“Failure to Launch” is an unfunny romantic comedy about a 35-year-old man who still lives at home. The parents want their house back, so they hire Paula (Sarah Jessica Parker), a sexy consultant who specializes in moving men out of their boyhood bedrooms. Paula goes forth and works her magic on their boy, Trip (Matthew McConaughey).
Adult sons who don’t want to leave home are apparently a growing phenomenon in real life, as well as in the movies. Maryland psychologist Leonard Sax has been studying such boy-men and says the character of Trip’s friend Justin is pretty typical.
“Justin goes off to college for a year or two, wastes thousands of dollar of his parents’ money, then gets bored and comes home to take up residence in his old room, the same bedroom where he lived when he was in high school,” Sax wrote in The Washington Post. “Now he’s working 16 hours a week at Kinko’s or part time at Starbucks.” His parents are upset that Justin doesn’t have a career, girlfriend or any ambition.
For my money, the movie could have ended after five minutes. All the parents had to do was say, “Go.” If they were feeling generous, they could have given Trip till the end of the month. Alternatively, they could have told him, “Rents have gone up in town, and yours will be … .” Or, “You know, the garage needs a new cement floor.” What made the movie unfunny, if not depressing, was that the parents did none of the above. Not only did they leave out the welcome mat, they were the mat.
In one scene, Trip’s mom waits on him with a pancakes-and-sausage breakfast. In another, she is vacuuming the chips that Trip stomped into his bedroom rug. This was humorous – or so the soundtrack indicated. The ultimate gag (gag as in retching, not laughing) is toward the end, when everyone apologizes to Trip for having tried to trick him into leaving the house.
Note that the grown children playing videogames all day at their parents’ homes are almost all sons and not daughters. You wouldn’t see Mom meekly serving the huevos rancheros breakfast to her idle daughter. She’d dump it on her head first.
Sociologists have observed that the women who live with their parents usually go to school or are starting a business. In short, they have a plan. The girls are better off not being infantilized into their 40s, but they clearly encounter a lower level of adoration than do the boys.
When psychologist Sax discussed the trend on National Public Radio, several men still residing with their parents called in. Some said that rising rents made it impossible or unwise to live on their own.
Nice try, but somehow their sisters manage to pay for rent. Sax comes up with possible explanations for the boys’ different attitudes, including changes in the workplace. But again, how does that affect the men and not the women? Ryan from Nashville calls in with his defense. “I do my own laundry,” the 24-year-old says, “and don’t take money – anything like that.” It’s apparently never occurred to Ryan that he might contribute to the household expenses. In Ryan’s world, money flows in one direction – from his parents to him. His parents obviously never tried to change that impression.
In an online discussion of Sax’s Washington Post piece, a mother in Fairfax, Va., said she was “somewhat embarrassed” that her 27- and 30-year-old sons were living at home. “They can’t afford to rent or buy alone but seem perfectly satisfied to live with Mom and Dad, go to work, come home, play the Xbox and go out with friends,” she wrote. “Is there no end in sight?”
Now was that e-mail for real, or is one of my enemies trying to torment me? Sax responded that he understood the “economic realities of this area, which make it difficult for young people to live on their own” but was concerned by the boys’ lack of drive.
Let me break in here. The problem is not passive boys, but parents who indulge their sons to the point of imbecility. And that’s why “Failure to Launch,” frankly, would have been better named “Losing One’s Lunch.”
