Awkward pop-culture experiences with parents
Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d like us and the readers to answer? E-mail us at [email protected].
In reading the AVQ&A about movies that aren’t about sex or violence, a line jumped out at me: “there’s nothing in that movie that I’d feel ashamed about watching with my parents.” What pop culture did you experience with your parents, where suddenly an unexpected cringe-inducing shaming moment emerged? —Kara |
Tasha Robinson
When I went off to college, I got into film in a major way, and a roommate and I put a giant piece of poster board on the wall and wrote down the titles of films we’d heard about and felt we need to watch to further our film educations. But I spent enough time on academics, extracurriculars, and social activity that felt I wasn’t going through films fast enough, so at Christmas break, I’d take home lists of Serious Business Film-Scholar movies to track down and watch during the downtime. Which is how I ended up watching Grave Of The Fireflies with my family at Christmas. That wasn’t embarrassing so much as heartbreakingly bleak, sad, and inappropriate to the season. But the following year, I compounded the error by insisting we all go to a theater together to see The Piano, which I knew little about except that it was supposed to be a terrific art film. The results weren’t as mortifying as they might have been if I’d been 14 instead of 19, but it was still two hours of sitting with my family, and watching Harvey Keitel’s ass, Holly Hunter’s protracted sexual awakening, and eventually Sam Neill getting crazy with an axe. I squirmed all the way through it, knowing exactly how much my family was hating every moment of it. Mom’s only comments afterward: “Well. That was certainly depressing,” and “Tasha does not get to pick the Christmas movies anymore.” For extra awkward value, that’s been a running family joke—but also a basic rule—ever since.
Will Harris
I feel like I should preface my answer to this question by revealing that I once took my mother to see Pulp Fiction, and although I wouldn’t say she walked away from the experience a Quentin Tarantino fan for life, she did like the film—and more importantly, she enjoyed sharing the experience of seeing one of her son’s favorite films with him. I did, however, experience a profound desire to make a mad dash for the exit on Mother’s Day 1999, when I decided that my mom, a retired teacher, would appreciate the premise of Alexander Payne’s Election. I was not wrong about that, for what it’s worth, but having not actually seen the film yet myself, I was relying strictly on the trailers, which made it look like a fun teacher-vs.-student romp. Being utterly unprepared for quite how much sexual content was contained therein, I spent a great deal of the film sinking progressively deeper into my seat, wondering if my blushing was visible in the dark.
Sarah Collins
Oh, so many of my pop-culture memories fall into this camp. I was an only child, so my family pretty much never watched kid-appropriate movies, because my picks were always outvoted. I’ve never seen Mary Poppins, but I have seen every crappy, generic drama released between roughly 1998 and 2004. I watched a lot of tasteful sex scenes during that Friday-night family-movie time, and not a one of them was comfortable. There is, however, one time I can recall my mom picking a film specifically because she thought I would like it. It was Saturday Night Fever, and I was 9 years old. I liked Grease, so surely I would love to watch a movie all about John Travolta dancing. Because, in my mom’s memory, that’s all that movie was about. Turns out rape, machismo, racism, and accidental death aren’t really topics a 9-year-old can comprehend, so I spent a lot of time asking questions. My mom is still horrified that this happened, although why she didn’t just turn off the TV, I’ll never know. Maybe if she had, I’d be able to watch that movie again. As it is, I’ll never be able to think about it without feeling the first adolescent pings of confusion and awkwardness.
Phil Dyess-Nugent
My mom took me and my sister to see Airplane! End of story, except that my mom was horrified when she heard me laughing when Julie Haggerty performed fellatio on the inflatable “Emergency Pilot,” and realized I was sufficiently well-informed to get the joke. (I never told her that three-quarters of my sex education came from reading her copies of Portnoy’s Complaint and Eye Of The Needle.) The funny thing is, the theater was so packed that we couldn’t find three empty seats that were even close to each other, so to my childish delight, I got to sit by myself and pretend I wasn’t part of a family unit. But people who know me a lot less than my mother did have told me that my laugh is hard to mistake for anyone else’s.