Iris and the Movies: Introduction

A recurring theme at Bad Dad will be exposing my six year old daughter to movies most would deem inappropriate (in accordance with the Bad Dad theme). Don't worry, I don't think she's ready for A Clockwork Orange or Taxi Driver yet. A. O Scott just wrote a piece on taking kids to adult fare, and it resonated pretty deeply with my philosophy.

Children are very lucky to live in what I would call the golden age of children's movies. The Harry Potter series, Pixar movies and a host of others are far ahead of what passed for children's fare in the '70s, or possibly at any time in movie history. Our parents gladly dropped us off at those dumb '70s movies, whereas now I find myself dropping hints to my daughter about kids movies that I want to see. However, a good part of my childhood moviegoing involved being dragged along to movies made for adults and about adults. Children got in for about a third of the adult price, so it was cheaper than a babysitter and I usually wanted to go. There were quite a few movies I didn't understand, but that was OK because children are accustomed to not understanding everything they see and hear; I can recall that once the adults got going at the dinner table they might as well have been talking in a foreign language.

Society's current need to cocoon children is most evident in the MPAA ratings. Growing up, one of my good friends going up was banned from attending movies with a rating other than "G". My research for this posting indicates that he could have seen: The Italian Job (1968), Oliver! (which has the vicious murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes), 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gone with the Wind, four of the five Planet of the Apes movies, Fiddler on the Roof, Airport, the Andromeda Strain, and Ice Station Zebra. Many of these would be PG-13 today, yet they were considered appropriate family fare in the "good old days".

Incidentally, the real reason (IMHO) for the creation of the PG-13 rating in 1984 was not that movies were getting more violent. By 1984, the criteria for a G rating were so severe that only a few sugar-coated outliers could achieve the rating. With all those formerly G movies getting pushed up to PG, the PG category was simply too broad. Creation of the PG-13 rating enabled the territory once occupied by G to be split into PG and G.

My own precocious recollections include seeing Lawrence of Arabia as an early grade schooler, the French Collection at the age of 8 and the Godfather as a nine year old. Somewhere in there I saw Cabaret, and didn't have a clue of what was going on (although I liked the musical numbers). The James Bond movies were favorites from age nine on. These were not scarring experiences that turned me into a psycopath, but moviegoing adventures that I recall vividly (especially Lawrence)

Next I'll talk about the best place to start with even the youngest of children, musicals, an area where my daughter is now an expert. When she was two, she would tell people that her favorite movie was Chicago. I'm also going to try out the silent clowns; I'll let you know how that works out.