Have you guys watched HBO’s show Mare of Easttown? I binge-watched it this week, fully immersed in Kate Winslet’s Pennsylvania accent. Though I’m embarrassed to admit that until I watched this show, I wasn’t fully aware Pennsylvanians had an accent.
Winslett was widely praised for said accent, and— predictably — for the brave artistry of looking kind of terrible, i.e. like a normal person. I was skeptical about the show. I was afraid it would be a leering train wreck with Hollywood types trying to pretend they are one with the common people, but Mare of Easttown was very, very good. For once, I agreed with the critics.
Here’s my biggest takeaway from the show: American teens and young adults are NOT ok.
I did not notice this mentioned in any of the reviews I read, though it seemed to me to be a defining theme of the show. Underneath the hard-scrabble, downtrodden lives of the adults, are a bunch of totally f-ed up teens and young adults. A corollary theme to the show seemed to be that, in PA at least, if you are in a job that was once considered highly respectable, like police detective or high school teacher, you are basically only half a step up from trailer-dwelling red necks.
To the producers’ credit, I don’t think this was prejudices of the show’s makers — but rather the socio-economic reality of the middle and upper working class in former industrial areas of the US (and no doubt other countries too.)
The plot of the show revolves around the adults trying to pick up the pieces after the destructive actions of the young people. An addict son commits suicide, leaving behind a toddler and a junkie baby mama. A sweet teen mom gets murdered, sending the community into a tailspin. Before she’s murdered, teen mom’s boyfriend and father of her baby sets her up to be viciously beaten by his psychotic new girlfriend, also a teen. It’s eventually uncovered [SPOILER ALERT] that the sweet teen mom actually set up the horrible boyfriend as the baby daddy, and in fact the real father is…her father’s cousin who is a grown man with a family including a middle-school aged son. Who is so enraged that his father had an affair with the high-school age cousin, he shoots her dead.
Throughout all this, dutiful Mare tries to cope and solve crimes. In the hands of a pro like Winslet, these awful tragedies are portrayed gracefully and with some truth. The kids aren’t evil, no matter how evil their actions. They are just so far down a rabbit hole of hopelessness and addiction even their well-meaning and present parents cannot reach them.
This is my question to you guys still living in the States: is this an accurate portrayal? Has the demise of the once-mighty American middle class had such a stark impact on the lives of young people?
It certainly seems that way. I see evidence of it everywhere.
Here’s another question: how is this ok? Where’s the presidential commission on generational trauma generated from terrible economic policies? Where’s the hashtags and protests for these kids?
Even though different demographic groups have different realities and live in essentially different cultures within the US, kids up and down the socio-economic ladder have been handed a poisoned chalice, and they drink from it thirstily.
I’ll be looking at this in more depth next week with an essay on parenting, using as my jumping off point an excellent book called The Problem with Parenting, written by Nancy McDermott (hi Nancy!🤣)
Charles Murray's 'Coming Apart' is probably the single-best explanation of what's happened to the industrial places that used to function that no longer do. The elites and the working class are effectively segregated and the gaps just grow bigger. The smart and the industrious leave, and so the left-behind tend to be the less smart and less industrious. JD Vance's book 'Hillbilly Elegy' documents this phenomenon pretty well too.
Murray reckons that it's a mix- some places are undoubtedly coming apart. But he thinks lots of places outside the big cities still have a common community and sense of place and functioning societies.
Charles Murray's 'Coming Apart' is probably the single-best explanation of what's happened to the industrial places that used to function that no longer do. The elites and the working class are effectively segregated and the gaps just grow bigger. The smart and the industrious leave, and so the left-behind tend to be the less smart and less industrious. JD Vance's book 'Hillbilly Elegy' documents this phenomenon pretty well too.
Murray reckons that it's a mix- some places are undoubtedly coming apart. But he thinks lots of places outside the big cities still have a common community and sense of place and functioning societies.