Recently, I was musing about my very early years, between ages 5 to 7, a period before I learned to read but after the neurological components for memory had developed in my brain. Although I was illiterate, nonetheless I was recording images and impressions. I know, for sure, that I was often at the movies. I have ample memories of sitting in a movie theatre, watching the movie start, and making no sense of the opening titles. They could just as well have been written in Japanese. I could make nothing of the scribbles on the screen. This opening phase was boring to watch but I had to sit through it. (No fast-forwards then.) To the eager impatient child that I was, each minute seemed to drag on and on.
At some point, I grasped or recognized that while the movie started with little scribbles, it would pause and show ‘big scribbles’, which only later I would translate as ‘Produced by…’ and ‘Directed by…’. When they came on screen, I knew my wait was over and the movie was about to start for real.
The point I want to make in this tale is that although I did not know how to read, I genuinely enjoyed and loved the movies. Not only my memory, but my imagination centers had also started operations in my head and I had no trouble following whatever story was being told on the screen. Most importantly, I was beginning to learn and I was beginning to deduce. The very first sentence I could confidently read, without laboriously trying to ‘sound it out’, was not “Run, Jane, run” but rather “The End.” I felt no sense of accomplishment in being able to read and understand that sentence, just sadness and regret.
I never read Pauline Kael’s seminal best seller of the 1960’s about the cinema, “I Lost It at the Movies”, but that memorable title always stuck with me. From the title alone I knew what I would find. She would be referring to a loss of innocence or a loss of virginity, or perhaps both. I knew I would refer to Kael’s book in this essay; and I also knew I was not going to read it. To avoid any big, ‘jumping out’, errors, I naturally pulled it up on Wikipedia. I reprint this small paragraph taken from Wikipedia, because it bears directly on my theme.
When an interviewer asked her in later years as to what she had "lost", as indicated in the title, Kael averred: "There are so many kinds of innocence to be lost at the movies.” [The book] is the first in a series of titles of books that would have a deliberately erotic connotation, typifying the sensual relation Kael perceived herself as having with the movies, as opposed to the theoretical bent that some among her colleagues had.
I have to presume that Kael was referring to a loss of a kind of childhood innocence. I don’t know when, in what period of her life, that loss of childhood innocence happened for Kael, but I believe it was much, much later for her than for me. Could I nail it down somehow? I thought knowing when she saw her first movie might offer a clue, but to my surprise I never encountered that factoid on the Internet. I even pulled up some reviews of her biography, “Pauline Kael: ‘A Life in the Dark,' by Brian Kellow”, published in 2011. In one of them, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I searched the review for the presence of the word, ‘first’. I only saw ‘first reviews’ that she wrote, not the ‘first film’ she saw, or how old she was at the time. This seemed to be the pattern in other sites as well, including the New York Times. So Pauline Kael’s earliest movie experiences remain unknown to me, and thus I cannot compare my rich preliterate childhood experience at the movies with hers, if she even had them.
My experience at the movies was definitely not like my children’s, who only saw a few Disney movies during that early period and was always accompanied by either Sondra or myself. Movies were not the issue in raising our children. Rather, our task as parents was to try and control their access to the television. Now our children are trying to keep our grandchildren away from whatever is streaming on the wall TV (or their cell phones!)
I can speculate that many people reading this, realizing that I am speaking about being at the movies at a very early age, often alone, may feel that I was not adequately supervised. After all, movies were not rated back then, so I watched anything that was passed by Hollywood codes and allowed by the State of Texas. (Back then, Texas probably had less censorship than Massachusetts, certainly Boston.) Almost all my movie experiences occurred on Saturday, at the morning “kiddie show”. It’s true that the advertised movie for the kiddie show was usually a cowboy or an adventure picture, either current or recycled from the past. It was always accompanied by a short comedy, a travelogue, a newsreel, a series of previews (now called trailers), some animated cartoons (we screamed with joy) and the weekly installment of the ongoing serial, (which could easily take 3 months to get through). You might notice a high level of violence and (yes) sometimes we were exposed to a kind of thoughtless endemic racism, but otherwise everything was fairly innocuous. I suspect that almost nothing we saw in the kiddie show of those days would fail to be rated as suitable for children, today.
But I never left the theatre when the kiddie show ended. I stayed to watch the early afternoon showing of the regular feature, and this could be anything and everything. I sat in my seat as most of the kids filed out of the kiddie show and relatively few people actually came in for the early afternoon feature showing. No usher ever questioned me. Could this be considered abusive behavior by my parents, who otherwise never failed to make me feel that I was always adequately loved and protected? I guess we come to the nub of the essay part of this memoir: should I have not been ‘let loose’ at the movies at such a tender age. Was my early exposure to movies an unintended unconscious case of parental neglect and child abuse?
Nah, I really don’t think so. First of all, I was never in physical danger. You have to understand that back then — late 40’s and early 50’s — movies, or the “picture shows” as we called them, were really safe havens for children. While often I was accompanied by my brother Don, 8 years older, or a cousin my age; I imagine there were times when I could be escorted in by a parent, given a dime for popcorn, and then picked up by an older sibling 3 or 4 hours later. Probably by the time I was 6, I could navigate alone, in the afternoon, the 5 blocks back to my home. Although I had no allowance, I knew that I only needed a nickel and 4 pennies to buy a child’s ticket to the regular feature, (although the kiddie show cost a quarter), and no one, neither the ticket seller in the glass booth nor the ticket taker by the velvet rope hanging on the stanchion, was going to ask if I had my parent’s permission. Everyone knew that as far as ‘child care’ (a word I never heard back in that era) was concerned, there was nothing safer and cheaper than the ‘picture shows’.
Physically, there may not have been any danger, but that still leaves the question of possible psychological damage. The answer to that question turns on what we mean by a ‘loss of innocence’. Certainly Kael is speaking of something rich and varied and magical; in contrast I define it here narrowly, simply and operationally; when and how did I learn about the “birds and bees”?
Here I remember exactly when my mother tried to introduce me to that concept. A seed was swallowed and subsequently grew inside her. I don’t remember asking her where I came from, but by her answer she must have presumed I did. She pointed to a jagged appendectomy scar from the 1920’s. That was a time when laparoscopic was not even a word but merely a set of random letters like scrabble tiles spilled from the box. A time when scars were scars, and incisions were made big enough to accommodate a surgeon’s hands, if needs be. My mother pointed to this scar and said, “You came out here.” I am able to peg that memory to my being 3 years old. We were in my parent’s bedroom in Dallas, where we moved shortly after my third birthday in the late fall of 1945. I must have been a little older than a toddler, still too young to be left alone in a room unsupervised. Otherwise my mother always dressed herself in her bedroom, alone, modestly.
It’s true I remember this episode, so obviously it must carry some freight. But at the time I just accepted this information as just another bit of knowledge that seemed to come to me unbidden, without my even being aware of my ignorance — it was just more data being dumped into an empty folder. I didn’t dwell on it long enough to even question it.
So I don’t count this as my introduction to hearing about the “birds and bees”. To count, it must convey information, not misinformation. Besides it doesn’t fit with — what I think is — the standard or popular conception of what happens when you learn about the “birds and bees”, what happens when you lose your childhood innocence.
What I believe to be the most accepted story is that learning about the “birds and bees” is always accompanied by a sudden moment of revelation. Perhaps it occurs when the child is sat down by a parent and told about “the facts of life”. Perhaps the information is delivered informally on the playground from a peer. No matter, the characteristic response is always said to be the same. Shock. Disbelief. Revulsion.
That is the standard story and it describes the sudden jolting passage out of childhood innocence, the moment it is lost. That has been my conception and I don’t know if it is backed up (or refuted) by anything scientific, or anything measurable, like a tabulation of later sociological or psychological interviews. (Measurable data is often assumed to be scientific data, but they are very different animals.) No matter. My conception of the standard story, whether true or not, will do for the purpose of this essay. For most young people, this is the moment when childhood ends. With sexual enlightenment comes the loss of innocence.
So what was this moment like for me? Surely I must remember. So I searched my memory, and I asked, when was I told about the “birds and bees”? Was I shocked when that happened, was I left in a state of disbelief, and disgust? I pondered, and after a degree of self-reflection, I realized that I had never experienced that moment. In any real sense, I never had that period of childhood innocence. Unlike Pauline Kael, I didn’t lose it at the movies, rather the movies prevented any innocence from forming in the first place.
I knew from a fairly early age that kids, at some point, should expect to be the recipient of some secret lecture entitled “the birds and the bees”. I had no clue what this lecture was going to be about. I only knew that something of the natural world was going to be revealed, a secret reserved just for adults. When some older school mate finally told me what it was about, I clearly remember my response. Indeed I was shocked. “What!”, I thought with surprise, “It’s about that!” I knew all about that. I always knew all about that. I always knew about sexual intercourse and how babies were made, just as I always knew there were trees and sidewalks, curbs and streets, and dogs and cats. I couldn’t remember when or how I learned about it. It was stuff I seemed to know from day one and was always present, no more than scenery on the stage where my consciousness played daily.
Today, I am certain that my knowledge and understanding was picked up from watching dozens and dozens of movies, starting very early, before I learned to read. There is no way I can tell you the means by which the movies taught me the most intimate details of sex; somehow I got the essential features. I was shy around adults and strangers, but I had no difficulty asking pointed questions from any of my peers, where I found an entire spectrum of information and misinformation. But I was not a stupid kid, and it did not take me long to develop a fairly accurate idea of what information made sense and what sex involved.
The movies had made it very clear that sex was the most powerful force in the world. I had witnessed in the movies, over and over, the tidal power of sex: how people responded to one another when it entered the picture, as it almost always did at some point in the reel. People stole for it. People killed for it. I was not yet 8 in 1950 when I saw William Holden stagger into a swimming pool in the movie, Sunset Boulevard, and die face-down in the water — a scene that both started and ended the story. I didn’t need Gloria Swanson’s close-up to understand that people came apart and unravelled under the influence of sex and its associated emotions. That was an early lesson continually repeated for me on the screen.
But I am still left with the question of whether I was damaged or hobbled in some way because I missed out on that period of childhood innocence. Is it necessary to go through a period in childhood when you are blissfully ignorant of the “facts of life”? The psychoanalysts of yesteryear called it latency and said we needed to go through it, but, (as per usual), they never offered any evidence for their assertion. It’s true that we go through developmental stages but if we needed to hang around in each of them, I guess we would all be born as tadpoles. But I cannot even argue the point. I cannot say that missing a period of childhood innocence didn’t matter. If I never developed a sense of smell, could I argue that not knowing the fragrance of a flower was of no importance? I have nothing to compare myself to, no me who had a normal period of innocence, no me who was shielded from an exposure at such an early age to life (as depicted in movies). The best I can say, logically, is that somehow I survived not having that period. If I’m generous with myself, I might even say I didn’t turn out too badly.
Nothing is ever fully right and fully wrong; nothing is ever in black and white only; and there are always compensations. As I said at the beginning, I genuinely enjoyed and loved the movies, always did and still do. Almost every memory associated with the movies of my childhood is filled with awe. How can I ever forget the “The Wizard of Oz”, re-released in 1949, as a feature film, not as the kiddie show. The moment when Dorothy opened the door from her sepia-toned black and white Kansas home onto the technicolor land of Oz was almost too breathtakingly magical for this impressionable 7 year old, already an old movie hand and not easily astonished.
It is as if my memories of that time have been filmed through a wonderful Tom Sawyer-like filter and taken on a special sheen. How delightful to walk home from the picture shows on a Saturday afternoon with my cousin Phyllis (one year older), accompanied by my older brother Don and her older brother Norman. Our route took us past a backyard with fruit trees protected from depredation by a tall white wooden fence, even taller than Don and Norman. They would hoist me up to the top of the fence: one pair of hands would anchor me around my ankles, and another pair would reach up and grip my thighs to steady me. I would pick what pears and plums I could reach and quickly pass down the loot. We would walk the remaining two blocks home sharing in the bounty. I was told to bite into the fruit, chew it for its flavor and any sweetness, and then spit out the meat. It wasn’t ripe enough to eat. I rarely eat pears and plums to this day — not because I dislike them or because I have difficulty digesting them. It is simply because I have never been able to recapture the pleasure I had back then, biting into that small, round, firm green contraband, and laying down a trail of crushed masticated fruit on the sidewalk leading home.
Certainly I would have been fine without knowing the facts of life so early, facts that I so easily acquired at the movies. Maybe I could even have been better than fine. But the movies taught me sweetness, and sharpened an embryonic sense of empathy, and an awareness that life can sometimes be poignant. Even at that young age, I relished the humor and the music that often poured out onto my lap as I sat in the dark. The only movie I can say for sure that I didn’t see alone as a child was “Annie Get Your Gun”, released in 1950, when I was still only 7. My parents took me to that movie, in downtown Dallas, at night, really the only time I remember them taking me. (This was before they bought a TV set. After that, they never went to the movies again, but that’s another story.) I loved that movie. I remember how distraught I felt, reading on the screen “The End”. I really wanted that movie to go on forever.
It makes me so happy to see that The Hays Code utterly failed you. And if it failed you, it's probably safe to say it failed a lot of people. I consider that a good thing. Will Hays' 36 rules for "decency" in cinema resulted in some nonsensical movies but for the most part, sharpened Hollywood writers' skill with double entendre...which was clearly not lost on the child version of you!