Watching Movies with my Parents

The movie starts at 9:00 p.m. Not 8:59. Not 9:01. 9:00.

You do not start with a snack. If you are hungry, you need to wait until the first plot point at the end of Act 1. Your father’s finger is hovering above the pause button. He will not let the plot point slip by without a pause. It’s 41 minutes and 53 seconds into the movie. Now you can get your first snack. The snack break is two minutes long. You must get your popcorn and use the bathroom during that time. Bathroom breaks outside of plot-related pauses are not permitted. 

I started watching movies with my parents when I was six years old. My twin sister Aurora and I could not sleep one night, so we came downstairs and entered the lounge, where my parents watched a movie. We asked them if we could watch with them. They looked at each other, shrugged, then said okay, as long as we were very still and very quiet. The movie was Barton Fink. It was the best thing I had ever seen. That is, until the following week, when we went downstairs again and watched Silkwood. After that, Stalag 17. Then Fitzcarraldo. My Dinner With Andre. Glengarry Glen Ross. Soon, we were finagling our way into most movie nights, staying calm and quiet and obeying the rules meticulously. A break after each plot point. No conversations or comments of any kind. Chew your food only during loud scenes. Even our normally manic dog seemed to understand the rules. We were all in a secret club. By the time second grade rolled around, Aurora and I knew the works of Werner Herzog, the filmography of Jeremy Irons, the screenplays of David Mamet by heart

Movies have always been at the heart of my family. My parents’ first date was Raging Bull, where they learned all about romance and healthy relationships. (Joke!). They almost broke up years later over a vicious fight regarding Lynch’s Eraserhead. My father reviewed films for The Sunday Times when our older siblings were young. He recalls going to review Se7en alongside a posh veteran critic during a matinee. It was just him and the veteran critic, neither of whom knew a lick about what they were about to watch. After the opening credits rolled, complete with razors skinning off fingertips and Trent Reznor crooning like a sociopath, the veteran critic said, “Crikey.” He got up and left the theater. My father stayed. 

Aurora and I were not allowed to watch TV, nor were we allowed internet of any kind until we reached middle school. Thus, our sole form of media consumption—besides our tape player, upon which we religiously played our Spice Girls albums—was dictated by the whims of our parents: 70’s whistleblower films and French melodramas, lesser-known Scorsese flicks, and lengthy documentaries about various genocides.

When I entered sixth grade, my teacher, a “royal windbag” (my mother’s words) named Mr. Weiner asked each of us to submit a movie suggestion for the “Weiner List”— a film recommendation list that he would then send out to the class. I, naturally, suggested Being John Malkovich. “The movie where they put Cameron Diaz in a cage?!” exclaimed Mr. Weiner tearfully. “That does not pass the Weiner test!” My parents got a lengthy letter. My official Weiner List submission after that was the delightful Hanks joint Big (which, by the way, is not much more tame than Malkovich… she fucks a twelve-year-old, people!)

It wasn’t until I was older that I realized how unorthodox my family’s movie-watching methods were. Watching Fever Pitch with my high school friend's family, I was horrified! My friend’s mother got up ten minutes in (plot point, who? We hadn’t even gotten to the call to adventure, for fuck’s sake!) and got herself a glass of water. And a normal glass of water it was not! No, readers, she used the ICE MACHINE!! Deafening cubes of ice tumbled into her glass, rendering poor Jimmy Fallon practically mute. And when she came back into the living room… nobody reprimanded her! Nobody passive aggressively rewinded! My friend turned a lamp on. A source of light outside the TV screen, in my household, was a sin akin to preferring the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crowne Affair to the original. But here she was, searching for her phone charger, and then TEXTING! “I think Drew Barrymore is just adorable,” said the father, and nobody even thought to reply: “No debriefing until after the movie!” I was stunned. 

The Amidon movie watching regimen, you’ll be surprised to hear, did not always serve me. Amidon rule #7 “you do not give up on a movie no matter what” did not, for instance, serve me when I picked Enter the Void as a first date movie with my high school boyfriend. Cue three plus hours of horrified, humorless white-knuckling through uterine POV shots, etc. Nor did it serve me when I— typically meek and terrified of confrontation— started a fight at the Union Square Regal when the group behind me dared to chit-chat mid-movie. To be fair, the movie in question was A Quiet Place. Who talks during A Quiet Place?? I spun around and hissed “you would all DIE in the world of the film” and they spent the rest of the film tossing balled up straw wrappers at the back of my neck.

If anybody was affected most by the Amidon Regimen, though, it was my twin sister. To this day, she is utterly religious about movies. She unironically loves The Turin Horse, a Hungarian film in which, to my understanding, a bunch of people eat potatoes and then a horse dies? She is now a very successful film critic, and says she feels “cranky” if she doesn’t watch at least one movie every day. Whatever Amidon movie watching habits I lacked growing up, she had in spades. Once, in high school, we were watching 2001: A Space Odyssey with our admittedly very stoned boyfriends. Every time one of them made a comment, she would rewind the movie all the way to the beginning. We were watching until dawn. I still remember the floating fetus, drenched in light from the outside sunrise, and the horrified pang, the despair I felt when my boyfriend pointed at said fetus and shouted: “What the goddamn hell is that?”

The post-film debriefs were always my favorite part. My father would refill his and my mothers’ wine glasses (this would make it their third and final glass of the night), and we’d wait, in silence, for him to return. Typically, fights would ensue. We would make fun of my mother for her arbitrary rules about what makes a movie good (for example, she liked Dune, but didn’t care for the “sandy bits”). Aurora would talk about postmodern film theory and I would say something obnoxious about story structure until one of us was crying. Those nights forced me to be opinionated. It turned me into the kind of person who will never agree with someone’s take on a movie just for the sake of it. And that, I think, for such an otherwise tragically agreeable person, is a good thing. 

All that said. As I have embarked on the gruelingly boring and eye-rollingly adult work of pulling myself out of the trenches of crippling anxiety, I have had to let go of some of these… quirks. And the truth is, sometimes I do like to have films and TV shows on in the background! And I have spent many a joyful night since leaving home talking over ridiculous movies, yelling out theories, making fun of badly written lines. And I like to give up on movies if I don’t like them, instead of forcing myself to suffer through something that sucks. Still, I don’t know who I’d be if it wasn’t for the Amidon Film School. It was absurd. It was sometimes terrifying. I walked around for weeks in third grade saying “I love this refrigerator so much I could fuck it” after watching The Talented Mr. Ripley. That was unfortunate. But it was church. It was sacred. I was part of a club. And whenever I come home, I make sure I’m sitting on my chair (NOT my dad’s chair) in the lounge at 9:00. Not 8:59. Not 9:01. 9:00.