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 So I rescinded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.
