Most of my generation, I suppose, were most influenced by movies as children, movies and television. I had a different childhood. What movies I saw till the age of 15 were solely on television because my parents were members of a Holiness Christian sect that forbade going to the cinema. Even to see a Disney cartoon. We were taught that to cross the dark threshold of the moving picture parlor was to seal one’s damnation.
Yes, I had a very unusual upbringing… at least, back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was unusual.
I watched a lot of television, an amazing amount in retrospect, an amazing variety of shows – my parents didn’t seem to exert much control over my intake of cathode tube rays in the beginning. And my mother loved certain movies – Hitchcock, in particular. I remember seeing The Birds a number of times (starting around age 4) and being utterly fascinated and terrified.
I especially loved Westerns, war movies, and detective shows. More of my personal ethical inclinations owe more to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood’s work for Sergio Leone than to sermons and The Good Book. Then there was The Fugative and its healthy dark fear of authority; and Ephrim Zembalist, Jr. on The FBI, who just seemed trustworthy, and the flatfoots on Dragnet, the patrolmen of Adam 12; Mannix, Cannon, Barnaby Jones, Columbo, Banacheck, McMillan and Wife, McCloud; later, there’d be Quincy, ME.
But above all there was The Rockford Files, with the maverick law-bending, hard luck, happy-go-lucky, barely making ends meet Jim Rockford/James Garner. I think he was my supreme archetype for what a man was supposed to be like – the guy who tries to do the right thing, screws it up, gets punished for it, tries to do the right thing again, and so on until, at the end, he’s as broke as he started the day. But he did what he was supposed to do: stood for something worth standing for, regardless of the price, and outwitted the opposition, sometimes with the help of some dumb luck (and a sympathetic scriptwriter).
I learned about all the great and not-so-great movies of the ‘70s as they came out in the then black and white inky pages of MAD Magazine – I was introduced to the not-so-subtle arts of parody and satire and caricature, and to a bit of New York sarcasm and Yiddish cursing, all a providing a view of the world new to me. Later on I discovered the originator of MAD – Harvey Kurtzman – through reprints of the ‘50s issues, which were utterly amazing, especially the pieces with the artist Will Elder. It was like looking at William Hogarth prints made for 20th century sensibilities. As an aside, it was because of Elder and Kurtzman that I became interested in Hogarth, and thus in the 18th c. and its satirists, such as Voltaire, its philosophies and ideas.
As I became a little older in the late ‘70s and hung around other degenerate young boys, we regularly got our hands on issues of Playboy by various means, most nefarious, others hilarious. Stories for another day. The direction I’m heading here is a little strange – while the other boys immediately went for the centerfolds (“My name is Candy and my biggest turn-on is a warm smile and my biggest turn-off is nose hair.”), I discovered that Kurtzman was writing a comic for Playboy called Little Annie Fanny – sometimes Elder did the illustrations, at other times other teams worked on them, but overall they were as hilarious and socially pointed as anything Mel Brooks did in his earlier movies (though I did not know this at the time as it would be years before I got to see a Mel Brooks movie). Not that I didn’t get around to looking at the centerfold (“My name is Candy…”) like everyone else, but I had to check out what was happening in the topsy-turvy world of innocent and moral -- and curvaceous and barely or non-clothed, big blue-eyed – world of ol’ Annie. My sense of humor, warped as it is, was being shaped, right along with my view of planet Earth – warped as it is, too. I mean, the planet, not my point of view.
Star Wars came out around this point. My life was, to say the least, a little unsteady those years due to an ongoing family crisis, and, for some reason, I experienced Star Wars as some sort of redemptive event, as if my seeing it would somehow make everything turn out alright, open doors to new worlds, brighten my horrible and bleak Appalachian-bound existence, heal the unhealable. I fell head over heels for Carrie Fisher, whom I love even more today as a fiction writer, social commentator, and activist for mental health and addiction issues. And she’s still pretty, too.
