Childhood as Spectacle

Abstract

The satisfactions of Peter Weir's film The Truman Show (1998) rely less on its satire of media culture than on a vision of childhood that reaches back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile (1762). Rousseau embodied his pedagogical theory in person of boy Emile, isolating him in a setting designed to mimic a natural state but entirely subject to tutor's artifice as boy is subject to tutor's surveillance. Jim Carrey's Truman Burbank, in his little-boy outfits and his backlot playpen of Seahaven, captures baby-boomer nostalgia for 1950s childhood. To first generation raised with and by television, film offers a safe voyeur-exhibitionist fantasy; to look intimately at Truman is to imagine being looked at as well. Emile and Truman, as exemplary representations, mark boundaries of an epoch in history of childhood and its discourses, which, books under review suggest, seems to be coming-or to have come-to a close. Broadly speaking, these recent works detail history and analyze consequences of a cultural transition from childhood perceived as a unique stage of life with special needs (assessed and provided for by social institutions such as family, church, school) to childhood as spectacle, orchestrated in, by, and for marketplace. In Kids' Stuff: Toys and Changing World of American Childhood, Gary Cross charts commodification of childhood through history of toys. Cross calls material culture of childhood stuff, a phrase I associate with 1930s movies: Aw, that's kids' stuff, a Mickey Rooney character might say, to distinguish himself as a near-adult. And indeed, historically, as soon as the child begins to be a widely recognized distinct category, arguably not until late seventeenth century, stuff begins to accumulate around and for him. Cross begins ruefully: There have been disturbing changes in making of playthings in last few decades (4). In place of companies providing creative playthings that parents could delight in giving their . . . have come a new breed of companies that specialize in novelty and appeal directly to imagination of children (5). Toys that once conveyed messages between parent and child and allowed shared enjoyment beKids' Stuff' Toys and Changing World of American Childhood By Gary Cross Harvard University Press, 1997