The Movies and Me

My life in the movies began at a young age. I was born in 1939, the year Judy Garland appeared in "The Wizard of Oz." Not that my parents took me to see it on the way home from the hospital, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had. Going to the movies was a part of life in those days.

I remember that my mother took me to every Margaret O’Brien movie that was made. She was a year older than I and apparently a template for my mother and me; she was the reason I wore braids until I was ten and pined to be a ballerina. I really do wonder if, in her wide-eyed, earnest delivery, her extreme articulateness and her evident—at least to me—position at the center of things, she affected the shaping of my personality.

I also remember hearing my mother go out the door with my brothers to see “Uncle Remus”—while I stayed at home with the mumps; seeing “Gone With the Wind” with my brothers at the Senator Theater in Washington when I was about ten; watching Batman serials with my brothers; playing hooky when I was a junior in high school, at my mother’s suggestion, to go with her to “The Trouble With Harry;” giving up popcorn when I went with my father, after he got false teeth; seeing movies in New Orleans after I was married; being hugely pregnant with my first baby when I went with my sister to watch “What’s New, Pussycat?” To this day, my week isn’t complete until I’ve watched a movie on Saturday night, either in the theater, which I prefer, or at home, where the choices are often better.

The last sentence reflects a change in my movie-viewing attitudes. It used to be, I would watch anything. Now, I avoid movies depicting extreme violence. Paco and I left “Hurt Locker” after the first twenty-five minutes because I was sitting there with my eyes covered. I refused even to consider going to “Zero Dark Thirty.” I hated “Pulp Fiction” because the characters took murder so lightly. I won’t see movies about the mob. Paco doesn’t like fantasy or a Holocaust theme, so I go to those movies by myself. Surprisingly, it was his idea a week ago to watch “Life of Pi” on demand. We were both blown away.

The prospect of taking a course called “Theology and Ethics at the Movies” appealed to me at once, first of all because it is the first invitation I’ve received to stand back and look at my movie-going, which is so second-nature it is almost like breathing. There’s also my need to interrogate, or perhaps I should say articulate, a feeling I’ve had, which I think must have started with “Pulp Fiction,” “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Magnolia.” All my life I’d taken the movies for granted as something fun to do. Now, in my sixties and seventies, some of them were saying, “Pay attention to me. I have something to say.”

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