My eldest daughter graduated from high school this week, an event that most parents who have been through it before will understand can be stressful and emotional traumatic, for the eager graduates, of course, but for us old codgers too. For her, the promise of a new road ahead, full of uncertainty, new experiences and challenges, is exciting and frightening in close-to-equal measure. For her mom and dad, even though she’s not going to a school very far away geographically, it’s a signpost of a newfound independence that is only going to gain strength until one day (though not immediately) there will be one less chirping, shrieking, laughing voice echoing through the modest halls of our house.
And for me, it means that my first daughter may not be around as much to keep her old man happy by going with him to the movies. I took her to her first movie, Shrek, when she was only one year old, and the bout of night terrors she experienced that very same sleepless night (her one and only tangle with them, thank God) signaled that she may not have been entirely ready for the wonders of the motion picture. About a year later we embarked on our moviegoing adventure together in earnest (some details about that experience follow below), and it’s been great fun—for both of us, I’d like to presume—navigating the Pixar years (which, if Coco is any indication, are far from over) and into more adventurous and mature terrain as the years passed by.
We saw a lot of classic films together at various venues in and about Los Angeles over the span of 16 years, giving her a much broader base of experience and understanding of what movies were and how they reached the incarnation her generation is most familiar with than most kids her age. And, naturally, I often wrote about the experiences. One of those pieces, "I Didn't Know a Cowboy Movie Could Be So Emotional," touches on a little of our then-nascent journey with classic movies, this one centered around a great screening of John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven.
But the piece that follows here, written in 2008, a couple of months before the Magnificent Seven post, details a moviegoing experience on her preferred turf at the time. I realize that most readers of this column might not be particularly interested in an account of a 10-year-old kid’s movie musical, itself the apex of a schoolyard phenomenon that actually began two years earlier, in 2006, as an unexpectedly popular TV movie. But High School Musical 3: Senior Year is really only tangentially the subject of the account that follows. What I was really interested in writing about was the process of instilling, or trying to instill, movie love in my kids as a natural part of their growing, learning, and maturing process, which is potentially a subject of broader interest that the on-screen antics of the squeaky-clean students of East High and whether or not Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens could keep their love strong. (The lesson on the difference between screen romance and real-life romance would come later.) I think I got at quite of bit of that, at least from one father’s shepherding experience, in the piece I’ve refurbished for you today in tribute to my own daughter’s marking one of life’s first big mile markers. I can only hope that you will agree.
Oh, and Happy Graduation Day, Emma!
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As a relatively responsible movie-going parent, I’ve always been
curious as to how much of an influence our children’s response to the movies we
take them to work to color our own. One of the first movies I ever took my
first daughter to, when she was two years of age, was Monsters, Inc. Of
course, she loved it. She even reached up midway through the movie to give me
an unsolicited kiss, as if to say, “Thanks for taking me to this movie.” I came
away convinced that Monsters, Inc. was a masterpiece of
children’s entertainment, and that sublime ending, with Sulley peeking through
the doorway at a sleeping Boo, did nothing to dispel that notion. (Neither did
my daughter’s resemblance to Boo at the time do anything to dampen my happiness
over our experience.) Thus began a history of taking my daughter(s) to the
movies, one in which we’ve endured plenty of duds (any chance I could trade in
our two screenings of Open Season or Indiana
Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for one more shot at Wall-E on
the big screen?), but one which I’ve also had some genuinely lovely
experiences. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed movies together (Spirit: Stallion of
the Cimarron, Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D) that are unlikely to
end up on anyone list of children’s classics. And I’ve been blessed to be able
to turn them into fans of the drive-in movie, thanks to that quintessentially
American format’s unlikely local renaissance courtesy of theaters like
the Mission Tiki Drive-in, the Vineland Drive-in,
the Rubidoux Drive-in, and the Van Buren Drive-in.
(There exists somewhere a videotape of me and my then three-month
old daughter taken in 2000 at the now-defunct Foothill Drive-in in Azusa, CA,
in which I guide her on a tour of the near-deserted lot just before movie time
and express my regret that by the time she’s old enough to see them drive-ins
will likely be completely extinct. Thank God for my inability to suitably
conjure Nostradamus for my inaccurate prognostications.)
Finally, this summer we definitely rode that same wavelength in
our mutual adoration of Speed Racer. After spending the movie’s
opening day simmering in a downtown jury room awaiting the call that would
ultimately never come, I spent a goodly portion of my downtime reading
the Los Angeles Times and various other sources (accessed on
the courtroom’s $5.00-a-hour Internet access computers) as they
proclaimed Speed Racer to be an incoherent dud the scale of
which could ultimately bring down its studio, Warner Brothers, after an epic
botch of the movie’s marketing. (These were, after all, the bleak days before a
certain Dark Knight came and cheered up everybody on the WB Burbank lot.) To
celebrate my release from jury duty sans commitment to an actual trial (the
system works, folks), I called my daughters and told them to make plans—we were
gonna head out to see Speed Racer, my thinking being that if
nothing else it would be a boatload of fun witnessing just how far off the
rails a major studio movie can go in this age of buttoned-down, micro-precise
marketing strategies. At dinner before the movie, we encountered a waiter who
overheard us talking about seeing a movie afterward, and when he found out what
we were seeing this rather tall, imposing gentleman immediately revealed
himself to be a hyperactive member of the uber-geek community. He’d seen Speed
Racer earlier in the day (remember, this is opening day)
and was hard-pressed to contain his enthusiasm. He implored us to come back and
let him know how we liked it, and I thought to myself, “You’re a nice guy, Bub,
but you’re not gonna want to hear what I’m probably gonna think about this
movie.”
I couldn’t have been less surprised when my daughters began
immediately squealing with delight over the candy-colored antics of the
Wachowski Brothers’ movie splashing with abandon upon the wide screen. But I
kept waiting for that moment when, rather than giving in to the abandon, I had
to shut down in the name of self-protection and begin actively rejecting the
nonsense. That moment never came. And about three-quarters of the way into the
movie, sometime either during or just after the movie’s spectacularly
disorienting Fuji race, its track deliberately evocative of the loop-de-loop
Hot Wheels tracks of my youth, I turned to my oldest daughter with a huge grin
on my face and admitted, “I love this movie!” I spent the
remainder of its short summer theatrical run returning to Speed Racer,
five times in all, and twice in IMAX, with my daughters and my friend Don, the
only other grown-up I know who seems to understand. (The night of the movie’s
release on DVD I got a message from him that stated simply, “Have you watched
it yet?”)
But then, my kids also loved Open Season. And Indiana
Jones and that cheesy crystal skull. And Steve Martin’s remake
of The Pink Panther. And Madagascar. And countless
other crass movies pitched primarily to their demographic which I, either
proudly or sadly, cannot abide. This is the group into which I have
traditionally lumped the High School Musical phenomenon.
Despite featuring an abundance of tunes that seem to have sprung directly out
of a hit-making machine, so insidiously, preternaturally catchy are their hooky
melodies, HSM just seemed too Disney-prefab for anyone old
enough to be able to draw the line between the adventures of Troy and Gabriella
and those of Frankie and Annette. Of course, the entire raison d’etre of HSM is
giving the elementary school set a freshly scrubbed look into a universe that
they’ll soon be experiencing, with all its real-world complications, soon
enough, thank you. And of course, that universe doesn’t resemble reality in any
meaningful way beyond the carefully marketed multiculturalism of its casting,
which is, I suspect, an issue of far more importance for those who don’t have
kids or are looking for an easily accessible ax to grind with the movies. High
School Musical is simply the wrong place to go trolling for evidence
of social reality, and to knock the series for the absence of cholas in
the hallways of East High School, or because the movies don’t deal with the
hard-hitting issues like pregnancy or premarital sex that face today’s teens,
is to miss the point entirely.
(Peter Travers’ appalling review of High School Musical 3: Senior Year, in the pages of Rolling
Stone, seems to me a particularly egregious and desperate attempt to pander
to the demographic and presumed tastes of his magazine’s readership, not to
mention their prejudices. “If you're gay and/or eight years old, HSM3 is
the movie event of the year,” Travers opines. “From the first leering close-up
of Zac Efron shaking off sweat on the basketball court before bursting into
sappy song, the movie — like the two TV movies that preceded it — is a
nonthreatening sexual marshmallow.” Does that sound like an opening sentence
written by a man who isn’t in some way threatened by this innocuous
entertainment? Okay, we got ya, Peter--- you’re way too smart, and too butch,
for this shit. Sadly, Travers’ review is not an isolated
instance of his continued assault on the credibility of film critics, not to
mention the music of the English language.)
High School Musical is, again, fantasy, the kind that many of us grew up on in
various forms, whether it be Annette and Frankie, or the Tammy movies, or
even The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family. I
don’t see a lot wrong with my daughters having someplace to hang their hopes in
a pop culture framework for the life they eagerly anticipate as they get older
and school gets tougher. It seems to me they have a right to a fully
romanticized idea of high school they can revel in, one which will undoubtedly
be snatched away from them far too quickly in any case. (And anyone who
subscribes to the Entertainment Weekly-fueled enthusiasm over shows
like Gossip Girl or the new 90210 and doesn’t
admit that they are simply fantasies of another kind, built on puerile
sensationalism and exploitation of trendy attitudes instead of googly-eyed
innocence, is conveniently deluded.) I have yet to see the first two TV movies,
so the duty of taking my daughters out to see HSM3 fell to my
wife, who has indulged the girls’ enthusiasm to a far greater degree than I
ever have. (I have been, up to this point, exclusively the one who needles my
oldest about Zac’s hunkiness and how I far prefer the perpetually plaid-clad
Ryan.)
Of course, my daughters loved the movie—I would have been foolish
to expect anything else. (If somebody would have concocted a big-screen version
of Jonny Quest when I was eight years old I probably would
have similarly flipped out.) What was surprising, however, was the report
brought back to me by my wife regarding the reaction of my eldest, the
eight-year-old. Patty said that, about midway through the movie, during an
emotional number in which Troy, Gabriella and Troy’s best friend Chad confront
the reality of Gabriella moving to Stanford (“Just Walk Away”), my daughter,
never one to hide her emotions, began weeping openly, uncontrollably. Patty
attempted to comfort her, but it was clear that our daughter, to whom these
characters were close to real people she has seen grow up over the course of
three zippy, poppy movies, was taking their dilemma utterly seriously. And it
was breaking her little heart. (It made me think of Pauline Kael’s comment
about how, for many people whose primary experiences in the movies were
the Star Wars trilogy, it’s understandable how, no matter how
raggedy the last chapter, the fates of Luke, Han and Leia might be experienced
on a deeper level than some might be willing to concede.)
My daughter’s emotional outbursts were not confined to the scenes
involving the separation of her friends, however—the tears continued to flow
through the end credits, along with the presumably real tears of the actors on
screen who, in taking their final bows, couldn’t help but acknowledge their own
emotional responses to the ending of a series that has framed their entire
teenaged lives. It was this summing-up that my daughter was finally reacting
to—she got to experience, through the power of this prefab little musical
phenomenon, feelings about a series of movies that has been hugely important to
her. Though they scared her a bit and she didn’t initially know what to do with
them, those feelings somehow found an outlet and she felt safe enough to
express them.
The following Saturday it rained in and around Los Angeles. Stuck
for something to do while my wife spent the afternoon working, curiosity got
the best of me and I suggested we three go see High School Musical 3 together. Both my daughters were
shocked that I even wanted to see it, and they extracted a promise from me that
I would not openly mock the movie throughout. I agreed, and off we went to a Glendale
auditorium packed exclusively with moms and daughters, and me. (I feel
confident in asserting that I was the only male of any age in attendance that
day. Take that, Peter Travers.) Turns out that, for this non-veteran of
the HSM experience, the third chapter is a pleasant-enough
diversion. My tolerance for chirpiness was tested from time to time, and there
was a patch when I was fighting off slumber—a frequent occurrence whenever I
hit the matinee circuit—but both my daughters helped me through that rough
patch (“Dad, you’re snoring! Knock it off!” cried my youngest, and I don’t
think I dozed a wink after that.)
Speaking of which, the moment came when Gabriella must leave for
Stanford, and sure enough, my lovely, open-hearted little girl let fly the sobs
as she tucked herself in my arms for the duration. And I know I was simply
reacting to her reaction, but I didn’t resent the fact that I ended up crying
too. Any movie that can touch my daughter without resorting to cheap tactics,
but instead by allowing her to get to know a group of kids, the corollaries of
whom she’ll likely never meet in real life, kids with little else on their mind
but their personal loyalties and that intense need to sing and dance, is okay
by me. It doesn’t matter that I don’t necessarily think it’s a great movie.
This time it’s enough that she does.
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