INAPPROPRIATE FAMILY MOVIE NIGHT
We cultivated an early regimen of film watching in our children. At the time, we thought that kids wouldn’t stay sequestered in a back room with a movie during adult dinner, weren’t “trying hard enough”. This was before anyone thought to question the impact of continuous screen time on social and cognitive development.[1] Originally, our conditioning exercises were limited to the DVDs (VHS tapes even) we owned. With three girls, these were all some variation on the princess/fairy/orphan/all-of-the-above theme. By the time our youngest came around, M & I could not bear one more moment of characters bursting into song, wacky animal sidekicks, or pastel crinoline dresses. As we ushered our DVD player to the curb, we likewise initiated a moratorium on not just Disney princess movies, but kids’ movies in general. So began “Inappropriate Family Movie Night”.
We didn’t baby step from Babe to Breakfast Club, or from Toy Story to Terminator, or Fantasia to Fight Club. Our youngest daughter jumped straight from Dora the Explorer to Lord of the Rings.[2] The switch-over coincided with the advent of downloadable movies (piracy confession). As a result, we embarked on a walk down memory lane of the movies of our past that we remembered fondly - and largely inaccurately.[3] For example, our recollection of the “Hasta La Vista Baby” version of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, completely overshadowed the opening screen where he guns down the innocent roommate as she crawls a bloody streak across the floor. Better that than the bait-and-switch of Gremlins – one moment Phoebe Cates playing with a cuddly Mogwai, next minute the cookie-baking mother character is butchering reptilian monsters with an oversized kitchen knife. Even I was out in the hallway for that one, yelling “Abort! Abort!” while M was downstairs popping corn. The alternative to films with a high risk-of-decapitation were movies about gunning down aliens; teen movies about drugs and getting laid; dramas about dying; or comedies illustrating our societal development on issues like racism and misogyny. In all cases, regardless of theme, there was invariably copious amounts of blood, swearing, nudity, and not so subtle innuendos.
This made for some uncomfortable movie watching but gave rise (out of necessity) to some excellent “teachable moments”. We soon established a series of opening credit disclaimers, which like most rules were based on prior judgment errors. For example, “if you are a black NYC cop working in LA in the 80s you can use the F word, but otherwise you cannot”.[4] The girls also had blankets at the ready to hide under – not for scary scenes (those were “watched” from out in the hallway), but for the inevitable sex, needles, gory fight (or all three combined) scenes. These we never hit fast-forward fast enough on, and somehow got frozen on the worse possible visual assault moment each, and every, time.
I am sure there were about a million film options that we would have enjoyed as adults, that were also age appropriate for the kids. To be fair, we had a poor track record on selecting movies. Once M took his mother to the Bad Lieutenant which famously starts out with Harvey Keitel raping a nun. Another time he watched Borat on Christmas eve with my father (who thankfully went to bed before the hotel room scene). When we first started dating, we would drive out to the new strip mall to take in a movie at the multiplex, a new-fangled thing at the time. We would buy a ticket to the earliest show and pinball between theatres like a live action version of channel surfing. In the end, our total experience would be a action/comedy/drama mash-up of kung fu, gun fight, love triangle, cheap laughs, sob-fest, that spliced together the worst of 1990s film in the best possible way. This perhaps explains why we had imperfect memories of the films we later showcased to our children.
When I asked our youngest for her memories of IFMN, she said she has “blocked it out”. But her conditioning has proven useful. Every night is Inappropriate Family Movie Night these days. Far more graphic and adult themed content fills every streaming platform, without any gate keeping or recommendations for “parental guidance”. Now when we watch TV together, we can count on her to calmly watch the zombie/needle/surgery/creepy clown scenes and “let us know when it’s safe to come out from under our blankets.” To this day, I don’t know whether to be proud or ashamed of the fact that our elementary school daughters’ favourite movies included the likes of Almost Famous or Pulp Fiction. Either way, like all our early parenting efforts, it’s too late now.
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[1] I now perform my 21st century parental duty of “tsk-tsking” the white noise of New Girl/Office that is the soundtrack my daughters’ lives. But it’s just hypocritical performance art, given the amount of time I spent in front of the “Boob Tube” at their age. This even though we had no cable and the 24 button “converter” gave access to little more than fuzzy reruns of Dr Who and Fred Astaire movies.
[2] Interestingly, they both involved three-part quests over mountains and through woods - though Frodo likely would have preferred to end up at Dora’s Abuela’s house than the pits of Mordor.
[3] Easter Egg for any readers who attended the movie fundraiser for the elementary school playground. Our poor movie selection was not limited to our kids, as it turns out. My memory of Tom Hanks nibbling the mini corn cob in Big totally overshadowed the tricky part where the little boy has sex with a grown woman.
[4] Beverly Hills Cop, in which Eddie Murphy famously drops 13 F-bombs in the first five minutes, briefly inspired the use of the term “Get the Fuck Outta Here!”