Family Rituals

My parents weren’t big TV watchers, other than the news and the occasional made-for-tv movie or series, but they loved movies. Before having me, they’d go out on Friday nights to see films in local second-run cinemas, and they took me to movies from a very young age. (I have vivid memories of seeing Lynch’s Dune in the cinema and being very, very confused).

So, when video technology became affordable, they jumped: we bought our first VCR in 1985, and our second about two weeks later (so my dad could bootleg movies, which he did, enthusiastically, right to the end). We also soon developed a ritual: on Fridays, whichever parent picked me up from my afterschool program would take me to one of three local movie stores. We’d rent a few movies for the weekend, and watch them on Friday night and Saturday night. My folks were gracious about letting me rent pretty much any kid thing I wanted (though my mom, perplexingly, once drew the line at letting me rent an episode of Jem), and they were also pretty gracious about letting me watch whatever they were watching. Maybe they should have been less casual about this; 6 was too young for The Thing, and no one is ever the right age to watch Watership Down.

We watched a lot of movies. I grew up not knowing one Golden Girl from the other, but damn if I couldn’t talk knowledgeably about every version of The Mummy from 1932 to present.

It only occurred to me much later on in life that, before my dad bought that VCR, my parents had almost no way to access most movies ever made - classics, childhood favourites, famous bombs, cult hits, whatever. Unless it wound up on TV (and we didn’t have cable until the mid-90s, so it had to be on regular ol’ over-the-air television), or was in a second-run cinema, it was inaccessible. It’s no wonder my folks went kind of nuts over video. It’s also no wonder they turned our family movie-watching into a kind of ritual: picking movies out, making dinner, staying up way too late. We even, occasoinally, ate dinner in front of the tv, but mostly only when my mom was out of town.

My parents worked long hours and our weekend days were usually full of errands and extended-family stuff, so those few hours together on Friday and Saturday nights took on an almost hallowed aspect - one which was heightened after my father’s premature death. My mother and I developed new rituals after he was gone, but it wasn’t the same; how could it be?

Oddly, becoming a parent myself meant that my husband and I found ourselves in the same position my parents had been in, decades earlier: busy during the week, differently busy on weekends, and looking for a way to carve out a little spare time for just the three of us. Since Jared and I are also both massive movie buffs, falling back on my own, long-lost family ritual was easy to do: our kid couldn’t have been more than two when we ritualised the “pizza party” - most Friday nights now, we get a pizza, sit on the floor in front of the tv, and have a picnic while watching something silly.

Our movie options are broader even than they were when Jared and I were young, while also weirdly constrained by whatever Netflix/Disney/Prime’s algorithm’s pushing on us; to find something we want to see but which won’t freak out or bore (or both) our kid is as much a part of the ritual as the pizza itself. (Generally: Domino’s pepperoni). We’re less generous than my parents were about what we watch together, and none of us stay up as late as we’d like. It’s pretty great.

All of which is a very long way of saying that, for the last few weeks, we’ve been watching the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings movies together on Friday nights, and I am absolutely, 100% going to be writing about them next time (and slating The Hobbit some more.)

•  X-Men ‘97 is great? And keeps referencing the acutal Jim Lee comics from the early 90s as well as the 90s version of the show itself? A+ work; highly recommended.

• The new Lindsey Lohan romcom on Netflix is terrible AND commits atrocious sins against the on-screen representation of the publishing industry, to the degree that makes me want to pivot and only write newsletters about how much Hollywood loves to get publishing wrong. Also her character falls down all the time; like, why is the film industry obsessed with women who trip over things??!! (Shh; the answer is because romcoms tend to hate women!)

• If you’d rather not get your pizza from Domino’s, you can make your own dough (easy and fun!) and then make your own pizza! Yes, this is the superior way to enjoy a Friday night pizza party, but also sometimes it’s nice to have someone bring you a big greasy box.

• Your average American will only have “one healthy birthday” after 65, apparently. Should we diet and exercise more to maximise our chances of living well for longer? Or is it all just a genetic lottery? This New Yorker piece strikes an intriguing balance between the two poles (PS eat the pizza).