So how do you make a movie about "growing up"? Trick question: you can't because there's no such process. You could make a movie about people stopping drugs or binge-drinking or hopping to yet one more job or finally getting their own place... damn, they did, it was called St Elmo's Fire. What can you make a movie about?
Becoming an adult, which is quite a process. What adulthood is not about is "putting aside childish things": by now you should know not to fall into that trap. We make ourselves people by advancing our projects, our plans for our lives, the contributions we want to make to other people, institutions and the arts and sciences. Sounds a little pompous, as well it should. Adults have plans that challenge them. What counts as a challenge depends on the place and time: just getting by with some dignity is pretty damn heroic in Kyrgyzstan, but it's really not enough in Frankfurt for a middle-class engineering graduate.
Adults don't dream their life away and they don't throw it away either. A talented lady surgeon loses her adult status if she gives it all up to have children. She can do what few others can, and that's her obligation to the rest of us. She has to hire a nanny and get back to work. The capable have duties that the plain folk don't have. A tax-collector can throw it all in and paint in Polynesia, but only if they're a better painter than tax-collector.
Adults accept their responsibilities, but do not confuse those with other people's needy demands. Adults don't rescue, but if they have the ability to help and someone asks for that help, then they do. Adults know the difference between rescuing and helping.
Adults have lost most of their illusions, but so they can deal with the real world with clear sight. Illusions are pleasant and it is better to have had them and lost them than never to have been illuded at all. There's something a little dull about people who never had any illusions.
Adults understand that right action is contextual, specific, and depends on your aims, not abstract moral law. This is not something that young people and moral philosophers who want timeless moral principles understand. Adults also understand that in many cases there are no right actions, and there aren't even any less wrong ones.
Adults do apologise for their occasional crass, rude or thoughtless actions. No-one is perfect. They don't apologise for themselves. It doesn't mean they are perfect: an adult is always changing because that's the world they live in. It does mean that they do not allow anyone to make them feel ashamed of themselves. There's always someone out there who can push our buttons, but adults fight it. Or leave.
Especially an adult does not apologise for taking a share of the Good Stuff (however you conceive of the Good Stuff). They go after what they want without worrying if there's enough for everyone else in the queue. Adults accept that they can't take it all and they can't stomp on the competition to get to the trough, but they don't feel guilty when they take what they need.
Finally, an adult doesn't take major shit from anyone. The indignities of everyday life have to be suffered by us all, but major shit gets fought against. This is the final defining moment in the evolution of a black-belt adult, and a knowledge of the arts of self-defense is usually needed.
According to this, a great many people of mature age are not adults. It's not their fault: it never was a common spiritual condition. A consumerist, post-modern capitalist, bureaucratic society and economy doesn't need adults, it needs good little consumers and flexible employees who don't defend their interests, whose projects can be realised by buying things and experiences and buy following "processes", who believe the hype (or at least don't try to see beyond it), who can be guilt-tripped into conformity and leaving the Good Stuff for their Lords and Masters, and who are prepared to take a whole load of shit because you can't take the law into your own hands and you can't fight City Hall. Every one of us, after all, spends the first twenty-one or so years of our lives at the mercy of hormones and examinations, and of teachers and parents whose overwhelming need is to keep us within the limits that they are comfortable with. We spend twenty-one years being rewarded for doing as we are told and punished for being independent or unruly. You need more than just determination to shrug that lot off: you need to know there is an alternative and that it is acceptable.
Now there's a subject for a movie: showing a bunch of adult guys dealing with the overgrown children around them.
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