Dinosaurs Eat Man, Women Inherit the Earth

So instead a favorite film genre, like say horror, or romantic-comedy, I have a favorite film theme. Be it fun and exciting or dry and pretentious, all my most treasured movies fit into this vague and nuanced bucket. 

I call that bucket  "The Hubris of Man." 

And I don't mean "man" as in male-identifying individual, and I'm not even talking about all of  "mankind." Here I'm using "Man" as a symbol for those who hold social power and use it to create and perpetuate oppressive systems. I suppose it's similar to the usage in mid-century counterculture movements, when the phrase "THE MAN" served as an amorphous signifier for the status quo establishment.  

In these films, Man already has power, yet wants more. So Man gets himself involved in a situation, place or community he doesn't understand.  Even worse, he is clearly unwilling to do the work required to authentically understand. He makes his choices, propelled and rationalized by some sort of arrogant ideology, and this creates a problem. Of course he then tries to solve this problem using the very same hubris which created it in the first place. 

At the narrative peak, when things do not go to plan, and the situation/ environment/ community refuses to bend to Man, he faces the consequences of his arrogance. Man is hurt, embarrassed, or killed, and he is held accountable by the very thing he tried to exploit. 

It's a delicious parable of community-based consequences, leveled against an overly confident oppressor. 

One recent film that fits very nicely into this is Midsommar, where Man is clearly the visiting graduate students, and the community/situation is both the Hårga and the protagonist's grief.  Similar to this is Midsommar's folk-horror ancestor and my favorite movie ever, The Wicker Man (the 70s original- not the remake with Nicolas Cage), which uses this same theme to explore the tension between parsimonious Christian morality and more the gregarious, holistic practices of Celtic paganism.

I even will argue that Jurassic Park fits into this theme, with John Hammond - old, white, male and incredibly rich, as Man, who is eventually shamed and made a failure by the very dinosaurs (all female btw) he foolishly tried to control. 

There are countless other examples of this story told in film and other mediums. Man can be settler-colonialism or misogyny or capitalism or climate-change denial or fascism. He created the problem it, and now he's going to solve it. ...Or is he?  

This is (finally, sorry) where reading "Some Conceptions of Youth and Youthwork in the United States" and "Community Based Youth Work in Uncertain Times" come in.  They fit into my theme. They identify a dynamic as frustrating, but also as  affirming, as the scene in Jurassic where the T-rex eats the lawyer (also Man) on the toilet.  Man wouldn't have been eaten if he hadn't decided to build the toilet- or for that matter, the dinosaur theme park, or the dinosaurs.

The parallel here is that "youth" are becoming that T-Rex. 

In the reading, Fusco explains the history of youthwork originates from a problem that the racist, classist and adultist status quo both created, and continue to try to solve by using more racism, classism and adultism. Of course there has been zero actual investment developing an authentic understanding of what, or who, they are trying to "fix."  Thinking more deeply, I was struck by the many layers of contrasts and contradictions that are inherent to our work, especially identifying "youth" as a product of, and yet also a solution to, the exploitative nature of a capitalist system founded on white supremacy. 

In the "Some Conceptions of Youth and Youthwork in the United States", Fusco asks: 

"What might youthwork look like when constructed by youth and youthworkers in local communities to meet actual real-time needs and desires?"

For me, that question is where the solution lies. That question is why I'm here- in this field, in this program. I want to help build work that will answer it. 

Already I see youth who have been supported by wholistic, liberation-focused, student-led programming, described by Fusco as a "radical paradigm approach" out there being the T-Rex. And it's 2020, so it definitely feels like we're hitting the narrative peak. Maybe it's time to ramp up the community-based consequences to the systemic hubris generations of young people have tried to navigate.