what's going to happen to you, Anthony?

I saw 500 Days of Summer last night and noticed something which I'll now share. There's a trend in movies, especially in indie movies that tackle adulthood as a theme (500 Days, Bottle Rocket, Me and You and Everyone We Know), to instill young characters with an uncommon wisdom, a foresight, a rationality, entirely lacking from those in the midst of whatever crisis the movie happens to be about. These grade schoolers are articulate, sophisticated, sometimes sexually precocious, and seemingly immune from passion whilst only too aware of its beguiling effect.

An interesting piece in New York Magazine which I must quote from memory because I tossed New York Magazine as soon as I flipped through it because New York Magazine is a total rag mentioned, in the context of the films of John Hughes, the role that adults played in his movies. They spoke a different language from the teenagers, their world of responsibility and marriage had nothing to do with with the world of youth, they were hopelessly unsympathetic and tragically unhip. The article went on to say that now adults are more than likely to take their cue from teenagers, following them onto facebook and listening to their music, and the dividing line between adult and youth is not so clear cut. Indeed, you could find a 14 year old and a 40 year old wearing the same sneakers, similarly styled jeans, the same tee shirt, and on their ipods the same music.

The high priest of this eternally hip youth is David Byrne.

But to return to the movies, I'm not saying that they believe that these little kids are as self possessed as this, these kids are presented, after all, with a wink and a nod and serve to emphasize the adult characters' immaturity or confusion, but they do say something about how we think about adulthood. We are all familiar with our lack of rites of passages, our pampering educational systems, the fetishizing of children and families, all of which is part of the cumulative experience of the much talked about 'extended adolescence.' It is, I think, an interesting side note that in an era when kids begin earlier than ever to resemble adults, and meanwhile adults don't seem to break definitively from being kids, our movies have begun to use as a stock character the wise child.

500 Days of Summer has its shortcomings, its tweeness, the voice over, but it holds on to the dim idea of the responsibility of love - and here anything would do - as somehow transformative, but it doesn't quite know how to make sense of it. Indeed the characters in the movie get it wrong, which is the point. And by way of setting off youth from adulthood, we're given children with the sort of mature qualities we would traditionally have as adults, and adulthood becomes the foggy arena that used to be the territory for high schoolers in, say, the comedies of John Hughes.