Heir Apparent

I’ve been thinking a lot about how our movie tastes are formed. For many of us, I suspect, our parents were our first teachers—in this as in so many other things. Of course, I know that some from my generation were shuttled off to the movies every Saturday, to see whatever was playing at that week’s kiddie matinee. The Saturday afternoon regulars probably came to view their movie outings as a chance to slip away, however briefly, from parental influence (and their parents doubtless appreciated those matinees as a source of cheap babysitting).

Older kids, of course, have always delighted in ferreting out movies that undermine the safe, sane worldview of their parents. Back in the day, this was part of the allure of Roger Corman-style monster flicks. Director Joe Dante (Gremlins) told me as much: “The whole thrust of these cheap movies was that they were movies your parents wouldn’t want you to see.”

Still, conscientious parents have long used moviegoing as a way to instill their own values into their offspring. An African-American filmmaker I know remembers that from an early age she was introduced by her mom and dad to the films of Sidney Poitier as well as every movie that touched on the black experience in America. Some parents share with their kids a taste for science fiction or for musicals or for foreign films with a leftwing slant. As a boy, novelist David L. Robbins regularly accompanied his mother to the picture show. She had a passion for heroic epics like Ben-Hur and El Cid, and David’s whole concept of manliness evolved from those afternoons in the dark. As he confessed to me, “I even to this day still have some sort of internal moral compass: it’s not What would Jesus do?, but . . . What would Spartacus do?”

And me? I was the child of good-hearted liberals who liked films that illuminated the great social issues of their day. When they let me stay up past my bedtime to watch an old movie on the Late Late Show, it was always a quiet kind of teaching moment. From The Ox-Bow Incident, I learned about the dangers of mob rule. Through Gentleman’s Agreement, I discovered that bigotry can lurk beneath a polite facade. The Best Years of Our Lives introduced me to the concept that no one really wins a war. Citizen Kane convinced me that the ultimate source of mystery is the human psyche. No monster movies for me—I grew up conscious that the world could be a difficult place, but also that you could find something approaching a happy ending at the final fadeout.