My Parents Exposed Me to Adult Material and This Is How I Turned Out
Every now and then I hear parents talking about what they will and will not let their children see at the movies. My parents had a simple rule: I could see it if it was quality, not crap. Whenever I mention this, inevitably someone starts talking about how movies and TV are more extreme today in terms of what is suitable for children. For instance, they don’t want their children seeing torture porn, like Saw or its many sequels. To that I respond that, according to my parents’ system, I would not have been allowed to watch torture porn. Torture porn is crap! Crap is specifically ruled out with, “No, you can’t watch that - it’s crap!” However, violent movies like The Godfather, movies that treated mature themes and/or had some sexual content - those were okay as long as they weren’t crap.
In addition to the usual Disney movies - wholesome family fare which featured hunters murdering mother deer as they cried out to their fawns to run, and psychotic old women who skinned puppies for coats or enslaved, poisoned or induced comas in their stepdaughters - I saw the following “mature themed” movies at quite a young age, and this is how they affected my growth and development. (Warning! Spoilers!)
Lili (1953)
Why I got to see it: Lili was the first “grown-up” movie I ever saw in the theatre. Leslie Caron, Mel Ferrer and the fact that the movie had puppets in it were the deciding factors for my parents allowing my attendance. I was around 5 or 6 years old.
Lili is the story of a naïve young woman with an ugly gray outfit who joins the circus. In the opening scene Lili is almost raped except that a man comes blundering by and sort of begrudgingly helps her. Lili immediately falls in love with the man, who works in a circus. She goes to the circus, starts talking to some puppets as if they were real, and it doesn’t take the circus folk long to realize they can make a buck off her mental delusions. The man who “rescued” Lili has no interest in her because he is secretly married to Zsa Zsa Gabor. The puppeteer (Ferrer), however, falls in love with Lili because she is the only woman who will join him in his little fetish world and communicate with him solely through his puppets (and we thought Lili had problems). When he doesn’t have his hand up a puppet, the puppeteer is so verbally abusive to Lili that she decides to leave but is stopped by the puppets - most notably by the fox puppet who offers to sell his tail. Lili finally realizes she is being manipulated by the puppeteer and in a burst of mental health, tries to leave but somehow gets caught up in a surreal dance number where she dances with life-size versions of all the puppets who one by one turn into the puppeteer. Lili decides that she loves the puppeteer which means he no longer has an excuse to be nasty to her, so we assume they live happily ever after - with the puppets.
Effect on my life: I remember being horrified that the fox puppet would sacrifice his tail for Lili. She didn’t seem worth it. I couldn’t understand why a grown woman wouldn’t realize there was a puppeteer behind the puppets when a little kid like me knew what was going on. The music and puppets were both cute, though, so overall I enjoyed the picture, although the dance number was really kind of scary. Puppets need to stay small.
I Love You Alice B. Toklas (1968)
Why I got to see it: Amazingly, I was allowed to see this movie glorifying drug use and the hippie movement, basically because of Peter Sellers. My parents thought he was a great actor, so at age 7, I got to go. Alice B. Toklas is, of course, famous for her recipe for marijuana brownies.
In this movie, Peter Sellers plays Harold Fine, a thirtysomething man about to settle for marriage to a humorless shrew. But Harold decides to leave her at the altar and go “find himself” in the hippie community. After a slew of hilarious highjinks, Harold realizes hippie life is not for him, so he just goes home. The wedding is on again. But as Harold nears the altar, he bolts for a second time, and runs giddily through the streets shouting that he doesn’t know where he’s going, but there is something beautiful out there and he is going to find it.
Effect on my life: This movie really turned out to be pivotal for my life. It taught me that you don’t have to do exactly what everyone else is doing. You can look for something you like better. And if that doesn’t work out - you can keep looking. This movie opened my eyes to the immense possibilities in life more than a class in quantum physics probably could have - and it was funnier. This movie made me an optimist and a seeker, even in the most appalling of situations - there is something beautiful out there, and I am going to find it!
Planet of the Apes (1968)
Why I got to see it: You might think it was Charlton Heston that enabled me to see this movie, but really I think it was Roddy McDowell. The fact that Moses was in the movie didn’t hurt, but my parents respected McDowell’s long acting career. So at a mere 7 years old, I got to accompany my older sister, and attended this movie not knowing what to expect. It might have been about cute chimps for all I knew.
Holy bejesus! Damn, was I terrified! I think the MOST terrifying thing about this movie was actually the soundtrack. I never heard anything like it. Instead of an orchestra or a band, the music was very tonal. It sounded like things dropping on you from above, or sneaking up on you. I can’t even describe it. Then just when I was getting used to these astronauts lost on a creepy planet, there were gorillas on horseback, chasing humans down, catching children in nets, carrying dead human bodies around on poles and posing for pictures with human corpses as if they were a bunch of dead deer. Freaked the shit out of me. Well, you know what happens in the movie. And I figured out what the thing on the beach was before it was revealed.
Effect on my life: Well, I did become an anthropologist, and I have lectured to classes about chimpanzee language studies. So I guess it (and the numerous sequels) did maybe affect my life- ya think?
Paint Your Wagon (1969)
Why I got to see it: At 8 years old I was exposed to polyamory. As the movie asks, “If a (Mormon) man can have two wives, why can’t a wife have two husbands?” Starring Lee Marvin and a young Clint Eastwood, I think I was allowed to see this Mature-rated film because it was a musical and a Western. My parents had heard the songs “Born Under a Wanderin’ Star” and “They Call The Wind Mariah” and liked them. Lee Marvin might have been a factor. Eastwood wasn’t famous yet.
In Paint Your Wagon, a drunk (Marvin) accidentally buys a wife from a Mormon. She takes a shine to his business partner (Eastwood) and since they share everything, well …. The Pioneer Trail is apparently lacking the Morals Police so the three of them happily set up a home together until the producers remember that they can’t do that and find a way to bring about a happy ending for just two of them.
Effect on my life: I think I’m an open-minded person, and I have friends who practice a variety of lifestyles. Plus the appeal of a woman having two husbands is much greater for me than the idea of patriarchal religious-based polygamy (yech!).
The French Connection (1971)
Why I got to see it: My father had seen this movie and thought it was quality, so he actually encouraged my mom to let my older sister take me. It was an R-rated movie (my first) so my mother went to the ticket taker and did her thing of “I’m the mom and I don’t want to see the movie but these are my daughters and they do, so sell me two tickets.” I was age 10 and in 5th grade.
The French Connection is about cops and drugs and guns and wild chase scenes all based on the true story of the biggest heroin bust in U.S. history. Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider. Dad was right about it; it won a lot of Oscars and is considered a classic today.
Effect on my life: I enjoyed this movie, but couldn’t figure out for the life of me why it had gotten an R rating. I felt very grown-up and was the envy of all my classmates.
Carnival of Souls (1962)
Why I got to see it: This one I saw on TV, somewhere around 9 or 10 years old. It scared the hell out of me and gave me nightmares of Herk Harvey’s hollow-eyed face staring at me through windows.
Carnival of Souls is about a demented woman wandering around Lawrence, Kansas.
Effect on my life: I grew up to be a demented woman wandering around Lawrence, Kansas. Now I’m a demented woman wandering around Nevada, MO.
In retrospect, though, I don’t think I was traumatized by any of these movies. You know what really traumatized me? The Lassie TV show. Seriously! Something bad happened to that poor dog every week.