Aboy named Ash leaves home at ten. His mission is to capture and train monsters called Pokémon. His only weapon is Pikachu, an impulsive little rodent that turns its electrical powers against him when he tries to confine it in its Poké ball–just like the impulses that threaten to sabotage every boy on his life’s journey. Ash must learn to understand its feelings and direct them toward winning the battles ahead. His companions are eleven-year-old Misty, who is beginning her own journey into the volatility of adolescence and turns her infatuation for Ash into wildly alternating hostility and nurturance, and thirteen-year-old Brock, who is vain, girl-crazy, and food-obsessed, a funny but annoying reminder of the appetites that Ash knows will awaken soon in himself and make his journey still more difficult. Together, they lead each other into endless trouble but ultimately compensate for one another’s weaknesses and come out of every challenge triumphant.
Subduing the 150 kinds of Pokémon requires comprehending the widest possible range of attributes and personalities. There is Arca-nine, a noble dog-like beast, and Meowth, a conniving, condescending cat. There is Gyarados, a raging, all-destroying sea dragon, and Squirtle, a turtle that acts like a juvenile delinquent. Snorlax does nothing but inhale food and fall asleep. Jigglypuff is a narcissistic ball of fuzz that makes everyone listen to its boring song and becomes furious when they fall asleep. Mewtwo is a tragic creation of evil science. Togepi is a baby in an eggshell diaper that requires its trainer’s constant vigilance. To train them all to use their powers for the common good, Ash must learn to master all the emotions, all the personal twists, all the strengths and weaknesses life can present. He must also guide each in gaining enough life experience to evolve to its next form. After enough victories in battle, delinquent little Squirtle becomes the pugnacious Blastoise, which becomes the powerful but sober Wartortle. Along the way, Ash evolves, too. He bonds with fuzzy little Caterpie, and when it takes glorious flight as Butterfree he must learn to overcome his attachment and let it go.
Ash aspires to train all the varieties of Pokémon, win the ultimate tournament, and earn the title of Pokémon Master. Along the way, he has to battle villains like Team Rocket, formidable in raw power but constantly defeating themselves with selfish squabbles and blinding vanity, who teach him how not to grow up. His teacher and model is Professor Oak, a master who no longer needs to carry Pokémon clipped to his belt as the young trainers do. His Pokémon are inside him, in a sense, for his power is the wisdom of one who has won the battles of his life. To be a master, in short, is to be an adult. The story of Pokémon, whether told directly in the cartoons, turned into interactive variables in the video games, or made individually manipulable in the cards and toys, is the story of growing up.
Pokémon is an especially vivid metaphor of the journey to adulthood, an especially popular one at a global scale, but nearly every popular story of combat and victory is the same at heart. Nearly every one gives us a protagonist who is at first too small, too inexperienced, too lacking in power, too alone to conquer the massive challenge facing him, until by learning something about the opponent or himself, or by gaining a new power or ally, he overcomes. And in doing so, he enters a new role in life or makes the world somehow new and better. The gamer dies countless times as he tries to learn the game map, discover each new opponent’s weaknesses, experiment with combination attacks, until he’s finally able to beat even the once invincible “boss” foe and move on to the next level. The action movie plot turns on the uncovering of the enemy’s weaknesses, or the hero’s confrontation with his own weaknesses, to turn the “low point” into the sudden triumph (I can still hear development executives in every story conference demanding, “What’s your third-act reveal?”). The rapper may strut as though he’s the master of his world, but every rapper’s body of songs sketches out the harsh childhood, the seemingly unbeatable forces of a hostile society, the rapper’s own taking charge through the discovery of his own rage or the cynical rules of the game. All those stories are about confronting an intimidating challenge beyond anything encountered before and growing or learning enough to be able to master it.
When we look for stories that might help children grow up, we often think only of educational media or the stories like those in The Book of Virtues, with clear messages, lessons, and morals. But every story has its lessons, as does every emotional experience. Even if the child comes out with no lesson that he can articulate, the experience itself teaches him something about life and himself. And those are the lessons that stick–not even the most impressionable child will fully internalize a story calculated to carry a didactic message, which most of us know even as we optimistically plunk them in front of Barney or read from a Berenstain Bears book. He may enjoy the characters and stories, but if he notices the moral at all he’ll usually just tolerate it as part of the package. Barney, apart from its contrived little messages, conveys powerful evidence of the value of being big and colorful and loud and full of movement, earning the attention of other people through unrestrained goofy good will. That’s its most useful story. The stories that live inside us and shape us as we grow are those that engage our passions and turn us into someone else for a little while.
Nearly all the violent stories that kids love enact powerful lessons about courage, resiliency, and development. No matter who the good guys and bad guys are, who wins or loses, or what values are espoused by the characters in the course of the action, the action itself–the process of identifying emotionally with a character who is faced with a physical threat and fights back with every resource he can find–transmits some basic life lessons:
Achievement feels good.
Goals are achieved through complete commitment.
Clear choices must be made.
Sometimes conflict is useful.
Sometimes shattering old ways is necessary.
Loss and defeat are survivable.
Risk has its rewards.
We can feel fear–but do it anyway.
Monsters can be destroyed.
Self-assertion is powerful.
Simply being me is heroic.
Mass entertainment can portray these lessons with a special power and universality. Precisely because its purpose is to maximize sales worldwide, it emphasizes the simplest, most emotionally compelling fantasies, consciously removed from any educational agenda or individual artistic visions that might narrow its appeal. That’s a weakness, but also a strength.
When I was asked to write Superman material, I set out to try to understand how this one simple character could be so compelling to people from toddlers in Superman pajamas to adults who loved the Christopher Reeves movies. I found that for preschoolers his one great power was simply being above pain. Pain is a central issue for young children–wondering how bad it will be, how to avoid it, how to be brave when it’s inevitable–and Superman being attacked and defeating his foes is a comforting demonstration that one can pass through it and come out happy on the other side. As kids get older, they’re more likely to value Superman just because he’s strong. He can knock down buildings, throw jet planes around the sky, tear through the heart of a mountain; whatever seems unsurmountable to a child he can do. By the preteen years, fans become more interested in Superman’s secret identity. Going through more complex social stresses, becoming aware of the need to maintain different personae among their buddies in the classroom and at home, trying to retain their fantasy lives without being “nerds,” they respond deeply to a nearly omnipotent hero who can be endangered by no more than the revelation of his “real self” to the world. Many fans in their early teens see in the same hero the nexus and protector of a community of widely differing individuals: Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Supergirl, assorted superheroes and aliens. Others love learning his decades-long fictional biography and real history. Adults respond to Superman most powerfully because he is, in one twenty-something fan’s words, “an innocent individual who goes through the worst that a corrupt world can throw at him and comes through clean and pristine–while everybody else grabs hold of him and is lifted out of the swamp themselves.”
Just as a battered action figure in a preschool sandbox and the same figure in mint condition on a teenager’s shelf are the same toy, popular fantasies may be manufactured as one object but transformed into completely different symbols by each of their users. The changing uses of a simple, generic idea like Superman as young people pass through different developmental challenges show some of the ways in which we grow. Our fantasies and ideals blossom from the most self-interested and subjective to become ever more complex, more inclusive, more abstract, and more social.
Every successful children’s action fantasy, like Pokémon, like Superman, is also an organizing fantasy. Mastering a world, finding the hero’s proper place in that world, learning rules and limitations, integrating various powers and functions, completing collections, understanding the connections among the good, the bad, and the in-between can be more important to young fans than the simple excitement of the action. As the real world that our children have to master becomes more complicated, so do the fantasy worlds they’re attracted to. Pokémon is a mind-boggling labyrinth of information and connections. At the peak of the fad, it was also an astonishingly consistent and all-encompassing imaginary world, one in which cartoons, collectible cards, Game Boys, computer games, comic books, toys, and every other kind of merchandise interlocked with perfect visual and thematic unity. Even fans of the World Wrestling Federation tend to talk less about the fighting itself than about the wrestlers and their exaggerated characters, about who’s in a rivalry with whom, who breaks what rules, who looks coolest as an action figure, whose special attacks are the “undertaker pile-driver” and the “atomic drop.” It’s a more simplistic fantasy world than Pokémon but one with an equally precise organization. As in Pokémon, the battles test the way the organization works. Those fantasy worlds, like growing up, are all about building passion into the whole: integrating wild, selfish emotion into a complete, confident self that can function in a complex reality.
The danger of such gratifying fantasy worlds is that we won’t want to leave them. I see them at every comic book convention, game designers’ conference, children’s film festival: the ten-year-old who can’t stop talking about his Pokémon, the sixteen-year-old who lives in Half-Life, the forty-year-old who still yearns for the original Green Lantern to come back. Sometimes I can tell that they’re frustrated or exhausted by spinning in fantasy, but they can’t let it go. Even many of the professionals I worked with in the comic book industry were stuck spinning, and it seemed to trap them in developmental stages they should already have left in their early teens. Many of them were far happier than they had been before they entered the comic book world, but they were also afraid to move beyond it. I fell prey to some of the same problems during my years of writing nothing but action fantasies, finding myself caught in adolescent feuds, frustrated by silly power struggles, losing my adult perspective on my professional and social life. What lifted me out was integrating the fantasy world with the real world through parenthood, studying the powers of stories, and working with kids.
For a lot of young people, unfortunately, the wall between the fantasies they crave and the world they’re asked to participate in has been raised too high. One of the forces that’s built that wall has been our efforts to banish aggression and violence. We draw such a sharp ideological and social line between what’s “good for us” and what’s “junk” dealing with make-believe power and violence that some kids feel that they’re in an either-or conflict. They don’t have cues to show them how to build from their power fantasies and become more powerful in reality, and they feel that the world of fantasy entertainment is the only place that is safe and welcoming.
That line is reinforced within the media itself, where “educational” and “commercial” producers have drawn into two warring camps. Anna Home, OBE, the head of children’s television for the BBC during its most adventurous years, has described the art of programming as “walking a tightrope between what children want to see and what adults think they should see. If one errs, it’s far better to err on the side of what the children want. Unfortunately, the powers that be rarely let one do so.” Attempts to integrate the two can produce good results, but they tend to founder when physical conflict enters the picture. The Fox network once tried to fill the “educational” portion of its programming with an intelligent action cartoon, Sherlock Holmes in the 21st Century. It was a smart show, produced by very conscientious creators at Dic Entertainment. Two children’s media authorities, Drs. Donald Roberts and Donna Mitroff, made sure that every action scene demonstrated the superiority of brains to brawn, showed the hero turning his opponents’ force back at them, and never depicted serious injury or death. But when the episodes were reviewed by the Annenberg Foundation, which advises producers and the FCC on educational content, every pratfall by a villain, every exploding evil machine, every deft judo throw, was blasted in the report as “violence.”The show did reach the air, in a somewhat different form and with different people attached, but an opportunity for a major research foundation to reconsider what “violence” might be, an opportunity to bring the “official” version of what’s good for kids together with what kids really like, was lost.
To help our children grow up more effectively as individuals, we need to grow up more as a society. Our two sides–the idealistic and the accepting, the official and the commercial–need to come together. Instead of reacting to make-believe violence like the nervous kindergartner who yells, “The boys are fighting again!” we need to accept it as a valuable part of children’s emotional makeup and discuss with optimism and acceptance how it can best be used and how we can help children use it. That doesn’t mean pressing action entertainment into the usual morals, lessons, or restrictions. Its strength is its unquestioning responsiveness to the public’s desires, and curtailing that won’t make it a more effective educator but only a less effective source of fantasy. It does mean making the industry itself more open to kids as individuals, creating more venues for young audience members to get their opinions heard, supporting programs for kids to tell their own stories and create their own entertainment, reaching out to parents and teachers to discuss what kids love and why.
A weakness of mass entertainment is its impersonality, its lack of a single guiding artistic vision or a personal statement. Maurice Sendak alone made Where the Wild Things Are, and any child who loves the book is engaging with Sendak’s unique personality. Superman began as a collaboration of two young men in the 1930s, but over the next six decades it became an industry to which dozens of writers, artists, editors, filmmakers, toy makers, and game designers of different nationalities and generations have contributed in every entertainment medium. But that weakness is also a strength. Much of the power of mass entertainment derives from its communality. Every consumer feels invested in it, part of it, free to make it his own. The child playing with the action figure cares nothing about any meaning assigned to the figure by its manufacturer but only what it means to him. Even the older fan who studies every nuance of his favorite X-Men artists cares little about what the artist is trying to tell him but only how well he approximates the fan’s own heroic fantasies.
The people who create the entertainment are usually former fans themselves. It was important to them in their childhoods, and now they want to immerse themselves in it again, to change it to fit their own visions and have a new generation of fans accept their visions as a legitimate part of the make-believe world. (Even the most commercial entertainers crave popular acceptance most of all. Money is a welcome by-product of that, but no one gets into the entertainment industry just to get rich–the market is too undependable and the odds are too long.) Their stories are shaped by the original material they knew, by their own needs and fantasies, and what they perceive to be the demands of their young audience. The audience responds to what they do, accepts, rejects, reinterprets, and contributes some new young talents to change the material yet again. Thus the whole process becomes a sort of giant conversation, to which participants of all generations and positions bring their fears, yearnings, aches, tastes, developmental challenges, and knowledge, bargaining and swapping for mutual gratification. That’s a metaphor for growing up too: learning what we need and what we have to give and how to be a part of the world in a way that makes us and others happy.
When I worked in comics I met the men who created the Hulk, the monstrous hero who had been so significant in my own growing up. They were an artist and a writer of radically different temperaments and intents, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, who came together for a few years in the 1960s to change American popular culture.
Kirby was a short, pugnacious kid from the ghettoes of Manhattan’s Lower East Side who came of age on gangster movies and adventure comic strips in the Depression and put his rage into the most powerful action art anyone had ever seen. When we picture “superhero art” today, we picture some variant of Kirby’s angry, rippling-muscled heroes, his brutal punches and hurtling bodies. The first time I talked to him, Kirby said, “You ever been punched in the jaw, kid?” I thought I’d offended him somehow. “I used to box at the Y when I was a kid,” he continued.“When you take a really good shot in the jaw, that’s when you know you’ve felt reality. I think every writer and artist ought to be punched in the jaw at least once.” I was grateful that he didn’t offer to do me the favor.
Stan Lee told me he’d never been punched in the jaw. The child of a successful publishing family, he grew up wanting to write the great American novel. In his teens he took a job in a relative’s magazine firm (just until he could get his literary career going, he thought), where he’d climb impishly onto file cabinets and play the ocarina for the amusement of the pulp writers and comic book artists who’d pass through. Jack Kirby thought he was some kind of pansy. The years went by, and Lee never did get out of his cousin’s company. He wrote vapid, trend-following comic book stories through decades of quiet desperation. He acted up to cover his shyness, but he was painfully sensitive, desperate for approval, and easily swayed by others. A liberal in the city, he moved to the suburbs and became a conservative, then let the youth movement swing him back to the left.
Meanwhile, Jack Kirby was battling his way through the business, constantly creating new genres and pissing off publishers. Eventually Lee was about the only editor who’d hire him, and Kirby was almost the only good artist Lee could afford. They came together at midlife, in the nadirs of their careers, and they decided to play around and see what happened. Their strengths merged in a chemical combustion. Kirby’s angry, violent, monumental power met Lee’s vulnerability, self-mocking charm and poignant sensitivity to human frailty. They created Marvel Comics: the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the Silver Surfer, the X-Men, and dozens of others. They made comics a vital part of ’60s pop culture, which opened the door to underground comics and changed visual storytelling forever. A whole generation of kids grew up on Lee and Kirby’s shared fantasies and–beginning with George Lucas and his Kirbyesque Star Wars–went on to rewrite the way heroism and violence are portrayed in commercial entertainment.
X-Men was one of Kirby and Lee’s less successful creations at first, but it resonated with a loyal cult of teenage fans. Some of those grew up to take it over themselves and rework it into one of the most vital symbols in kid culture of the last twenty-five years. That metaphor of alienation invented by a couple of Jewish New Yorkers who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s has been brought back to life by baby boomers from the suburbs, Generation Xers from California beach towns, Midwestern WASPs, Englishmen, Canadians, and a Korean- American artist, Jim Lee, who became a comic-book superstar in the early 1990s. Its bigger-than-life expressions of love and loyalty in a world of chaos and violence spoke to sensitive, alienated kids–teenage comics geeks, female fans, young gays–and eventually to that part of even the most mainstream preteen that feels persecuted by adult society.
Among the kids who loved X-Men in the late 1970s was Michael Chabon. Comic books helped lead him to science fiction and fantasy novels, which led him in turn to literature. All along the way he liked to make up stories inspired by what he read, and in time he became well regarded as a writer of fiction: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, A Model World, Wonder Boys. And all along the way comics remained on his mind. He wrote a treatment for a planned X-Men movie. Then he wrote a novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, set in the early days of the comic-book business and drawing on the experiences of Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and their colleagues. It also includes some passionate arguments for the necessity of escapism and violent fantasy of the kind that comics brought to American children.
After that novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, Chabon addressed the San Diego Comics Convention on the confluence of comics and literature. He spoke of the “invitation to create a world” that any imaginative storytelling offers. “These writers and artists invited me to enter their worlds and play, and in so doing they invited me to create my own. Now I feel that I’m passing that same invitation on to new readers.” Afterward, he said, “The problem for young people today is the way their lives are so totally mediated, so coopted, by adults, from scheduled playdates in corporate-run ‘play zones’ to the entire capitalistic pay-per-view worldmaking industry. But we have to remember that children are quite adept at taking the crappy materials of the world-retailers and cobbling them together, syncretizing them into something authentic and good.”To Chabon, it’s important that parents know what their kids are consuming, “but the most important thing is that they stay out of their kids’ playworlds.”
I saw another sort of world creation at the Cinemagic conference on youth and media in Belfast. I’d talked with young people from both sides of Northern Ireland’s violent, centuries-old cultural and political war, watched them play video games, seen their amateur movies, and listened to the rap CDs they’d made, heard them voice their mingled rage at the “other side” and desire to make peace. Later, at a dinner table in a small hotel dining room in Belfast, one of my fellow conference attendees gave me a new perspective on it all. He was a Catholic Irishman, a producer with a local BBC station, and the topic he was discussing at the conference was the influence of American mass media on local culture. He asked me to explain a paradox he’d encountered when viewing our culture through Irish eyes: “We’re always saying over here that Americans are too literal. That you don’t understand irony, you can’t take a joke, and you don’t understand the value of the imagination. We see it in your educational philosophies, your political correctness, and so much of what your leaders say. But then you turn around and produce something as brilliant as The Simpsons, where the irony, the humanity, and the fantasy is almost on a level with Shakespeare!”
Struggling to pull myself together from the shock of hearing a BBC producer compare The Simpsons to Shakespeare, I babbled something about Calvinism, idealism, the fear of change, young people’s need to have their emotions mirrored. He suggested a different way to express the philosophical divide: lyricism, which formed the central thread of Celtic and Catholic civilization, seeking truth through art and emotion more than through externalities; and literalism, a more Protestant thread, which seeks a single, objective reality to the world. Shakespeare and cartoons are lyrical. Barney is literal. Psychiatrists who explore dreams and understand the value of hidden fantasy are lyrical. Psychologists who quantify media effects are literal.
Then he began to describe his own experiences as a lyrical Irishman within a BBC dominated by English Protestants. “The Protestants can’t help being frustrated with us sentimental, irrational Celts,” he said. “And they drive me crazy with their uptight, control-freaky perfectionism in everything. But the more I’m with them, the more I can see the damned nobility in them wanting the world to be just so bloody . . . good. And then they’ll start to admit what they gain from the passion and humor and lunacy I can bring to things.” There are moments, he said, when the two unite, creatively and mentally, and provide a glimpse of the rich future Northern Ireland might have.
Empathy creates a union of all these opposing viewpoints: reform and acceptance, literalism and lyricism, idealism and sensualism, reason and imagination, virtue and devilishness, whatever we call them. Empathy for the emotions that make children love violent stories, empathy for the forces that make artists want to tell them, empathy for the ideals that make others want to banish them. I see parents achieving this union of opposites every day through empathy with their children. My mother would drive me to comic book stores to find old Hulks, even though they ran counter to all her ideals of the perfect child and the perfect world. Because she could feel that a part of me was being strengthened by them, she increased my trust in her and her ideals, while allowing me to increase my trust in myself through dramatically different fantasies. When thirteen-year-old Jake’s father reads his Jane Austen and listens to his Bill Evans but opens the door to let Jake gush about his latest bloody triumph in Half-Life, he’s doing the same.
As with so much else in my work, I come back in the end to my son. When he was five years old and feeling nervous about the coming of kindergarten, I watched Nicky become a Power Ranger to feel stronger, and a Teletubby to feel protected, and a “Tubby Ranger” to feel both at once. Then he discovered the Power Ranger toy line: the Zords, transforming robot-vehicles that could be snapped together to become one huge Mega-Zord, and a collection of weapons–ray-guns, shields, crossbows, one for each Ranger–that could be clicked together into a single Mega-Blaster. The pieces could be played with separately, as cool cars and weapons, or together, as the biggest battle toys he’d ever seen. He would play with them for hours. They were perfect challenges for his patterning and fine-motor skills, and a great focus for daddy-time when he needed my help. But as we played together, I realized that he took more than that out of them. He’d pretend to be a Mega-Zord coming together. He’d wait eagerly for the Zords to combine at the end of a TV episode to defeat the biggest of the bad guys. He returned again and again to the fantasy of diverse pieces combining into one more powerful form.
Then one day he was talking about “Tubby-Zords,” Teletubbies hooking together to become more powerful than any Ranger alone or ordinary Zord, and it made perfect sense to me. Life is in so many pieces. So many people, so many messages, so many realities to pull together. Even he was in pieces. Angry Nicky, happy Nicky, scared Nicky, sad Nicky, loving Nicky behaved so differently and saw the world in such different ways. The very simple message of those plastic toys was the essence of growing up: getting all the pieces to fit just right makes us more powerful than any piece could be alone.