Boy's Coming of Age: Cultural Guilt and the Savior Story

Those of you who know me well, know that I am not much of a movie watcher. It is not that I don’t love movies. I do; they are an extension of my love of literature because a great movie is simply awesome storytelling in a different form. 

My problem with movies is personal: I go to bed early most nights, and movies are really, really long. Therefore, it is rare when I agree to watch a movie because I dread staying up too late. 

Recently, however, I was rewarded by my choice to stay up past my bedtime when I sat down to watch The Holdovers, written by David Hemingson and directed by Alexander Payne. I thoroughly enjoyed the characters and happily broke curfew to follow the arc of a young man and his teacher trying to find themselves in a world often unfriendly to educators and students alike. 

My point in bringing up The Holdovers is not because I am suddenly dipping my toe into the genre of movie review. Rather, I found myself pondering an idea that came to me while watching: it is by no means a wholly original theme. As I watched it, I found myself thinking about Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, Dead Poets Society, and Good Will Hunting. Obviously, there are many movies about the mentoring of young adults into the adult world. But there is something about this grouping that the movie brought to mind. Firstly, they are all about men mentoring young men, something for which our society is fascinated. Even when a movie or book isn’t completely about mentorship, such as A Separate Peace, there is a quality to the storytelling that is reminiscent of trying to make sense of those younger years from an older male perspective. Kite Runner is another example of such a story. What was so striking as I watched was how often these stories are about men mentoring young men and they are also often set in all-boys schools.

Additionally, I was struck by the bogus nature of the story we like to tell ourselves about our society’s interest in teens. As a person whose job it is to mentor young adults into adulthood as a coach and tutor, I am often struck by how little the institutions we place these young people in seek to mentor them. Now, to be fair, some of these stories are built around critiquing these places. The Holdovers definitely looks at the way teens are left behind, quite literally in this film. The Holdovers., like many others in the genre of male mentorship movies, looks head-on into these communities and shows the alienation that they create in young people. Also common in this genre of coming of age is the savior character that then comes along and, in saving the young person, saves himself (forgive my gendered language, but let's face it, these films are gendered). 

Now, I am not a film critic or even a great watcher of movies, as I already admitted, but a quick search of my own experience watching movies and the internet, tells me I am not wholly off base here when I say that these movies are often about men and boys. Coming-of-age stories of women rarely have adult mentors. Romance seems to be the key catalyst for female change. Insert barf sounds here. 

Anyway, I digress because capturing this thought is complicated. My point is that while these films show the alienation of young men and the mentorship of older men, I don’t see this care in the real world. I see young people adrift in intractable institutions that teach Catcher in the Rye while never looking at why Holden Caufield is depressed and how the failure of the adults around him (yes, the schools, not just his parents) is to blame. 

I guess very simply, I would like to stop romanticizing the story of young people’s alienation and stop assuaging our cultural guilt and incompetence with the savior story. It might be time to face up to the fact that we are failing our teens, and we don’t need to be if we were all a little braver and more curious about what these young people truly need.  

Photo by Anthony Fomin on Unsplash