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As someone with a moderate interest in sociology, despite that field of science generally being captured by leftist activists I cannot really stand, I’m somewhat intrigued by the American concept of ‘peaking in high school’ which I wasn’t even aware of until recently. I tried to dissect what it actually means but I feel like I’m not getting that much closer.
Before I continue I’d like to state two assumptions on the subject, based on what limited information I’ve gathered. One is that the concept, or accusation/dismissal if we want to be more honest, is almost always applied to men only. The second is that it doesn’t really exist as a subject of any conversation outside the jock-vs-nerd dichotomy as a wider concept. It’s a subconcept, if such a thing even exist. It's also inseparable from the idea that your high school years are the best years of your life.
As far as I can tell, the concept basically describes a high school guy who’s a midwit and largely without ambition or intellectual curiosity in life but also has street smarts and some level of charm, plus genetic attributes that are to his advantage (muscle mass, height, jawline etc). Whatever he goes on to do after graduation, wherever he moves to and whatever choices he makes, his social status will never be relatively higher than it was in high school. He’ll never be more popular in his social circle or at his job than he was in high school. Whatever level of success he goes on to have, it’ll never surpass the success he had in high school in terms of noteworthiness within his social circle. The things that made him popular he probably is not even aware of, and he just doesn’t know any better.
Is this an accurate description or am I missing the point?
Let's return to some of the original texts: listen to Glory Days and read/watch/listen to Death of a Salesman with a particular focus on the characters of Biff and Happy.
Lyrics of Glory Days:
This is the basic concept: peaking in high school is about a person who still talks about events in high school, when they were the number one in high school. It's also, we can see, gender neutral. If anything, peaking in high school is way more common for women: girls are often at their prettiest at 16-18, I can remember a lot of girls in college where my wife looked at their old facebook pictures and thought "wow they were so pretty 30lbs ago..."
They were the hottest and the best in high school, everyone thought they were so cool, they did all the cool things back then, and now they don't, their life is limited and boring. So they still talk about high school.
Then consider Death of a Salesman, which Arthur Miller specifically wrote in reference to his uncle Manny a salesman. When Arthur was young, Manny was constantly comparing his own sons to Arthur, with the implication that they were in competition. Arthur, the weedy literary type, would go on to write important American plays and bang Marilyn Monroe; Manny killed himself. Throughout the play, Happy and Biff are Willy Loman's pride and joy, and he brags constantly about their exploits as athletes in high school, and derides his friend's son Bernard as an "anemic" loser. Now in their 30s, Bernard is arguing cases in front of the supreme court, while Happy is a cad and Biff is a burnout working as an itinerant farm laborer. The action of "peaking in high school" is largely through the mechanism of the parents, Willy and Charley, rather than through the boys themselves. Willy is still bragging about the high school exploits of his sons, while Charley doesn't need to even talk about Bernard's accomplishment because they are so obviously superior. Biff and Happy are pathetic, man-children, immature.
Salesman lives on as a canonical AP English Lit play because it speaks to something in the human condition: Arthur Miller's revenge of the nerds fantasy against his uncle. A lot of people, high school nerds, recognize themselves in Bernard.
Huh. That wasn’t how I remembered Salesman at all. The parts that stuck with me were
Which makes it more of a counter-cultural paean than a revenge fantasy. I fit it into the canon as part of the general AP Lit introduction to the cynical. I should do a post, sometime, on how that fits into a broader schema of critique and novelty in media.
At the same time, your reading makes obvious sense. Incentive for teachers, at least.
You can interpret it many ways!
I think the countercultural reading of Biff tends to focus more on the fact that he doesn't want to get a real job, he liked being an itinerant farm hand.
But the Charley-Bernard vs Biff-Willy conflict is the heart of the "liked but not well liked" iconic line in the play:
Willy and his boys are focused on superficial qualities, athleticism and looks and appearance and popularity, High School qualities. Bernard and Charley focus on academics, learning, focus, and Charley finishes way ahead of Biff and Hap, who "peak in high school."
It's a sub plot, but it's there. And I think it can be considered central because of how Miller recounts being inspired to write the play by his uncle Manny and his "constant endless race" between Arthur and his own son.
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