Kids Are Weird (But So Is Everybody)

I recently started a book about Hitchcock. I gave up. The author had some insights. However, when I am reading psychological analysis and the author fails to understand fundamental human nature, I start to question what the author could be offering.

The author argues that Hitchcock was fascinated by violence. He anticipated Psycho early on. One of his first films kills off an innocent boy unwittingly carrying a bomb (the death occurs off-camera). When questioned about his penchant for violence/horror, Hitchcock referenced his English upbringing and specific stories from his childhood. (Over the years, the specific stories became somewhat "prepared.")

It's the dog that stands out in Sandlot,

not adult concerns.

Then the author makes a mistake. Hitchcock lived through the first World War, but he never referred to it as an influence. How could it not be an influence?! It must be! Hitchcock is, ah, repressing. The world was so filled with violence at that time: soldiers in the streets, the state of fear. So, ah, so here's how he was influenced by something he claims he wasn't influenced by!

But kids aren't necessarily influenced by the obvious. In Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis references the terrible schools he attended. However, at one point, he pauses and states that although one particular school was probably, on paper, the worst of them all with a mad headmaster and the boys reduced to near poverty-level survival, he doesn't remember it as the worst. He and the other boys bonded against the crazy adult. It was later schools when the boys were split and torture was endured individually that stood out to Lewis as far worse.

This is truth. Over and over again, psychological analysis records that kids are less traumatized by a state of weirdness and more traumatized by an outlying event within that weirdness and by reactions to that weirdness. The constant questioning, the adult panic, the oddness of other people's reactions is what stands out to them, not the event itself.

War and even COVID won't appear strange to them until the strangeness becomes charged with someone else's emotions.

It is entirely believable that Hitchcock was frightened as a child by events that stood out from the ordinary everyday rather than the terror of "war" as an event. After all, the kids in Hope & Glory cheer when the school blows up!