The Invention of the Adolescent
This film was made at a time (1967) when the "generation gap" had become apparent and become a household term. I've wondered about the inorganic nature of the youth/adult divide. It's difficult to navigate the transitions from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, and it's no wonder that people remain somehow stuck or stunted at the earlier two in adulthood. Nothing about being young prepares you for getting old.Until the mid-20th Century, the world into which kids grew was not so different from the world in which their parents had been raised. However, even a century ago, popular culture, through radio and movies, was beginning to issue directives to the masses, with depictions of life as few people knew it, but nevertheless having to answer to them psychologically, and eventually adapt to them as they became acceptable by dint of their desirability. The ubiquity of rarefied cultural influences and their effect on so many people conditioned people to accept and expect that their culture came from above, or from outside their ranks, in the hands and from the mouths of experts and professionals.
The pre-fab construct of adolescence became the perfect laboratory conditions for infusing cultural engineering, although the most recent species of mindfuckery seems to be necessarily imposed upon kids still too young to comprehend comprehend sexuality and gender identity, requiring stocking the elementary-school library with illustrated storybooks on anal sex, blow jobs, and man-boy love. Back in my youth, porn was hard to get ahold of, and a guy had to wait until high school to be peer-pressured into being last in line for the gang-bang. My parents had never had any schoolmates who were burnouts or acid casualties; they probably had never known anyone who'd smoked pot. Their turning 18 didn't entail enthusiasm to drink their first legal beer.
The sex/drugs/rock-n-roll bomb was dropped in the mid-'60s, and our society was forever transformed by it. A whole new way of dressing, talking, and behaving was spread across the world in a short amount of time, via the now-primitive means of TV, radio, and printed media. The contagion is now drastically, and more immediately, broadened by the Internet. It even spreads laterally, across informational sources on the Internet. Most podcasters aren't as concerned with presenting new and ground-breaking information, saying instead what everybody else is saying in pursuit of clicks on trending subjects, even those which are more contrarian or controversial. Monetization and threat of its being reduced or rescinded encourage conformity to status quo ideology.
Back in the mid-'90s, I had already lived without a TV in my domicile for over a decade, when the TV series Friends was popular. I resented that I'd even known about it. It was the sort of thing that I wanted to have no influence upon me whatsoever – but then there was Jennifer Aniston's butt on the cover of Rolling Stone, and though I still didn't want to watch an episode of the series, I wanted to see more images of Jennifer Aniston's butt. I resented knowing "who" Jennifer Aniston was, but I was all about her booty. Nevertheless, I was resistant enough to addiction to not go out and buy a TV just to have an imaginary relationship with the owner of those glutes. In more recent years, I can say that I've seen only the porn scenes excerpted from Game of Thrones and that I went for years without knowing what the seemingly-popular term "breaking bad" meant.
Contagion-by-Internet has come to induce young people, and people old enough to know better but know a payday when they see one, to become the Internet. You're not really someone unless you're on this-and-that social platforms; you are reified when other people can subscribe to your broadcasts and notifications of your activity. Along with that come certain ways of talking and comporting oneself. I remember being about nine years old and watching "the hippies" congregating in the park, and thinking to myself how stupid they looked to be dressing and talking they were all the same retarded person. A decade later, I was dressing and talking like all the other punk-rockers, unaware of how stupid it made me look. Will today's crop o' youngsters grow up to feel stupid for having had ring lights and spoken in rapid run-on sentences while pinching the air? What lab-grown, technologically-induced trends of a future generation might supplant that or "rebel against" it?