Young Kids: It's Black and White

I remember when I was younger (way back in the 80's) I used to love watching cartoons like Transformers and Voltron. There were plenty of other series on like Smurfs, G.I. Joe, Dinosaucers, and many, many others.

I remember as I grew up it became fairly confusing how each of the series seemed to follow the same tropish formula. I don't mean just the examples found in series like Voltron, either, where you have a basic premise of the bad guys coming in and launching an all-out assault against the "good" planet (alway focusing somehow on the good guy's base of operations), good guys get into a scrape (how will they get out of it?) then the whole thing is resolved in the last five minutes by forming Voltron and slashing the bad guy in half with the Blazing Sword.

No, I mean the trope wherein these cartoon worlds were always divided into two factions; the good, and the evil. While in elementary school I began to wonder why the good guys always won. It was boring. We never knew why the bad guys wanted to take over the universe (who would want the paperwork involved? And what do you do once you've taken over the universe? Go to Disneyworld?)

Why were bad guys bad? Sometimes there's some trite backstory involving how the psychotic Bad Guy(tm) feels the world wronged him or the hero of the series wronged him, but there was never a decent reason given as to what motivated this Bad Guy to dedicated his life (and make a living, somehow) off making the Good Guys suffer, or why the Good Guys were dedicated to thwarting the Bad Guy.

It was always so simple, so clear cut which was good and which was bad (why didn't the bad guys just wear white? They could easily infiltrate the Good Guy base just be switching colors, it seemed). For no apparent reason whatsoever the bad guy simply perpetuated every "bad" stereotype out there for being bad. It really drove me nuts. Even in church I never understood why the Devil, Satan, Prince of Darkness, was such a trope...if God was infallible, and was the paragon of goodness, why would Satan have crossed Him? What possible reason would have made him think he could "beat" God? And even if it was just because he was jealous, why dedicate the rest of existence to this endless game of screwing with humanity to anger God? I mean, doesn't it get boring after a thousand years, and why wouldn't God just get tired of it and say, as most parents do when they grow weary of a child's petulance, "That's enough, you've had your fun. Now stop it or I'm going to invert the laws of physics holding your molecular structure intact."

The world didn't seem to play by these simple rules of Here's Good, There's Evil, and Good Always Wins, although we were always told that's how things worked. Certain political parties pandered to the citizenry as holding American values, that we're the Good Guys, that we do what must be done for the good of the world. We are the good guys, over there are the bad guys.

As I grew older I read stories of American warriors sent to other countries to destabilize their governments; we assassinated, we tortured, we killed. We reeled in disbelief at pictures held up by our government of concentration camps created by other countries as examples of their evil intentions and behaviors while simultaneously forgetting that America apparently had concentration camps for Asian-Americans during World War II.

The blinders continue to this day, but I'm not entirely sure anymore it's media that causes this viewpoint. Rather, media simply reinforces this notion that the world is a simple matter of black-and-white, good-and-evil. They're playing to an audience in order to sell more stuff to kids.

I'm the father of a four year old. Thanks to our corporate overlords my son was introduced to Lego Wii games in the form of Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Star Wars. I blew his mind when I told him these were based on movies.

So he watched Star Wars. Yes, even three. I'm a bad parent that way. But what I found interesting was his total lack of comprehension for what he's watching. Yes, he's four, but there are some things he latched onto ("Star Wars people are cool!" he'd say, referring to the Jedi with the lightsabers) and other things that flew over his head (understandably so). But in particular, he needed to divide the movie into "good guys" and "bad guys."

Star Wars is not necessarily a shining example of perfect storytelling. But it is rather complicated. It weaves a story together not just of a man's journey from his own failures and shortcomings to redemption, but of a man who plotted and achieved great power at the expense of a democratic republic, all the while the people of the republic supported his ascension to power. It told a story of corruption and of the apathy on the part of the citizenry that were in a position to do something about these things and didn't.

My son talked of the "bad guy" Trade Federation, the army of droids, in the movie. They weren't bad, I tell him. They were oppressed by taxation that they felt was unfair. Not surprisingly this didn't matter to my son.

He doesn't understand how the Republic ended up putting powers into the hands of Palpatine as supreme chancellor, and how he manipulated the events to eventually make himself emperor, or turn a democratic republic so mired in bureaucracy into a smooth if oppressive empire.

He doesn't understand how the "good guys" in the first three movies become "bad guys", or that Vader became Vader because he was selfish but driven to gain power over life and death itself in order to protect his true love (whom he ended up killing anyway).

As I live to observe kids in different ages I see fewer and fewer differences. We are, by most accounts in ways it matters, sheeple. We follow crowds. We are manipulated by television ads and print media, all the while told the television shows and ads and print media are just giving us what we want. Petulance becomes tempered and expressed in other more subtle forms as we get older, but in observing children I see human behavior in its most raw form. I see what we want, and what we want to do, in the most basic form. Children have no qualms about telling someone they're fat. Or that you stink. Or any of a number of things that we learn are social faux-pas to admit to. They want something, they say so, unlike my teenager that tries to manipulate us into getting something for her through other means.

And one of the things children latch on to is the idea that the world is simple. It's black and white. There's good, there's evil. Grey wavy lines in between are uncomfortable and take thought and critical thinking to work through.

That's why I think Star Wars is actually kind of a nice critical thinking test for my son. He doesn't yet understand what is going on in it, but someday he hopefully will. In it's own way Star Wars is a wonderful analytical exercise for understanding and critical thinking despite the obvious tropes and horrible elements put into the story for seemingly no reason (Jar-Jar? Oh geez...)

There are elements that should give pause. Why were the Jedi revered while so arrogant in their own power? Why was so little emphasis placed on the fear they placed on ordinary people, or is it unethical that children strong in the force were simply taken away for training, whether they wanted to or not? Was the Empire truly bad, when they apparently had done some good for the citizens in the Empire? And the rebels were killing large numbers of people who probably were not inherently "evil"...they blew up a Death Star that probably had many innocent people working and living on it. They killed beings whose only sin was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And at the same time, the Empire had held the galaxy in order, and by destroying the central government they achieved what? Plunging the galaxy into a system of regional chaos, overseen by regional governors with their own agendas, while trying to re-establish a central Republican (not American political party Republican) government like the one that had become bloated an ineffectual in the first place? The Empire had drawbacks; being xenophobic, killing dissidents, and a small roster of other offenses to what we consider basic freedoms, but the Empire also brought stability and actual governance where the Republic had failed miserably.

On the surface the movies are simple and appeal to people who, like my son, want superficial simple good-is-good and evil-is-evil and rah rah for the good guy action. But there are skeptics and critical thinkers that want more.

I know this because there is now a growing surge in revisiting the 80's. It seems every franchise is having an attempt at a reboot, and in the process storylines are being fleshed out and revamped, some for better and some for worse.

Not long ago I read a story about the origin of Megatron, the leader of the "evil" Decepticons in Transformers (the real transformers, not the Michael Bay productions). I truly enjoyed it. Why was Megatron bad? He wasn't, really. He was a miner whose job was being taken away through the automation of the plant at which he worked, so Megatron and all the other "low ranking" beings were being forced from a job so a corrupt Autobot government would profit. The series showed how Megatron more or less fell into the position of Decepticon leader after leading a rebellion against a corrupt government. The Autobots were not all clean and clear of fault after all, and the Decepticons, despite having a simplistic set of motives in the childhood cartoons (namely, "we're conquering the galaxy because...well, because.") had actually valid reasons for the spark of insurrection.

Other heroes eventually explored the more complicated intricacies of their backgrounds. Batman is a truly screwed up individual. Iron Man faced his ethical demons in the Civil War story arc, one of the best series I've read from Marvel. Even Voltron has had some light shown in darker recesses that question how wonderful and pure he was as a hero when you look at the original, non-Americanized (and non-Disneyfied) Japanese origin story of Voltron.

This gives me some hope that sometime down the road my son will grow to be a critical thinker. There's hope I can interest him in thinking under the initial layers of simplistic thinking, that the Empire, despite Lucas' efforts to show otherwise, isn't just an evil scourge on the universe. There are complicated undercurrents to the story that can be fascinating to explore and in the process perhaps learn more about the world in which we live.