steve rose - 2012
To get it right, they should have watched just about every other Hollywood comedy of the past decade. There they'd have found the solution to the plight of American masculinity: don't grow up. Just stretch out that period between adolescence and parenthood to the extent it becomes a prolonged state of infantile bliss. Teenage hedonism on a grown-up salary; being old enough to smoke weed but still having your mum do your laundry; not having to share your Star Wars figures with anyone. This is the new American dream.
This perpetual state of immaturity has spread like a fungus across the movie landscape, the freshest example being the Duplass brothers' Jeff Who Lives At Home. As the title suggests, Jeff, played by Jason Segel, is the latest in a long line of movie men-children with no great urge to fly the nest, and why should he, when his mum feeds him, puts him up, lets him smoke weed in her basement and no doubt does his laundry? This backwards evolution in movie masculinity might well have started with Tom Hanks in Big, which somehow made the idea of a 12-year-old boy in a 30-year-old body look like the cutest thing. Get rid of Big's mystical body-swap premise and what do you get? Adam Sandler. He was encouraging schoolkids to pee their pants in 1995's Billy Madison, and 15 years later there he still is, peeing in the pool with his buddies in Grown Ups. In the interim period, many more have limbo-ed under the maturity bar. The Frat Pack stable, for example (John C Reilly and Will Ferrell in Step Brothers must represent some kind of landmark). Then the vaguely more reflective Judd Apatow crew (at least Seth Rogen actually realises he needs to grow up in Knocked Up). Not to mention Kevin Smith, Jack Black, Danny McBride, Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott. Without arrested masculine development, where would American comedy be?
At indie-movie level, we've had a few equal-opportunities studies of 21st-century juvenility, such as Sam Mendes' Away We Go and Miranda July's The Future, both of which focused on thirtysomething couples reluctantly growing up. The exceptions only prove the rule, however: this is predominantly a guy thing. The figures back it up. According to the US Census Bureau, the proportion of men aged 25-34 living with their parents rose from 14% in 2005 to 19% in 2011. For women, the figure has always been a good 10% lower.
The situation is getting so bad, people are writing books like Men to Boys: The Making Of Modern Immaturity, The Decline of Men, and Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys. As the latter suggests, feminism is an easy target – "Why man up? Even when it comes to having children, women no longer seem to need them," asks author Kay S Hymowitz. Other probable causes include the harsh economic climate, property prices, overindulgent parenting, higher education, men's magazines, the 1960s, the 1980s, video games, and Adam Sandler.
The movies can't be held entirely responsible, but they're hardly the solution either. Hollywood's manchild heroes usually exist in an artificial reality sustained by other movie constructs.
Could the triumph of the manchild be any reflection on the people making movies? The ones who are paid a fortune to stay in touch with their inner children and keep us in touch with ours, by spoon-feeding us infantile comedies and superhero movies? Go down that road and you start to sound like a bitter parent bent on spoiling the frat party. Invoke manly actors of yesteryear and you sound like a cranky reactionary yearning for some spurious golden age of masculinity (I'll get my hat and walking stick in a minute, don't worry). But where previous generations rebelled even when they had nothing to rebel against, to paraphrase Marlon Brando in The Wild One, this one seems content to play in some sort of giant pop-culture creche. It might be fun, but it's not clever and it's not Big.
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