This week, I took my child to her first movie. What film, you might ask, could entice an almost-five-month-old out of her baby gym and into the dark hush of the theater? Princesses in distress? Anthropomorphic animals? Cartoon conundrums? The answer, of course, is none of the rhythmic above. It was Cruel Intentions, a psychosexual thriller about wealthy New York teenagers French kissing and then doing other stuff a little more French than kissing.
Clearly this was “one for me.” The occasion was a BYOB (b, in this case, for baby) screening at a new independent theater. I’ve learned that baby screenings are a thing (another mystery that lurked behind the veil of parenthood): late afternoon, lights a little bit up, sound a little bit down. A chance to do an adult activity in public, codependent familiar in tow, and not feel the need to constantly apologize for their presence.
Myself and two fellow baby-enhanced human beings (“I will not write ‘mom friends,’ I will not write ‘mom friends,’” she wrote) met for ice cream and then headed to the 4:15 p.m. show, buzzing with the delight once reserved for things that happened later, on weekends.
Because this is Los Angeles, I purchased a glass of natural orange wine from the lobby refreshment stand. The air was as electric as air can be at 4:15 on a hot Tuesday, and we pushed our strollers into the theater, with them the new reality that we would have to find out where to sit in a theater with strollers. The back row beckoned, and we settled down. I counted about six babies (including our own), along with a few parties that either didn’t know or didn’t care about the baby thing. We settled in, ready to watch some good old fashioned life-ruining.
When my husband and I watch television in the baby’s presence, we have resorted to increasingly elaborate structures in order to block her view, desperate to protect her from the screen time she will, inevitably, gorge herself on later in life. But someone told me projector light is different than our TVs or our phones, being more ancient, so I let her take in the tale, hoping that the words and images were mostly lost on her developing brain.
The tale is as old as time, or is at least as old as Les Liaisons dangereuses, on which it’s based. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillipe decide to ruin Selma Blair and Reese Witherspoon’s lives but it ends up backfiring, as sexual intrigue often does. The most shocking twist in the movie is that Ryan Phillipe falls in love with Reese Witherspoon because she makes him laugh, a quality that (speaking from experience) is not top of the list in capturing straight men’s attention.
Two of our party made it to the end, with only mild fussing, intermittent feeding, bag rustling, and diaper changes along the way. At one point, when my child had grown tired of the main characters’ desperate antics, I threw her in her carrier and paced the back row until she fell asleep. In this case falling asleep in the middle of a movie was extremely polite. Another way children turn everything on their head.
When it was over, we exited to the blazing sunshine, contemplating how we would fill the hour or so before baby bed times. I was so grateful for an experience that just a few years ago seemed as natural as breathing: watching a movie on a hot summer day. But of course the intervening years have been full of events that have banished us to our homes, and I wonder if this an experience my child will have as she ventures into conscious memory. Even though making movies is not, you know, brain surgery, it’s important, and it makes me sad that like many things we love, corporate greed is bleeding it to death.
Hopefully Hollywood will soon be back to doing what it does best: making psychosexual camp thrillers that concerned parents will decry as moral rot, forgetting the healthy diet of moral rot that made them who they are in the first place.
The screening was at Vidiots, a cool new theater in Eagle Rock! Please go and support it so we can continue to expose our children to the art of late 90s cinema.
As we enter into a double strike, consider a contribution to the Entertainment Community Fund.
So, no white gloves across your window sills if I ever come for a visit? You know I would insist on a formal lunch.....
Oh my god, you are such a fine writer. Being good at this should not be possible when you have a newborn. Getting words on paper is so much more complicated than washing your hair, putting on a dinner party for 20 or even going to the movies. How do you manage it?