Seeing Stars
by Wentworth Sutton, assistant vice-principal, Mitchell Hepburn Collegiate Institute, Don Mills, and president emeritus, Semiologico-Hermeneutic Institute of Toronto
As all psychologists know, when you see adults wearing spaceman costumes lining up overnight to watch a children's movie, you're onto something.
The movie, of course, is Star Wars Chapter II: Attack of the Thirty-Foot Invisible Lobsters or whatever it's called. The critical community is engrossed by the question of whether Star Wars can outdraw Spiderman.
A more interesting question is why the North American movie market is dominated by two childish fantasies. The age group at which moviemakers aim is the 18-to-34-year-old group. You'd think people facing the challenges and enjoying the rewards of young adulthood would have lost interest in movies about cowboys and Indians in space or costumed heroes with magical powers.
An event which helps us understand this phenomenon is the revelation this week that the government of the United States had been warned in August 2001 that followers of Osama bin Laden might be planning to hijack planes. To understand how that explains Star Wars we have to look at how the American government responded to this warning.
The response of the American government to this warning was to do nothing. The official excuses are that a) investigating all 20,000 foreign students at flight schools was impossible, and b) that no one realized that the planes would be used as missiles. Oh, there you go – no one realized that buildings were at stake, just people's lives. As for the possibility of investigating 20,000 students, does the Immigration and Naturalization Service not have computers? Even if it was impossible, couldn't some effort have been put into strengthening airport security?
No no no no no. What a silly idea. The United States government prefers to put its faith in what, boys and girls? That's right – a revived Star Wars defence project! That's interesting, too, eh? The magical shield which will protect America from its enemies is named after a children's movie.
The United States has acted like a homeowner who installs a high-tech home security system and then doesn't bother to lock his doors. Well actually that's not quite right, is it? The United States has acted like a homeowner who intends to buy a home security system which is not yet on the market and then doesn't bother to lock his doors. The Star Wars defence project remains about as real as the technology in the movies for which it's named.
Defence contractors, of course, are very good at delivering technology contingent on the receipt of huge sums of public money. They're not about to promote any low-tech alternatives to their products. The real problem is that the low-tech alternatives are not commercial products.
The chief low-tech alternative to defence technology is common sense. Common sense would have ensured that airport security technology was being used properly. But you cannot buy common sense with the taxpayers' money the way you can buy alleged ABMs. You actually have to apply yourself to acquire common sense.
And that, of course, is contrary to the spirit of the age. The spirit of the age says that technology can solve every problem. Thanks to technology, people believe, you never actually have to think or work, you just have to have enough money on you to afford the technological solution.
Which brings us back to Star Wars, the movie. Eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-olds have grown up in a world in which technology is touted as the solution to every problem, even problems of personal relationships. They have derived from that proposition a corollary – they never have to grow up. If technology will solve every problem, then why bother to acquire adult traits like analysis and common sense and responsibility? Adult behaviour is now conceived of as the ability to buy really good technology.
So why do we see young adults lining up overnight to see a children's movie? They line up for it because they're not aware it's a children's movie.
As Gilbert Ryle observed, to have counterfeit money you first have to have real money. To have the stage of life traditionally referred to as childhood you have to have the stage traditionally referred to as adulthood.
Not so long ago people also failed to distinguish childhood and adulthood, because they considered that life consisted of one long adulthood. In a world in which most children started working at very young ages, that supposition had some merit. Childhood was an age of responsibility. For example, a review posted on this site of a nineteenth-centruy children's book observes that the hero, a twelve-year-old boy, is expected, before making a discretionary expenditure, to calculate the loss of interest the expenditure would cost him.
In the twentieth century, as children became unnecessary in the work force, we acquired the idea of childhood as a distinct age. In the twenty-first century, it seems, under the onslaught of propaganda for technology, we have decided that adulthood is just a better paid variety of childhood. Politics has been reduced to an exercise in deciding who's wearing the white hats and who the black, and the movies have been reduced to a vehicle for selling merchandise to an infantilised public.
Live long and buy those light sabres – uh, ABMs – uh, whatever we have to sell you this week.
May 2002
Seeing Stars © Coolth, 2002
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