Alice in the Cities

I have just seen this wonderful film by Wim Wenders again after many years, and it has all the charm that I remembered. It is about the friendship between a grown man and a little girl aged eleven (whose mother has 'dumped' her on him). These days, no one would dare to make such a film because children and grown-ups no longer have friendships. This film may well have been inspired by the earlier 'Sundays and Cybele' (1962), a brilliant film on the same theme by the talented French director Serge Bourgoignon, who has mysteriously not made a film since 1969, despite winning the 1963 Oscar for Best Foreign Film with 'Cybele'. Imagine an Oscar being given today to a film about such a taboo subject! Children are now locked up in the house by their neurotic mothers and not allowed to play on their lawns, they are just as tightly under siege from the danger of adults as we all are in the process of being from the danger of 'terrorism'. In fact, the present consensus is that all adults are terrorists from the child's point of view. Best never to meet any! Professor Neil Postman, a brilliant social psychologist and cultural critic whom I knew slightly (he died in 2003) analysed what is going on as long ago as 1982 when he brought out his shocking book 'The Disappearance of Childhood'. In it, he pointed out that the concept of 'childhood' as we have traditionally known it until recent years was a creation of the Renaissance, and that prior to that, children were just little people who had not yet learned very much. If one reads Postman's book carefully, and considers what is really going on at the deepest psychological levels today, the powerful guilt feelings which adults now have are clearly the motive force behind the psychopathic mania now raging in the English-speaking world about paedophilia. Add to this the false memory syndrome where unscrupulous 'therapists' are convincing huge numbers of women and girls that they have been raped as children, usually by their fathers (when they haven't), and you have a real mixture! Of course, any logical outside observer of human society would point out that we now live in a society which perversely and insistently attempts to sexualise children. Fortunes are made by greedy corporations in marketing sexually suggestive clothes and even pole-dancing kits (!!) to little girls. The role models of these little girls are allowed by their idiot parents to be pop singers who are sex-addicts, cocaine-addicts, everything a little girl should NOT want to become. The media are the evil collaborators in this sexualisation of children because it sells ads, and also because many media folk are frankly extremely perverted. All of this means that films like this one by Wim Wenders are now of archaeological interest, bearing witness to a past civilisation, before little girls were encouraged to dress and behave in public like mini-prostitutes and jiggle up and down with their 'pole-dancing kits', or to think that the word 'sexy is the highest form of praise that exists for a child. Yes, childhood has largely disappeared, and it will probably never return. But then, with childhood went sensible parenthood as well, and the Collapse of Western Civilisation is nowhere more conclusively demonstrated than by the vanishing of those two institutions.