on Movie Memories

When I was three we lived in a little dilapidated black house with white trim.  I have so many memories from that house, from swimming in my underwear in a plastic wading pool in the back yard, to pedaling my little plastic Jaguar down the sidewalk along our cross-stile white fence.  I can remember finding my first Lego set, sent from my grandmother in Vancouver, Washington, waiting for me under the wood burning stove.  Also from that time I have two distinct memories of movies.  One was some kind of devil-worship film with cloaked figures in a circle; after all it was the sixties.

The second movie memory was of a little girl dressed up as a ham for a school play.  She fell down a hillside and her brother ran home in the rain to get help.  However, when he got home his sister was already there, having been carried by a scary man who was hiding in their shower.  This frightened me tremendously and caused me to always check behind shower curtains before "doing my business" for years and years.  Finally in high school we watched the old b&w version of To Kill A Mockingbird and I recognized the frightening scene.  It was very much like Freud has postulated: if you can truly get to the source of the fear you can eliminate it.

Films that truly had an emotional or psychological influence on me includes Star Wars.  It came out in 1977 when I was still in grade school.  Everyone I knew had already seen the film at least once but my parents didn't want to pay the raised price to go to a theater.  Movies were suddenly at a staggering $4.00!  I was finally able to see the film with the next door neighbor at a bargain theater the following summer.  It blew my little mind.  I became obsessed.  My neighbor and I began to make our own films and I grew increasingly in love with special effects and movie make up.  I spent an allowance on the action figures of C3PO and R2D2.  My mother was furious that I had spent my money on two tiny pieces of plastic, so she threw them in the outside garbage pail and forbade me to go digging them out, which is of course what I did that very night.  I still have those figures sitting inside the original Millineum Falcon my parents broke down and got me.  It wasn't until I was an adult though that the little robots gained the company of Chewbacca, Han, Leia, Luke and Darth Vader.

Jaws and Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind affected me greatly too.  Speilberg has always been good at drawing me into the film with good acting and clever pacing.  I have never once felt like anything more than a mere observer to a Michael Bey or Bruckheimer film.  In their films I could not care less if the main characters get killed which is the true sign of a badly told story.