by Simon Carr
This wrestling went on in different ways all year.
We went on holiday. Five of us – three males, Jose, Georgia – drove in a little rental car from Tuscany to the South of France. We ended up deep in the country, underneath that volcano park, in Jose’s sister’s old stone farmhouse. There was the swimming pool, dinner on the vine veranda, evenings in town playing bar football.
Jose’s Gallic style included a cigarette in the corner of her mouth and cocking her hip when shooting. It’s why we admire French women. Hugo played a ferocious game, his karate-trained wrists snapping the ball in from the back row. I took on the role of an ailing stag being thrown around in front of the hinds. That’s no fun at all, incidentally, even after you’ve got used to the idea and although no one else has noticed.
Hugo must have felt this rising mood because neither of us enjoyed playing with the other, and one evening we gave up and walked away from the table in the middle of a game. We were tense with each other the rest of that evening and also, unusually, the following morning. It lasted until I said to him, ‘We’ll go into Aubenas this evening and I’ll let you thrash me at bar football.’ The mood lightened at once, the tension evaporated and suddenly I was able to give him useful advice like: ‘When you play, Hugie, only win by a goal or two.’ And so every game thereafter with women and children – and indeed with me – he’d win by a single goal.
‘I do realise how awful I am to talk to, Hugo,’ I told him later. ‘Whenever you say something and I say “Where did you read that?” and go off the deep end, I know that’s awful, but I am getting better.’ It was a technical recognition and better than an apology. The structure of the exchange didn’t demand that he forgive me. It didn’t pin him to the wall where he had seethingly to say the last thing he wanted to, like: ‘No, no, you’re fine, I don’t mind. I’m annoying too.’
That’s something adults do, incidentally. Hugo performed an act of polite self-sacrifice for a mother once, and she said: ‘But don’t you mind? Isn’t it inconvenient for you? You say you were going to do that anyway, but were you really? Are you sure you were going to do that anyway? Now I feel guilty that you weren’t going to do it anyway and you’re doing it just for me. You’re sure, are you? You really were going to do it anyway? Promise me you were? Oh good, I feel better.’
But shortly afterwards something strange and interesting happened to Hugo. At school, he put on an intellectual growth spurt. Suddenly his engine was revving. He got a string of A grades in his essays and he was overflowing with energy. His negative instincts had been turned around. He was less worried about being invaded, perhaps, more confident in handling intrusions. And maybe for that reason he said the words that set him on the path to adulthood: ‘Oh, I’m sorry about that. It was completely my fault.’
Children vary in their ability to accept fault, to take the blame for errors. If you can’t say this easy thing, ‘I’m terribly sorry, it was entirely my fault,’ you can find yourself forced into the half-light of a world you’ve had to construct, where you are always the innocent bystander who has been badly or unfairly treated by events. And because that can have very serious psychological consequences, apologies are essential. So maybe the apologies I made to them have been more important than they seemed at the time.
And then, with this new confidence, there was a great leap forward intellectually.
‘Listen to this, Hugie,’ I said to him. ‘Here’s a biologist asking whether there is a gene for schizophrenia. He concludes, “There’s no more point in looking for genetic effects than consulting an architect’s plan to find out why your roof is leaking.” ‘
And Hugo said, ‘I can see what he means, but architects’ plans are perfect. Genetically linked diseases actually will show up as an imperfection in the DNA.’
It was the sort of leap forward that makes a parent realise how fast and how well their children are growing up.
As our understanding improved, he got me very deftly. He said, ‘Pokemon’s so cool. It’s educational.’
‘It’s not educational!’ I rose eagerly to the bait. ‘Television isn’t educational, no one has ever learned anything about evolution by watching television let alone watching Pokemon.’
‘That’s not true,’ he played me elegantly. ‘I’ve learned about evolution.’
‘What! What has Pokemon taught you about evolution?’
‘Well, for a start, that Pokemon evolve!’
‘How do they evolve?’
‘By putting evolution stones next to them!’
‘…!’
Part four
Children and culture
Without a full-time female influence hog heaven still emerges. We slump like Sky slaves in front of the television and watch double Friends, double Simpsons, a mid-evening screening of Air Force One and a late-night South Park followed by Futurama.
On the evidence of our viewing schedule one thing is clear: jokes for children are getting very much better than when I was young. In the Sixties our childish level of subversion consisted of I’m Sorry, I’ll Read that Again. (‘Daddy, Daddy, what are those for?’ ‘Four? Four?’).
The Simpsons, in its time, marked the bottom of the barrel. Sections of the media denounced them as grossly inappropriate role models. Bart wore a T-shirt with the words ‘Under-achiever and proud of it!’ and ‘Eat my shorts!’. President Bush declared he wanted to make American families more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons (and lost his election as a result). Of the characters we particularly like, the pre-eminent is Bart’s fat, lazy father, the accident-prone safety inspector of a nuclear plant. He tells his children: ‘Trying is the first step to failure.’ When he thought he was dying one night he passed on his accumulated wisdom to his son, the three phrases you have to know to be a man: ‘(1) Cover for me; (2) Good idea, Boss; (3) It was like that when I found it.’ His highly intelligent eight-year-old daughter complains that he doesn’t understand her and he says plaintively, ‘Lisa, just because I don’t care doesn’t mean I don’t understand!’
I also like Mr Burns, the nuclear plant owner. When the Simpsons thwart his plan to become state governor he muses on the ironies of modern life: ‘You know, Smithers, these slack-jawed troglodytes have cost me the election. Yet if I were to have them killed it would be I who would go to prison!’
Nonetheless, there’s a gentle centre to the show. Lessons are learned, the message is moral, the family members always come to realise how much they depend on each other. The Homer – Bart combination has, in all seriousness, done the ‘I-love-you-Dad-I-love-you-son’ thing that only American sitcoms can do.
We admire it more for its innovations in screen violence. A traditional cat-and-mouse duo has its own slot during Krusty the Clown’s half-hour. It’s a cartoon within a cartoon within a cartoon that satirises cartoon violence in other cartoon shows. Thus, Itchy will bash Scratchy’s eyes out with a bat and replace the eyeballs with little round bombs that blow the cat’s head to pieces. Then the children watching at home – even the would-be vegetarian Lisa – issue harsh, birdlike laughter. Itchy once nailed Scratchy’s feet to the starting blocks, so that when the starting gun went off, Scratchy’s skeleton leaped out of his body and ran down the track. Laugh? Oh, laugh is not the word for what we did when we first saw this.
For those who thought The Simpsons was the bottom of the barrel, South Park is another barrel further down. It’s an animation show with extraordinarily unambitious animation, the characters are crudely coloured paper cut-outs, which jerk across the screen as if on sticks. Apart from the school cook, two unknown voices do the rest of the work, so all the characters make the same sort of noise. The show is a farrago of physical crudity, infantile excrementality and vicious male nihilism. Arrogant network programmers are damaging British youth – perhaps irreparably – by showing this at such an hour that they have to stay up late on school nights to watch it.
In the video compilations of the shows you can see the two creators talking di
rectly to the audience. They are nice-looking young men dressed in 1950s Saturday-morning-serial cowboy clothes, but they treat their native-American companion with barely concealed irritation. They handle their six-guns like girls and flinch when firing them.
‘Hi, South Parketeers! This is our favourite episode, partly because we were able to get Natasha Henstridge to do the voice of the substitute teacher. Natasha Henstridge was the actress in the movie Species and we loved her acting. In fact, Matt and I used to freeze-frame a lot of her acting on our VCR and play with ourselves. Then we’d play a game called I Am Natasha Henstridge. I’d close my eyes and pretend Matt was Natasha Henstridge and then he’d close his eyes and pretend I was Natasha Henstridge. Kids, remember: if you want to play I’m Natasha Henstridge with your friends, play safe.’
‘That’s gross!” Alexander says quite censoriously. The playground, in its confused, ten-year-old way, is strangely homophobic these days, and ‘gay’ is an all-purpose term of abuse (boy kisses girl: ‘Urgh! That’s so gay!’). But when I’m writing the South Park skit off the screen I’m laughing so hard Alexander rather comes round to it. I haven’t laughed so much since Chef (voiced by soul singer Isaac Hayes) sang about his chocolate balls, and enjoined his audience to come and suck on them. They’re big and brown, apparently. And at the end they catch fire.
Then there is the language. If swearing is a sign of a small vocabulary you have to wonder why there are so many swear words. In half an hour of South Park you can hear the cartoon eight-year-olds saying: ‘Who cut your hair? Stevie Wonder? Asshole! Screw you! Cheap bastard! Fat ass! Goddammit! Sieg heil! I’ll kick your ass! This is a bunch of crap! Where did I put Pip’s invitation? I shoved it right up my ass! You butt-hole! Your mom’s a dog! Kick his ass, Jesus! Holy crap, dude! Holy poop on a stick! Thanks for burning everything down, you bitch! Oh crap! Excuse me, new kid, I didn’t mean to fart on you! Fart boy! You dirty cheap-assed piece of crap I want you to die! Girls suck ass! Get your bitch-ass back in the kitchen and get me some pie! At least my mother isn’t on the cover of Crack Whore magazine! Kyle! She said she was young and needed the money!’
As for small vocabularies, I know words like periphrasis, but this sort of thing makes me laugh so hard that small veins go off in my face like firecrackers.
South Park is popular prime-time viewing in New Zealand, but late night in England where standards are higher. However, prime time in England Family Guy has got through the censor’s net. This show has a gentler centre than South Park, but the surface is spikier than The Simpsons; we also get the surreal juxtapositions from The Young Ones. So we get the best of several worlds when we enjoy the cartoon family watching a catchphrase game show on their television – the phrase the family has to guess has the words: ‘GO *UCK YOURSELF’. The winner correctly guesses the phrase to be ‘go tuck yourself in’.
‘Boy,’ the father says, ‘I can’t believe we missed “MY HAIRY AUNT” last week.’ I didn’t explain that particular reference to Alexander, but Hugo took the smallest nudge to get it, whereupon we both covered our faces with our hands and squealed like pigs.
Filth and horror and popular entertainment
There’s a song by a group called Bloodhound that Alexander and Georgia used to like: ‘The roof, the roof the roof is on fire’. It’s sung in a despondent, nihilistic sort of way (although nihilism gives a false sense of drama to the dead-boy vocals). The chorus, which sends them into raptures, goes: ‘Burn, motherfucker, burn, motherfucker, burn.’ The fact that my boys aren’t allowed to swear gives this added texture. They can’t do it themselves, but they love to witness it in others. Why do they like it so much? All the tots can tell you is: ‘It’s cewl.’ Maybe it takes them beyond the outer markers, out there in the forbidden territories where the fun is. It’s lifting off the manhole cover and looking down into the swirling, unconstructed, Dionysian stuff that is down there.
They even love it when they know people are swearing but it’s been censored, as in the Jerry Springer Show where there are sometimes whole minutes together of bleeping while the afternoon guests swing and swear, and let themselves be held back by security. And this makes the boys hold themselves in, they hold their ribs and squeal with happy, childish laughter. ‘She’s a man! She’s a man! He’s been living with him for six months and she’s a man!’
Have films like these depraved or corrupted either of them? No more than they did me. Some mothers, and no doubt some fathers too, are careful about the age restrictions on videos. Belinda was very hot on it, but whether her children are any less depraved than mine is hard to say.
But our swearing ban has had a long history and both boys accommodate me in this. At seven years old Alexander said of a friend, ‘He says “fuck”,’ and then hurriedly, ‘I’m not saying it, Daddy, I’m just saying he says it.’
Around the age of eight and a bit Alexander lightly said of a friend, ‘She’s a cunt, isn’t she?’ and I had only to say quite softly, ‘You know that’s the worst word there is for someone, don’t you – worse than the F-word?’ and he went such a colour it was clear (1) he’d no idea what he’d said, and (2) he wouldn’t use the word again until he’d been through a life-changing experience (puberty, say). Children pick up this sort of thing and the trick is to dispose of it if you can, with the least possible effort, in order to leave the least possible mark on them.
My objection to children swearing is rarefied at one end and visceral at the other. On the visceral side – I just don’t like it and that’s that. On the other it’s a sign of damaging introversion, of egotism. Calling a person a ‘!*$#£$!’ tells us nothing except that you don’t like them. The attention is all coming back to you, the swearer, rather than the sworn-at. Saying ‘Derek’s a $#!@$!’ fails to tell us that ‘Derek’s a clapped-out publicity seeker with a reputation Jeffrey Archer couldn’t have invented’. Swearing is worse than uninformative, it also hinders you thinking about what you don’t like – you’ve dismissed it. So it’s a sign of laziness as well as egotism and that’s why it’s a privilege reserved for adults.
Equally, it’s no reason to restrict Lethal Weapon IV to the over-fifteens (when they’re too old to enjoy it).
I don’t know what girls need, but it’s clear to me that boys need to process horror and violence – because it’s so much a part of the world they feel surrounded by.
When Alexander was still five years old, a host mother overheard the conversation he was having with her own five-year-old. It concerned the videos they were going to watch that evening. ‘Ahhhh,’ she cooed, ‘they want to watch Thomas the Tank Engine.’
‘No!’ Alexander said quite indignantly, ‘we want Terminator Two first and then we want Thomas the Tank Engine.’
They are two very different sorts of film but they existed equally in these little boys’ affections. The Arnold Schwarzenegger picture, incidentally, is an outstanding action film, the source of ‘Hasta la vista, baby’, and ‘Arl be bark’. A multi-weaponed cyborg built on a hyper-alloy combat chassis comes back from the future to – oh, never mind. It’s a terrific piece of work for those of us who like that sort of thing. You may think it’s a little out of the normal range for a five-year-old and certainly the British censors would agree with you. However, the swearing, the fighting, the brutality, the explosions are all first class. The Terminator ends up self-terminating by lowering himself slowly into a cauldron of molten steel in order to protect the little hero. The robot’s epitaph, according to the child-hero’s mother is: ‘The only real father the boy’s ever had.’
But there we were: Alexander enjoying Terminator Two and Thomas the Tank Engine. He likes Bloodhound, but also jokes like ‘What does BMW stand for?’ ‘Batman’s Willy!’.
As he’s matured, if that’s the right word, this has become even more extreme. At the age of ten he likes mutant zombies’ heads being blown off just as much as he likes Teletubbies. If you haven’t actually watched Dipsy, Po, La La et al. on screen you should know that Bill and Be
n have the force of Gallic intellectuals compared with the Teletubbies. There are forty words of dialogue in an episode, including the words, ‘Teletubbies love each other very much’ – and at the end they get together for a group hug under the chuckling, baby-faced sun. Alexander loves cyber violence, he loves Beany Babies. He loves flying body parts, he loves Winnie the Pooh. He loves Teletubbies and the Terminator.
They’re boys, they’re sentimental and gruesome. This hasn’t changed since I was a boy. The reason I was given the job of telling stories after lights out to my ten-year-old peers was because my stories were the most disgusting. They dealt with death in its worst guise, often by spiders with their wet, masticating jaws and the dose of poison that paralyses but doesn’t anaesthetise, so that … That was all in the middle 1960s, when the most corrupting things on television were Daleks.
The acculturation of boys has been quite intensively changed over the last three decades, but plus ça change. On the walls of Alexander’s classroom in Oxford hang typical – even archetypical – examples of history course work. A Tudor time-line shows the kings and queens illustrated with historical details. Without exception, the pages that have axes, spears, dripping blood, severed heads and implements of torture are signed by boys.
‘Do girls produce this sort of revolting, nihilistic violence?’ I asked him.
‘No.’ Alexander snickered. ‘The girls just do what the teacher tells them to. The boys try and find some way of making the most of it.’
And how do girls talk about things like this? ‘They’re useless. They just say, “Someone jumped off a cliff and died.” ‘ We both made hopeless faces at each other. ‘What do boys say?’
‘Oh, boys say, “He pulled a knife down his back, and opened him up and started eating his heart.” ‘