Is Adulthood Dead?

In this past weekend's New York Times Magazine, film critic A.O. Scott published "The Death Of Adulthood In American Culture" — a sprawling cultural examination of maturity through the lens of three titanic TV characters: Don Draper, Tony Soprano and Walter White and how they relate to the genre of young adult literature, Huckleberry Finn, Beyoncé, Louis C.K. and "Broad City."

In less fancy terms: it's a biggun! Scott devotes the better part of 4,500 words to declare that the very concept of "adulthood" — symbolized by Draper, Soprano and White — is dead and maybe was never alive in the first place. We are, Scott writes, in a "crisis of authority." 

What all of these shows grasp at, in one way or another, is that nobody knows how to be a grown-up anymore. Adulthood as we have known it has become conceptually untenable. It isn't only that patriarchy in the strict, old-school Don Draper sense has fallen apart. It's that it may never really have existed in the first place, at least in the way its avatars imagined. Which raises the question: Should we mourn the departed or dance on its grave?

A scary thought! Like when one graduates college, steps into the real world, and then realizes that the "adults" are still capable of pettiness, immaturity and general aimlessness. For Scott, this truth is finally manifest in popular culture.

It is now possible to conceive of adulthood as the state of being forever young. Childhood, once a condition of limited autonomy and deferred pleasure ("wait until you're older"), is now a zone of perpetual freedom and delight. Grown people feel no compulsion to put away childish things: We can live with our parents, go to summer camp, play dodge ball, collect dolls and action figures and watch cartoons to our hearts' content. These symptoms of arrested development will also be signs that we are freer, more honest and happier than the uptight fools who let go of such pastimes.

Scott may not be the old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn, nor the youths trampling on someone else's landscaping — but instead the random jogger witnessing this conflict and wondering which side he's on. Should we celebrate unfettered youth, or revere the man who gives a shit about his patch of grass? 

If we take one step back, outside into the crisp autumn air, these observations are still very "adult." Like: if you presented Scott's essay to an actual adolescent they would say it's "for grown-ups."

And so the grown-ups did hem and haw — as grown-ups are wont to do — over Scott's claim that "adulthood is dead."

Alexandra Petri, at the Washington Post, argues that the very genre of literature Scott feels is contributing to the decline of "grown-ups" — young adult fiction — is actually a necessary element of adulthood.

First, the end of people willing to admit that they are grown-ups: I think a great deal of this has to do with the rise of the Internet, where the primary mode of communication is the confessional. We know better, now, than to think anyone has anything under control. […] Second, on the criticism of childish things […] All really popular stories today are, to some extent, fairy tales. "Harry Potter" is a fairy tale. "Star Wars" is a fairy tale. "Batman" is a fairy tale. And fairy tale problems are not the problems of adulthood. They are deeper and less practical. The rise of what is termed YA, I would suggest, is actually a return to the kind of stories that cast larger shadows — the kind of fiction that is necessary. 

— The Death Of Adulthood? Yes, Please, The Washington Post

At Salon, Andrew O'Hehir agrees with Scott's assertion that adulthood is dying, but blames our prolonged immaturity on the economy. Because it's always the economy, when you really think about it.

If Scott gets to play frustrated English professor in his article, I get to play former college Marxist in mine, and insist that sometimes economic forces really do shape the cultural zone. Real wages have fallen since Don Draper's heyday, especially for American men and double-especially for the middle-class and working-class white men who were once the bulwarks of the mid-century model of adulthood. We now live in a culture (using the word in its anthropological sense) of diminished expectations and permanent underemployment, where many or most young people will never be as affluent as their parents. 

— The 'Death Of Adulthood' Is Really Just Capitalism At Work, Salon

The core thread that weaves it way through Scott's essay is the adult man and how popular film portrays him. For Scott, the celebration of Apatow's "man-child" protagonists reveals that we're okay with "failure to launch" (the culture trend, not the movie). Vulture's Adam Sternbergh argues that grappling with "grown-up" responsibility — as all of Apatow's man-children do — is more mature than past male figures pretending that they already have things under control.

The best part of any essay about changing cultural notions of adulthood is that it encourages us, again, to revisit what adulthood means, exactly. To some, it's men in suits and smoking and not being able to do what you want anymore, because propriety. For others, it's a continuing suspicion of cultural pleasure that would make the Puritans proud. To my eye, watching Seth Rogen grapple with responsibility in Knocked Up is a much more honest engagement with the meaning of maturity than watching Woody Allen grapple with a 17 year-old Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan, a presumably more "grown-up" film. […] Part of being an adult, onscreen or on the page or in life, is developing the confidence to refuse to accept unquestioned a bunch of inherited precepts about cultural seriousness. Really, what could be more grown-up than that?

— The Death Of Adulthood And The Rise Of Pleasure, Or Why Seth Rogen Is More Serious Than Woody Allen, Vulture

Maria Bustillos, at The Awl, also tugs on Scott's thread of The Men That Is Now and deftly points out that, in the span of an hour and a half, every Apatowian man-child grows up. 

Scott's view of the oeuvre of Judd Apatow is nearly as baffling as his view of YA literature. He thinks that Apatow's bromedies are dumb and juvenile, and that the people who love them are attempting, embarrassingly, to prolong their own childhood. But if the flight from adulthood is all about avoiding marriage or "responsibility", Apatow's anti-heroes do a terrible job on that front. The end of nearly every Apatow film finds each hapless young man embracing the most absolutely conventional "adult" values: getting married, having the child, demonstrating loyalty to the friend, saving the business, in a display of mainstream morality conformist and, indeed, conservative enough to satisfy Peggy Noonan. If anything, Apatow's movies are a guide for man-children to become adults, while still maintaining some aspects of their childhood selves intact.

— The Birth Of Adulthood In American Culture, The Awl

A lot of very smart, well-reasoned criticisms of the claim that "adulthood is dead." And the very fact that this discussion exists suggests that "adulthood" is still very much alive! 

At times, it would seem that the world is like a middle-school class without a teacher. Paper airplanes fly, the classroom fills with shouts and curses and horseplay abounds. Adults earnestly read books for teenagers; grown men fetishize comics and video games and smoke weed; tech millionaires refuse to tuck in their shirts. It all seems so very grim. 

But media outrage cycles continue, a prominent film critic takes the time to ponder the concept of maturity in the year 2014, this post attempts to make sense of it all. Adulthood is fine.