Are we stupid, selfish children stumbling through a world we are too brainwashed by infantile, corporate dross to understand?

Quite possibly we are

After the studios had poured out childish fantasies based on comic book superhero franchises for what seemed like a lif​etime, the critics cheered last year when, finally, Hollywood issued two big-budget stand-alone movies.

It was as if it had returned to its glory days before juvenilia rotted the minds of producers, directors and audiences alike.

The first was a true rarity, a film with stars and money behind it aimed at an audience with an intelligence slightly above that of a gormless 13-year-old.

But alongside Oppenheimer was Barbie, based on a toy. And yes, and thank you so much, I know it was meant to be an ironic feminist take, but it was still a film that treated adults as overgrown kids. Far from being insulted, its audience was entranced.

If you think I am being an old curmudgeon, I am probably guilty as charged. But just because I am a curmudgeon doesn’t mean I am wrong

Mark the sequel. As Keith Hayward writes in Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood (out this week from Constable) following the success of Barbie, the toy manufacturer Mattel signed up creatives to develop films based on their Polly Pocket dolls and Hot Wheels toy cars.

Netflix decided to reboot the Masters of the Universe cartoon as a feature film. Universal Pictures developed movie versions of Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots and a horror franchise based on the Magic 8 Ball toy. And Mattel looked for partners to develop future film franchises based on the 1970s strongman Big Jim action figures, Barney the purple dinosaur, and their Chatty Cathy doll.

After films for grown-ups based on children’s comics, we have films based on children’s toys.

You can predict that the critics will note their ironic intent.  But there comes a point when the ironic becomes moronic and according to Hayward’s bracing and angry study, we are way past it.

There are huge dangers in writing about cultural decline. You can end up like Jordan Peterson, himself an embodiment of infantilisation, or one of those columnists in the right-wing press who rage against millennials and their smashed avocado and sourdough sandwiches.

If I wanted to take the easy route, I could knock out a piece in half an hour denouncing “moral panic” and “cultural declinists”. We are not in the 20^th century any more, I might say, and what films Hollywood makes are no longer as significant as they once were.

Who the hell cares about Barbie?

But Hayward is not only talking about the film industry. He builds on the work of cultural critics going back to the 1960s and asserts convincingly that business – “capitalism” if you prefer – makes money by treating children as adults and adults as children.  

“Whether you choose to gaze at society through a political, cultural, psychological or moral lens, it’s clear we are heading for trouble – generational trouble,” he begins.

“The gusts of infantilisation blown in by postmodernism and its associated capitalist logics have reshaped contemporary society into something resembling a cross between a Neverland fantasy and a low-risk play area.”

Previously, politics was characterised by reasoned argument and mature critical debate, he asserts, as he looks back with ever-so-faintly tinted spectacles.

Today, “thanks to the clown world of social media and a TV-marinated commentariat, the vast majority of political argumentation has all the discernment of a baby spitting out food it hasn’t even had time to taste” – which is undeniable.

As you can see Hayward combines a taste for cultural theory with a fine polemical style. As adults are treated like children, so capitalism treats children like adults: sexualising girls and denying childhood. Generational mulch dissolves, or appears to dissolve, the life cycle as it creates a unified market of young and old who consume the same goods.

Adulthood once meant learning about deferred gratification, thrift, making and mending and all those old virtues, which were not good for business.  

And so

“In the realm of popular culture where, instead of being seen as an aspirational state, adulthood is depicted as something either to be avoided entirely or, like an ageing gigolo who continues to ply his trade despite diminishing returns, a past-its-prime irrelevance from a bygone era.”

I am always wary of thinkers who anthropomorphize “capitalism” and turn messy economic arrangements into some kind of evil mastermind who can direct his troops to commercialize childhood one minute and force adults into needless consumer debt the next.

The empiricist in me asks for evidence, and what is so magnificent about Hayward’s work is that he supplies it in abundance

Music

In the case of popular music, you can pretty much prove that it has been infantilised in the 21^st century.