Six Damn Fine Degrees #199: Parental Guidance Suggested?

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

What was the first film your parents ever took you to see at the cinema? I’m sure the latest Disney production, for many, were frequent firsts. Or even the myriad of family comedies just in time for the Christmas season? I remember it well and it was pretty standard: my parents took me to see Disney’s The Lady and the Tramp at Bern’s ABC cinema. I must have been around six. This led to more, obviously, with Astrid Lindgren’s Ronja rövardotter (1984) a particular favourite of mine.

So far so good.

Then things suddenly started to change: As we grew into our early teenage, my parents became rather more restrictive than allowing of our widening tastes for movies and TV: what did my mum find dangerous about David Hasselhoff when she started rushing up to switch off the TV whenever the Baywatch or Knight Rider title sequence started playing? Or what did they mean when they said watching people eat each other up kissing on Dallas and Dynasty was disgusting? Or why were German krimi series like Der Alte and Derrick out of bounds for us? It’s safe to say that I often still stood one floor below in the doorway with a very good upstairs sideways glance and saw many such episode in secret!

I guess my parents had somehow read or discussed about the corrosive or harmful nature of certain programs on children – and we were otherwise left to our hour of children’s program on Austrian television every weekday. So maybe there was a concept, a teenage-friendly plan?

But then things got really weird: even before I was twelve, they suddenly started letting me watch certified film classics, starting with the family friendly romp that is … Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969)! I don’t remember exactly why I didn’t sleep all night after seeing it: was it the gunning down of hundreds of gay SA troops during Hitler’s famous Night of the Long Knives? Or the corruption and decay that is the Von Essenbeck family? Or Helmut Berger’s campy yet disturbing drag performance of Marlene Dietrich to spite his family? I’m pretty sure that I didn’t quite get the incesty bits between Berger and his mother (Ingrid Thulin) yet, but this was strong stuff and I still wonder what dark pedagogical playbook this had come from for my parents..

Maybe they had just chosen badly? After all, they had been adamant filmgoers between the mid/late ‘60s and the ‘70s and were maybe just catching up with missed opportunties. Well, to say the least, the odd choices continued: next, my mum took me to the comedy of errors that is … Anna Göldin – Last Witch of Europe (1991), a rivetingly glum retelling of the last ever killed woman for witchery in Glarus, Switzerland. Kids swallowed needles from their milk, the master of the house got all rapey and blackmaily, and at the end there is certain death of the witch at the execution block. Again, understandably, I couldn’t sleep.

Another fun excursion was Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) when I was barely twelve! How did they even get tickets to take me? On the big screen, Keanu Reeves was gorgeous (my sister rooted for Oldman!), but the three vampire ladies scared me and the sights and sounds were so overly impressive, overlaid so thickly with Wojciech Kilar’s beautiful score. By the time Dracula finally lies impaled in front of his castle and is laid to rest by Winona Ryder, I was emotionally exhausted! This was followed up by next week’s make-up film Conquest of Paradise, with another witch being killed just to begin with. We were on a roll here!

I guess somehow my parents tried to wise up and suggested watching The Name of the Rose (1986) one night on TV was not okay. When we asked, they reminisced about the dead bald monks stuck heads-up in buckets of blood. Instead, that night we watched an adaptation of Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight (1977), a sultry piece full of eroticism and sex, with one infamous scene showing a bucket of ice poured over one man’s private parts for the cooldown. My sister and I rolled our eyes and have ever since poked fun at my parents’ decision-making process. In the meantime, we started watching The Name of the Rose in secret at my grandparents house and discovered how much dark enjoyment it is. And I must say, that peasant girl undressing Christian Slater on the floor of the monastery kitchen also had a big part to play in that!

By that point, we had made ourselves independent from our parental guidance and my dad developed a penchant for late night horror movies, especially the often quoted ‘Deadly Earnest Horror Show’ on Sky TV at the time, which featured horror gems from Poe’s short stories, often starring Vincent Price or produced by Roger Corman. He would especially quote endlessly from Witchfinder General (1968), The Premature Burial (1962) or House of Wax (1953). Hearing about Christopher Lee’s untimely demises in all his Hammer horror performances also featured heavily in the tales of his nightly exploits. I only later understood that he had been kept up by nagging rheumatic pain that kept him away from work for over a year. Cinema and late night TV had become his saving grace.

When I was old enough and my mum was out, he let me watch one of the late night, the wonderfully diastrous The Cassandra Crossing, the underrated pandemic thriller starring Sophia Loren and Richard Harris among many others. I was riveted and I was hooked. I had found my passion for movies and soundtracks and we bonded over our love for such genre cinema.

In retrospect, their more or less conciously bad choices opened my taste buds up very early to the power of cinema, the difficult subject matter at hand and the radical ways filmmakers from different eras and backgrounds had found to explore them. So I blame my parents that I still can’t leave my hands off movies that pack a punch.

And after all, there’s one more love they instilled in me, this time by my parents trying again the banning strategy: When they went our one night, they somehow forbid me from watching my first Bond movie. “It’s crap, don’t watch it,” was their expert advice. As you can imagine, I snuck back up in front of the telly and was riveted from the beginning (a suicidal countess is rescued on a beach!) to end (that countess is unexpectedly gunned down after the wedding!).

It was the beginning of a neverending love story.