Society
My children watch a film and then practice ju-jitsu kicks. I watch a documentary and get heavy period pains
Published 24 January 2000
It's now a month since Christmas and our 12 year old has watched The Matrix at least six times. Admittedly the film is supposed to be restricted to people aged 15 and above, but I don't understand the certification system in this country. We sat and watched Arachnophobia with the children. It's a PG film, but within 15 minutes the children were weeping in terror and we had to switch it off. The Matrix is a film featuring stylised, cartoonish violence, with a strong moral storyline and an uplifting happy ending.
Obviously we do draw the line somewhere. When a friend came back from school to play with our six year old we said that they couldn't watch it, since some parents might draw the line at their children watching a film that they were legally nine years too young to see. So I came into the room and found our six year old explaining the "bad bits" of The Matrix to her open-mouthed playmate: "There's this bit where his mouth gets completely grown over and then they put this insect on his tummy and then it goes inside him and it's really yucky."
The 12 year old now knows the film by heart. In Diner there's a character who goes around reciting the (very good) script of Sweet Smell of Success. Our child recites the script of The Matrix while watching it. We were watching the film with some friends over the weekend and there was a sort of opposite echo effect. A high-pitched voice would speak every line just before it was spoken. And there are some very cool lines, at least the kind of lines that I find cool - "We need guns; lots of guns!" - that sort of thing. I think my film aesthetics are still stuck in the playground.
My children have grown up watching films in a completely different way from me. I was obsessed with movies from an early age, but the only way to see a favourite film was to wait for it to come on TV and then watch it once, in black and white, or else seek it out in a distant cinema. The character in Diner - set in the sixties, I think - is labelled as a fanatic because in order to gain his knowledge he must have gone to see the film in a cinema over and over again. Nowadays almost all children in the developed world know their favourite films backwards in the same way that they know their favourite books.
The result is that our children have done lots of culturally deleterious things with unpredictable results. (I'm having to rethink some of my attitudes on the effects of screen violence on children since our eight year old now spends half her time watching The Matrix and the other half aiming savage ju-jitsu kicks at empty space.) But our children have never in their lives just "watched television" as I used to, by which I mean watching Play School at the age of 14, or the horse racing on Saturday afternoons because there was nothing else on. It does enable one to have rather tediously postmodern conversations at dinner parties where a collection of graduates discuss which is their favourite Woodentop or which Thunderbird they would have if they were allowed one. Our children won't have that. The lucky sods.
My own viewing habits have recently been changed all over again. One of my brothers has a job writing TV previews, so every few weeks we get several cardboard boxes of videotapes. Sitting in bed, unable to sleep, all I need to do is dip into the box and watch some strange documentary that I missed when it first went out. A large proportion of them are about illnesses, and like everybody else I'm unable to watch any documentary about an illness without starting to feel the symptoms. There was a recent series about "embarrassing illnesses", and I developed all the pains, even the ones associated with very heavy periods.
I blame my increasing inability to finish a novel (I mean reading one) or to start a novel (I mean writing one) on CJD and, specifically, the time I made steak tartare back in the late eighties when my choice of beef had veered slightly more to quantity than to quality.
Most startling of all was a documentary in Channel 4's Equinox series about phantom limbs. Everybody knows about amputees feeling a missing arm or leg. And after a mastectomy, some women report feeling tingling in the absent nipple. But did you know that some men who have had their penis amputated because of cancer report a phantom erection? I didn't want to know that, but now that I do I feel that, in a strange metaphorical way, I can identify with it. The Phantom Erection: I've got a title for my autobiography, now I just need to write it.
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