Maybe We Need To Revisit Some of Those Old Movies

Unlike my two older brothers, I wasn’t the avid reader as a young child into young adulthood. I read what was required more than falling in love with the written word. Still perhaps, in retrospect, I had more exposure to it than many would have. I recall at a young age enjoying the poetry from the literature books my mother taught and I did fall in love with a few special books. As far as expansive novels, and the new writers on the scene in the sixties, it just had not happened yet for me, and I was more enamored with the screen; both silver and TV. Movies would help me fill in the cracks of confusion I sometimes felt growing up as a latch-key youngster ( both parents working) walking the west side streets of New York at 8 years of age often by myself without a figurative veil free to observe human nature sometimes in horrible hyperbole.

Although there was something special about growing up in the west side of Manhattan in 1960 that was beautiful, the contrasts were a lot to take in. I was there many times to witness, first-hand many moments of violence, the suffering of the helpless and homeless, the neglected addicts on the streets, half-starved, and let’s not forget for a ten-year-old, the acts of the angry, demented and dangerous. Exposed daily to the streets of New York, I thought myself worldly of all things,

until I realized one day that I wasn’t.

Taking the subways at a young age, I found myself in places and environments that frankly, terrified me. It was really the case that neighborhoods were to be respected. Still, New York City was and is my home in my soul and I find it difficult to be away too long.  

 We as a family did not travel outside the US much. And aside from the Standard Encyclopedia Britannica collection which we marveled at, it was ‘The Movies’ that would be for me the largest source of my education about other peoples, other countries, other cultures. Even though I was immersed daily growing up in the center of Manhattan. My daily interactions left impressions on me, that often just left me more confused about the things I saw in real life.

Good films although a wonderful form of escape, also brought me understanding of a world I couldn’t experience personally. They, perhaps most of all, gave me perspective, context and love of the world I was experiencing.

It’s a big realization that this is the case, especially since I think it may be true for many others, that we have a view of things that may have in part been formed through the eyes of someone else’s lens.

And I am ok with this because I have always felt more empowered and more in touch every time I watched a good film that challenges my precepts. Movies brought to the forefront in vivid exaggeration the issues of the day. Issues of circumstance and the complex inner dynamics taking place within ourselves were on full view. I keep thinking of a movie called ‘David and Lisa’. Which was a film that dealt with anxiety disorder and autistic tendency as early as 1964 in a love story of all things. It hit me like a ton of bricks.

The filmmaker always had me at hello (sic). I was a sucker for the emotion they tried so hard to convey. I bought it.

As an example:

Born Free, was a film which followed the lives of a lioness and her cubs in Africa and the researcher, Joy McKenna and George Adamson, who cared so much for their survival. The movie brought meaning in a way that earlier documentaries I had seen had missed. The movie left me with a better understanding of how nature is construed as cruel, perhaps only in our eyes. The music score manipulated me to expose my empathy.

Such a film helped me see that humans were often the predators and that the path to change starts off with the odds stacked against us. It showed me great fealty to our endeavors; devotion means sacrifice. That is a lot to learn for an 8-year-old at a midday showing.

I was introduced to foreign films at a very young age and films like the bicycle, the red balloon, Small Change, le Grand illusion and so many others that had a raw feeling to them, and reading the subtitles as a child actually improved my reading skills as well, because in order to follow the story you had to read fast.

The reason for this post is because I worry that without those movies, how might I be different? And since so many young people I meet today have no patience for movies, I get anxious. I think of films like ‘Mr. Smith goes to Washington’, or ‘Meet john Doe’, ‘all the president’s men’, just to name a few. I wonder if my understanding about the inner workings of politics would be the same had I never seen the innocence lost when a true good deed doer faces those in power as I did in those films? I wonder what part of our common sense of outrage was developed from having seen that. Did the countless portrayal of our common conflicts in film help glue our sense of morality together with other viewers? I feel my ethos is grounded from that exposure as much as perhaps any of the religious teachings, I had growing up. It didn’t matter if the movie was about sometime in the past present or future. loss and joy is, as I learned, as timeless as the movies reflecting it.