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John A. Davis et al.'s JIMMY NEUTRON: BOY GENIUS is a well-done film that older viewers may find funnier than kids do: There are a number of nice little sight gags the kids will miss. What bothers me is that kids will see the film on their own and not discuss it with elders, for the film has a strong "MORAL" (like the moral of a fable), a debatable one that they should start debating.

The film teaches children that, with cops the only exception, strangers are not to be talked to-not even intergalactic strangers trying to make First Contact. Or, especially not strangers who are truly alien, since aliens will kidnap your parents, possess them, and try to eat them. Such a message may make some kids safer, but it's dangerous for community: community is based on trust, and for any community beyond a very small village, that means trusting strangers.

Older kids might follow JIMMY NEUTRON with renting TERMINATOR II, for the suggestion that even cops can be a threat-and older kids and younger should be talked with about the necessity for both caution and trust, in dealing with cops and other strangers. Younger children should watch E.T.: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL. There is an SF tradition, most famously shown in THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951), that if aliens did arrive from space, some American would try to shoot them. Americans aren't more xenophobic than most people, just better armed than most people. "Don't talk to strangers" is one lesson kids must learn. But the Jewish morning prayers rank "Welcome the stranger" as an obligation right up there with "Honor father and mother," and there's a whole lot to be said for welcoming strangers, too. JIMMY NEUTRON is a good place to start discussing with kids such conflicts.

OTHELLO and _O_: CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Kid-Bashing, and the Generational Struggle

GENERATIONAL WAR CONTEXT In _The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents_ (1996), Mike A. Males cites the film KIDS (1995) as a cinematic embodiment of the generational war of US adults against teens. One could cite also CRUEL INTENTIONS: in _Dangerous Liaisons_, the horrible people are aging grownups; retelling the story with teens suggests that contemporary US teens can be-or are-as nasty as corrupt French aristocrats of the bad old days just before the French Revolution. I've suggested and am looking for a student or two to do a literature search and write up for publication the thesis that Antony Burgess's full, 21-chapter _A Clockwork Orange_ is a kid-bashing book in its concluding, non-sequitur assertion that ultraviolence and such = just a stage boys go through and outgrow. (As Males notes, guys don't outgrow violence so much as take it indoors; in any event, the adults in the first 20 chapters of _Orange_ have not aged out of ultra-nastiness.)

OTHELLO VS. _O_ In Shakespeare's _Othello_, Othello is significantly older than Desdemona, and this is one of the reasons he concludes that she is cheating on him. In America of the 1980s and 1990s, one popular idea had oversexed teenage boys knocking up promiscuous teenage girls for an epidemic of teen pregnancy. That was not the reality. In terms of the statistics Males presents, at least half of the "raging hormones" involved in teenage pregnancy belonged to men in their 20's and older. A realistic, modernized _Othello_ would have an 18-year old Desdemona hooking up with an "Other" man who was Black, important, noble, and at least in his late 20s (maybe a younger, darker, Collin-Powell figure).



_O_ AND THE GENERATIONAL BATTLE Setting _O_ in a prep-school/high school is additional evidence for what at least two over-30 film producers have noted as the dominance of relative youngsters as the consumers and makers of recent movies. That far it is a legitimate example of Kid Power. _O_ is also an esthetically respectable look at kids both good and pathological, well-written and directed, and very well acted by its young stars. At the same time, _O_ functions in its cultural context as anti-kid propaganda. If you know _Othello_ well, _O_ can say, truthfully, "Kids can be as messed up as grownups." Most film-goers hardly know _Othello_ at all, and part of the message of _O_ for them will be that US kids are screwed up: drug-abusing punks, with some psychos loose among the boys, and deceiving victims among the girls. In Odin James in _O_ do we have "the noble Moor whom" the "full Senate" of the United States could "Call all in all sufficient?" No, we don't. Nor in Desi Brable do we have the poetic force and ideological significance of Desdemona's perfect love. For most viewers, _O_ is another example of messed-up kids: one more fictional justification for US adults' hostility toward US kids.