We live in different times now. Children do not, to the same extent, satisfy their twin appetites for screen time and storytelling by watching movies. I should say, some children might do that. Mine do not.
Oh, they'll watch a movie with us if we put it on the schedule. The younger one enthusiastically, the older one less so. But these events are also becoming less common, in part because my wife is also less interested in them.
Except maybe there is still hope for my 11-year-old.
Yesterday afternoon, I noticed he was starting to watch Spider-Man: Homecoming. When he saw me notice him starting to watch it, he kind of gave me a look like "See? I'm doing something you like doing." Though the fact that it was a newsworthy event does indicate how uncommon it is otherwise.
When I asked him if he had seen the movie before, this is when I got more encouraged. (I should be able to remember myself, but I've got two kids and sometimes I can't remember who has seen what.) "Oh yeah," he responded. "Two or three times."
Which means that yesterday, my son just felt the urge to watch Spider-Man: Homecoming, so he started to watch it.
Hooray.
It was a similar urge that prompted me to press play on all those VHS tapes back in the 1980s. I don't know why on certain days I felt like watching, I don't know, WarGames, and on other days it was The Pirate Movie. But the point is I got those urges, and responded accordingly.
Now, things still aren't what they once were. Attention spans are much different now. I say my son is "currently" watching Spider-Man: Homecoming, even though I also said he started it yesterday. Both of these things are true. While watching, he's likely to take breaks and game for a while, or watch a YouTube video.
However, the fact that he started it yesterday and returned to it today means he sees something sacred about completing a viewing, and not just sampling a small part of a movie and moving on. There are cinephiles who do the second thing, of course, and God bless them for whatever form they want their engagement to take. But my son is taking my form of engagement, completing what he started, and that further tickles me.
What's more, this additional engagement -- even if it is in its nascent stages -- is deepening his overall engagement with the cinematic landscape. Another thing I have wondered is if today's children -- or more specifically, my children -- would ever become conversant about movie stars, knowing their names and what other films they had been in. They do know some names, such as Dwayne Johnson and Jack Black, but even some very famous names, like Tom Cruise, may cause them hesitation.
Well, one person my younger son knows is Tom Holland, star of Spider-Man: Homecoming. He mentioned him by name earlier this month when we were at Universal Studios. So it may be that my son is choosing personal favorites among actors and intentionally choosing films starring those actors, which is another way further in to cinephilia. I just don't need him to watch Holland movies like The Devil All the Time -- not at this stage, anyway. (Given that I think that movie is shit, possibly not ever.)
Look, I'm not going to blow this out of proportion, all evidence to the contrary in the fact that I'm writing this post. But for a guy who constantly longs for "the way things used to be," this is an encouraging development, both for me personally and for my hope about the younger generation.
I have also been worrying lately about the way the kids are spending their summer, essentially devoting most of their time to screens except for the break we force them to take for a couple hours in the early afternoon. If my 11-year-old starts choosing to wile away his summers on movies -- the way I once did -- then that removes that stress for me as well.
Now, I just need him to start obsessively ranking his movies and watching more than 150 of them per year ...
NOTE: Less than an hour after I published this, my son began watching Spider-Man: Far From Home. Yay.
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