Margaret's Column

Yesterday’s newspaper (8/10) reprinted a story about Alloy Entertainment, a New York based ‘publisher’ catering to the teen market, mostly with tales of romance and gossip among wealthy New York or Southern California teenagers. They have deals with tv and movie studios. The thinking is, the books introduce the ‘brand and build a following, by the name the television show or feature film comes along, there’s already huge ‘brand loyalty’ for the new product. Ca- ching!

Ugh.

Now I’m not going to go on about the purity of art. History is full of hacks. Shakespeare, Dickens, Alcott. Even Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings after considerable pestering by his publisher. But this is something different, and perverse. The point of this company isn’t to tell good stories they think that young people will like. The point of the company is to make money. Lots of money. And their own ‘product brand’ isn’t the only one they’re pushing.

These books, and their attendant movies/tv shows are full of expensive consumer goods, all of them brand names, of course, frequently mentioned by name. The book The Clique, lists six expensive status brands in the first four pages, including perfume,. (the character is in the seventh grade. What seventh-grader wears perfume?) Goods that most of the kids reading and/or watching couldn’t afford in a million years. Like kids in the fifties and even later who wondered why their own lives weren’t ‘Father Knows Best’ perfect, today’s kids no doubt wonder why they don’t have all this stuff, just like ‘all the other kids’.

They shouldn’t wonder. None of this, not fifties sitcoms, or today’s shows, have anything to do with reality. They're all about fantasy.

Consider the ‘family’ shows from the fifties and sixties. Prosperous, white-collar (even if Father never seemed to really do anything) well-ordered, no family tension. I remember classmates of mine in the seventies, like me the children of divorced parents, talking longingly about ‘how families used to be’. They took these old shows to be sociological documents a la Galaxy Quest. And of course, they weren’t.

When these types of programs started, the country was coming off of two decades of upheaval. First the Great Depression, than World War II. Families frequently separated, while one parent looked for work. Marriages failed (including my grandfather’s). Then the war pulled thousands of men into the military and thousand of women into the factories. No wonder that, a decade later, TV producers created shows with these ‘perfect’ families. But it wasn’t the norm even then. Neither of my parents grew up in neighborhoods like that. In fact, only about a third of families fit that ‘Leave it to Beaver’ mold. A third! Yet a generation later, children watched these shows and assumed it was ‘the norm’.

This distorted picture of the world is very bad for kids. They probably read and watch this junk and wonder what's wrong with their own lives. Meanwhile,  writers and TV producers who want to do real stories about real kids are finding it harder and harder to get a toe-hold in the industry. And people who care nothing about either kids or good storytelling keep right on shoving shallow consumerism in everyone's faces.

Makes me want to weep.