In today's Sunday comics, Luann's mother was lamenting that, now Luann was a teenager, she knew nothing about her daughter. The next cel has Luann walking through with her cell phone, saying, "Yeah, I Googled him last night. Did you see his YouTube vid? LOL! I'm gonna text him about his MySpace blog." The last cel has both parents mystified at that computerese.
In The Week's new issue is this item: "Sales of dolls, action figures, and outdoor toys are down sharply, while electronics sales to children are up 16.6 percent in the past two years. So toymakers are combining conventional toys with electronics. Mattel's newest Barbie doll, for instance, doubles as an MP3 Player. The Wall Street Journal."
When I was still working, I hooted when my boss told us how he and his wife had severely grounded one of their sons, confining him to his room for a month. Would I have been so lucky when I was a teenager. That room had a computer, a CD player, a telephone (this was before the cell phone craze), video games, and I'm sure much else of the expensive electronic toys with which we indulge our teenagers. Add cars and more necessary things like brand-name clothes and sportswear, all expensive, as I know from my nieces and nephews. And I probably should mention teenagers' adamant fast food choices, making certain franchises rich while driving parents--and uncles--crazy. Which has replaced the hamburger with pizza, I'd guess.
That is what I meant when I wrote how Tab Hunter had emphatically described how teenage money has captured the marketeers' attentions, since that time especially in the new electronic technologies that supposedly mystify anyone over, say, 40, which is why we have constant references in the comic strips to baffled parents depending on children and teenagers to program the cell phones, to use the DVD player and burn new CDs by downloading, as they do their iPods, their digital cameras, other gadgetry. Teenagers may not know who Chopin or Poirot or what the Magna Carta or Machu Picchu is, nor do they care in their noisy insular worlds at booming volumes, epitomized in one of my very favorite comic strips, "Zits." Jeremy Duncan is the quintessential teenager at 15, peer-driven, anxious about Image, a guitarist in a rock band, often sullen especially mornings, indolent, insolent, a slob, an eating frenzy, contemptuous of his "old-fashioned" parents, Walt and Connie, in their clumsy technological skills and efforts to communicate with him, as he even texts his mother at the table, programs his father's phone, and is somehow endearing for all that. Most recently he downloaded Walden for his iPod so he could listen to it for an assignment while he played video games. I LOL'd (text message acronym for "laugh-ed out loud"). Thoreau's famous journal is the American bible for individualism, not to mention that his Civil Disobedience inspired Mahatma Gandhi and India to kick out the British Empire by sit-ins and peaceable obstructionism, which returned to us a few decades later with Martin Luther King and the South sit-ins. But Walden was just a necessary temporary distraction, if that, for Jeremy. The creators of this strip are brilliant at the contemporary family with a teenager.
And Dennis Haysbert's somber new Allstate commercial would not be so affecting if it were not about 6,000 teenagers killed annually in auto accidents (300,000 injured), the leading cause of teenage death. (For some perspective, Car-Accidents.com claims in 2005 that 6,420,000 auto accidents cost us $230 billion, injured 2.9 million, and killed 42,636, 115 daily, one every 15 minutes. Our car-crazy culture is clearly crazy, like a war against ourselves.) And yet what teenager would be willingly without a car?
So I understand well enough why accountants aim at teenage demographics and cash burning in their designer jeans, ready to make millionaires and billionaires out of rock stars, treating the rapidly evolving technotoys as necessities of life, pandered to by TV and Hollywood. We went from Father Knows Best to Saved by the Bell and Happy Days to Beverly Hills, 90210, The O.C., and One Tree Hill, as Superman goes to high school in Smallville, Texas football gets free advertising and becomes iconic in Friday Night Lights, and Dawson's Creek infuriates me because its very simple gimmick is role reversal of the adults and teenagers, the adults willfully self-centered, superficial, irresponsible, even irrational and dangerous, while the the teenagers ooze serious caring and sharing responsibilities. (I am aware that we have thousands of working teenagers not pampered, barely managing, but they aren't the targets of the CPAs and corporate seduction.)
Puccini's La Boheme--what teenager would willingly attend an opera?--becomes Rent, as tuberculosis mutates into AIDS. Jane Austen's Emma becomes Valley Girl Clueless, as her Pride and Prejudice becomes that again in 2003 set in California with a college student as Elizabeth, the sisters turned into roommates, or Bridget Jones's Diary, and a new version with Keira Knightley comes out (though one of the most interesting is Bollywood's Bride & Prejudice, brilliant with India's colors and musical choreography). O (2001) is Othello set in an Ohio high school with a basketball player as the lead. A kung-fu version of Romeo and Juliet with Jet Li is Romeo Must Die, and Leonardo DeCaprio, still playing a teenager, and Claire Danes starred in a sensationally splashy Romeo + Juliet. Of course, Zeffirelli had made that change way back in 1968 with actual teenagers for his Romeo and Juliet, with Leonard Whiting at 18 and Olivia Hussey at 17. One of my favorite made-for-teenagers Shakespearean revisions is 10 Things I Hate About You, a witty version of The Taming of the Shrew, far better than the notorious Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton Shakespearean movie, though I have to add that Cole Porter's adult Kiss Me, Kate outdoes it. (I just like anything Julia Stiles is in and should add that she was also Ophelia in a curious modern corporate Hamlet set in New York's business world.) The 2006 TV movie High School Musical is Disney's megahit, selling a million DVDs in less than a week and still drawing huge audiences as well as now going on the theater circuit. Grease is still out there too, and Hairspray is earning rave reviews. I didn't mention all those awful beach movies like Beach Blanket Bingo or the American Pie series lowering the standards of American Graffiti. I don't have to wonder why BBC America chose a Robin Hood looking way too young to have been to the Crusades with Richard the Lion Hearted and Showtime a young, handsome, slender Henry VIII, who was neither, though he did ascend to the throne at the age of 18. (If I understand correctly, Luke Skywalker became active with the Jedi at 19.)
The list of examples is very long, and it is hardly a secret why young people are orienting themselves to music, sports, entertainment, with the preposterously huge salaries now offered for young talent, another way the CPAs have bought into and influenced our youth-oriented culture. Roman bread and circuses. I just needed to stop to think about all the ramifications of what the manufacturers and advertisers have been up to--down to?--culturally, the magnitude inundating us. Small wonder fat women with pierced navels and ugly tattoos are wearing low riders, showing their thongs, and Viagra has become part of the drug scene, and men still play cars, and both sexes like a little Nip/Tuck, eh? And it's a nice irony now that the music business is disintegrating as youth refuses to buy albums when single songs can be downloaded, causing current uproar in the CD world. (When I was growing up and we bought 45 rpm singles, we always knew the song we wanted, Side A, would be paired with a song we didn't care about, Side B. Likewise, most albums even today have a few hits, lots of dross.) Sometimes pandering bites.
Leave a comment