularly mis-credited with composing a 6 word short story: "For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn." and I think there is something about a comparison between The Old Man and The Sea and The Lord of The Rings that can somewhat illuminate content for grown ups and content for children if for no other reason than we can eliminate "complexity" as a defining criteria.
Tolkien made up whole languages and set the benchmark for fantasy worldbuilding and yet "The Lord of The Rings" is not for grown ups. It's hard to imagine simpler stories than The Old Man and The Sea yet I would have to say it is vastly superior to The Lord of The Rings, being a story of the form "There and back again" but more emotionally challenging while being far more economical.
The last thing to point out as childish, is that one could pick over "The Old Man and The Sea" and try and debate whether it presents toxic or non-toxic masculinity. That kind of analysis I think is also part of the infantilism of the present day. I'm not sure whether it was ever treated as a treatise on masculinity, maybe, probably, but again I don't think there's an answer to be found, the story doesn't contain enough information and the ending is ambiguous, though it is easy to convey - The old man returns to harbour with a skeleton of the largest fish ever seen. So is it triumph or tragedy?
I watched a video essay by "Like Stories of Old" that motivated me to start writing this post titled "The Death of Cinematic Curiosity" something I was thinking about recently with Furiosa failing to capitalize on word of mouth (scoring 90%+ with both critics and audiences, yet inspiring nobody to go see it) and watching a movie like "The Marathon Man" or knowing Umberto Eco's "The Name of The Rose" is one of the highest selling books ever written...and in the present day and age, I struggle to imagine "The Marathon Man" or even "The Godfather" or "Cabaret" getting produced and a book like "The Name of The Rose" getting published.
Anyhoo, Like Stories of Old also hits upon the inability to cope with ambiguity and he cited a pre-culture-war criticism of "Schindlers List" by a reviewer David Mamet that I will quote here, having been unable to find the original source, credit to Like Stories of Old for curating an apt quotation:
"But the film panders to the audience. It invites them (as does any melodrama) to reward themselves for Seeing that the Villain is Bad; and, in the Liberal Fallacy, of feeling this perception is a moral accomplishment."
Bringing me to Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte's world is now as foreign (to me at least) as Tolkein's Middle Earth. I couldn't write a story with a concept like the British class system, nor imagine a world where no adults would intervene in the welfare of a child as the characters so fatalistically give over Linton to his father Heathcliff being like "oh well, there's nothing to possibly be done."
For me, Heathcliff is written and characterized in such a way, as to not be ambiguous, with the confounding factor being that Heathcliff was a shit prior to being abused. In fact the only reason I've been presented with to be sympathetic to Heathcliff, is that other characters are sympathetic to him, even though, close to nothing warrants this attitude.
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| By Kate Beaton, from her Webcomics "Hark A Vagrant" |
At it's simplest, Wuthering Heights could be considered a morality tale about the perils of mate selection, except Catherine actually chooses the better mate, making Heathcliff a "Marijuana, not even once" kind of caution. At root, the tragedy and bleakness of Wuthering Heights has to be laid at the feet of Mr Lockwood, and perhaps is justification for why the narrative doesn't begin closer to the stories end. Mr Lockwood fucks everything up by introducing Heathcliff to his family system and leaving his family to deal with the consequences.
As such, Wuthering Heights is hard for me to make head-or-tail of, and it isn't a detective story or murder mystery. I would struggle to tell you what it is about, without just giving a blow by blow account of plot details. I guess I'd summarize it as: the wheel of fortune intermittently crushing various people. It is very much a story where stuff just happens, though Heathcliff turns bad quickly and stays bad so can be seen as the antagonist, though people seem to have settled on anti-hero or Byronic hero, in which case I have to allow for the possibility of some kind of redemption ark. (spoiler, he basically just dies and property is restored via marriage to the families he swore revenge against).
It is full messy like life, even if it might be fanciful. One could feel a sense of moral accomplishment by managing to identify where in Wuthering Heights, things went wrong because it isn't a simple process of pointing to the dudes in the Nazi uniforms, but given the expansive time frame and the trauma passed on through generations, it confronts an adult with the realities of being an adult - you might identify who started it, or who the villain is, that doesn't mean there's anything you can do about it.
In this sense, to tie Wuthering Heights and The Old Man and The Sea together, Jaws is a movie for grown ups. You can spot the villain - it's the Great White Shark, and you can watch helplessly as it eats vulnerable people.
Jaws demands contemplation, in terms of, Spielberg famously not letting people see the shark until the end of the film. The shark destroys the sanctuary of the boat, Brody has to make his shot as he is sinking into the shark's territory, stupid as a man and a shark going at each-other is.
Jane Eyre I would similarly struggle with an attempt to describe what the story is about. It also takes place over a fairly vast timespan, Jane starts destitute and subservient, Rochester begins wealthy and dominant, Jane becomes wealthy and...I mean, she stays in love with Rochester.
It certainly defies the "Beauty and the Beast" tropes, though it may seem not to. Rochester is transformed from a man into a cripple. The ethics of his treatment of his wife, and Jane Eyre's disposition to it may have been intended to be straightforward back in the day, but contemporary readers as at maybe the release of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" back in the 70s will probably struggle.
What is timeless is likely the "moral" of the Bronte's stories being that conversation is the most important activity in any marriage. Personality seems to triumph over both looks and class. "Oh and they lived happily ever after" (unlike almost half of all marriages).
And of course, for me, a male reader, there's an element of "witchcraft" to reading the Bronte's novels, or for that matter "The White Masai" because I have no insight into why the various heroines make the decisions they do. Rochester does seem appealing when dialoguing with Jane, the couple as portrayed do have the kind of rapport that is only really achieved by two lovers being written by the same author.
But Jane's love of Rochester seems to be largely because a) Rochester is the only dude around, and b) really a struggle of Jane triumphing over her low self-worth.
Both Jane and Catherine make their respective stories happen however, by rejecting the men they love. Jane leaves until she is coincidentally taken in by her cousins she never knew existed, and Catherine marries another guy more fitting to her station.
Things work out for Jane, nothing I believe works out for anybody in Wuthering Heights, except maybe people once Heathcliff is dead, enjoy stable lives.
Yet, these stories aren't just morally ambiguous but ambiguous in general. They reveal feminine pragma with their consciousness of class and what every male suitor earns, much like Jane Austin's novels. They give insight into an existence of simply looking for safe harbour, and I guess again like Jaws the only way out is through - they have to swim with the sharks.
Now, as I pointed out earlier, Jane Eyre is one of the first stories I ever read. It is beyond my capacities of recollection to find the abridged version I was exposed to, certainly none of the abuses of Jane Eyre's upbringing left an impression on me, but I was pleasantly surprised by the "there's someone in the walls" horror element, and I can remember then being intrigued that it turned out to be a secret wife. I remember the conclusion though, and I recall Jane Eyre devoting herself to a crippled Rochester.
I had no impression that what I had read was a fairy tale, for children, I couldn't credit myself with being able to imagine what horror elements of Jane Eyre had been downplayed or omitted and it wasn't like I'd gotten up after 8.30pm or whatever my bedtime was back then and gone to find my parents and subsequently glimpsed a scene from Friday the 13th or The Hand That Rocks The Cradle or The Silence Of The Lambs on TV.
Which is to say, what muddies the waters in determining whether popular media is maturing or infantilising is that just as 50 year old's can sit and read Shonen Jump or Harry Potter, kids can read Huckleberry Finn, Animal Farm or Jane Eyre.
I think our intuitions tell us such, if for example some families were on holiday and in a quiet moment of the afternoon a parent stumbled across some kids reading and in that intrusive way of parents asked "What are you reading?" and one kid said "Harry Potter" and another said "Jane Eyre" I think people whether by chauvinism or not, would intuit that the kid reading the second book was mature beyond her years or something.
Conversely if you walked into your workplace breakroom and saw two employees at separate tables on their lunch break and one was reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and another was reading Percy Jackson or The Maze Runner, I feel most people would see the person in their mid 20s reading YA fiction at best an aspiring YA author, but more likely having some kind of emotional development issue, normalized by prevalence but no less debilitating.
Malcolm Gladwell is for...?
Another simple way to find media content for grown ups would be to avoid fiction, stick to non-fiction. Indeed Michel Montaigne's essays are well worth reading but almost impossible to recommend to a child.
Alas, Charli D'Amelio's autobiography is non-fiction (despite, I'm sure, being highly curated) and there's almost nothing to learn from Charli D'Amelio being that the interesting part of her life story is that she blew up on TikTok performing a "cover" of a dance.
Bringing me to the most perplexing case study - Malcolm Gladwell. He is simply an interesting guy, exactly who you would hope to be a guest at a friend's dinner party you are obliged to attend.
Having said that, Malcolm Gladwell might be the only person I have seen single-handedly nuke his own side of a public debate when he went all in on "anyone who argues against legacy media is a racist" debating Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray.
Aside from that, Gladwell is undoubtedly one of the most talented storytellers in living memory. The trouble being that he tells non-fiction stories, that from time to time, have turned out to be fiction, or made fiction by further study.
I saw something recently, a piece of apologetics for new testament or old testament bullshit, that was like "it's not the book, it's the reader." The position that the errors are not in the bible itself, but the Christians attempting (and presumably failing) exegesis in which case, I would argue one can simply throw away the book and concentrate on just teaching the output of sophisticated and correct exegesis.
Now I think, to pick a prominent example, adults should be trusted with a book like "Outliers" to not then latch onto the simplest and most risk averse idea being the 10,000 hour rule to destroy countless people's lives through parents attempting to vicariously secure their futures by forcing relentless deliberative practice upon them.
Evidently, they cannot. But, and you'll have to stick around for my reasoning, in the present day and age I think the world would be better off if grown ups read Mein Kampf. Because I don't think it would produce Nazis so much as be a bullwark against it. Children can't be asked to read Mein Kampf in part or whole because it is a boring and tedious book replete with wild leaps to anti-Semitic conclusions, just as children can't be asked to read scripture, yet are forced to, and I've heard many former Christians testify that the best way to create atheists is to have them read the bible.
I digress, patently, if one is grown up to the extent that they can entertain ideas without needing to be persuaded by them, Gladwell's science communication is fine, though I suspect it is simply an elite level of the "doing your own research" that produces conspiracy theorists. Gladwell to his credit, will not defend the 10,000 hour rule, admitting that by simply observing the Beatles, Wayne Gretsky and Bill Gates he ignores the Roger Federer, Michael Jordan and Steve Jobs who enjoyed tremendous success while generalizing or at least not specializing in the fields they came to dominate.
Furthermore, if there is a thesis of Outliers, it is that the aspect of success within our control isn't making our kids amass 10,000 hours of violin practice by the time they are 16, but rather that success is highly contingent on opportunity. Bill Gates had access to a computer where his contemporaries didn't, Wayne Gretsky probably was born the right time of year to be older and bigger than other kids in his little league etc.
On the other hand, what Gladwell and other science communicators do, is make science accessible, in which case I doubt there's a Gladwell book on the market that children can't read, and children are in that demographic most prone to watching Dawson's Creek and thinking they are getting smarter because they use big words and discuss grown up things.
I feel as such I can't rule on who Gladwell's writing is for. More so that useful science should perhaps not be subjected to a popularity contest. The "best" ideas winning out hopefully is taking place in the context of a sport like Boxing, where cheating and rigging is scandalous, vs Wrestling where it is a form of theatre that also sports lower life expectancy for its actors than boxing does.
Clearly, if nothing else, media for grown ups is not as simple as "non-fiction" for grown ups, "fiction" for juveniles. Non-fiction can still be trite, and we likely saw a TED inspired boom of it, replete with communicating science that does not replicate.
I would have liked to say British panel show QI is for grownups, yet they refer to their staff as elves. It operates perhaps perfectly in that space of interesting trivia that isn't challenging in any way and thus does not require maturity to interact with. Yeah, it might be "challenging" to contemplate if there is more than one moon, or whether the moon is a moon at all, but ultimately it shouldn't induce anxiety to contemplate how science might classify a mass in space.
Gladwell on the other hand, has had perhaps most notably, a massive impact through science he has communicated, like the 10,000 hour rule. School sporting programs changed paradigm from generalist discovery to predetermined specialization or something. In which case, grown ups can't be trusted with the application of marketing to science.
All I can do is guesstimate, that part of the maturation process, or at least a shorter path to maturation process might be to read some nonfiction once in a while. Read some history, read some narrow subject science written by an expert in that domain. Maybe?
Reaction Videos are not for Grown Ups
I'm going to embed a video not because it's particularly brilliant explanation of clickbait and "reaction thumbnails" but because it puts onscreen a statistically significant sample of youtube thumbnails.
Suffice to say, a grown up should at least notice their own minds being hacked by a photo of a wide eyed person, mouth hanging open pointing to a pixelated blur captioned with "you won't believe the results!"
If maturation means anything, it has to somehow involve learning from experience.
Beyond the ability to resist mind hacking click-bait, does one really conceive of the internet, and in particular youtube the largest media site on earth, as basically a mind-blowing machine?
The fact that clickbait proliferates, promising content consistently more exciting than it can ever hope to deliver in a battle for our attention reflects poorly on our own predictive abilities.
I don't want to single out the content creator, because fundamentally I don't think he is a bad guy, but what got annoying to me and I couldn't quite put my finger on it, was the value-adding chain that seemed parasitical but could have been symbiotic.
This person was doing reaction videos to a comedians reaction videos to chef recipes. Now he could argue that by adding his own two cents as a professional chef he was adding value, but it was also clear that he was riding the coattails of someone riding coattails.
When taking the total number of professional chefs in the world clearly most don't decide on taking the path to success of creating easy reaction content to established attention grabbing content. Fundamentally, the success and viability of reaction videos kind of a deregulated DVD commentary track industry, is likely a symptom of society being facilitated in their lack of curiosity.
We can get 9 hour video essays about Dr Who, instead of having to try a new show a bunch of people took big risks and were hugely invested in making, and isn't bad but doesn't rate high enough to get greenlit for a second seasons.
Reaction videos are not for grown ups, because, and I don't want to spend too much time on it: a) they do not involve the risk of putting yourself out there. b) they are designed to facilitate the outsourcing of thinking.
What do you think of this? I think what pro-chef thinks. You are perfectly capable of trying things and reacting on your own.
Now, youtubers I'm happy to name as a fine example of producing media for ungrown, immature people is "The Dave Cullen Show" now, Dave and I probably agree about a lot of films particularly produced by Disney in the last 8 years.
But there's a sharp dividing line, at least apparently. If in I don't know 2014 someone comes to me and says "should we make 5 more Star Wars movies and 4 Star Wars TV shows to be released in the next 8 years?" to me the question does not depend on who makes them, my answer would be "no, that's too many films I personally think there are between 3 and 4 Star Wars films too many."
I don't think Dave Cullen shares my view that I simply want all this exploitation of IP to stop. I think he wants more Star Wars, more Star Trek, more MCU, more Dr Who and I infer this because he makes videos promoting fan films of these IPs.
But more to the point, I would guess Youtube has trained him into appealing to the infant mind of audiences because he has released videos titled:
"Why does this keep happening?" and "They're doing it again..." and "That's Weird..."
Okay, can you guess what these videos are about? I've watched one of them and I can't remember what it was about. You can check out his video channel page and I think the thumbnails will give you ample idea of the tactic of employing "Spielberg face"
Now, there's a lot of money to be made off children and this is very counterintuitive for a lot of people because children don't have jobs. For example, in the 2000s if you had to guess who was the biggest band in the world you might guess The White Stripes or System of a Down or maybe Britney, Destiny's Child or Backstreet Boys. Few people if prompted would guess the huge act that is largely invisible to them - The Wiggles.
In the influencer economy of "content creators" its probably easier now to be aware that the major players make content largely for people who are 12 years old - People like Mr. Beast, whose videos I've never seen but yes every single thumbnail on his channel's video page has his Spielberg face on display, but somehow algorithmic learning has dragged science communicators down into this marketing strategy treating not just content for children like people competing for $1,000,000 dollars by standing on a circle for longer, it is applied to theoretical physics by Sabine Hossenfelder.
Which is again, having to trick people into seeing a Scorsese movie (that flopped in the 70s) by putting Batman and Joker costumes on the poster. In which case is "Science News" with Sabine for adults or children? Well, I can only go by the marketing and say that according to Sabine her content is for children, not grown ups and Professor Dave explains has taken the care to make two videos now explaining that Sabine's content is anti-science.
I started disregarding her content once she started with the click bait.
Inconclusion
I'm still wearing basketball shorts, I'm listening to Moby Dick by Herman Melville, a book I don't yet understand but I was prompted to read it after finding in my library's audiobooks "And The Ocean Was Our Sky" by Patrick Ness, that I downloaded because it's premise of retelling Moby Dick from the whale's perspective sounded like an actual interesting intellectual exercise compared to the proliferating genre of "retelling [insert classic text] from [insert marginalised group]" genre of fiction perhaps started by "Wicked" or "A Thousand Ships" I don't know.
That book sucked and the chapter of Moby Dick that just deals with the narrator Ishmael sharing a bed with a cannibal harpoonist is more interesting than the whole of "And The Ocean Was Our Sky" that really didn't step up to the challenge of writing Moby Dick from a whale's perspective, like Watership Down or other books about animals.
This post is unlikely to conclude for the simple fact that consuming media takes a bunch of time. The approximately right conclusion (as opposed to being precisely wrong) is the attention economy and smart hones hack our brains and its created a race to the bottom in terms of media content that is more childish, more kitsch designed to make our reptillian brains salivating - salt, fat and sugar.
I also think there's the macroeconomic happening of longevity that has infantilised society in general. People are sticking around, staying in jobs, not delegating, not succession planning, micromanaging and acquiring and hoarding and that makes children of us all.
The prerequisite to maturity is responsibility. Responsibility is not something we can be trusted with only once we are mature. This I feel has been our great mistake. The technological progress of the 20th and 21st century meant children were trusted with less because the economic necessity of giving children responsibility disappeared and this has now applied to Gen X for pretty much all of their lives.
Those vast numbers of us with no real responsibilities are left simply to amuse ourselves. My brother is someone who for example is not alone in struggling with the existential angst of a 2nd Trump presidency. Yet, he is also a big fan of From software games where to oversimplify things you always play a dead person in a world where everyone and everything is dead and falling apart and struggle through extremely difficult and slow paced combat.
When I reread what I wrote comparing the egocentricity of LOTR having Frodo as "boring English person stand-in" declare that he will carry the one ring to the cracks of doom before the council of Elrond, vs The Old Man and The Sea being about an old man catching a Marlin in a futile ordeal, I think I can reconcile my brothers inability to consume news media about Trump while loving very bleak video games as a form of escape.
I think such media can be described as "meaningful life simulators" where people simulate doing things of social consequence. Worlds where we are responsible for our world, rather than on the receiving end of them.
I'm also currently reading "Trainspotting" better known as a quintessential 90s movie, and a non-fiction book called "The Sell-In" I think I'm doing better at least at consuming media for grown ups, and I can recommend it.
Perhaps its about escaping into books that actually challenge you, or turn around and force you to contemplate your own life as it is, vs books that comfort you with grand narratives about good triumphing over evil.
There's so much more I could write about, but I think you should probably just get a library card and start reading some stuff, for the act of reading itself is now pretty grown up in a TikTok economy.
I don't think I can conclude anything, but the question itself is definitely worth asking.
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