Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth

7. The Man-Boys of Steven Spielberg

7 The Man-Boys of Steven Spielberg Murray Pomerance In any modern society, especially in the context of advanced global capitalism, it is difficult to draw the clear distinctions between adulthood and childhood that seemed to characterize those preindustrial social arrangements nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century anthropology adored. Today, job restructuring and managed unemployment routinely infantilize persons who would have been considered adults (or young adults) twenty-five years ago, not to mention the intentional prolongation and stabilization of adolescence as a rabid consumer base and the proliferation of the latchkey family that lays responsibilities once reserved for adults on the knapsack-slugging shoulders of children. Useful for those who would try to understand the conditions under which adulthood is constructed now and the tacit guidelines constructers use in constructing it—given the confusions of biological age-grading—is a distinction Erving Goffman made in 1974 between natural and social primary frames. What he referred to as social activity is an organization of “guided doings”: the natural world, by contrast, is taken to be “undirected, unoriented, unanimated, unguided” (1974, 22). In light of this dichotomy, the process of growth and socialization can be seen as a complex ongoing production of guidedness, an increase in the extent to which persons can be taken as skillful and capacious agents of their own activities and therefore as suitable repositories of responsibility both casual and legal. The adult owns action, if not formally and economically as property then at least morally, and to the degree that his moves can be taken as indications of his intent, alignment, and will. Children, on the other hand, exist in nature, without fully internalized—and therefore, 133 Childhood, which by my own admission and everybody’s impression of me, is what my life has been. Steven Spielberg murray pomerance 134 automatic—socially constructed systems of guidance in place to assist them in navigating the world with control. It is the natural being, not the successfully socialized one, Mark Twain brings to our attention concluding Tom Sawyer, surely one of the most celebrated and perceptive treatments of boyhood in modern Western literature. “So endeth this chronicle,” he writes: “It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man. When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop—that is, with a marriage; but when he writes of juveniles , he must stop where he best can” (1946, 318). The really critical definition of the adult male rests in his capacity to get married— to exist in the state of being “married,” indeed, instead of “not married,” as Laura Mulvey put it in a 1989 reflection on Duel in the Sun (1946). When a male marries he grows up, and the boy he was disappears. And, apparently, when a male grows up, he marries, or at least stabilizes—participates in a complex of adaptations, attitudes, projections, plans, biographical constructions, status alignments, pretenses, masks, ensnarements, modesties, surrenders, claims, hypotheses, groundings, honors, celebrations, poses, and artifacts: the wedding announcement, the wedding ring, the wedding photograph , the wedding cake, and the wedding bed. A fellow marries and announces his willingness to join what was in Twain’s time, and what remains in most American states and Canadian provinces today, a heterosexual conspiracy. One plans to make children, or at least admits to no longer belonging rather exclusively in the company of them oneself. One engages in consultations before accepting dinner invitations. One is guarded in staring adoringly at persons the unknowing world could label as suitable sexual partners. One shares bank loans and tax benefits, toothpaste and favorite films and flavors of ice cream. And one apparently does not play while being seriously at work, does not have, as Stephen Schiff claims for Steven Spielberg, an “insatiable passion for video games”: Sometimes he plays them by modem with Robin Williams, who lives in San Francisco. Sometimes he just plays by himself. He plays after the kids go to bed, and on weekends, and sometimes on movie sets. “He has little hand things,” Dustin Hoffman says. “On Hook, while they were lighting, he shut everybody out, and he sat on the camera dolly and he played those—what are they, Game Boy? And The Man-Boys of Steven Spielberg 135 then for a while he was getting all the flight information from...