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Narrative Gambit #2,654: Cheap Sentiment & Preserving the Status Quo
There's a peculiar article in today's New York Times about the obsession being aired on popular television with doing harm to children: threatening them, sometimes (often?) killing them.
The central argument, which the writer has culled from a studious perusal of the plots of made-for-Lifetime TV movies, "Criminal Minds," several of the "Law & Order" series and "Weeds," is that:
"Television has become an extremely inhospitable place for middle-class children, and in some sense, for the demanding ideals by which they are now raised - a gory receptacle for any and all of our collectively sublimated parental ambivalence."
This seems strange to me, since if the reporting in the New York Times is any indication, "parental ambivalence" busted out of the collective unconscious some time ago and is making itself manifest in the form of angry coffee shop signage, stroller hatred, and various child-free movements. All of which the Times eagerly reports.
This is not to say that people aren't questioning what it means to be parents and, as a card-carrying contrarian, I can attest to how enraged I get when faced with "demanding ideals" of any sort.
Still, the is a history of narrative child threat goes quite far back, predating television, if you can imagine such a thing. Consider all the people waiting on the New York docks for the final installment of Charles Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop, desperate for news of Little Nell. Gone With the Wind has a terrible child death, and so do countless more recent books and movies that still predate this recent "phenomenon" uncovered by the Times. There was a period in the early 1990s when I spent too much energy wishing for child death in some movies (I was desperate for some T-rex to chomp those insipid kids from Jurassic Park).
Are these contemporary stories doing something different with their threatened or dead children? In this case, I'm of the everything-old-is-new-again opinion. This kind of storytelling has always been around, but it is being exaggerated now because people eat it up. Look at the stories that the evening news refuses to relinquish. Look at the stories that generate wild headlines and public outcry. Child threat stories are so successful because the narrative gambit is so supremely manipulative, requires little work on the part of the audience, and covers emotional terrain that is (almost) universally comprehensible: losing a child is unimaginably terrible. No one will argue with that.
When I was in 6th grade, Wednesday afternoons were spectacularly unpleasant (which is saying a lot for middle school) because the educational system decided that students should be taught how to deal with emotional issues. This meant that we were shown awful movies about death and divorce every week. Because we were children, the death was often of beloved animals. Dogs were threatened, a heard of deer was poisoned, horses went lame, cats got sick. I admit now that I spent a better part of these screening sessions in the washroom wishing I could do something terrible to the people who made these movies. They certainly made me miserable, and I was always relieved to go home to find my family and my dog intact.
To a certain extent, if there is a trend, I think its origins have less to do with parenting ambivalence and more to with a need to tease ourselves with worst-case scenarios. Hideous "what ifs" which make us give thanks for our "normal" lives and "good" children.
If this is the case, these stories don't do anything as subversive as the New York Times suggests, they work instead to preserve the preciousness of children that all of the "ambivalent parents" claim to find discomforting while embracing. They don't subvert the ridiculous culture, they reinforce it. Articles like this only support the sense that the world is an evil, threatening place that requires constant vigilance and, indeed "strict ideals" to ward off unspeakable calamity.
And how weird is it really? Children's stories frequently dispense with the parents. (Remember Babar?)
posted by Elise at 8:42 PM
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said...
Hi there
I need help with my crappy computer! It is always freezing when i open IE and going to MSN? What do you think?
By the way, I love that too! Where did you get that at?
See you soon! Girly Girl
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2/12/2007 10:27 PM
said...
Hello!
what is your favorite color of....mine is blue!
Wow, I've found the same to be true too! How did you find that?
Bye, - MyGirl!
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2/19/2007 11:56 AM
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