A Sheltered Childhood

When I was a kid, I didn't see R-rated movies. Most of the time, I didn't see PG-13-rated movies, either. Hell, I remember begging and begging my parents to let me watch an episode of that scandalous, controversial TV show The Simpsons when I was 8 and barely being able to watch a single episode. (I remember it well: the episode was, I think, "Itchy and Scratchy: The Movie," wherein Bart is forbidden from seeing the new movie with his favorite cartoon characters because of how typically bad he is. Though I've seen the episode a few times since then, all I remember from that night in 1992 is hearing my mother say, as I was getting ready for bed, "Well, that won't be happening again for a while.") When I see kids with or without their parents at movies that are--or should be--way over their heads these days, I have to wonder if I was lucky, a rare case, or something far different.

This train of thought comes about for two reasons. The first is that I was briefly engaged a couple of days ago in a Twitter conversation with Slate's film critic Dana Stevens (@thehighsign) and Salon's TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) about R-rated movies and kids. Stevens was commenting on having seen children under 10 at a screening of The Hangover: Part II, a movie that's clearly inappropriate for most, if not all, kids under the age of 13. Stevens was rightfully horrified at this sight. In fact, I remember a few weeks back that Stevens was asking her Twitter followers about whether or not it'd be appropriate for her to bring her child to a screening of the newest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which is far less inappropriate for kids. (Fun fact: when I saw the movie this past weekend, there was a child around 1 year old who cried almost nonstop through the second half of the film. The child's dad was, I guess, hell-bent on seeing the movie, so he just sat with his kid on the front step of the theater, which was merely 10 feet from where my wife and I sat. Classy move, fella.) If nothing else, Stevens, like most critics, is smart enough to know which movies her kids are right to see and which movies aren't. Better still, she's savvy enough to know when to ask for advice, which is something most parents clearly don't care about doing.

The second reason this train of thought arose is from a screening experience I had last night, in Tempe. If you're an avid enough reader of various film blogs, you know that sites such as HitFix, Collider, and Ain't It Cool News helped sponsor a screening of the new British film Attack the Block last night in 25 cities across North America. Having read nothing but good things about this movie, I picked up a couple of passes and was eager to see what the fuss is about. Though this isn't going to be a review, know this: the hype you may have heard is dead-on. Attack the Block is a great piece of entertainment, scary and funny and intense stuff about a group of teenage thugs who band together with a nurse they mugged to fight off an apparent alien invasion. I had seen no footage, only knowing that Edgar Wright produced the film and Nick Frost had a supporting role, so I was pleasantly surprised with the film's twists and turns. Attack the Block's writer and director is Joe Cornish, someone who I wasn't familiar with until now. Knowing that he, Wright, and Steven Moffat (of Doctor Who and Sherlock fame) have written the script for the Tintin movie being helmed by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, though, makes me automatically excited for that project.

But, to the point. While I waited for Attack the Block to start, I saw a few kids walk into the theater, accompanied by parents. One of the parents was either press or was invited by a member of the press, because she got to go past the tiny velvet rope that blocked off the first two rows of stadium seating in the theater. Now, suffice to say, Attack the Block will be rated R for, among other things, profanity, gore, and drug use. The kids I saw at this screening ranged from under 5 to around 10 years old. I'm sure the older kids may have gotten a kick out of the action (or maybe a nightmare or two), but it just baffles me that even in a controlled setting like a screening, no one thought the kids should maybe stay home. Of course, I come at this as a) someone who doesn't have kids and b) someone who never got to see R-rated movies as a youngster. Maybe I'm jealous? Seriously, my wife and I plan on having kids, and though we were raised differently, I can't imagine that movies such as Attack the Block or Bridesmaids (which we saw the weekend it opened, and, yes, there were kids present) will be allowed in the house until our kids are of a certain age.

One thing I know: when my kids get frustrated or angry or sad at me for not letting them see, say, the new Saw movie (I have seen into the future, and predict a 15th film in the franchise!), I'll feel their pain. I still remember being almost physically crushed at the prospect of not seeing Jurassic Park in theaters in the summer of 1993. That massive, PG-13-rated blockbuster was pretty much the only movie to see that year, as far as I cared. I was a big movie fan even then, but for the most part, I didn't see anything above a PG rating. Still, even as an 8-year old waiting to turn 9, I saw the previews and did the math in my head: Steven Spielberg plus dinosaurs. Where do I sign up? My parents knew how badly I wanted to see the movie, and they made a simple rule: if it's rated PG, I can see it. If it's PG-13, no dice. The film's opening day was June 11, 1993 (a date that I'm so confident of remembering, I'm not even looking it up), so I didn't find out the film's rating until June 6 of that year.

How am I sure of the date? Well, June 6 would've been a Sunday, and Sunday meant a few things in my house: we got donuts that morning, my parents and I listened to Will Shortz and Leann Hanson on Weekend Edition, and my dad got the Sunday New York Times. We lived in a suburb of Buffalo, New York, so we only got the Grey Lady on Sundays. For me, reading the New York Times on Sundays equaled one thing: the Arts and Leisure section. This was before the Internet was common enough in our neck of the woods, and because I didn't watch much TV, I wouldn't find out the movie's rating until I opened up the Arts and Leisure section to the page where the film's poster was staring out at me...along with a PG-13 icon on the bottom right-hand side.

I couldn't believe it. I wasn't often prone to getting angry when there was an apple fritter staring me in the face, but I couldn't believe my parents wouldn't let me see the movie. Half of me, surely, was also furious at Steven Spielberg. What was wrong with this man? I thought he was brilliant, but for making a dinosaur movie that I couldn't see, he obviously had a few screws loose. Even worse, as the film's opening loomed, Spielberg (if memory serves) told USA Today that he didn't really want his kids, who were 10, seeing the movie in theaters. "You're not helping, Mr. Spielberg!" I can imagine myself being even more distressed when my longtime babysitter told my parents that there was one particularly traumatic scene where a Tyrannosaurus rex attacked two kids who were supposed to be 10 and 8. "You're not helping, longtime babysitter!" I felt bereft, knowing that plenty of kids in my classes would see the movie long before I ever did. I still remember hearing from one kid in my third-grade class about how cool the second Terminator movie was.

Obviously, I've seen Jurassic Park many, many times. In fact, the first time I saw any of it was on VHS during the fall of 1993. Something else that happened on Sundays for pretty much all of my adolescence was that my dad volunteered for a local radio station that read newspapers, magazines, and books to the blind in the Western New York area. I would go with my dad each Sunday, mostly just to sit around and spend time with intelligent adults who managed to tolerate my chatty nature. One morning in October, we walked in and a giant T-Rex was staring me in the face from the 19-inch TV. Jurassic Park had come out on VHS the past week, and the head of the radio station bought it as soon as he could. This story doesn't end with my dad grabbing me, covering my eyes, absconding with me back to the car, or anything. No, in my family, my dad was more permissive, so he let me watch as much of the movie as I could until we had to go, knowing that he couldn't really do too much. Two years later, when I was old enough to finally get more of the jokes on The Simpsons, and it was airing twice a day in syndication on CBC, a Canadian station our TV picked up, he was more than happy to turn the other cheek and not tell my mom.

I delve back into my memory to say this: as much as I wish I could've seen R-rated movies back when I was a kid, I hesitate to know what's to become of the kids who were plopped down in front of Attack the Block, Bridesmaids, The Hangover: Part II, or any of the other R-rated options out there now. As I said to Stevens on Twitter two nights ago, I can't remember the last R-rated movie I've seen where there WEREN'T kids in the audience. I can look back on my childhood and wish I'd been there for Jurassic Park or Terminator 2 or any of the other cool movies I could've seen, but I was way too young to appreciate them. I may have more sheltered than my peers, but I doubt they really knew what was going on.

That's really the issue at hand: I'm not trying to argue that seeing R-rated movies leads you down a path into all things wicked and foul, as much as I'm saying that these kids are being forced to potentially endure something simply because their parents are too damn lazy to be parents for a couple of hours on a Wednesday night or on the weekend. Each child is different, of course; some can withstand the most terrifying images on screen, and some are like me, at age 4, shouting in fright at the sight of Christopher Lloyd turning himself from a dour, black-coated judge into a bug-eyed Toon in the climax of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. How I got through that movie, I'll never know, but even in that mostly over-my-young-head movie, I was mostly thrilled to the colors, the sensations, and the allure of old Hollywood. I doubt the kids last night were thrilled. If we're lucky, they were just bored.