Where have all the grownups gone? Part 2, Parents

In Part One, I argued that the sharp cultural discontinuity which became visible during the Sixties was caused by a generation of parents not talking to their children, and in particular not teaching them all the behaviors and expectations that had formerly made up the fabric of society. And I further suggested that the reason a whole generation of parents fell silent is that they were traumatized by the Second World War. But how did that really happen in practice? I hear you ask. Sure, it's a clever idea. But anyone can come up with a clever idea, and this one sounds almost too clever by half. Are you trying to say that one morning in 1946 all the adults in the country became Trappists?

No, of course not. But it's a fair question, and one that I think it is easier to answer by showing than by telling. Fortunately, there are movies which do exactly that.

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

The Best Years of Our Lives follows three recently-discharged servicemen as they try to reintegrate into civilian life in the fictional Midwestern town of Boone City. Al Stephenson is a bank executive who served in the infantry, rising to the rank of sergeant. Homer Parrish is a high-school athlete who served in the Navy and lost his hands; the Navy replaced them with hooks. Fred Derry is a drugstore soda jerk who proved to be a talented bombardier in the Army Air Corps; consequently he was commissioned as an officer with an officer's pay.

All three have trouble re-entering civilian society. The war has changed them, and they no longer fit where they fit before. What is more, no one in civilian society understands them at all: nether what they went through during the war, nor who they are now. 

• Al, the banker, approves a loan to a man with no collateral, and is chastised by his superior at the bank. Al explains that he was used to putting his life and those of his men in the hands of others, and so developed a pretty keen sense of who deserves trust and who doesn't. He assures his superior that this man is good for the loan, and the matter is settled … but not really, of course.
• Homer left a sweetheart back home when he shipped out, and now he can't believe that she still wants to marry him when he no longer has hands.
• Fred suffers from PTSD flashbacks at night, and the only job he can find is his old job at the drugstore. But that pays less than a third what he made as a bombardier. Also his wife (whom he married on a fling just before shipping out) is disappointed in him and wants the freedom she had during the war, while she could spend his pay without having him underfoot. 

The movie is masterfully made. The characters are real and believable; the situations are honest. If you haven't seen it yet, do. But what is important in this context is to see the massive gulf between the servicemen and civilian society. On the one hand, the civilians flatly cannot understand the minds of the servicemen. For their part, the servicemen understand civilian life in a manner of speaking, because they used to live there too; but they have no respect for it. They can't take it seriously. After what they have been through, the things that civilian society finds important look petty and artificial and childish. 

But they can't say this openly, of course. They might not even articulate to themselves that this is why they are so ill at ease. But ill at ease they certainly are, all of them. And while the movie gives us hope that they will each find a way forward, it gives us no reason to think that anyone will understand them any better in the future. 

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956)

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was made ten years after The Best Years of Our Lives. The protagonist is Tom Rath, but he might as well be Al or Homer or Fred. His experience of the War was at least as bad as theirs.

Tom Rath lives in suburban Connecticut. He has a house, a wife, and three children. His income isn't large enough, and he is trying to advance in his career. He never talks about the War unless asked directly, and sometimes not even then. It's as if he has put that whole experience in a box in the attic, where he never has to look at it.

Except that he, too, suffers from PTSD flashbacks, and not just at night. We see him one morning taking the train into work, when some loud noise on the tracks startles him and suddenly he is in the middle of a memory of battle. He remembers the 17 men he killed. He remembers the death of his best friend. In fact, we see clearly in the scene that Tom himself was (by accident) responsible for his friend's death; and yet in his conscious mind Tom never seems to recognize this.

In one sense we don't see the same overt incomprehension from the civilian world that we see in The Best Years, because Tom Rath never tries to be understood. He never opens the box. Except once. While he was fighting in Italy, when he never knew whether the next day might be his last, he had an affair with an Italian girl. Through a remarkable series of coincidences, he discovers that she is still alive, that she had a son by him, and that she badly needs money. He tells his wife about the affair, because he wants to send the girl some money to get by. And his wife is furious. She cannot understand how he could do such a thing. She judges him entirely by the standards of respectable peacetime behavior. And she runs off into the night. 

In the end Tom and his wife are reconciled. And there are many more subplots. This is a long movie, and a lot happens. But the key for my purposes is to look at the character of Tom Rath himself. The classic pose from the movie, as in the picture here, shows him standing stock still at parade rest: suit immaculate, hat on, jacket buttoned. It is easy to imagine that this is what Al and Homer and Fred from The Best Years will look like in ten years' time. They and Tom will take care of business; they will do what has to be done. When confronted with the myriad subtle rules that form the fabric of civilian society, they will comply with the ones that aren't too much trouble; they might quietly ignore the ones they find particularly stupid. But they won't accept any of it uncritically, nor are they likely to reflect critically—on their experience or on society itself. They will do their duty and keep the rest of it tightly buttoned up. Closed in a box in the attic.

That's how the War trained a generation of men to live silently. In Part 3, I'll talk about how this silence affected their growing children.