Losing control of my kids' Future

So earlier this year I made a bad call and showed my kids The Princess Bride when my wife was out of town. In fact, she might have even just been out for the evening. Either way, it was clear from her reaction that I should have waited until she was around so we could jointly show them a movie we both love. She wasn’t mad; she was sad, which you will agree is probably worse.

She seemed to get over that pretty quickly, but on Sunday, she got her revenge.

My sons were having twins over for a playdate, an impromptu outgrowth of a morning playing laser tag together at the local shopping center. They’d played outdoors and indoors and video games, and the afternoon was supposed to wind down with a movie, to be accompanied by chocolate chip cookies my wife made freshly.

They wanted to watch Shazam!, but we still think that a number of scenes in that movie (and one in particular) are just far too intense for the younger one, who is not yet six. His eight-year-old brother had to cover his eyes in that scene, even when he saw it for a second time recently on the plane, after turning nine. It became clear that their guests weren’t interested in anything animated. They grow up so fast.

So my wife suggested “How about something old school, like Back to the Future?”

That seemed a great idea to me – until I learned I wasn’t going to be able to watch it with them.

The Princess Bride may be in my top 20 films of all time (#11 currently), but Back to the Future is a whole different story. It’s my #2 movie on Flickchart, bested only by Raising Arizona. Although I hadn’t specifically mapped out a plan to show it to them, it’s probably among the next five “classics” I had imagined I'd expose them to.

Quickly realizing the stakes, I said, “Yeah, maybe I’ll watch it with you.”

The look on one twin’s face was priceless. His eyes went wide, and almost in spite of himself, a single word in a small voice escaped him: “No.”

I wasn’t going to inflict my will on a guest. So I rescinded the idea and promptly occupied myself in other rooms, listening to the movie’s familiar score and dialogue through the imperfect buffer of several walls.

So I was joking a bit when I said my wife got her revenge on me. Certainly she hadn’t envisioned that I’d be prohibited from watching the movie, but neither did she probably guess I’d suggest watching it with them either. My kids like to watch movies with me on movie nights, and in fact, sometimes they get upset if they want to watch something that I don’t want to watch and I slip away or never start watching in the first place. But when they have friends over, my kids don’t need or want me there, particularly the older one. He confirmed this later on, that he wouldn’t have wanted me to sit with them. I get it. (For the record, the younger one cried when I un-invited myself to watch, which was sweet, except that him crying in itself became a problem.)

It was really weird having one of my favorite movies of all time so close yet so far. I was supposed to be the one showing them this movie, but instead, no one was showing it to them. They were discovering it on their own, with no one there to subtly direct their eyes back toward the screen if they got distracted, no one there to imperceptibly indicate just how great a certain scene was.

And without a guide, they predictably got distracted. The younger one actually spend a decent amount of the second and third acts playing in his room, which I also get, because Back to the Future has “a lot of talking.” The older ones mostly paid attention, but one of them was whacking our bean bag chair with a large plastic orange bat, and there was a point near the end when all three of them were in the kitchen, playing a game where they tried to stretch each others’ clothes to the breaking point. In fact, both my wife and I had to threaten to turn the movie off, though it really wasn’t much of a threat, since maybe that would have been fine with them. So it was more of a sad “Why don’t we just turn the movie off if nobody’s watching.”

What did I expect, I guess. I was 11 when Back to the Future came out and I saw it in the theater (something like three times), but the difference between 9 and 11 is maybe the difference between liking Back to the Future and really loving it. Then you've got to factor in the way their relationship to screens is so much different than ours was then, plus the changes in what they find entertaining. They did like it, but the fact that there was a lot of talking was definitely mentioned. I heard some laughs, though, which was good.

The atmosphere of general chaos that eventually took over did have a benefit: It at least allow me to insinuate myself into the living room for the ending. We all kind of ended up in there for that, even my wife. And as I sometimes do with movies that I love dearly, I surprised myself by tearing up at the scene where Doc Brown lets out the triumphant howl after Marty successfully warps back to 1985, dancing in the flame tracks of the Delorean, a look of glee on his face, as a forlorn strain of Alan Silvestri’s main theme graces the soundtrack.

I guess maybe they really were too young, as my older son asked me “Why was there so much swearing in old movies?” and “Why did that woman take Marty’s pants off?” Maybe some of it was a bit advanced. Then again, I kind of appreciate a time when you could say “son of a bitch” in a movie watched by children and no one batted an eyelash. And none of the mother-son incest is really consummated anyway.

Raising Arizona will probably be a bridge too far for at least a couple more years, but you better bet I won’t let anyone show them this without me present. As for my #3 film on Flickchart, well … I think it will be a lot more time before either of them is allowed to watch Pulp Fiction.