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Magazine | TH CULTUR ISSU

The Death of Adulthood in American Culture A. O. SCOTT SPT. 11, 2014

Sometime this spring, during the first half of the final season of “MadMen,” the popular pastime of watching the show — recappingepisodes, tripping over spoilers, trading notes on the flawlessproduction design, quibbling about historical details and debating bigthemes — segued into a parlor game of reading signs of its hero’salmost universally anticipated demise. Maybe the 5 o’clock shadow ofmortality was on Don Draper (fig. 1) from the start. Maybe theplummeting graphics of the opening titles implied a literal as well as amoral fall. Maybe the notable deaths in previous seasons (fictionalcharacters like Miss Blankenship, Lane Pryce and Bert Cooper, as wellas figures like Marilyn Monroe and Medgar Evers) were premonitionsof Don’s own departure. In any case, fans and critics settled in for avigil. It was not a matter of whether, but of how and when.

TV characters are among the allegorical figures of our age, givingindividual human shape to our collective anxieties and aspirations.The meanings of “Mad Men” are not very mysterious: The title of thefinal half season, which airs next spring, will be “The End of an Era.”The most obvious thing about the series’s meticulous, revisionist,present­minded depiction of the past, and for many viewers the mostpleasurable, is that it shows an old order collapsing under the weightof internal contradiction and external pressure. From the start, “MadMen” has, in addition to cataloging bygone vices and fashion choices,traced the erosion, the gradual slide toward obsolescence, of a powerstructure built on and in service of the prerogatives of white men. Theunthinking way Don, Pete, Roger and the rest of them enjoy theirposition, and the ease with which they abuse it, inspires what hasbecome a familiar kind of ambivalence among cable viewers. Weren’t

those guys awful, back then? But weren’t they also kind of cool? Weare invited to have our outrage and eat our nostalgia too, to applaudthe show’s right­thinking critique of what we love it for glamorizing.

The widespread hunch that “Mad Men” will end with its hero’sdeath is what you might call overdetermined. It does not arise onlyfrom the internal logic of the narrative itself, but is also a product ofcultural expectations. Something profound has been happening in ourtelevision over the past decade, some end­stage reckoning. It is theera not just of mad men, but also of sad men and, above all, bad men.Don is at once the heir and precursor to Tony Soprano (fig. 2), thatavatar of masculine entitlement who fended off threats to the alpha­dog status he had inherited and worked hard to maintain. WalterWhite, the protagonist of “Breaking Bad,” struggled, early on, with hisown emasculation and then triumphantly (and sociopathically)reasserted the mastery that the world had contrived to deny him. Themonstrousness of these men was inseparable from their charisma,and sometimes it was hard to tell if we were supposed to be rootingfor them or recoiling in horror. We were invited to participate in theirself­delusions and to see through them, to marvel at the mask ofmasculine competence even as we watched it slip or turn ugly. Theirdeaths were (and will be) a culmination and a conclusion: Tony,Walter and Don are the last of the patriarchs.

In suggesting that patriarchy is dead, I am not claiming thatsexism is finished, that men are obsolete or that the triumph offeminism is at hand. I may be a middle­aged white man, but I’m notan idiot. In the world of politics, work and family, misogyny is astubborn fact of life. But in the universe of thoughts and words, thereis more conviction and intelligence in the critique of male privilegethan in its defense, which tends to be panicky and halfhearted when itis not obtuse and obnoxious. The supremacy of men can no longer betaken as a reflection of natural order or settled custom.

This slow unwinding has been the work of generations. For themost part, it has been understood — rightly in my view, and this is notreally an argument I want to have right now — as a narrative ofprogress. A society that was exclusive and repressive is now freer andmore open. But there may be other less unequivocally happy

consequences. It seems that, in doing away with patriarchal authority,we have also, perhaps unwittingly, killed off all the grown­ups.

A little over a week after the conclusion of the first half of the last“Mad Men” season, the journalist and critic Ruth Graham published apolemical essay in Slate lamenting the popularity of young­adultfiction among fully adult readers. Noting that nearly a third of Y.A.books were purchased by readers ages 30 to 44 (most of thempresumably without teenage children of their own), Graham insistedthat such grown­ups “should feel embarrassed about readingliterature for children.” Instead, these readers were furious. Thesentiment on Twitter could be summarized as “Don’t tell me what todo!” as if Graham were a bossy, uncomprehending parent warning thekids away from sugary snacks toward more nutritious, chewier stuff.

It was not an argument she was in a position to win, howeverpersuasive her points. To oppose the juvenile pleasures of empoweredcultural consumers is to assume, wittingly or not, the role of scold,snob or curmudgeon. Full disclosure: The shoe fits. I will admit tofeeling a twinge of disapproval when I see one of my peers clutching avolume of “Harry Potter” or “The Hunger Games.” I’m not necessarilyproud of this reaction. As cultural critique, it belongs in the samecategory as the sneer I can’t quite suppress when I see guys my age(pushing 50) riding skateboards or wearing shorts and flip­flops, orthe reflexive arching of my eyebrows when I notice that a woman atthe office has plastic butterfly barrettes in her hair.

God, listen to me! Or don’t. My point is not so much to defendsuch responses as to acknowledge how absurd, how impotent, howout of touch they will inevitably sound. In my main line of work as afilm critic, I have watched over the past 15 years as the studioscommitted their vast financial and imaginative resources to thecultivation of franchises (some of them based on those same Y.A.novels) that advance an essentially juvenile vision of the world.Comic­book movies, family­friendly animated adventures, tales ofadolescent heroism and comedies of arrested development do notonly make up the commercial center of 21st­century Hollywood. Theyare its artistic heart.

Meanwhile, television has made it very clear that we are at a

frontier. Not only have shows like “The Sopranos” and “Mad Men”heralded the end of male authority; we’ve also witnessed the erosionof traditional adulthood in any form, at least as it used to be portrayedin the formerly tried­and­true genres of the urban cop show, theliving­room or workplace sitcom and the prime­time soap opera.Instead, we are now in the age of “Girls,” “Broad City,” “Masters ofSex” (a prehistory of the end of patriarchy), “Bob’s Burgers” (a loopypost­"Simpsons” family cartoon) and a flood of goofy, sweet, self­indulgent and obnoxious improv­based web videos.

What all of these shows grasp at, in one way or another, is thatnobody knows how to be a grown­up anymore. Adulthood as we haveknown it has become conceptually untenable. It isn’t only thatpatriarchy in the strict, old­school Don Draper sense has fallen apart.It’s that it may never really have existed in the first place, at least inthe way its avatars imagined. Which raises the question: Should wemourn the departed or dance on its grave?

Before we answer that, an inquest may be in order. Who or whatkilled adulthood? Was the death slow or sudden? Natural or violent?The work of one culprit or many? Justifiable homicide or coldbloodedmurder?

We Americans have never been all that comfortable withpatriarchy in the strict sense of the word. The men who establishedour political independence — guys who, for the most part, would beconsidered late adolescents by today’s standards (including BenjaminFranklin (fig. 3), in some ways the most boyish of the bunch) — did sopartly in revolt against the authority of King George III, a corrupt,unreasonable and abusive father figure. It was not until more than acentury later that those rebellious sons became paternal symbols intheir own right. They weren’t widely referred to as Founding Fathersuntil Warren Harding, then a senator, used the phrase around thetime of World War I.

From the start, American culture was notably resistant to theclaims of parental authority and the imperatives of adulthood.Surveying the canon of American literature in his magisterial “Loveand Death in the American Novel,” Leslie A. Fiedler suggested, morethan half a century before Ruth Graham, that “the great works of

American fiction are notoriously at home in the children’s section ofthe library.” Musing on the legacy of Rip Van Winkle and HuckleberryFinn (fig. 4), he broadened this observation into a sweeping (and stillvery much relevant) diagnosis of the national personality: “The typicalmale protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run, harriedinto the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat —anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say the confrontation of aman and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage andresponsibility. One of the factors that determine theme and form inour great books is this strategy of evasion, this retreat to nature andchildhood which makes our literature (and life!) so charmingly andinfuriatingly ‘boyish.’ ”

Huck Finn is for Fiedler the greatest archetype of this impulse,and he concludes “Love and Death” with a tour de force reading ofTwain’s masterpiece. What Fiedler notes, and what most readers of“Huckleberry Finn” will recognize, is Twain’s continual juxtapositionof Huck’s innocence and instinctual decency with the corruption andhypocrisy of the adult world.

Huck’s “Pap” is a thorough travesty of paternal authority, awretched, mean and dishonest drunk whose death is among the leastmourned in literature. When Huck drifts south from Missouri, hefinds a dysfunctional patriarchal order whose notions of honor anddecorum mask the ultimate cruelty of slavery. Huck’s hometownrepresents “the world of belongingness and security, of school andhome and church, presided over by the mothers.” But this matriarchalbosom is as stifling to Huck as the land of Southern fathers isalienating. He finds authenticity and freedom only on the river, in thecompany of Jim, the runaway slave, a friend who is by turns Huck’sprotector and his ward.

The love between this pair repeats a pattern Fiedler discerned inthe bonds between Ishmael and Queequeg in “Moby­Dick” and NattyBumppo and Chingachgook in James Fenimore Cooper’sLeatherstocking novels (which Twain famously detested). What struckFiedler about these apparently sexless but intensely homoeroticconnections was their cross­cultural nature and their defiance ofheterosexual expectation. At sea or in the wilderness, these friends

managed to escape both from the institutions of patriarchy and fromthe intimate authority of women, the mothers and wives whorepresent a check on male freedom.

Fiedler saw American literature as sophomoric. He lamented theabsence of books that tackled marriage and courtship — for him thegreat grown­up themes of the novel in its mature, canonical form.Instead, notwithstanding a few outliers like Henry James and EdithWharton, we have a literature of boys’ adventures and femalesentimentality. Or, to put it another way, all American fiction isyoung­adult fiction.

The elevation of the wild, uncivilized boy into a hero of the ageremained a constant even as American society itself evolved,convulsed and transformed. While Fiedler was sitting at his desk inMissoula, Mont., writing his monomaniacal tome, a youthful rebellionwas asserting itself in every corner of the culture. The bad boys of rock‘n’ roll and the pouting screen rebels played by James Dean andMarlon Brando proved Fiedler’s point even as he was making it. Sodid Holden Caulfield, Dean Moriarty, Augie March and RabbitAngstrom — a new crop of semi­antiheroes in flight from convention,propriety, authority and what Huck would call the whole “sivilized”world.

From there it is but a quick ride on the Pineapple Express toApatow. The Updikean and Rothian heroes of the 1960s and 1970schafed against the demands of marriage, career and bureaucraticconformity and played the games of seduction and abandonment, ofadultery and divorce, for high existential stakes, only to return ageneration later as the protagonists of bro comedies. We devolve fromLenny Bruce to Adam Sandler, from “Catch­22” to “The Hangover,”from “Goodbye, Columbus” to “The Forty­Year­Old Virgin.”

But the antics of the comic man­boys were not merely repetitive;in their couch­bound humor we can detect the glimmers of somethingnew, something that helped speed adulthood to its terminal crisis.Unlike the antiheroes of eras past, whose rebellion still accepted thefact of adulthood as its premise, the man­boys simply refused to growup, and did so proudly. Their importation of adolescent andpreadolescent attitudes into the fields of adult endeavor (see “Billy

Madison,” “Knocked Up,” “Step Brothers,” “Dodgeball”) delivered abracing jolt of subversion, at least on first viewing. Why should theylisten to uptight bosses, stuck­up rich guys and other readily availablesymbols of settled male authority?

That was only half the story, though. As before, the rebelliousanimus of the disaffected man­child was directed not just againstmale authority but also against women. In Sandler’s early, funnymovies, and in many others released under Apatow’s imprimatur,women are confined to narrowly archetypal roles. Nice mommies andpatient wives are idealized; it’s a relief to get away from them and acomfort to know that they’ll take care of you when you return. Meanmommies and controlling wives are ridiculed and humiliated.Sexually assertive women are in need of being shamed and tamed.True contentment is only found with your friends, who are into pornand “Star Wars” and weed and video games and all the stuff that girlsand parents just don’t understand.

The bro comedy has been, at its worst, a cesspool of nervoushomophobia and lazy racial stereotyping. Its postures of revolt tend toexemplify the reactionary habit of pretending that those with the mostsocial power are really beleaguered and oppressed. But their refusal ofmaturity also invites some critical reflection about just whatadulthood is supposed to mean. In the old, classic comedies of thestudio era — the screwbally roller coasters of marriage andremarriage, with their dizzying verbiage and sly innuendo —adulthood was a fact. It was inconvertible and burdensome but alsofull of opportunity. You could drink, smoke, flirt and spend money.The trick was to balance the fulfillment of your wants with thecarrying out of your duties.

The desire of the modern comic protagonist, meanwhile, is towallow in his own immaturity, plumbing its depths and reveling in itspleasures. Sometimes, as in the recent Seth Rogen movie “Neighbors,”he is able to do that within the context of marriage. At other, darkertimes, say in Adelle Waldman’s literary comedy of manners, “TheLove Affairs of Nathaniel P.,” he will remain unattached andpromiscuous, though somewhat more guiltily than in his Rothianheyday, with more of a sense of the obligation to be decent. It should

be noted that the modern man­boy’s predecessors tended to be a lotmeaner than he allows himself to be.

But they also, at least some of the time, had something to fightfor, a moral or political impulse underlying their postures of revolt.The founding brothers in Philadelphia cut loose a king; Huck Finnexposed the dehumanizing lies of America slavery; Lenny Brucebattled censorship. When Marlon Brando’s Wild One was asked whathe was rebelling against, his thrilling, nihilistic response was“Whaddaya got?” The modern equivalent would be “. . .”

Maybe nobody grows up anymore, but everyone gets older.What happens to the boy rebels when the dream of perpetualchildhood fades and the traditional prerogatives of manhood areunavailable? There are two options: They become irrelevant or theyturn into Louis C. K. (fig. 5). Every white American male under theage of 50 is some version of the character he plays on “Louie,” a showalmost entirely devoted to the absurdity of being a pale, doughyheterosexual man with children in a post­patriarchal age. Or, if youprefer, a loser.

The humor and pathos of “Louie” come not only from theoccasional funny feelings that he has about his privileges — whichinclude walking through the city in relative safety and the expectationof sleeping with women who are much better looking than he is — butalso, more profoundly, from his knowledge that the conceptual andimaginative foundations of those privileges have crumbled beneathhim. He is the center of attention, but he’s not entirely comfortablewith that. He suspects that there might be other, more interestingstories around him, funnier jokes, more dramatic identity crises, andhe knows that he can’t claim them as his own. He is above all aware ofa force in his life, in his world, that by turns bedevils him and giveshim hope, even though it isn’t really about him at all. It’s calledfeminism.

Who is the most visible self­avowed feminist in the world rightnow? If your answer is anyone other than Beyoncé (fig. 6), you mightbe trying a little too hard to be contrarian. Did you see her at theV.M.A.'s, in her bejeweled leotard, with the word “feminist” inenormous illuminated capital letters looming on the stage behind her?

A lot of things were going on there, but irony was not one of them.The word was meant, with a perfectly Beyoncé­esque mixture of poiseand provocation, to encompass every other aspect of her complicatedand protean identity. It explains who she is as a pop star, a sexsymbol, the mother of a daughter and a partner in the mostprominent African­American power couple not currently resident inthe White House.

And while Queen Bey may be the biggest, most self­contradicting,most multitude­containing force in popular music at the moment, sheis hardly alone. Taylor Swift recently described how, under theinfluence of her friend Lena Dunham, she realized that “I’ve beentaking a feminist stance without saying so,” which only confirmedwhat anyone who had been listening to her smart­girl power balladsalready knew. And while there will continue to be hand­wringingabout the ways female singers are sexualized — cue the pro and conthink pieces about Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Iggy Azalea,Lady Gaga, Kesha and, of course, Madonna, the mother of them all —it is hard to argue with their assertions of power and independence.Take note of the extent and diversity of that list and feel free to addnames to it. The dominant voices in pop music now, with the possibleexception of rock, which is dad music anyway, belong to women. Theconversations rippling under the surfaces of their songs are as oftenas not with other women — friends, fans, rivals and influences.

Similar conversations are taking place in the other arts: inliterature, in stand­up comedy and even in film, which lags far behindthe others in making room for the creativity of women. But television,the monument valley of the dying patriarchs, may be where the newcultural feminism is making its most decisive stand. There is nowmore and better television than there ever was before, so much so that“television,” with its connotations of living­room furniture and fixedviewing schedules, is hardly an adequate word for it anymore. Whenyou look beyond the gloomy­man, angry­man, antihero dramas thattoo many critics reflexively identify as quality television — “House ofCards,” “Game of Thrones,” “True Detective,” “Boardwalk Empire,”“The Newsroom” — you find genre­twisting shows about women andgirls in all kinds of places and circumstances, from Brooklyn to prison

to the White House. The creative forces behind these programs areoften women who have built up the muscle and the résumés to dowhat they want.

Many people forget that the era of the difficult TV men, of Tonyand Don and Heisenberg, was also the age of the difficult TV mom, ofshows like “Weeds,” “United States of Tara,” “The Big C” and “NurseJackie,” which did not inspire the same level of critical rapture partlybecause they could be tricky to classify. Most of them occupied thehalf­hour rather than the hourlong format, and they were happy toswerve between pathos and absurdity. Were they sitcoms or soapoperas? This ambiguity, and the stubborn critical habit of refusing totake funny shows and family shows as seriously as cop and lawyersagas, combined to keep them from getting the attention theydeserved. But it also proved tremendously fertile.

The cable half­hour, which allows for both the concision of thenetwork sitcom and the freedom to talk dirty and show skin, was alsohome to “Sex and the City,” in retrospect the most influentialtelevision series of the early 21st century. “Sex and the City” putfemale friendship — sisterhood, to give it an old political inflection —at the center of the action, making it the primary source of humor,feeling and narrative complication. “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”and its spinoffs did this in the 1970s. But Carrie (fig. 7) and hergirlfriends could be franker and freer than their precursors, and thismade “Sex and the City” the immediate progenitor of “Girls” and“Broad City,” which follow a younger generation of women pursuingromance, money, solidarity and fun in the city.

Those series are, unambiguously, comedies, though “Broad City”works in a more improvisational and anarchic vein than “Girls.” Theirmore inhibited broadcast siblings include “The Mindy Project” and“New Girl.” The “can women be funny?” pseudo­debate of a few yearsago, ridiculous at the time, has been settled so decisively it’s as if itnever happened. Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Amy Schumer, Aubrey Plaza,Sarah Silverman, Wanda Sykes: Case closed. The real issue, in anycase, was never the ability of women to get a laugh but rather theirright to be as honest as men.

And also to be as rebellious, as obnoxious and as childish. Why

should boys be the only ones with the right to revolt? Not that the newgirls are exactly Thelma and Louise. Just as the men passed throughthe stage of sincere rebellion to arrive at a stage of infantile refusal, so,too, have the women progressed by means of regression. After all,traditional adulthood was always the rawest deal for them.

Which is not to say that the newer styles of women’s humor aresimple mirror images of what men have been doing. On the contrary.“Broad City,” with the irrepressible friendship of the characters playedby Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson at its center, functionssimultaneously as an extension and a critique of the slacker­doofusbro­posse comedy refined (by which I mean exactly the opposite) by“Workaholics” or the long­running web­based mini­sitcom “Jake andAmir.” The freedom of Abbi and Ilana, as of Hannah, Marnie,Shoshanna and Jessa on “Girls” — a freedom to be idiotic, selfish andimmature as well as sexually adventurous and emotionally reckless —is less an imitation of male rebellion than a rebellion against the rolesit has prescribed. In Fiedler’s stunted American mythos, wherefathers were tyrants or drunkards, the civilizing, disciplining work ofbeing a grown­up fell to the women: good girls like Becky Thatcher,who kept Huck’s pal Tom Sawyer from going too far astray;smothering maternal figures like the kind but repressive WidowDouglas; paragons of sensible judgment like Mark Twain’s wife, Livy,of whom he said he would “quit wearing socks if she thought themimmoral.”

Looking at those figures and their descendants in more recenttimes — and at the vulnerable patriarchs lumbering across the screensto die — we can see that to be an American adult has always been tobe a symbolic figure in someone else’s coming­of­age story. And that’sno way to live. It is a kind of moral death in a culture that claimsyouthful self­invention as the greatest value. We can now avoid thisfate. The elevation of every individual’s inarguable likes and dislikesover formal critical discourse, the unassailable ascendancy of the fan,has made children of us all. We have our favorite toys, books, movies,video games, songs, and we are as apt to turn to them for comfort asfor challenge or enlightenment.

Y.A. fiction is the least of it. It is now possible to conceive of

adulthood as the state of being forever young. Childhood, once acondition of limited autonomy and deferred pleasure (“wait untilyou’re older”), is now a zone of perpetual freedom and delight. Grownpeople feel no compulsion to put away childish things: We can livewith our parents, go to summer camp, play dodge ball, collect dollsand action figures and watch cartoons to our hearts’ content. Thesesymptoms of arrested development will also be signs that we are freer,more honest and happier than the uptight fools who let go of suchpastimes.

I do feel the loss of something here, but bemoaning the generalimmaturity of contemporary culture would be as obtuse as declaring itthe coolest thing ever. A crisis of authority is not for the faint of heart.It can be scary and weird and ambiguous. But it can be a lot of fun,too. The best and most authentic cultural products of our timemanage to be all of those things. They imagine a world where no oneis in charge and no one necessarily knows what’s going on, whereidentities are in perpetual flux. Mothers and fathers act like teenagers;little children are wise beyond their years. Girls light out for theterritory and boys cloister themselves in secret gardens. We havemore stories, pictures and arguments than we know what to do with,and each one of them presses on our attention with a claim ofuniqueness, a demand to be recognized as special. The world is ourplayground, without a dad or a mom in sight.

I’m all for it. Now get off my lawn.A. O. Scott is a chief film critic for The Times. He last wrote for themagazine about a crazy thing that happened on Twitter.

Editor: Jake Silverstein

Credits for photographs at top of story: 1. JamieTrueblood/AMC/Everett Collection. 2. Craig Blankenhorn/HBO/EverettCollection. 5. K.C. Bailey/FX/Everett Collection. 6. KevinWinter/MTV/Getty Images. 7. Craig Blankenhorn/Warner Bros./EverettCollection.

A version of this article appears in print on September 14, 2014, on page MM38 of theSunday Magazine with the headline: The Post­Man.