The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture

Rating:
Summary: "I believe that children are our future..."
Review: Gary Cross's book starts out with a painful paradox, and then becomes less subtle and nuanced as it goes on. There is something obsessive with our desire for childhood innocence, there is something unhealthy as we try to find spiritual meaning them by showering them with gifts and ensnaring them in the consumer marketplace. "We buy more things for the little ones at birthdays and holidays than research shows they want, and then we fret when older children seem so insatiable....We want kids to be kids, and yet we force our young into early adulthood when we introduce them to the consumer market." Cross discusses how children became idealized and innocent at the beginning of this century ("the cute") in such a way as to allow a certain a naughtiness. But as time went on, children began to react to the saccharine excess of innocence and became hipper, more saracastic ("the cool"). Adults became worried at these trends and began to engage in mostly unhelpful moralistic panics, becoming alarmed at video games, comic books, smoking and other pastimes.

Cross starts off with looking at ideals of "sheltered" and "wondrous" innocence, and found that the child psychologist supported elitist tone of the first was undermined by the commercial qualities of the second. He then provides a chapter on the image of the cute child in such areas as advertisements, dolls, the rise of teddy bears and Shirley Temple. He then goes on to discuss the charming urchins and coquettes that we see in such comic strips as Buster Brown, the Katzenjammer Kids and Dennis the Menace. We then have a chapter on how holidays became more child-centered. Although somewhat over-reliant on John Gillis' A World of their Making, many people will be intrigued to learn how little a role children played in modern holidays until the last century began. The ritual of small children trick or treating did not really get underway until the thirties. Christmas celebrations were much older, but they tended to be more rambunctious and adult-centered until the nineteenth century. Santa Claus did not gel into his present form until Thomas Nast's 1879 illustration. Likewise "Happy Birthday to You" dates to 1893 and family vacations from the late forties and fifties. After discussing Disney World as the apotheosis of the family vacation, Cross then discusses the origins of the Cool. We see the domestication of the Disney cartoon. We see the replacement of Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys with pulp fiction and comic books. The Cool keeps making headway as we see the rise of cartoons in the sixties (as late as 1960 children had to wait until 10:30 Saturday morning to see them), the rise of Barbie dolls and GI Joe, and the birth of video games. We see attempts to control the Cool, tainted with snobbish and racist fears, with proposals to censor movies, ban toy weapons, outlaw Pinball, control comic books, regulate children's television advertising, and preventing youth smoking. As Cross concludes his book we can see that he has discussed a wide range of examples.

But he has not been correspondingly deep. It's not just that some of his details aren't right. Contrary to what he says the children in "Carrie" and "The Shining" are not possessed by the devil. And whereas Cross says that Dennis the Menace is never punished, I can remember a lot of cartoons where he ends up sitting in the corner. And whether children take the Katzenjammer Kids' antics in good fun depends, I would suggest on how they react to seeing them spanked at the end of every strip. The larger problem with Cross lies with his conclusions. To wit, the commercial manipulation of children can be crass, but much of it is inevitable. It would be moralistic, elitist and ascetic to be excessively concerned about it. But then genuine empathy for children can transcend selfish adult uses of innocence. It is rather Clintonesque, seeing both sides of the question, providing good wishes for the left, while leaving the economic interests of the right untouched. (The discussion of Disney World is especially gutless.) Cross' argument is not helped by the striking absence of children from the book: this is more a book about representations of children than the actual entity. His book often relies on newspapers, which gives the book a sort of press-clipping feeling, while the opinions of children themselves are ignored. It is rather striking that his examples of children's culture come more from the mass produced world of comic strips, comic books, Hanna-Barbera cartoons and toys, while the more memorable individuals such as Linus van Pelt, Charles Wallace Murray and Matilda Wormwood do not get a mention. We get a brief, not terribly thoughtful description of Bart Simpson, and nothing about his sister. Cross does not appreciate that children may object to the crass, repetitive nature of children's mass culture, and that in retrospect they may despise its makers for taking advantage of their limited knowledge. We may laugh at Rick Moranis in "Parenthood" for getting his four year old daughter to read "In the Penal Colony." But there is almost nothing on television as good as Maurice Sendak and Evelyn Nesbit, and it would not be snobbish for Oxford University Press to point this out.