I’ve been continuing to think about the film Hallam Foe and my experience of it in the company of fellow UK bloggers (see my recent post). The film is amongst other things, an exploration of adolescence and many of us I think identified with the hero’s journey, sometimes funny, sometimes painful, often bewildering. Trying to figure out his place in the world.
I suppose Hallam experienced what I often feel. The Groucho thing of not wanting to join a club that would have me as a member. In that sense, I think I’m still fairly adolescent, caught between my desire to belong and my reluctance to conform. I rather think you’d find that quality among many of the people in the audience that night.
And I am pretty sure that Dave Mackenzie, the director, must have put a lot of his own inner adolescent into the movie… right down (as I noted before) to his attractive awkwardness in putting his unfinished baby in front of us.
Anyway, I’d like to stand up for my own inner adolescent, or maybe I’ll go for what the wikipedia post calls “emerging adulthood“:
Some scholars have theorized a new stage of development, post-adolescence and pre-adulthood. Arnett (2000) calls this stage “emerging adulthood,” and argues that it is characterized by “relative independence from social roles and from normative expectations. … Emerging adulthood is a time of life when many different directions remain possible, when the scope of independent exploration of life’s possibilities is greater for most people than it will be at any other period of the life course.” (p.469). Arnett, notes, however, that this stage is situationally and culturally constructed (i.e., people in other countries may not experience this as a unique life stage.)
Hey, isn’t adulthood largely about coming to terms with things always emerging anyway? And don’t us older folks have just as much scope for exploring life’s possibilities as our less wrinkly peers?
PS Oh look, Hallam even has his own MySpace page.
PPS Links to other bloggers’ views of the movie at the Hallam blog.
