Adulthood, Onscreen and Off

How Mass Culture Abandoned the Long, Messy Middle—and Left Us To Improvise Alone

In 1979, the highest-grossing film in America wasn’t a franchise, a fantasy, or a two-hour commercial for the next installment. It was Kramer vs. Kramer—a movie about a marriage coming apart, a child caught in the wreckage, and two ordinary adults failing each other in ways that were painfully familiar.

It won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and it pulled massive audiences into theaters not to escape reality, but to face it.

Sit with that for a moment. A custody battle was once a cultural event. Marital collapse was once box-office gold. Millions of people willingly bought tickets to watch the slow, intimate unmaking of a life they recognized as their own—or feared would be.

Hollywood assumed that adult experience—love curdling into resentment, desire colliding with responsibility, the bruising afterlife of promises—was not niche material. It was the center of the story.

Now ask yourself a simple question: When was the last time a big, mainstream Hollywood movie left you shaken—not by explosions or special effects, but because it felt uncomfortably close to home?

Not a city blown apart. Not a masked villain revealed.

But something smaller and harder to shake. The slow cooling of a marriage. The quiet loneliness and depression that often settle in during middle age. The messy, unresolved love between a parent and a child. The moment when desire and duty collide—and neither comes away clean.

If you’re having trouble thinking of an example, that’s not a failure of memory. It’s a clue.

Movies that treat adult life as the main event—the place where the deepest conflicts happen—are no longer at the center of popular culture. They still exist, but they’ve moved to the edges: smaller films, festival darlings, prestige television series you stream alone.

The theatrical spotlight has shifted elsewhere.

Some of that change is economic. Blockbusters are safer bets. Superheroes travel well overseas. Franchises scale.

But that explanation only goes so far.

Something deeper has shifted. We no longer treat the middle of life—its commitments, its compromises, its moral weight—as the heart of the human story. We treat it as background noise, something to manage rather than something to examine.

And that shift matters for more than entertainment. When a culture stops telling serious stories about adulthood, it quietly changes how adulthood itself is understood—and how prepared we are to live it.

When Adulthood Was the Main Story

It wasn’t just Kramer vs. Kramer. A few years earlier, An Unmarried Woman followed a woman in her late thirties after her husband leaves her.

The film didn’t rush her grief or tidy it up. It showed her anger, her loneliness, her humiliation, and then, slowly, the return of desire. It treated all of that as normal—painful, yes, but ordinary. This is what adult life looks like.

And it wasn’t alone. In the 1970s, films like Terms of Endearment, Ordinary People, Five Easy Pieces, The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore arrived in quick succession. They were very different in tone and setting, but they shared one basic assumption: the real drama of human life happens in the middle.

Youth, in these films, was preparation. Old age was aftermath. The action was in between—in marriage, in divorce, in parenting, in disappointment, in compromise. These movies assumed that adulthood was where the stakes were highest.

What made these movies work was something simple but powerful. They assumed the audience had already lived enough to understand. They didn’t over-explain. They didn’t lecture. They trusted viewers to recognize marital strain, parental guilt, erotic frustration, or the slow realization that life hadn’t turned out quite as planned.

The filmmakers supplied the details; the audience supplied the recognition.

And the 1970s weren’t inventing this from scratch. They were reviving an earlier tradition.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, American cinema produced its first great wave of serious adult drama. The Best Years of Our Lives followed three veterans trying to return to domestic life after World War II—and it didn’t pretend reintegration would be easy. A Streetcar Named Desire, From Here to Eternity, All That Heaven Allows, The Marrying Kind—these films treated adult sexuality and marriage as serious matters.

Sex in these films had consequences. It could ruin reputations. It could expose illusions. It could bring a person face to face with who they really were—and who they weren’t. The films didn’t promise that things would work out. They assumed the audience was old enough not to need that promise.

Why then?

World War II had forced people into adulthood quickly. An eighteen-year-old in 1944 might already have seen death, lived far from home, encountered people from backgrounds utterly different from his own, and faced moral choices under pressure.

Adolescence, as we understand it now—a long stretch of self-exploration and deferred responsibility—barely existed. You grew up because you had to.

Hollywood absorbed that reality. Postwar audiences didn’t need to be told that trauma lingers, that marriage is strained by absence, that the person you imagined becoming at twenty might not be the person you are at forty. Those experiences were shared. The emotional vocabulary was already there.

Just as important was the way those films understood conflict. Before feminism offered a structural analysis of patriarchy and inequality, many filmmakers and writers filtered domestic and sexual tension through a psychoanalytic lens.

That framework had real blind spots. It often pathologized women and treated systemic problems as personal neuroses. But it also created a kind of psychological depth that is hard to replicate.

Desire was not simple. Love was not pure. People were not transparent to themselves.

In A Streetcar Named Desire, Stanley is cruel—but Blanche is not simply a victim of external forces. She participates in her own undoing. Her longing, her self-deception, her humiliation are intertwined. That is why the film still feels raw. No policy change could have saved her. The tragedy runs through her.

That kind of complexity gave these films their weight. They took adult life seriously—not as a sociological case study, not as a moral lesson, but as the place where human beings confront themselves.

And that seriousness, for a time, was at the center of American storytelling.

The 1970s: A Brief Second Moment

The revival of serious adult drama in the 1970s didn’t happen by accident. It grew out of a particular set of circumstances that didn’t last very long.

The old studio system had collapsed by the late 1960s, and younger directors were given unusual freedom. Filmmakers like Altman, De Palma, Coppola, Ashby, Scorsese, Cassavetes, and Mazursky were allowed to experiment with tone and subject matter in ways that would have been difficult a decade earlier.

At the same time, the country itself was unsettled. Vietnam, Watergate, and the civil rights movement had fractured the postwar consensus.

Divorce rates were rising. More women were entering the workforce. The women’s movement had made it possible to treat female interior life as a serious subject rather than a sideshow.

And just as important, the movie audience was still largely adult. People of different ages and backgrounds were still going to theaters together and watching the same films. There was still something like a shared national culture.

That combination produced a remarkable run of films. But it didn’t last. By the mid-1980s, the conditions that made that work possible had changed.

One reason was simple economics. Jaws and Star Wars showed studios that spectacle could generate returns on a scale that intimate drama could not. A carefully made film about a troubled marriage might turn a respectable profit. A franchise film built around action and special effects could earn hundreds of millions, even billions, worldwide. Once that became clear, the industry’s priorities shifted.

Another reason was globalization. Stories about the fine details of American domestic life—its class tensions, its particular gender expectations, its regional textures—don’t always travel easily. A superhero battling a global threat does. As international box office became more important, culturally specific adult dramas became harder to justify.

The third change was technological. Home video, cable television, and eventually streaming gave audiences more options and more privacy. Instead of sitting in a theater with hundreds of other people watching something difficult and discussing it afterward, viewers could choose what to watch and when, often alone.

The shared public experience of adult drama became optional. And when something becomes optional, it becomes easier to avoid.

The Move to Television

Serious adult storytelling did not disappear. It moved.

Beginning in the late 1990s, shows like The Sopranos opened the door to what many critics have called a new golden age of television. Series such as Mad Men, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Breaking Bad, and Succession explored marriage, work, parenthood, ambition, and moral compromise with real depth. In many cases, they treated adult experience more seriously than most contemporary films.

But the shift in medium changed the experience. Watching The Sopranos alone at home, however powerful it may be, is not the same as sitting in a crowded theater in 1979 watching Kramer vs. Kramer. That earlier film was not just a piece of art; it was a shared event. Large numbers of people saw it at roughly the same time. They talked about it at work, at dinner tables, in classrooms. It helped create a common reference point for thinking about marriage, divorce, and parenting.

That kind of shared emotional space is harder to sustain now. When stories are consumed privately and at different times, they can still matter deeply—but they don’t bind a broad public in quite the same way. One of the quiet losses of the past few decades is that we no longer rehearse adult life together.

When Adulthood Slipped from the Center

It would be easy to stop the story there and blame everything on industry economics. Blockbusters took over. Global markets favored spectacle. Streaming changed how we watch. All of that is true.

But it doesn’t fully explain what happened.

There was a moment when Kramer vs. Kramer could be the most successful film in America. The audience for serious adult drama clearly existed. The question is not just what studios chose to make. The question is what the culture was ready to recognize.

Something else changed, and it has less to do with Hollywood than with how we now live.

Adulthood itself no longer sits at the center of American life in the way it once did. Marriage is happening later, if at all. The share of adults who ever marry has been falling for decades. Fertility is at historic lows. Married couples with children—once the dominant household form—now make up a minority of households.

More people live alone than at any previous point in American history, and that includes both the young and the elderly.

None of this is simply a moral story. Economics matters. Housing costs matter. Student debt matters. But these shifts are also cultural. Youth has become an ideal rather than a stage. Flexibility, mobility, and keeping options open are widely valued. Commitment, by contrast, often appears as a narrowing—a loss of freedom rather than an achievement.

The great adult films assumed something very different.

They assumed that commitment is binding and that it is supposed to be. They assumed that compromise is not a sign of weakness but the substance of a shared life. They assumed that love includes frustration, that parenting involves sacrifice without applause, that desire can humiliate as easily as it can fulfill.

Most of all, they assumed that the middle of life—its routines, its limits, its moral gray areas—is where the most serious human questions are worked out.

Those are not easy assumptions to embrace. They run against a culture that prizes self-protection and optionality, that encourages people to renegotiate constraints if they become uncomfortable, that treats identity formation as an ongoing project rather than something eventually shaped by obligation.

In much of our public culture, youth now stands for authenticity and vitality. Adulthood, by contrast, is often associated with paperwork, responsibility, and compromise—with quiet desperation, something to manage rather than something to inhabit fully.

When that shift takes place, it becomes harder to build a mass audience around stories that take adulthood seriously. Not because those experiences have vanished. But because they no longer feel like the center of the cultural imagination.

Aging Alone: The Story We Don’t Tell

There is another piece of this shift that almost never makes it to the center of our storytelling. It has to do with old age—and, more specifically, with growing old alone.

A large and growing share of Americans over sixty-five live by themselves. Among older women, especially those over seventy-five, the numbers are even higher. Some of these people chose independence. Many did not. Some were widowed. Some divorced. Some never married. Some have children who live far away. Many are managing illness on their own, making medical decisions without a partner, eating dinner alone most nights, watching their circle slowly shrink.

Solitude in old age is not new. Widowhood has always been part of the human story. But the scale and character of it now feel different. The institutions that once tied older people to community—neighborhoods where families stayed put, churches with deep roots, unions, civic organizations, extended family networks—have weakened. What remains is often thinner and more fragile.

And yet this reality is largely absent from our most visible stories.

There are exceptions. Some novelists and memoirists have written powerfully about aging, illness, and grief. But as a central subject of popular film or widely read fiction, growing old alone is almost invisible. It is treated as too bleak, too narrow, or too difficult to render without sentimentality.

That absence matters. When a common life experience goes largely unrepresented, it sends a quiet message: this is not a story worth telling. For the people living through it, that silence can deepen the isolation. Art cannot solve loneliness. But it can acknowledge it. It can say: this is real, this is shared, this is part of being human.

Right now, we do that unevenly at best.

The Fraying Script of Adulthood

All of this points to a broader change. For much of the twentieth century, there was a fairly clear outline of what adult life looked like. You finished school, found work, partnered, married, had children, raised them, and eventually moved into later life with some sense of shared history behind you.

The path was not universal and it was not always fair. It placed heavy constraints on women and excluded many people from full participation. But it was clear. You could see where you were in the sequence.

That outline has frayed.

In many ways, that loosening is progress. Women have more freedom to shape their own lives. Same-sex couples can marry and build families with legal recognition. Fewer people are forced into roles that do not fit them. These changes are real and important.

But the old script has not been replaced with a new, widely shared one. Instead, we have a wide range of possible adult lives, with fewer common markers and less collective guidance. People are building relationships in new ways. They are raising children in new configurations—or choosing not to. They are caring for parents while managing unstable careers. They are moving frequently. They are improvising.

Improvisation is not necessarily bad. But it can be disorienting, especially without shared narratives to lean on.

Stories have always helped people understand where they are and what might come next. They offer examples—not blueprints, but reference points. They show what staying looks like, what leaving looks like, what caregiving looks like, what regret looks like.

When a culture stops telling those stories in a sustained way, it removes a form of practical wisdom. People still live through these stages. They just have fewer common mirrors.

The loss is not only artistic. It is human.

The Feedback Loop

Culture and behavior shape each other. It’s not just that movies reflect how we live. The stories we tell also influence the choices we think make sense.

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not arguing that people who marry later, decide not to have children, live alone, or build lives that look different from their parents’ are doing something wrong.

The old adult script was restrictive. For many people, it was unfair and confining. There is no virtue in pretending otherwise.

What I am saying is simpler. The cultural atmosphere around adulthood has changed, and that change affects how people think about their options.

No one makes decisions about marriage or children in a vacuum. We all make those choices inside a culture that signals what is admirable, what is normal, what looks dignified, and what looks like a burden. Those signals come from many places—family, religion, economics—but they also come from stories.

When a culture tells fewer serious stories about long-term commitment, about raising children, about caring for aging parents, about staying in difficult relationships and finding meaning there, it subtly shifts the balance.

Adulthood begins to look less like a serious, central stage of life and more like a narrowing. Commitment can start to look like loss rather than depth.

This doesn’t determine anyone’s choice. But it nudges at the margins. It makes some paths feel natural and others feel naïve.

And this matters especially at a moment when the economic side of adulthood is already under strain. Housing is expensive. Jobs are unstable. Childcare is costly. Marriage and parenthood are harder to pull off financially than they once were.

If, on top of that, the culture struggles to present compelling stories about why these commitments are meaningful, the hesitation grows.

The economic pressures and the cultural signals reinforce each other.

Rehearsing Adulthood Together

There is something else those earlier adult dramas did that we no longer do very well. They offered rehearsal for adulthood.

A teenager who saw Kramer vs. Kramer in 1979 had not been divorced. She had not tried to co-parent with someone she was angry at. She had not felt the particular shame and confusion of a marriage unraveling. But she had seen something close to it. She had images and language for it. She had watched adults struggle and fail and keep going.

That mattered.

These films helped younger viewers imagine experiences they hadn’t yet had. At the same time, they helped older viewers see their own lives reflected back to them. The difficulties they were living through were not private defects. They were recognizable parts of adult life.

That shared rehearsal function has weakened. We still go through divorce, caregiving, loneliness, regret, and compromise. But we do so with fewer common reference points. Fewer stories that prepared us. Fewer public conversations acknowledge that these are ordinary parts of living a long life.

This is not the only reason adulthood can feel disorienting today. But it is one of them. And unlike housing prices or wage stagnation, it is something we could change—by choosing to tell different kinds of stories.

What We’re Not Writing About

It would be easy to blame all of this on Hollywood. But the problem runs deeper. Even the novel—free from box office pressures and franchise economics—has often drifted away from the everyday realities of adult life.

Over the past few decades, much American literary fiction has focused heavily on identity: race, gender, sexuality, representation. These are important subjects. They deserve serious attention. But in many cases they have crowded out something else—the slow, ordinary, complicated experiences that make up most adult lives.

The long middle years of a marriage. The strain of caring for aging parents. The loneliness that can settle in after children leave. The reality of growing old without a partner.

Some writers have taken these subjects on. Philip Roth in his later novels. Joan Didion writing about grief. Alice Munro tracing the consequences of choices across decades. But often these writers were themselves older, writing from the vantage point of lived experience.

Younger writers, understandably, tend to write from where they are. Still, earlier generations imagined forward. They wrote about old age before they reached it. The relative silence now around aging and late-life solitude feels like more than coincidence.

Part of the reason may be that these subjects are simply hard to render. Old age doesn’t follow a neat dramatic arc. It doesn’t build cleanly toward a climax. It unfolds in small shifts—decline, adjustment, memory, repetition. Getting that right requires patience. It requires sitting with experience that doesn’t resolve.

And part of the hesitation may be cultural. Writing honestly about long-term commitment means acknowledging that it has value as well as cost. Writing honestly about aging alone means facing facts that are uncomfortable. In a culture that prizes autonomy and reinvention, it can be difficult to say that staying—staying married, staying responsible, staying present—can be an achievement in its own right.

What We Need Now

What would it look like to take adult life seriously again?

We would tell stories about long-term commitment that are neither sentimental nor cynical. Stories that admit boredom and frustration, the ways two people can change and grow apart—and still show why staying can be brave, not weak.

We would tell stories about aging that do more than celebrate late-life reinvention. Stories that face loss directly: the body that doesn’t cooperate, the friends who die, the future that narrows. Stories that look for meaning without pretending it is easy.

We would tell stories about growing old alone that are neither horror stories nor inspirational fables. Just honest accounts of what it is like to manage a life without a partner in a society built on the assumption that adults come in pairs.

In short, we would tell stories about the middle of life as if it mattered. Because it does.

Youth asks, “What will I become?” Adulthood asks, “How do I stay? How do I endure? What do I do with what I have chosen—and what I didn’t choose?”

Those questions don’t have tidy answers. The films that once faced them didn’t reassure their audiences. They unsettled them. They left them thinking. They sometimes left them shaken.

That is not a weakness of serious art. It is its strength.

What This Essay Is—and Is Not

This is not an argument for returning to the social arrangements of the 1950s. That world excluded and constrained many people. Divorce was stigmatized. Women’s ambitions were narrowed. Gay Americans were criminalized. Many lives were forced into scripts that did not fit.

There is no virtue in romanticizing that.

What I am arguing for is something narrower and more practical. We need sustained, serious storytelling about adult life as it is now—about marriage and divorce, about singlehood, about blended families, about caregiving, about aging alone, about the quiet moral weight of ordinary responsibility.

These experiences are the daily reality of millions of people. When they go largely unrepresented, the loss is not only artistic. It is human.

People living through these stages deserve recognition. They deserve to see their lives treated as worthy of attention. They deserve stories that help them think, prepare, and persist.

Most of us have grown up. Many of us are now in the middle of life or beyond it. We carry commitments, regrets, responsibilities, and histories.

The question is whether our culture is willing to grow up with us.

If it isn’t, we will keep aging in private—without mirrors, without rehearsal, without a shared language for what we are living through.

And that, more than the loss of any single movie, would be the real tragedy.