A Negative Breaking Point on Youtube

The other night, I discovered a new and enormously popular viral video in which an irate father exacts revenge for a Facebook post made by his teenage daughter. Naturally, it's of interest to me, because it depicts somebody hitting a breaking point and embracing it completely. It just so happens that I don’t approve in this case.

More than by anything in the video itself, I am struck by the enormous string of comments beneath it. While I have a pretty strongly adverse reaction to the video, my discomfort with the cheerleading in the comments is mitigated slightly by the awareness that it indicates that people widely see the appeal of breaking points and are genuinely desirous of them. There’s something positive in that; the trouble is simply that people may not realize that the satisfying feeling of watching somebody follow through on something like this doesn’t always mean that it’s good.

It’s shocking to me how unquestioning people are in the face of their own gleeful reactions to cool acts of vengeance witnessed at a safe distance. Comments siding against the unseen teenage girl dominate the comments on the video by a factor of something like thirty to one. That almost suggests a bullying mentality on the part of the crowd, and certainly it indicates a penchant for knee-jerk reactions. The daughter isn’t in this video to defend herself and we don’t know what her home life is. To my mind, it’s always good practice to give the benefit of the doubt to the one who is absent.

Even if the situation is exactly as it’s presented in this video, she’s just a teenage girl expressing her frustrations. Her frustrations may well be unfounded, but there’s a role for direct communication in setting her straight. This petty vengeance on the father’s part is just passive-aggressive, and it’s spectacularly passive-aggressive, as he seemingly goes out of his way to avoid addressing her directly (she’s not likely to see the video, after all) while still demonstrating serious aggression by discharging a fucking firearm.

Fostering a breaking point is only worthwhile if what arises from the destruction is significantly better than what was left behind. I don’t really see that happening in this case. In my experience, this sort of thing fosters resentment more than anything else. Wanton destruction coupled with virulent browbeating and public humiliation is pretty likely to drive a deeper wedge between parent and child, and the gap will widen still more as this man’s daughter acts out in more serious ways, generating still more outbursts from dad.

I’m rather sorry that people like this so much. It’s sad that people are so eager to watch a man snap and to live vicariously through it, while more nuanced, social, political, or cultural notions of breaking points evidently remain inaccessible to the masses. There is a role for bald aggression sometimes, but that role is not in parenting. Parenting should entail far more patience than this. The various commenters don’t seem to recognize that patience does not translate to acceptance or capitulation.

The point of patience in this is only that while the world provides us numerous just targets for cathartic vengeance, our children are not among them. There is no place for vengeance or pettiness in parenting. Those are things we should withhold from our children in the interest of seeing that they never misuse them either.

I Don't Gotta Cut Loose...

I saw the trailer for the remake of Footloose yesterday. It looks truly awful, and not just in comparison with the 1984 Kevin Bacon classic, which, I must confess, I loved as a pre-teen boy. Judging by the trailer, this new version just has all the earmarks of an objectively bad movie. It’s hard to justify an overall impression of that sort. The first minute or so of the trailer is full of melodrama, a lot of uncomfortably close camera work, and disorienting fluctuations in lighting. It looks simultaneously like a completely formulaic teen comedy, and a completely formulaic teen dance movie, which apparently is a genre unto itself now. However, if you didn’t notice any of these things on your first viewing of the trailer, you probably won’t sense them much more clearly after I’ve pointed them out.

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

But it’s that dance movie formula, which becomes particularly evident at the 1:20 mark, which gives me something distinct and analyzable to criticize. It shows a scene that presumably takes place somewhere in the middle of the movie, wherein a rather absurd number of teenagers are dancing in a large parking lot, and not merely shuffling and swaying, but showcasing rigorous choreography and acrobatics. So apparently, in this modern update of the town of Bomont, dancing by young people is outlawed, but all young people residing in the town are trained dancers, and they all still dance in spite of the law. Got that?

But then that looks even more ridiculous when you rewind to the first seconds of the trailer, and see a bunch of kids dancing at the party that led to the deaths that set the stage for the dancing ban. In that case, they all appear to be dancing by simply jumping in place – that is, dancing the way normal teenagers do. So in light of the apparent weird discrepancy, Bomont is actually a place where a few kids died in a car crash, the town outlawed dancing, but teenagers continued to dance for the three years of the ban, and got really, really good at it. Sensible plotline.

And that’s just it really. The final moments of the trailer also feature the female lead being pushed out of the way of a speeding train and a school bus exploding with two characters leaping into the air in the foreground. I get the impression that they’ve done about all they can to strip the film of any pretense of believability. The original was not a science fiction film; it required a fairly modest suspension of disbelief, and all of the events plausibly could have happened in the real world. The new version apparently sees no value in making a realistic drama inside of which the viewing audience can easily see itself.

This plays into the post that I made recently about analysis versus escapism, and may well say something about changing approaches to filmmaking and film viewing. When I watched the 1984 film and was not yet an adolescent myself, I cast myself into imagining what it would be like to be in the setting of the film. Bomont was not like any place that I was likely to live, but reactionary social pressures are real in every time and place, and with that as the antagonist, Kevin Bacon’s character was something to admire. I could watch him leaping across the screen and fighting his rival for the girl’s affections and think that if I kept up my martial arts training, then I too would be able to perform his feats of strength and agility. (I haven’t quite lived up to those ideals, admittedly.) I could watch him speaking before the town council and think that his conviction in the face of overwhelming opposition was something I should emulate as I grew up. But it was possible to identify with that character, because when the music kicked it, it wasn’t a stage play with three dozen hand-picked extras all with four years of modern dance and seven of jazz-tap, it was just a physically fit, outgoing guy dancing in the company of his friends. Not so with today’s version, or with any of a number of movies just like it.

I imagine that any child or adolescent who watches this sort of movie nowadays must be either so seriously deluded that he thinks that with a little work he can be talented enough, cool enough, and good-looking enough to join in with the crowd depicted on the screen, or so personally detached from the entertainment that he’s only interested in the spectacle, consciously recognizing no themes of personal significance underlying it.

When I heard about the remake of Footloose in the first place, I wondered, why on Earth does this need to be remade at all? What relevance has it really lost in the two-and-a-half decades since the original was made? Now that I’ve seen the trailer, I wonder, why on Earth was it remade like this? But on the other hand, it has at least answered part of my original questions. Apparently, the relevance that has been lost is the very presence of any relevance at all in the original.

Chip, Anyone?

There’s been a good deal of attention given to a positive, uplifting news story about a Chihuahua that was reunited with its original owners after five years of separation. I came across it a couple days ago with a link to the below video. I like to think it’s not just me, so I’ll assert that many people my age think of Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey when they hear a story like this. There are actually real life cases that parallel that film, but in this instance, the truth is significantly less interesting.

Recent Viral Media

Last week, there was a delightful little video making the rounds on the internet, depicting a fifteen year-old school kid being attacked by a bully and retaliating in a spectacular fashion. A few days ago, the story gained a layer of depth when the Australian teen was interviewed by that country's "A Current Affair" news program.

Watch it on YouTube.

There's a lot that I could say about this. I could use this as yet another jumping off point for criticism of the news media, as the presentation of this is sort of silly, in the typical fashion of news magazine shows. I could recall some of my earlier posts about children and teens, and praise the young man's articulateness and maturity. I could comment on the problem of bullying, and the public's responses to it, and I could certainly still criticize the tendency of this story to put the responsibility for dealing with it on the shoulders of the victim, rather than acknowledging that more should have been done before he had to fight.

But what most impresses me, and what I most want to comment on is a simple matter of language. I find it interesting, and very encouraging, that both in links to the original video of the kid, Casey Heynes, going all Zangief on his attacker, and in the subsequent interview and commentary on both, that the word "snap" is used in a glowingly positive way.

Think about it. How often do you really hear that word, in the context of someone lashing out or retaliating, used positively? The temporary loss of control or reason that that usually denotes is generally presented as a weakness of character, and as something that needs to be apologized for after the fact. But not in this case. In this case, it is the perfect embodiment of what this blog is all about. Heynes was pushed over the edge, and because he channeled all that pent-up rage and frustration into a perfectly appropriate, justified counter-attack, his life is in all likelihood taking a huge turn for the better.

Nobody who watches the original video thinks Heynes made a calculated, deliberate move against his attacker. He stood against the wall for a few moments, and then he let loose a sudden, powerful burst of narrowly channeled aggression, then walked away, leaving his bully unable to stand under his own power. In short, he snapped. That is the way it is being roundly described in media, and in discussion of the event, and everyone is praising it.

In the interview, the term is used at least three times, both by the presenter and by Heynes himself, who goes on to explain that he has no regret about what he did. Nor should he, and nor should anyone else think otherwise. Some of us probably would regret acting out as forcefully in the same situation. Many of us would probably feel conflicted about it. Even I would. Hell, when I got mugged, I pulled my punches while fighting back.

But I hope that in light of the story surrounding Casey Heynes, the positive usage of the phrase "he snapped" becomes more widely recognized and accepted. I hope this helps people to realize that when you're being pushed in the wrong direction, to snap - to reach a breaking point - and destroy something that's just no good is a beautiful thing. It may mean losing control, and it may even mean going too far, but sometimes the only way that necessary change can occur is by snapping under the pressure from that which is wrong, and fighting back against it in a way you couldn't have mustered when you were better in control.

In Casey Heynes' case, he not only destroyed the punk that would have made a victim of him, but I'll bet he destroyed the Casey Heynes that would be made a victim, that would not be given due respect among his peers, and would let himself put up with all the shit they therefore sought to dispense on him. It is in just that way that I want society itself, through all the breaking points I seek, to destroy its older self, and emerge stronger, purer, better, on the other side of that right of passage.

Childish Opinions

In the interest of keeping this post in line with the last, I thought I'd comment on a viral video that was making the rounds last week, depicting a five year-old girl insisting that she will not marry until she first has a job.

While some of the first comments to appear in response lamented the child's evident "brainwashing," the vast majority of those that followed took umbrage with that kind of commentary, with many emphasizing that the alternative is a role into which young girls are constantly brainwashed by toys, media, and the like. I can't argue with that, but I can argue that it seems a little misguided to defend the girl's parent by saying that her indoctrination is no different from society's indoctrination. For most people on either side of the argument, the decision to criticize or laud the instillation of an ideology in a child just comes down to whether they find the ideology to be agreeable. I think that misses the point by a seriously wide margin.

I happen to think that marriage is an antiquated institution, so I'm in favor of what the little girl has to say. In fact, I don't think she goes far enough, in that she still seems to take it for granted that she will marry eventually. That's not to say that I want her to enhance her views in another video. Actually, I want her to say nothing whatsoever on the topic, because, you know, she a fucking five year old child. The problem, in my mind, is not the kind of ideas we instill in our children, but the fact that we think it's okay to instill ideas in children.

Perhaps this commentary belies my respect for youth, and my belief that even children are capable of independent reasoning, because when it comes to things like this video, I find it impossible to believe that I'm witnessing anything other than repetition of something an adult has said. Five is awfully young, but I would be so bold as to say that by something like age nine, a child may well have the mental development and range of experience to make a decision about their own beliefs. Still, I don't think that they would tend to actually do so, because they'd probably be too busy being children. Marriage and careers aren't something we need to be thinking about at five, or even at nine. We should be teaching our children the skills and information that they will need to live full lives and have successful careers and personal relationships, but it's not necessary to have then planning out how they're going to utilize those skills before they can do long division. In fact, I would say that if we're raising out children right, it's for precisely that reason that we shouldn't be filling them with our ideas: we're giving them the tools to arrive at the right decision on their own.

Honestly, what bothers me about this video is not the sentiment. It's not even the mere sense that the girl's been told what to say. What bothers me is the aggressive intensity with which this five year-old girl speaks. A child that age should not be capable of such condescension. That's what makes it brainwashing: that the views a parent has instilled in her child come with their own safeguards, and those safeguards are not reason and logical analysis, but rather anger and rehearsal. When you fill a child with ideas rather than with the means of arriving at their own ideas, you tend to provide them with an undue sense of certitude, which makes every alternative appear not as a reasonable challenge, but as an attack on an ingrained part of their belief system. I don't think you can put an idea into the mind of a child without also giving them increased resistance to new ideas.

Is my view on this really so out of the ordinary? I can't seem to find much discussion that looks past the question of whether what a seemingly opinionated child is saying is right or wrong. I'd like to see a breaking point in this discourse, whereby we stop arguing over the content, and start analyzing the source of the content. And more than that, is there a way to reach a breaking point that makes us collectively realize that it's not our job, our right, or our responsibility to tell children what to think? Or will the breaking point only come when we have an over-arching structure of education that finally makes our children smart enough, early enough that they can resist any efforts of indoctrination by their parents, whether those ideas are good or ill?