The fear of being ignored is a prominent theme in many kids’
books and films. What does this say
about how young people relate to parents and authority?
Invisibility and parental recognition
I’d previously noticed that a number of children’s books play
on the unfairness of being invisible. I’d
particularly noticed the perverse glee taken in children being proved right
when something bad appears to befall them, after their cries for parental
attention have gone unheeded. In Not Now Bernard, Bernard is ignored by
his disinterested parents and is ultimately eaten by a monster as a result. Noisy Nora pretends to run away from home
after her parents won’t give her enough attention, but is welcomed back when
she returns soon afterwards.
Often it’s even manifested in the main characters being
literally invisible or small (Honey I
Shrunk the Kids, The Borrowers) or slipping into somehow parallel
dimensions (Tom’s Midnight Garden). (It’s tempting to see a link here to other
stories about parallel dimensions - Narnia; Peter
Pan; Conrad’s War; Alice in Wonderland etc – but I think
something else is going on here.)
Once I’d spotted this theme, I started noticing it
everywhere. But I also started noticing
different types of invisibility, and different responses to it. Did they relate to different stages of
childhood?
In books for young infants (maybe three to seven years old),
the reader seems to be invited to sympathise with another child who is
neglected, and strives for parental recognition and approval – like in Not Now Bernard and Noisy Nora.
Adventure time!
But in books and films for slightly older children (maybe
eight to fourteen), the emphasis seems to shift. Acting without parental supervision isn’t merely
frightening and undesirable – it acquires the heady excitement of doing
something magical your parents don’t know about. And following from that, the way young readers
empathise with the character not just in sympathy but with envy.
In the film ET, the eponymous alien hero is an amazing
secret known only to the children. (In
fact, the specific plot device of “We can’t let the authorities find out about
you, because scientists would want to take you away and experiment on you” ends
up becoming a fairly widespread plot device to accommodate this whole genre of
stories.) In Lynne Reid Banks’ The Indian in the Cupboard, the toys
that come to life, and the adventures they have, are known about only to the
main character (a schoolboy) and his peers.
Likewise Five Children and It,
The Demon Headmaster, and probably
hundreds of others.
These stories create a sense of peer-recognition and
community; the commonality that comes
from disempowerment. That shared
experience and understanding is the triumphant flipside of living under
parental control – the ability to act with agency, under the radar of the
all-seeing parental gaze.
This new-found excitement of doing something big without the
crusties is still often tempered by anxiety though. In The
Goonies, the heroes take delight in their adventure, but the happy ending
comes when all their parents arrive to give them a hug. It’s significant that the final scene in The Goonies is in the youths relating their experiences to their
parents and the press. This taps into something
else that many (but not all) children experience – the sense that if your mum only
knew what was going on, then everything would just be OK. Not necessarily
because they’ll have practical solutions to fix everything, but simply by dint
of your situation being made slightly more real by dint of their recognising
it.
Perhaps this is also why it’s so powerful when characters in
stories think they’ve just escaped from danger into the arms of familiar people,
or into safe spaces – only to find that they are not as safe as they
appear. (The scene in Jurassic Park where the woman thinks she’s
found her companion, but is horrified to find it’s only his severed arm. The part in 28 Days Later when we think the army will save them, only to discover
they just want to imprison and rape them.
The bit in every scary film when the hero manages to escape to the
safety of their car and drive away – only to realise that the killer is
actually on the back seat…)
Teenagers and respect
But maybe the flipside of the emotional need for your parents
/ the authorities to know what’s going on, is the frustration of (or fear of) not
being believed. This is a trope that
emerges for various teen characters, returning full circle to Not Now Bernard. Because although in many ways teenagers can
be eager to remove themselves from the adult world (eg through various specific
identities and subcultures) they’ve also often moved beyond the phase of wanting
Narnia-type adventures, and crave to be taken seriously as adults. They want to be shown respect. (At the very least, they want to appear grown
up to other teenagers – “Old enough to grow a bad moustache”, as one character
puts it in The Simpsons.)
In The Blob, a
group of teenagers are the first to recognise the threat of the giant gooey
alien predator. But the sheriff initially
doesn’t believe them, assuming it’s “only kids” playing a prank. The happy ending comes from the recognition
of adults. Similarly in Hackers, a group of teen computer geeks struggle
against an evil foe, only managing to win the day when they’re able to broadcast
their side of the story to the nation, by hacking into a TV station.
Teen stuff actually gets a bit more complicated than
children’s literature. I think this is because
whereas there are endless numbers of books written specifically for kids, this
is less the case for teenagers – although of course many books aimed at teens
do exist. Meanwhile, there are loads TV
shows and films directed at teenaged audiences.
But the cultural context of TV and film is very different to book, with
plots and characters often liable to be much more driven by advertising
revenues, and capturing specific demographic ranges. This means that in children’s literature the plot
will often focus on characters in quite a narrow age range, whereas other fiction
rarely features only teenagers –
there will usually be other characters with a range of ages, especially in
family films (Honey I Shrunk the Kids,
The Goonies); even where the main character is a teenager (Back to the Future); and even where almost everyone is a teenager
(eg Buffy the Vampire Slayer).
No doubt there are loads of other examples in youth fiction to
disprove all of what I’ve written above.
And there are plenty of adults being disbelieved and rendered invisible
in grownup fiction. It's certainly too simplistic to divide all youth into three clear-cut phases, whose subjectivity is felt identically by everyone, consisting of 'clinging to your parents', 'having adventures with other children', and 'selectively entering adulthood and seeking recognition'. But despite these caveats, I do still think that some of the tropes above tap into to specific fears and desires that are
experienced by many young people at certain stages of their development.
