#also I've been stewing on a queer evil-circus kids-on-bikes novel for literally a decade now

[marypsue]

a theory of Kids On Bikes

A dirt road. An asphalt backroad. A suburban street. 

One bike zips past. Two. Three. Four.

I say, “kids on bikes”, and it’s likely a story comes to mind. E.T. The Goonies. Stand By Me. This is a theory of nostalgia as much as it is of narrative. Even new stories often place their kids within one of two decades. The Iron Giant. Super 8. Stranger Things. The kids bike eternally through nineteen fifty-something, nineteen eighty-something; through an artifice of universal childhood, universal innocence.

The base unit of kids on bikes is four. It can go up as high as seven or eight, but at that point, group cohesion begins to break down. And group cohesion is important. The kids-on-bikes story is a thesis on friendship, the kind of friends you had when you were twelve. 

The kids-on-bikes story might be set in any place, at any time, but somehow it’s always about the summer you were twelve years old. The long days, lying empty before you and rich with possibility. The intoxicating feeling of freedom. 

The summer you were twelve is a place, a moment frozen in amber, and the kids-on-bikes story is the long car ride taking you there for one shining, finite, ephemeral week of vacation. The summer you were twelve could be a week in November, or years before you were even born. The summer you were twelve could be a state you’ve never visited and likely never will. The summer you were twelve is a state of mind, and so is a story about kids on bikes.

Now and Then. Stand By Me. Kids on bikes don’t need to face fantastical monsters.

IT. N0S48U. They don’t need to be kids.

Scooby Doo. Gravity Falls. They don’t even need bikes.

It’s more than just a handful of aesthetic elements that unite them, though of course it is that too. Bikes, of course. Scabby knees and bandages. Scuffed sneakers with trailing laces. Oversized glasses with thick frames. Missing teeth, and pigtails, and shorts. Analog technology. Horizontal stripes. Scout uniforms. Pocket knives. Slime. 

Monsters. 

But it’s also a sensibility. Love - romantic and otherwise. The incredible power of friendship, of community, to forge bonds between strangers with little in common, bonds that can become stronger than the fear of death. Courage, and kindness, and the value of wonder in a world overflowing with amazing - and terrible - things that most of us, caught up in the day-to-day, never see.

The world the kids on bikes inhabit asks only whether those wonders might include the fantastical. The world the kids on bikes inhabit is the world we all inhabit, but more so. Everything is outsized. The joys, the sorrows, are too vast for one person to contain, spilling over onto endless summer skies. The colours are more saturated. The shadows are darker - and full, teeming with some nameless menace that cannot quite ever really be defined, cannot quite ever really be defeated. The edges are sharper between them.

There is a faint golden nostalgia that lies over it all, of course. Like an August evening in the hour before sunset. I never had any friends later on like the friends I had when I was twelve. The kids-on-bikes story is not written, usually, by the child. The kids-on-bikes story is written by the adult, or perhaps the child within the adult. Looking back and seeing, for the first time, the value of something they didn’t know was precious when it was still within their grasp.

And it asks us to believe that we all had that same precious thing.

But the haze of memory and wistful regret colour everything. Blur detail outside the central focus. Bestow a false innocence on the deliberate structure of a story. Nineteen fifty-something, nineteen eighty-something. Four (or more) boys and one girl. One of them is fat. One of them is black. One of them might be queer, but only as an insult. 

They live and roam in an unmarked summerland, a world without history. Cruel or kind, the world is made new for them and them alone. The world, too, is adolescent and teetering on the cusp between innocence and hard-won experience.

The unmarked is not innocent. The unremarkable is not innocent. Monsters hide in plain sight, in the world of kids on bikes. Monsters that a stolid adult world dismisses as imagination or insanity. Monsters that, for all they disappear, chameleonic, behind the camouflage of adult assumptions of reality, can - and do - kill.

The kids-on-bikes story uses metaphor as both shield and sword. David Harbour speaks on an awards show stage about standing up for the underdogs, while Jim Hopper threatens children with bodily harm and calls a traumatised woman crazy to her face. The Goonies befriend a man the world thinks is a monster for his face, while the story mocks one of their number for his size. At twelve years old, it’s easy to see when you’re being bullied. It’s harder to see when you’re being the bully.

Love - and hatred. The incredible power of friendship, of community, to forge bonds between strangers with little in common - bonds that can exclude those stuck on the outside looking in. Courage, and kindness - and abuse of strength and power, and oblivious, childish cruelty.

The kids-on-bikes story is an adolescent itself. Teetering on the cusp between innocence and hard-earned experience. The kids-on-bikes story is, I think, afraid of growing up.

And well it might be. It’s set itself up in opposition to the adult world, the world of hard realities, the world where the terrors lurking in the shadows are easily seen and recognised, where those terrors have clear forms and names that are known. Against the world that understands and is understood. Once the world is familiar, it becomes a little smaller. Once the monster is seen, once it is called by name, it loses a little of its terror. Sometimes, it becomes clear that it was never anything more than a greedy, bitter old man in a mask.

And without those shadows, without the possibility of nameless menace, there is a fear of losing that saturated, golden sunlight. There is a fear of losing the joy with the terror. 

But everyone had a summer when they were twelve. And they were not all the same summer. 

There is room, I think, to tell stories about kids on bikes that haven’t already been told. There are still sun-drenched days of glorious freedom and unending possibility, where that possibility is wider than Ray Bradbury or Stephen King could ever imagine. There are still worlds and worlds of unspoken, unspeakable monsters, nameless and menacing, lurking in those summers’ teeming shadows. There is room to grow.

And kids on bikes don’t always need to be kids.

#mary writes #where the upside ends #maybe humanities academia stopped letting people just publish their rambly navel-gazings> #<on whatever was snagged on their brains that month #without requiring them to back it all up with extensively quoted sources and context and support from other academics #and just call it a 'theory' #or maybe i just never got far enough in academia to unlock the They Let You Just Say Stuff tier #either way I'm not an academic anymore #and i can write and post 'susan sontag's notes on the genre stranger things fits into' if i WANT #also I've been stewing on a queer evil-circus kids-on-bikes novel for literally a decade now #and it's given me a Lot of thoughts on the construction of the kids-on-bikes story that i wanted Out