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!
When I was a child, before the age of 7 or so, my parents took the family to the cinema once a year. Always on the second Sunday of Advent, we’d go and see whatever Disney movie was on – and it seems that there always was a Disney movie on at that time, sometimes a new one, sometimes a rerun. I don’t much remember the actual films: I have faint memories of seeing The Fox and the Hound, which would fit with the timeframe I’m talking about, and I think that Robin Hood and The Aristocats were also among the Disney films I saw when I was very young. I remember the tradition, though, which included us going to eat at an Italian restaurant after we left the cinema.
Eventually, Disney gave way to other films, and that’s where my memories start to fill in: I distinctly remember going to see E.T. when it came out, and at the time that was one of the most intense experiences I’d ever had. Even just in its first five minutes, the film had me completely in its grip, as the little alien gnome is left behind on Earth when US government agents arrive, forcing his fellow extraterrestrials to leave without him. A year or two later, we saw Ghostbusters, a film I also loved at the time (and it would be one of the first movies I got on VHS, after Raiders of the Lost Ark.)
Arguably, E.T. is a family film, suitable for children below the age of 10 – and even Ghostbusters was okay kiddy fare: a bit scary perhaps, and sure, some of the jokes weren’t age-appropriate, but then I doubt that 9-year-old Matt understood that Dan Akroyd was getting spectral head in that one scene. But beyond those two films, I don’t really remember us going to the cinema to watch any family films or even movies made mainly for children. In the same year as Ghostbusters, my dad took my sister and me to see Milos Forman’s Amadeus, a couple of years later I had the educational experience of being taken to see The Name of the Rose, and in 1987 I remember us seeing both Good Morning, Vietnam and The Last Emperor at the cinema.
Now, I remember enjoying all of those films, but they weren’t really the kind of movies that you’d generally go and see with kids or tweens. They weren’t even the kind of films that kids maybe shouldn’t watch but that they still love to watch, though perhaps at the price of a couple of weeks of nightmares. (The internet is filled with articles by men who are oddly proud of having been shown Aliens at the age of 8 or 9.) The Last Emperor especially was a film almost three hours in length, a historical biopic about, well, the last emperor of China, Puyi. (It was also the first film I’d ever seen set in historical China.) There was violence, but it wasn’t the spectacular type that you’d see in action films, and there was sex, but it was subtle and erotic. Perfect cinema for twelve-year-olds, it probably wasn’t.
I cannot remember whether, at the time, I thought much about being taken to see these films. Perhaps I was proud that my parents didn’t think I warranted children’s fare only, but more likely I just assumed that this was normal. You go and see films that are supposed to be good, and everything else – including age-appropriateness – is secondary. At home, too, I don’t remember there being much of a distinction between things we’d watch on TV that were for kids and things that were for grown-ups. Sure, I’d watch kids’ fare in the afternoon, but mostly because that’s what was on after school. The evenings, especially over the weekend after dinner, were a different matter. I don’t remember my parents watching anything outright inappropriate with us, but neither were they particularly squeamish. They didn’t make any concessions: if they were interested in a film or a series, they’d watch it, and we’d generally watch it along with them. I remember us starting to watch The Magician of Lublin one evening when I was probably 10 or 11, more or less by accident, since for some reason (most likely the film’s German title) my mother thought it was a movie continuation of the Bill Bixby series The Magician, and during a surprise sex scene my mum asked me in a somewhat apprehensive tone if the film didn’t bore me, but that was pretty much it. (I admit I was a bit bored by the film, an adaptation of a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer, but less because of the sex than because of the kind of story it was.)
When others talk about the movies they remember seeing as kids, they bring up films such as The Goonies or Hook. I saw those when I was a teenager, and I didn’t much like them at the time. In fact, even before that, when I was still a kid, I developed a sort of snobism: if a movie looked like it was made for children, I wasn’t much interested, because I was watching grown-up fare at home and even at the cinema. This changed a bit once I started to be interested in genre films, in particular fantasy, and arguably Labyrinth and Willow were perfectly fine for tweens and teenagers. But when I am asked nowadays about the films I saw as a kid, what comes to mind, after E.T. and Ghostbusters, is Amadeus and The Name of the Rose and The Last Emperor. I missed out on the classics of children’s film – but, having grown up in the ’80s, I’m fine with that. There are children’s books I read once I was no longer a child, but it seems to me that the classics of children’s literature don’t require their readers to be actual children to the same extent as the kids’ films I remember being a snob about. As a kid you can perhaps identify with the Goonies; as an adult, you just want them to go away, unless you have fond memories of them.
I don’t have any children myself, but if I did, what films would I want to show them? Apart from E.T., it’s almost entirely movies I only saw later. Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away, Laika’s ParaNorman, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Perhaps a few of the Pixar films. I wouldn’t necessarily get them to watch The Name of the Rose at the age when I saw it, but I wouldn’t want to restrict too much what they see. There’d be something hypocritical about me keeping them from seeing the films I saw as a child, because I consider those movies formative. The good thing about not having kids, though? I’ll never get to be embarrassed by my offspring having dreadful taste.
P.S.: Incidentally, Sam wrote much about the same topic last year, and his experiences were surprisingly similar. Perhaps A Damn Fine Cup of Culture is simply where the kids end up whose parents have zero filter when it comes to what they let their children watch!
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 