A few Sundays ago, my kids and I laid some plastic over the dining room table and broke out the clay. I gave them each a half-pound of clay and turned them loose. After half an hour or so of starts and stops, “Mr. Bill” skits, and a clay version of demolition derby, they each began to sculpt in earnest. It was looking like it would be one of the highlights of the month. I felt good about having them involved in something creative and not whiling away the afternoon in front of a video game console, laptop, or the television.
I allowed them to go at it for an hour or so and then returned to survey their work. I expected to see animals or trees or toys. What I discovered left me dumbfounded. My 9-year-old son had sculpted a model of himself perched in front of a TV with an Xbox controller. My 10-year-old daughter had fashioned a likeness of herself sitting in front of a laptop playing a computer game.
Something was terribly awry. Or was it?
My fellow Gen-Xers and I comprised the first generation that was raised on TV and video games en masse. I played Asteroids, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, and Galaga for hours, days, weeks at a time. And I also watched my share of television and movies. Cool Hand Luke‘s unanswered entreaties to God before he’s shot down in the church where he’d sought refuge fleshed out the tenets of my religious beliefs as cogently as anything I’d heard in churches or college philosophy classes. The final sequence of the original Planet of the Apes dialogue, when Taylor comes around a bend in the shoreline and discovers the Statue of Liberty half-submerged in the sand, conveyed humankind’s propensity for destruction more evocatively than anything I’ve ever heard in the debate over global warming. And at the end of Vanishing Point, when protagonist James Kowalski smiles peacefully just before ramming his 1970 Dodge Challenger into the state police roadblock, Kowalski’s act of protest and self-obliteration is as profound and harrowing as anything that ever happened in my life, before or since.
Those scenes and others combined to create a celluloid mythology that has never stopped informing me. I went on to be a fairly well-read and intellectually astute adult, and, truth be told, TV, movies, and video games were simply alternative sources for my philosophical forays and revelations.
If I were a kid today, my attachment to TV and video games would probably be worse. Our children can see we’re pathetic stewards of the planet. They sense the inequity and pettiness of our “system.” And they see through the artificial attempts we make to distract them from the mess we’ve made of things. Who can blame our children for immersing themselves in SpongeBob or getting lost in a video game? The unreality of SpongeBob is much more compelling than the stultifying reality of the aptitude-test-driven education compounds we send them to. And in Halo, World of Warcraft, and even Saints Row, our children are empowered. They can be who they want to be and have some control over what’s happening to them.
As adults, we constantly complain about our kids’ attachment to television and obsession with computer and video games, but we offer them an existence replete with prevarication, hypocrisy, willful ignorance, and countless, human-induced local, national, and global calamities. Before we condemn and attempt to thwart their retreat into fantasy realms – where good does mostly triumph over evil and nice guys (and girls) can finish first – aren’t we obliged to offer them a place where the obverse isn’t true?
If TV or video games offer my son or daughter any respite from accepting the ways and means of this iceberg-charging Titanic we adults call the “real” world, I say they should enjoy it while they can. They’ll get plenty of opportunities to reduce themselves to our level of existential dereliction soon enough.
E.R. Bills is a local freelance writer whose work has appeared in numerous publications.
