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.