Hostage to NeoLiberal Subjectivity?

Individualism Repackaged as Solidarity

“Can you imagine still living in Mercury—trapped with a wife, and a kid, and some crappy job?” asks Mavis Gary. Arch-brat and sociopath in Jason Reitman’s comedy-drama film Young Adult (2011), Mavis, played by Charlize Theron, sits outside a fast-food restaurant on a busy street in Minneapolis where she lives. 

Vexed by the news that her high school boyfriend has recently become a father in her “hick” hometown she harangues a passive friend about the impropriety of receiving an invite to celebrate the arrival of his son. “It’s like,” she goes on monologically, pausing for effect; “It’s like he’s a hostage.” 

“Yep,” her friend replies, mechanically, sardonically, whilst comfort-eating her way through a portion of fries. “We’re lucky we got out. We have lives.” This last part is said resentfully, with her mouth full.

The picture cuts to a panning shot of Mavis’ apartment, chaotic and empty like the rest of her—to put it bluntly—pitiful existence. Frequently waking up face down, hungover, at 37, her only steady source of companionship is her dog—and he’s neglected, too.

Emotionally numb and pathologically narcissistic, Mavis lacks the guarded insight of her friend. Impervious to commitment and unremittingly self-serving, her life is a mess, but, as a neoliberal subject par excellence, she is only faintly aware of the mess she’s in.

Spontaneously returning to Mercury one morning with the intention of getting her childhood sweetheart back, Mavis Gary is the antithesis of the remorseful, homesick Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz (1939)—a film which works in reverse, so to speak; unlike Dorothy, who, after seeking adventure in the Land of Oz, repeats “There’s no place like home” when she awakes from her fever in bed when Mavis is asked if she has “moved back” from the “mini-apple,” she responds reflexively: “Of course not. Gross.”

In Mercury, Mavis reencounters a real community, rich in civic virtue and family values and bound by bonds of reciprocity. Yet, so thoroughly bewitched by the neoliberal conception of the good life, she is unable to appreciate the simple pleasures enjoyed by Mercury’s residents and the virtues they observe: hard-work, decency, loyalty, humility, and care.

For Mavis, “babies are boring,” amateur amusements are “embarrassing,” and to be in possession of local knowledge is “weird.” Similarly, technical skill and craft is something she’s blind to. She is, in short, an adult infant, alive only to the superficialities admired in consumer society: good figures, large bank balances, and instant gratification.

If the lesson of Victor Fleming’s 1939 Hollywood classic is that a sense of rootedness is fundamental to a healthy human life, then the message of Young Adult is that, contrary to the epigraph of The Wizard of Oz, “Time” has, in fact, pummelled the “kindly philosophy” at the film’s core. At the hands of Mavis Gary, roots and duty and honour are defunct. 

Certainly, Mavis is extreme. Nonetheless, she is a parody of a person many of us will recognise, not just in others but in ourselves. Which is to say, to some extent, We are all Mavis Gary now. Doubtlessly, for anyone who has lived in a major western city—London, New York, Paris—the life Mavis leads in Minneapolis is uncomfortably familiar.

For most of those not born there, the city is a place, not a home. Rather than a place of safety and consolation, it is a site of unease and estrangement. Trust is a scarce resource there. And where there is no trust there is no community either, only individuals at odds with one another. On the surface, eccentricity may seem to flourish in urban centres, but, in truth, in the metropolis, it is usually just conformity within a smaller, self-selected group. 

As the late, great conservative philosopher Roger Scruton explained, only where there is trust is one truly free to express oneself clearly and do ones’ own thing. Mavis, for example, may appear unconventional among her Mercurian peers, dressing flamboyantly and writing young adult fiction for a living, but really she is nothing of the sort. Working from a manual to complete her novels and imitating popular art for inspiration in life, she is every bit as ordinary, more, than the people she dismisses contemptuously as unglamorous and stupid.

One thing can be said with certainty about Mavis Gary: ethics is not her strong suit. On the contrary, in renouncing the need for roots, she has become a monster. So entrapped by the desire to sabotage her ex-boyfriend’s marriage and ensnared by how life appears in film (“Love conquers all. Have you not seen The Graduate?” she reminds a former schoolmate without irony) when she passes her own mother on the street she can barely bring herself to acknowledge her. 

In the nineteenth century, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche warned that whoever sets about fighting monsters should see to it that they do not, in the process, become monsters themselves. It’s wise counsel, but Nietzsche was not always so sagacious. Formulating the notion of the “superman”, the unsparingly bold and totally self-reliant individual, he helped to create the intellectual environment we have all inherited. Still, we ought to cut Nietzsche some slack; he grew up in a fortress city, guarded by gates which were shut every evening. Mavis Gary, on the other hand, has no such excuse for her individualism—we have no such excuse.

If home is a place of trust, it is also, by implication, a place of loyalty; “It is a place”, as Scruton rightly put it, “to live up to.” In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy knows this well. When Professor Marvel knowingly anticipates why she’s running away from home and prompts her to think about how her Auntie Em would experience her abscondence, Dorothy feels dreadful and turns on her heels. Mavis, by contrast, can’t even begin to empathise with those around her. She is ruthless, like those responsible for the cancel culture which flourishes today. 

According to the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.” Furthermore, whoever is rooted does not uproot others. They do not wish to condemn people to a “dismal atmosphere of ennui.” Only intellectuals and the already uprooted are capable of uprooting others. Intolerant of the most minor transgressions politically, socially, they offer us absolute leeway to self-destruct—gender fluidity, addictive behaviours, the family unit—absolutely nothing is out of bounds.

For Weil, rootedness was essential at both the local and the national levels. Unlike the contemporary Left, who posit an individualism cheaply repackaged as solidarity, Weil wanted to make both the nation and the locale a home. She wasn’t squeamish about denouncing disloyalty and calling for an enlightened patriotism, motivated not by pride but compassion. In so doing, Weil belonged to a fine tradition of cosmopolitan patriots, figures such as John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold and Giuseppe Mazzini who understood that to be cosmopolitan one had to be patriotic first. Incapable of fraternal feeling themselves, the Left responds like Mavis does when she discovers that people pity her for her lack of roots: “What is wrong with you?” she screams, imploringly. 

The answer, of course, is that there is nothing wrong with Mavis’ townsfolk. The problem resides squarely with her. As her former boyfriend explains: “You’re very lonely and confused.” He is not the hostage, in other words; she is a hostage to neoliberal subjectivity. There really is no place like home.