INCORRIGIBLE BOYS

n·cor·ri·gi·ble  

adj.

1. Incapable of being corrected or reformed: an incorrigible criminal.

2. Firmly rooted; ineradicable: incorrigible faults.

3. Difficult or impossible to control or manage: an incorrigible, spoiled child.

4. (Philosophy) Philosophy (of a belief) having the property that whoever honestly believes it cannot be mistaken.

"Being beyond the control of parents, guardians, or custodians or being disobedient of parental authority. This classification is referred to in various juvenile codes as unruly, unmanageable, and incorrigible. "

Recently I watched two movies about incorrigible boys.  I have a weakness for them.  I think it is because male incorrigibility is often successful in a way that female incorrigibility is not.  (I am covertly incorrigible.)  The female is burdened by her sexuality (pregnancy and children) while the male is set free.  (Until genomic analysis made it possible to encumber his income for the rest of his life, unless he sticks to other guys.)  Both girls and boys, while young, are expendable.

In adolescence both soon find that sex is a way to survive, a commodity to get food, shelter, and other protections.  Incorrigibles are not likely to make good marriages, so they step outside those cultural guidelines and free lance their survival without regard for the next generation.  Yet their creativity and energy often contribute to the larger culture.  They inhabit a zone between convention and defiance, often in a ferment of interaction that can be good or bad for individuals.   Even in the big rich countries, we do not know how to educate them. http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2012/12/aa-gill-schools-ruining-our-kids  The addition of predators, drugs or disease makes this ferment lethal.  But in spite of the pill, abortion, infanticide and neglect, we have an excess of youngsters. 

These two classic movies were about incorrigible boys in the coal country of England where families are dismembered by early deaths of fathers who go “down the pit” and the alcohol needed to bear the life.  Some fathers simply desert.  One film is “Kes” and the other is “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.”  Each film shows the relentless and destructive pressure of institutions trying to control the boys and -- against that -- the endless stores of energy and ingenuity the boys have learned for survival.  Each is based on a metaphor:  the boy in “Kes” has taken a hatchling kestral hawk from a nest and trained it for falconry.  The boy in “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” is exactly that: a runner who can win marathons.  He has both tenacity and strategy, as well as an expressive wolfish grin.

The boy in “Kes” -- ribby, forelocked, plaintive little fellow -- takes what he needs, including freedom.  This provokes bullies everywhere, from fellow students to the head of the school to the ox of a soccer coach, who traps the boy in a cold shower for so long that even the other boys protest.  Only one English teacher (maybe the one who eventually wrote this story) shows any interest in what the boy actually cares about.  The lesson this boy learns is that the clever bully doesn’t make YOU suffer, but takes it out on what you love, which hurts more.

The boy in “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” is older, with more major crimes.  At the reform school where he is sent, the head master sees him as useful in interschool competition and gives him freedom to run so that he will win against an upscale snob school.  As the youth runs, there are flashbacks to what he loves and hates, but also he begins to figure out how much power he has over the situation.  When it is time to compete, he is far ahead of the other school’s champion, comes close to the finish line in view of the officials and audience, and stops -- letting the other side win.  What he wins is not some cup.  He has to go back to stupid jobs, but he has made a mark with his peers and kept his self-respect.

Two of my other favorite movies about incorrigible boys are “Empire of the Sun” and “Kim”, the 1950 version in which Dean Stockwell played the title character though Errol Flynn was supposed to be the star.  On frontiers in times of chaos these incorrigible boys have the skills that will not only help them survive but also prove useful for powers that be.  True leaders always recognize and enlist the incorrigibles.  It’s a favorite trope for the British Empire which has always abused but secretly cherished the cabin boy, the stable boy, the messenger boy. More recently, the boy who doesn’t fit in powers the “Harry Potter” books and “Lord of the Rings.”   In fairy tales it is the “Jack” stories (Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack the Giant Killer).  In the Bible it’s Joseph.  In America it’s been Tom and Huck, Penrod and Sam, “Two Little Savages.” They tend to come in pairs.  The boy in “All the Pretty Horses” is a particularly memorable version, esp. in the movie.

Where do they come from?  Bad families?  Evil schools?  Sick societies?  Or just simple chaos?  Oh, that’s the easy part. (All of the above.)  What’s harder is understanding what makes such incorrigibles take on the role and make it into an advantage.  It must be genetic: surely such physical endurance must have a genetic source -- their brains and daring as well.  But they may have gotten the focus from a book or even some adult in real life who took time to listen and give advice.  These days, when boys on many parts of the planet are illiterate to print but avid for images and story, it may have been a glimpse of the movies that float through now.  Short clips, music vids.

In “Kes” when the boy is explaining his kestrel to the interested English teacher, he describes indignantly how people on the street will talk to him patronizingly about his “pet” hawk.   “A hawk is never a pet!  A hawk is always wild.  You cannot tame a hawk.  You must MAN it.”  He means a meshing of training with the hawk’s instincts so that both man and hawk can be fed.  Of course, not all that feeds a boy is food.  He must yearn and dream.

There must be similar stories being written, filmed or simply lived out all over this planet.  Consider the “barefoot bandit,” Colton Harris-Moore, who managed  to flee across the continent by speedboat, light airplane, bicycle, and multiple car thefts without even putting his shoes on.  He is incorrigible but almost incredibly competent as well as auto-didactic.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colton_Harris-Moore