Aaron R. Davis

No, I didn’t watch the Grammys this weekend. I never watch the Grammys because I really don’t care.

What I did watch, though, was this horrific unfolding of anger online when Taylor Swift won Album of the Year and Lady Gaga didn’t.

Yes, the lost generation of social media morons who have no future decided that Sunday night was a war between fans of Taylor Swift and fans of Lady Gaga, and who deserved to win an award that has no bearing on what anyone listens to.

Seriously.

This is what Americans deem worthy of righteous anger and drawing lines in the sand. Not government overspending on endless wars. Not regulating the banks that caused the economy to nearly collapse. Not gay civil rights or world hunger or health finance reform. None of that is worth leaving the house for. No, the majority of people I saw take to the Internet last night were really, really pissed off that Taylor Swift won the Album of the Year Grammy and Lady Gaga did not.

Again: seriously.

It’s scarily weird the amount of nationalism that comes with pop culture. I use the term nationalism because people have come to use their taste as identifiers instead of just, you know, personal preferences. We live in a world of football riots, after all. We live in a world where the anonymity of the Internet has fostered a bizarre kind of simmering, low-level hostility to the point where a prominent film critic can now receive death threats for giving an unfavorable review of The Dark Knight BEFORE the movie even comes out.

So while it’s not surprising to see people (most of them teenagers) taking to Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr to fight over who’s better, a girly carbon copy country star or the latest in a series of avant garde fads pretending to be more artistic than she actually is, it’s still strangely scary. Because there’s discussion, there’s debate and then there’s actual comments about how Taylor Swift should have her throat slashed for daring to be more momentarily popular than Lady Gaga. And that kind of shit just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Not that I’m defending either artist; I just think it’s over the top that a minor aesthetic disagreement about what music one prefers warrants those kinds of psychotic comments.

The thing is, unless you’re in the music industry, does it really matter who wins a Grammy? Tell me, right off the top of your head: who won Album of the Year last year? Who won the last five? I have no idea. I had to look it up on Wikipedia to see that that Robert Plant/Alison Krauss thing won last year, and Herbie Hancock’s Joni Mitchell tribute album won the year before that. Is it a surprise that the most Baby Boomer-friendly album won this year? The Grammys are notoriously stodgy, no matter how much of a show they put on of pretending to be relevant.

And that’s not to slam Swift’s music as being stodgy. Or to praise Gaga’s as being fresh and hip. I don’t think either of those statements is true. But let’s look at this word relevant.

Does Lady Gaga’s album not winning the Grammy make it any less in your eyes? Do you actually need the validation of the same organization that gave this award to Steely Dan in 2001 over Eminem, Beck and Radiohead to somehow legitimize your love for Lady Gaga? Because if you do, you’ve probably got a lot of deeper self-esteem problems that are in bigger need of being addressed.

Seriously, Lady Gaga’s going to spin into obscurity now because she didn’t win this purposeless award that signifies no more than the majority opinion of … jeez, I don’t even know how they determine who wins the goddamn thing, anyway.

What I’m saying, in my bitchy way, is that whoever wins the Grammy has absolutely no influence on anyone’s listening habits, anyway. Are there more people who might check out Taylor Swift because she won Album of the Year? Maybe. Are there less people who are going to check out Lady Gaga because she didn’t? Probably not. Are there people who are suddenly going to stop listening to Lady Gaga because she didn’t win? Absolutely not. Should you stop listening to Lady Gaga and start only listening to Taylor Swift because of the Grammy decision? What are you, a moron?

Let me put it this way: Madonna was only nominated for this award one time, and not until 1999. Did her career suffer because of it? No. Because you know who you like and you don’t need anyone else to tell you whether you should or not.

So, you know, have a dialogue. Express your tastes. But don’t make them out to be a part of your personal identity. Don’t take personal offense when I don’t like Lady Gaga, and I won’t take personal offense when you don’t like Taylor Swift, because those preferences don’t make us who we are. They’re just things we like.

If we spent half of the energy we spend getting butt hurt whenever some awards board honored something we didn’t like on actual social change, this would be a world that wouldn’t have time to get angry over frivolous things like what music we listen to.

For the record, my favorite album in 2009 was Ocean Eyes by Owl City. I don’t need anyone to tell me if I’m “right” or not. It was the best for me, and you aren’t me, and I’m not you, and it absolutely does not matter.

Aaron R. Davis lives in a cave at the bottom of the ocean with his eyes shut tight and his fingers in his ears. You can contact him at samuraifrog@yahoo.com.

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Aaron R. Davis

Let’s just get this out of the way first thing: The Office has jumped the shark.

Ever since the hour-long wedding episode, which saw Jim and Pam finally wed and ended with the characters acting out a YouTube video, there have been a lot of people talking about shark-jumping. For the record, I was not one of the people who hated that episode and called out the show for leaping over a Selachimoprh. Maybe the wedding episode was a tad indulgent, but it seemed totally in character for Michael. We’ve seen him hijack a wedding before in his endless bid to be beloved and popular, and we’ve seen in the past how, like a child, he tries to replicate what he sees online because he thinks people will be delighted. I had zero problems with the wedding episode.

But what really cinched it for me was this past week’s episode, which was a fucking clip show.

Clip shows used to be a cheap way to pad out the episode count with filler when a show spent too much of its budget on other episodes. I’ve always found them joyless and easy to skip. Frankly, they’re the worst episodes of any TV series (unless we’re talking about The Simpsons; the worst episodes of The Simpsons are now musical episodes and any show where they tell three incredibly unfunny stories about something).

But in the age of DVD (not to mention ubiquitous Office reruns on TBS and a thousand local affiliates), are clip shows even necessary? And what really irks me is that it was the first new episode of the show in over a month (advertised with only the new scenes in the framing device to make it look like it was a real episode), it’s a rerun this week, and the Olympics are about to preempt everything. Why put in a “new” episode at all?

What really made me think The Office has jumped the shark was the weirdly smug tone of the whole episode; the way it reveled in the assumed adoration of the audience. There was no effort to it at all. At this point, the producers seem to think that the audience will love whatever they do, no matter how bad it is. They’ve gotten so overconfident in peoples’ love of the show that they think they can get away with anything.

Right now the producers are operating on a level of smarm that makes them believe they can just have Rainn Wilson sit in a chair and stare at the audience, wordlessly, for 30 straight minutes, and the audience will lap it up because they love The Office so much that nothing is a wrong decision.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the clip episode isn’t the episode where The Office vaulted over a shark called plausibility. Remember, jumping the shark is about long-term effects that you can only judge long after they’ve set in. So let’s go back and decide when, exactly, the show Fonzie’d over credibility.

My money is on “Stress Relief,” the hour-long episode that aired on February 1, 2009, immediately after the Super Bowl. That was the moment I first felt there was something … off. That was a bad episode designed as a sales pitch to whatever Super Bowl audience still wasn’t watching The Office, but it heightened everyone’s character quirks so badly that it felt overwrought, something the show had previously tried hard to avoid. That wacky, slapsticky opening with the office fire and Angela hurtling her cat into the ceiling was pure cartoon. Dwight’s behavior, especially slicing the face off of a CPR dummy to see if he can wear it over his own face like a serial killer, crossed the line into outright sociopathic. And, of course, celebrity guest stars are always a ratings stunt. It was a cynical exercise that felt completely out of place.

But since then, things have gotten more fantastic, and the plausibility of the show has become incredibly strained. The show was at its funniest when it was character-based and rooted in awkward behavior. No one seems to remember anymore, but there was a time when the show was downright uncomfortable to watch because the humor was so spot on. We’ve all known bosses like Michael Scott, and the original genius of the series was that the writers took what was familiar and ramped up the intensity just enough into absurdity. Mostly – but not always – it stayed within the realm of believability, and that’s when the show was at its best. But that kind of tension is now resolved by something magical or something pat or something wacky, and it’s come at the expense of character and credibility.

As this sixth season has gone on, with Michael and Jim as co-managers (which is about as believable as Jim being allowed to be a manager in an office where his wife works), the credibility is long gone. I especially don’t like the change that’s occurred in Jim. He was a great character because he was so effortlessly sensitive to everyone’s feelings, but now he’s turned into a total buffoon. We’ve seen this before, too – like the episode where he was in charge of the office for a day and tried to merge all of the birthday celebrations into one. He may be a nice guy, but he’s not necessarily suited for managing people, because people can be petty. And I understand the dynamic will shift, as it does in real life, when a person is promoted to a position of superiority. But the writers are handling it so badly it actually leaves me shaking my head sometimes. Dwight’s slide into cartoonish evil is bad enough, but his setting up the Employee of the Month plot in order to embarrass Jim would’ve required Jim’s brains to fall out in order to work. He’s turned into a total fool.

All of this is believability being thrown out of the window. And I’m not talking about realism. No sitcom is realistic. I’m talking about that moment when a show abandons its own interior plausibility, which every show spends time building up, only to ignore later when it goes on for more than three or four seasons and ends up on autopilot and starts doing more and more repetitive and/or outlandish things.

Frankly, by now a wizard could appear in the office and send Dwight on a quest, or Oscar could be harassed by a floating alien that only he can see and hear, and it wouldn’t seem out of place on The Office. I think believability is something the show abandoned a long time ago for the sake of ratings. It doesn’t necessarily make The Office bad, but it does make it a different show.

And with believability gone, I think we’re long into the post-shark jump period. Sure, there have been some great episodes since “Stress Relief.” I think all of the Michael Scott Paper Company episodes were brilliant. But no show goes immediately into the dregs because they jumped the shark. Declines have their momentary rises, but they always go back to falling. The Michael Scott Paper Company episodes were good, but still can’t quite touch the show at its peak. As The Office slides down the other side of the quality hill, those episodes were bright spots in a wane.

This is what happens when a show jumps the shark: overconfidence sets in, and overconfidence breeds laziness. And nothing is lazier than a damn clip episode.

The Office has jumped the shark.

Aaron R. Davis lives in a cave at the bottom of the ocean with his eyes shut tight and his fingers in his ears. You can contact him at samuraifrog@yahoo.com.

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Aaron R. Davis

Paul McCartney’s comment on the Golden Globes the other night that he was now known as “the guy from Rock Band” sparked a conversation between my wife and I about the recent marketing onslaught of the Beatles, a band that is constantly being repackaged, rekejiggered, and rereleased to a public ever eager to repurchase everything they own that has a moptop or a guitar with a Beatles logo on it. But it was also a conversation that ended up revealing how niche cable channels – channels devoted to one idea, like food or travel or classic music videos – end up operating.

Do you suppose these things come about because highly-paid television executives end up having the same conversations?

ME: They sure did push the hell out of The Beatles: Rock Band on VH1. They showed actual game play as music videos.

WIFE: The animation was great. And some of the nice fallout was that they actually showed Beatles videos on VH1. The actual clips they made, stuff like that.

ME: VH1 Classic aired a lot of their solo clips, too. Lots of John Lennon, especially. Not very much Wings, I noticed …

WIFE: Well, why bother?

ME: They’ve showed The Beatles Anthology again, too.

WIFE: Cool. Kind of a sucky documentary, but lots of great concert footage. I swear, there’s enough material for an entire cable channel devoted to the Beatles. The Beatles Channel.

ME: VH1 Beatles.

WIFE: Oh, man, I would watch VH1 Beatles 24 hours a day.

ME: All Beatles music videos and movies?

WIFE: And specials. And their old cartoon! That would be awesome. Just a lot of Beatles music and nothing else.

ME: Yeah, but then it would start to suck.

WIFE: You think so?

ME: It’s inevitable. It’ll get too repetitive, and they’ll want to sell more advertising, so that means more viewers. It’ll happen little by little. They’ll start devoting time to Beatles covers and some kind of show about how the Beatles affected, apparently, everything in the history of pop culture. Something like That Metal Show on VH1 Classic, where people sit around and talk about how great the Beatles are. Only it’ll be hosted by those 15 year-old girls who always think they’re the first ones to discover how great the Beatles were.

WIFE: Ugh. Have you ever listened to, like, radio shows where they devote time to the Beatles, like Breakfast with the Beatles? They just keep trotting out the same factoids as if they were revelations, like Tony Sheridan’s “My Bonnie” record with the Beatles playing back-up, or the German version of “She Love You,” like it’s never been available, or something.

ME: Then they’ll do a karaoke show. With a celebrity version, only with people who barely qualify as celebrities, like on any NBC show. It’ll be, like, Carrie Prejean or Rod Blagojevich or people who aren’t celebrities, but are just kind of newsworthy. Months ago.

WIFE: And a trivia game show to see who’s the biggest Beatles fan in the US, because they’re too cheap to send a camera crew to England.

ME: How about a syrupy reality show where people tell stories of the time they met one of the Beatles, or a Beatles song changed their life?

WIFE: How does a Beatles song change someone’s life?

ME: I don’t know; like, maybe it lifted a car off of them or something.

WIFE: I can see it now: personal stories of redemption, obsession and teeny-tiny brushes with faMe: Touched by a Beatle. With reenactments.

ME: And then they’ll put a bunch of Beatle impersonators in a house with a bunch of desperate blow-up dolls on a reality show like A Beatles Chance of Love.

WIFE: Yeah, but first they have to find the perfect Beatles impersonators, so they’ll do a reality competition show with phone-in results, like Beatles Idol. America’s Got Beatles. No, wait, America’s Next Top Beatles. Making the Beatles!

ME: Finding Fab.

WIFE: Oh, god, that’s it! And after they do the reality shows, they’ll all star in a sitcom! Which will be horribly ironic, because the Monkees were a rip-off of the Beatles, but the new Beatles sitcom will be a rip-off of The Monkees. Or, you know, the TV version of irony, which is really just coincidence.

ME: Don’t the Jonas Brothers already do a Monkees rip-off for Disney Channel?

WIFE: Maybe they can get the Jonas Brothers to be on the Beatles sitcom. Crossover!

ME: And, of course, there will be the inevitable week-long special I Love the Beatles, which features a bunch of shitty, low-tier, fifth-rate comics taking a break from doing insurance commercials and hosting game shows on Animal Planet to put the Beatles into perspective for all of us idiots who don’t realize how culturally important and hilarious they were.

WIFE: Yeah, but they do it by pretending Michael Ian Black is funny. Which is no fun for anyone.

ME: No. This whole channel is really starting to suck hard.

WIFE: Time to move on to another channel, I guess. VH1 Beatles just becomes another channel in a sea of channels that gets skipped whenever I’m flipping around.

ME: Man, when VH1 Beatles was just showing clips, their old cartoon and Yellow Submarine, it was classic. Now it’s just … VH1 Classic. And no one watches that anymore for pretty much the same reasons.

Aaron R. Davis lives in a cave at the bottom of the ocean with his eyes shut tight and his fingers in his ears. You can contact him at samuraifrog@yahoo.com.

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Aaron R. Davis

The year-ending two month-long self-congratulatory circle jerk known as awards season is now upon us. The staples of the season have started to appear: self-serious critics’ lists, announcements of hosts and formats, those “for your consideration” ads groveling for nominations, an amazing number of screeners available all over the Internet for download and a media that thinks “people really loved Avatar” is a really important news story.

Yes, readers of this column probably won’t be surprised to discover that, as with so many things our pop culture deems Very Important, I’m cynical about entertainment awards. You can only disagree with so many Best Picture winners before you come to realize these things are total bullshit. Opinions and matters of taste are all subjective; these awards are merely the majority opinion of professionals that work in a tight-knit industry. They’re no more important than an insurance industry’s Salesperson of the Year award, it’s just that prettier people go and they’re on television, giving them the air of some sort of national event.

But far be it from me to dampen the spirits of anyone enjoying the masturbatory self-reverence of Hollywood, a community now taking an annual break from its intense self-interest to pat itself on the back for being so damn important.

In fact, just for you award hounds, I’ve created this calendar of events for the next couple of months.

People’s Choice Awards: These were held last week, and I have to say, I barely noticed that it happened. This is the Special Olympics of awards ceremonies. The only joy to be had with these is watching those few people (and I’ve known a few) who get genuinely hurt when movie stars act like these awards aren’t a big deal. And guess what? They aren’t. They’re Procter & Gamble’s advertising bonanza. I think the billion dollars people around the world have spent going to see Avatar gives James Cameron some indication that you liked it. He’s waiting to see if he gets the award from his fellow professionals. But thanks, you guys are cute.

The AVN Awards: These took place last Friday, which was, incidentally, my mother’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Mom! I only mention the awards for porno (excuse me, “adult entertainment”) because I think the entire concept is pretty silly. Sure, it sells out some space in Vegas when fourth-tier stand-up comics with failed TV shows come out to host something irreverent, but really anyone who watches is just hoping to see tits. Does anyone outside of the porn industry really care who had the best girl-on-girl scene of the year? This is the only awards ceremony for movies that anybody off the street could make with their college’s stolen AV equipment and a couple of people who really want to make some money. There’s a reason this industry is having a hard time keeping up with the flood of amateur scenes on the Internet: no one cares about porno movies anymore except for the self-serious porn industry. All you need is a scene or two, anyway. I can’t believe I’m going for this pun, but porn is best in spurts.

Golden Globes (January 17): Essentially a formal dinner with awards given by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association – entertainment journalists affiliated with publications outside of the US – so that, for one night, the entertainment community they suck up to all year long can suck up to them for awards. One year, they gave an award to Pia Zadora as Best Actress in the terrible, universally-panned Butterfly, because her husband flew them out to Las Vegas on a junket. So, I guess there are some perks to the job. The most remarkable thing about the Golden Globes is that, because it’s a dinner and not an overstuffed ceremony, NBC can actually block out two hours of show time and the show will run for two hours. This year, though, the Golden Globes are being hosted by Ricky Gervais, the kind of comic whose total irreverence for this kind of bullshit is never, ever welcomed by the people involved. That might make them worth watching, actually.

Screen Actor’s Guild Awards (January 23): They actually televise these, though the, um, luster is diminished by the fact that they air on TNT instead of a real network. When Alec Baldwin’s acceptance speech is competing for air time against Law & Order reruns, it kind of takes the romance out of the whole thing. And who really cares? If you watch The Office, this is basically like the Dundies for real: a bunch of guys in the same office show up, get drunk, hand out some awards to each other and the rest of us ignore it.

Director’s Guild of America Awards (January 30): Let’s be honest, if you’re not a director, who cares?

Grammy Awards (January 31): I can’t follow these awards at all. First, if you want to see a music awards ceremony that seems to have absolutely no idea what’s happening in contemporary music, watch the Emmys. They’re worse than Rolling Stone magazine for being behind the times on music, and more laughable than the Onion AV Club for taking ridiculous pride in deliberately obscure pseudo-intellectualism. Second, the categories are so arcane that I don’t see how anyone not in the music business could care. It’s gotten to the point where I’m ready to see they’ve announced new categories like “Best Engineer on a Record Produced at Abbey Road Studios During the Second Half of the Year Under a Harvest Moon While Jupiter and Mars Were Aligned” or “Best Frank Sinatra Impression By Yet Another Faux-Hipster Who Thinks He’s Being Original.” Just talking about the Grammys gives me a migraine.

Writer’s Guild of America Awards (February 20): I have a lot of respect for writers. But I don’t care about these awards. No one does.

Independent Spirit Awards (March 5): The one day a year when the makers of the independent films – or at least the ones that get released by big Hollywood studios – get together to congratulate themselves for not being a part of the mainstream movie industry, before getting dressed up a couple of days later to congratulate themselves on being a part of the mainstream movie industry by going to the Oscars. These have been like a dress rehearsal for the Oscars for the last decade, as more and more people in Hollywood succumb to the need to seem hip by nominating more indies for Oscars, and more and more people in indies succumb to their need to make money by selling out to Hollywood. I could almost respect this mercenary endeavor, but there are two things holding me back. First, that the people who attend this show are way too caught up in their bullshit fantasy that getting nominated for these things makes them more genuine artists and more “real,” despite the fact that they will grovel for an Oscar given half the chance. And second, that holding the awards just before the Oscars in order to make a statement about which films really matter is ridiculously self-important.

Golden Raspberry Awards (March 6): I mention these awards because so many people think it’s funny that someone out there is taking time to “honor” the worst in film. I don’t know why they think this, since these awards are particularly gutless and hypocritical. This is another instance where something is supposed to be fun and irreverent, but really they’re just sucking up to the industry in order to get attention. Notice how they always pick safe targets and make fun of non-movies the critics have already heaped scorn on. They don’t have the courage to pick something phony like Crash as their Worst Picture, because it’s not an easy target. They would have to justify that, and that’s not what the “Razzies” are all about, are they? This isn’t criticism, this is bullshit. That they think of themselves as a legitimate and important awards show only adds to the stupidity.

Academy Awards (March 7): Formerly the most respected and biggest awards show devoted to film, they’ve had a troubled run in the last decade, making sweatier and more desperate attempts at populism. We all know the routine. Critics, bloggers, pundits, late night talk show hosts and “entertainment journalists” will complain about how long the ceremony is, but they’ll watch it, anyway. The host will joke about how long the ceremony is, and just keep making it longer. And the next day everyone will tear it apart, even though they all watched it because they’re all caught up in the seriousness of the whole thing.

Meanwhile, ABC sets them up for failure by blocking out three hours of programming instead of four, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that gives the Oscars a reputation of being “too long,” as if this thing is designed to be a TV show instead of an industry-supported awards ceremony. So, worried about ratings, they’ve tried to streamline the show. They’ve tried to shorten it. They pay anyone who isn’t an actor or director the disrespect of forcing their speeches to be shorter or, one year, accepting their awards from their seats. They claim to want irreverent hosts that won’t take the bullshit seriously, so we get a nervous Ellen DeGeneres or the supposedly hilarious Jon Stewart, who was so taken in by the bullshit of it that he couldn’t make the jokes people wanted.

This year, they’ve expanded the Best Picture nominees to 10 instead of five, a naked bid for populist acceptance that seems mainly to stem from complaints that the fatuous, overlong The Dark Knight didn’t get nominated for the award it didn’t deserve to get nominated for in the first place. It’s an open admission that the Oscars no longer care about which movies they think are the best, but instead are more concerned with what’s immediately popular, because they think that’s what people watching the show want to see.

In a sense, they’ve cheapened the prestige of the award to cave in to ratings. But in another sense, it’s all pointless anyway, because my favorite movie of the year is still my favorite movie of the year whether Hollywood endorses my opinion or not. And that’s why awards shows are nonsense to me. Unless Scarlett Johansson has a plunging neckline, what’s the point?

Aaron R. Davis lives in a cave at the bottom of the ocean with his eyes shut tight and his fingers in his ears. You can contact him at samuraifrog@yahoo.com.

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Aaron R. Davis

I spend a lot of my free time these days on Tumblr, the latest social networking fad site. Mostly, it’s just sharing pictures. But, like a lot of social networking fads, it’s also unusually revealing.

If there’s one thing that Tumblr has revealed to me, it’s a terrible fear of growing up among today’s teenagers. Being a huge Disney fan, I follow a lot of Tumblr blogs that are Disney-related. And I end up running into a lot of people between 15 and 22 who just come across as terrified of growing up and letting go of their childhoods. Is this fear really so prevalent among the young?

If there is, I kind of blame my generation. We tend to be navel-gazers. We’re fascinated with ourselves and the way we were brought up. We love our toys and have problems getting rid of them. If they were sold in a garage sale the weekend we were out of town, we can be obsessive about them. We let toymakers sell us our childhoods back, and get touchy when Hot Topic sells our childhood to kids who “weren’t there” when The Goonies originally came out. We define ourselves by our pop culture loves. Not all of us have adjusted well and, on the surface, a lot of us look like we never grew up.

But here’s the thing: there’s a big difference between collecting toys and being immature. There’s a vastness between loving comic books and being illiterate.

On Disney Tumblrs, it looks like kids today love Peter Pan above all other Disney movies. I see a lot of Peter Pan stuff. And Peter Pan sentiments. They seem to really want to relate to a character that never grew up. They see him as a hero. There’s a line from a Jonas Brothers song that goes “Peter Pan and Wendy turned out fine.” I see that quoted endlessly.

The thing about that sentiment is: no, Peter Pan and Wendy really didn’t turn out fine. These kids seem to be laboring under the idea that Pan and Wendy got together and never grew up. But that doesn’t happen in the Disney movie at all. (And, frankly, I’m not a fan of that movie, anyway.) If you read JM Barrie, Peter Pan is kind of a tragedy. It’s about a boy who is so terrified of the idea of being an adult that he retreats into an imaginary world of fairies, pirates and mermaids. That alone is practically an allegory for insanity.

Barrie’s celebration of childhood actually reveals almost crippling fears of social interaction and responsibility and adult relationships. Pan is a tragedy because he’ll never love anyone, he’ll never move beyond this callow boy who is only worried about filling his immediate needs. He’s selfish and forgetful. Hell, Walt Disney hated him so much he turned him into an adolescent, defeating the purpose of the entire story.

Peter Pan is not someone to emulate or want to be.

Why do you think Wendy leaves to grow up? Because being a well-rounded adult is better than being Peter Pan.

The other lament, and this comes from all over the Internet, is when people see something that’s different from when they were a kid and say “I feel like part of my childhood just died.”

It’s called growing up. You should look into it sometime.

I want to puke whenever I see or hear that phrase.

You childhood is supposed to die. You’re supposed to grow and change. These are the natural processes of your life. You can’t be nine years old forever, and trying to be is pretty sad.

BUT.

But as you grow up, you find ways to assimilate the things you like into an ever-changing life.

I think a lot of our problems come from the discord between the demands and responsibilities of adult life, and the strong desire to always be young and free of responsibility and to escape. So it makes change harder and harder to deal with if you’re the kind of person who runs from responsibility instead of just dealing with it. I understand because I’m often guilty of this, too.

What makes me sad is having experienced a lot of the problems that come from being afraid of responsibility but having to be responsible, and seeing others fall into this trap.

Someone who’s a Tumblr friend had a big blowout the other day with another user over the movie Avatar. My friend loved the movie; the other person had a lot of criticisms. And my friend just exploded. Instead of considering that there might be someone out there in the world who didn’t think Avatar was very good, and understanding that that fact doesn’t undermine or destroy or make any less his love for the movie, he went off about how the critic couldn’t appreciate a movie like Avatar because his inner child was dead.

I think it’s that fear of growing up that leads people to say something stupid like that. For my friend, it wasn’t a matter of taste, or a disagreement over what they both look for in a film, or an acknowledgment that people experience things differently, or an unimportant difference of opinion. He seemed to see it as an attack on his connection with his youthful feelings and his ability to enjoy things on the level of a child. Instead of “I disagree” it became “I’m sorry you have no heart because you have no connection with the child you used to be.”

There’s too much of that in this generation. And for the record, the critic wasn’t attacking my friend for liking it. He just felt it was too long and overly-familiar. His criticisms were about the movie itself, and my friend took it personally.

Look, nobody says you have to stop being a Disney fan to be a grown-up, and if they do, fuck them. You get to decide what adulthood is about. I think it’s important to be able to connect with your childhood feelings and loves. I still have action figures, I have Star Wars calendars, I have a Mickey Mouse watch and sometimes I love the Muppets more than members of my own family.

But I hate the sentiment that just because something’s different from when you were a child, experiencing something for the first time, that means your childhood is now dead.

YOUR CHILDHOOD STILL HAPPENED.

The only thing that can “kill” or “rape” your childhood memories is you devaluing them because you hated The Phantom Menace or because Frank Oz doesn’t work with the Muppets anymore or because Andy is a college kid in Toy Story 3 or DC Comics has ruined the continuity you loved.

I’m not saying you have to be happy with these things. You like them, or you don’t. Or you don’t mind them. You adjust to them, or you ignore them. You don’t spend 27 years of your life whining about the Ewoks.

Acting like your memories somehow never happened or a piece of your soul has died because someone didn’t like a movie you loved or because something’s different from when you were a kid or because you’re depressed that people expect you to be able to act like an adult … these are truly immature attitudes.

Like the things you like because you like them. But you have to grow up, too.

Aaron R. Davis lives in a cave at the bottom of the ocean with his eyes shut tight and his fingers in his ears. You can contact him at samuraifrog@yahoo.com.

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