Parent Trap Family Values

My dad was an early adopter. He was ahead of his time. He didn't even know the term. He was just always naturally interested in whatever technological toy was new and looked fun. I remember I was sixteen the first time I was mortified by him answering a phone call during lunch at a Taco Bell. He sat there and talked to that home phone style handset with the curly cord connected to a giant black box with a huge antenna standing its ground on the small table between us next to my burrito supreme without a hint of embarrassment. Everyone could hear him. Everyone was looking. I wanted to get out of there. At the time I never even imagined that not much more than two decades later I wouldn't even be able to get my own kids' attention away from their phones in that very same Taco Bell. Ferris Bueller was right. Life moves pretty fast. 

Several years earlier this same tendency toward personal innovation combined with a lack of shame so ably demonstrated by my old man caused us to have one of the first VCRs on the block. That was some worthwhile gear. VCRs really changed everything when I was a kid. No longer did any of us need to be a slave to network programming schedules, or to network programming at all if we wanted to rent movies. Nor would we be any longer intellectually and emotionally enslaved by the corporate fat cats with their capitalist consumer propaganda cleverly disguised as "commercials." I'm just kidding. Advertisements weren't disguised at al back then like they are now. They literally used to just say "Hey, buy this shit." 

Growing up in a  particularly religious family allowed me ample opportunity to be oppressed by censorship. As kids, my siblings and I weren't allowed to watch just any movie like those other kids whose parents apparently didn't care about their moral well-being at all. We stuck to a strictly defined set of rules based on MPAA ratings which have always been so consistently applied and universally applicable to everyone's individual world view. We were not to watch anything R rated. Forget about it, and never mind the other VCR Mom and Dad have in their room and the R rated movies they watch in there. PG movies were generally acceptable, but not necessarily universally. When the PG-13 rating was introduced it threw our family into chaos. No one knew what we could watch. Ultimately Mom and Dad ended up having to pre-screen, or otherwise approve each individual movie with a PG-13 rating. It must have been exhausting. 

The best thing about the system of censorship under which I was reared as a child, looking back, is what seems to me now to be a ridiculously obvious lack of philosophical consistency, particularly considering what the whole system was designed to protect in the first place, family values. 

For example, boobs were a non-starter. That should be the title of this essay. No nudity. None. This was rule number one and was clearly the most important. My gentle and innocent eyes were shielded from all potential risk of exposure to the natural beauty of the human body by the mighty power of the pause and fast forward buttons. All breasts were banned. All asses were axed. Every bush was whacked. I never saw a whole sex scene in a movie. For the first decade of my life I thought that having sex meant kissing for a while then skipping right to the walk of shame. I wish I had learned otherwise before I finished college. 

The really interesting thing though, that I didn't even think about until I was in my twenties, was that violence was fine. I was "allowed" to be exposed to as much violence as was necessary I guess. I didn't get clockwork-oranged and force-fed Rambo movies or anything. I watched those at my friends houses (because they were rated R). But no one ever tried to pause and fast forward through any scenes of violence on family movie night, domestic or otherwise. It is an interesting fact to consider in retrospect. In the culture in which I was raised, a culture which still very much exists, the human body was shameful, and acts of love were to be at worst ignored, at best abhorred, while gun fights, fist fights, violent crimes and acts of war were not considered to be necessarily worthy or deserving of censorship. Kids are going to fight. Let the boys be boys. It seems a little chilling now. 

In the spirit of retroactively ruining childhood for as many of my readers as possible I want to continue to offer a little modern perspective on one of the movies most universally loved by all souls in my home when I was a boy. It is a classic of American cinema and one of the movies that was most definitely "approved" for all audiences in my childhood home. We had a copy on VHS. It was well used. You know the movie because the name is in my title. 

The Parent Trap has been a couple of movies. I am too old to have ever even seen the one from the nineties. I am sure the stories are more or less the same in both movies. The film to which I refer is the 1961 original "romance" starring Hayley Mills. It is the story of identical twin sisters, both played by Mills, who accidentally meet each other at summer camp having no other recollection or knowledge of each other's existence. It is funny and silly. It is endearing and cute. It was intended to be all of these things, and it was a hit, not just for my family but for all of America. It was a very popular movie. 

It is a perfect example of the reasonless and non-sensical way I was taught family values. I will try and explain what I mean. 

Imagine a prequel, if you will, for this movie. Let's say it is a romantic comedy in which an east coast snob falls in love with a California cowboy. Lacking any suitable access to birth control, and given her lack of propriety over her own body and reproductive rights, and because people have always done what people always do, she is soon pregnant. It's twins. She also now fucking hates this guy and they decide to split up. Awww. Hilarious right?

But what are they going to do with the kids? Damnit. Inconvenient. They say "Well I guess we'll each have to take one, then each forget that the other ever even existed, we pretend we each only have one child and ignore the fact that we both know that we have another daughter, forget about it, and also lie to the girls. They can never know they have a sister. And also just to be sure let's never tell one she has a father and let's never tell the other she has a mother." Done. They got it all settled just like that. That's how it all started. The end. Fin. Divorce and child custody issues were once so simply solved.

Now we see The Parent Trap as the sequel IT MUST BE to the shitshow I just described. That's the setup. That is where the story stands at the beginning of the movie. That's what's up. These little girls have no idea that the other exists. They just start tripping balls when they come face to face at summer camp. Could you imagine the trauma of that moment at such a sensitive developmental level? It doesn't matter. They are only treated as a nuisance for their astonishment by the adults in charge of protecting and caring for them. 

Worse, they are left to figure it all out themselves, reduced to clandestine and rudimentary forms of communication, then forced to deceive every adult they ever trusted just at the moment they realize their entire world is a lie in order to conceive a hilarious plan to trick their parents into what has to be a particularly difficult confrontation for children to find the courage to endure let alone to instigate. They are tragic heroes. 

But it is sooooooo funny!!

And their parents, once confronted with their own treachery and barbarism, get real mad at the kids for pulling that shit. 

That's some good old American family values right there. The MPAA loved it. Rated G for general audiences. 

Woodstock

A few weeks ago I watched Woodstock for about the twentieth time in my life. Woodstock, for those of you who are new here, is a word we use in American English to simultaneously refer to a small town in upstate New York, an infamous rock music festival which occurred near there in
August 1969, and the 1970 documentary film about the music festival. They all go by the same name, simply, Woodstock. I know it is confusing, but like I said this is American English, and that is just the kind of shit we do. It is the last of these Woodstocks, and the first couple by extension, to which I refer in my opening sentence. It should be noted that we also have a fourth Woodstock, in the form of a cartoon bird, but this Woodstock does not really count because no one is ever talking about that Woodstock.

When I was a dumb kid in the eighties I worshipped the sixties. I was so pissed that I had missed it all. To make it all worse my parents had been there. They were teenagers and young adults in the late sixties and had been exactly the right ages to experience those years the way I wish I had experienced them if I hadn't been born so late. I was in the wrong time and it was clearly all their fault.

The first time I watched Woodstock I was in eighth grade. It was playing on VH1 or some other channel only old people watched at the time. I was initially interested in the music. It was Santana that caught my attention. It was naked girls who kept it. I couldn't look away and I didn't. Woodstock would become for me one of those movies I would always watch when it was on TV, and it was on TV in the eighties and nineties more often than you would have thought. Woodstock helped me discover all the amazing music of the sixties and seventies my parents would otherwise have never told me about. Woodstock led me back further to Ginsberg, Kerouac and the beats. Woodstock led me to Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Neal Cassady, Tom Wolfe, etc.

Woodstock changed me. It changed this country. It proved a concept that at the time must have seemed an impossible dream, and now seems even more likely a myth than a true story. But it happened. If you are unfamiliar with the details of the sociological miracle that Woodstock represents I will let you do your own research. I recommend the 1970 documentary. Even decades after the fact Woodstock showed me a glimpse of a world which was so different from the world I had known, and yet it seemed so simple and familiar at the same time. It was a world in which I wanted to wallow. Ultimately Woodstock is what began my now lifelong study of Americans and American culture.

In general I feel like I have a lot to do in life and I hate to repeat an effort but there are some novels, poems, and movies I have visited again and again as I have aged. I have read East of Eden three times, each about a decade apart. It has been a different novel with different lessons for me every read. The first time I read it I felt like I really understood Cal. The second time it was Lee and Adam who taught me about myself. The third time Samuel Hamilton seemed an unlikely hero to me. Maybe next time I will finally understand the novel itself.

Woodstock has functioned this same way for me over the years, though it is somewhat more ubiquitous than Steinbeck. The first few times I watched it was about Santana, Crosby Stills and Nash, and Jimi Hendrix. The next few times I watched it was about generation gaps and anti-war sentiment. Other times I watched it was about free love, bad acid, and human kindness. This last time I watched it was all about Sly Stone and Joan Baez.

Baez performed on the first night of the festival, following Arlo Guthrie and finishing out the "Friday night" lineup, playing from about 1 to 2 am Saturday morning. Her voice is absolutely beautiful and her set is nearly flawless. Among other favorites, she harmonizes perfectly with her own guitar during "Forever Young."

I really kind of hate that beautiful song.

I do appreciate the concept, and the metaphor, and all those wishes for future generations. It is deeply romantic and almost sickeningly sweet. It is everything great about American music. It will bring a fucking tear to your eye cowboy.

But do we really want to wish for eternal youth? Do we really want that for ourselves and the people we love? Do we want that for our country and our culture? I don't think I do. In fact the more I think about it staying forever young sounds like a prison sentence.

When I think about how much I have learned, and how my perspective has changed as I have aged, I am always horrified at how incredibly stupid I used to be. Aging is critically important for perspective. We all know this. It is the reason we feel bad for kids. Childhood sucks. You don't know anything and everyone is always telling you what to do. I can't imagine a more miserable existence.

I am a grandpa now. It happened recently and has me thinking a lot about age and time and generations. Although I have grown and changed with time, I can't help but feel like not much has changed in the world except my perspective.

At the time, as miraculous and impressive an occurrence as it was, some people thought Woodstock was only a combination of naive idealism and dumb luck. I can certainly understand this perspective, because fifty years later, given our current national socio-political climate, it seems impossible. It could never happen again.

But it did happen once. And it was as unlikely then as it seems now. I grew up feeling like I had missed the culture and climate of a tumultuous time in American history. I longed for clear causes to defend like civil rights and pacifism. I mistakenly thought I had missed it all. It took the perspective of time to show me once again how wrong I was. By all accounts these days are the same as those. This country is once again in turmoil, torn apart by generational and social divisions which are eerily reminiscent of what we once all assumed was a simpler time. But time doesn't really work the way we think it does. As it turns out I didn't miss anything. My independent studies of a past I would never experience were not merely pointless exercises of nostalgia. I didn't miss anything, I only prepared for it.

The generation that accomplished Woodstock, my parents generation, grew and aged and changed and eventually stopped fighting the establishment when they realized they were in charge. In a lot of ways I wish they had all stayed forever young. They gave us Woodstock but they also gave us Trump.  I wish so badly now they would all go back and watch Woodstock and try hard to remember what it was they once wanted the world to be like, because they made it happen, if only for a single weekend that summer of 1969. It was a magnificent accomplishment. They proved to all of us that even in a bad time we can all come together as people and live in peace and harmony. It was a beautiful moment. I lament the notion that it will only ever have been a moment. We all have something new to learn from Woodstock.