The One Absent Meryl/My Mother’s Rule

When I was little, I spent most of my leisure time in front of the TV. We were one of the first families in my neighborhood to own a video recorder; it was an obscure model, Video Recorder 2000, a giant chunk of a machine, about twice the size of its smaller cousin, the VHS, comparable now to those gigantic first portable phones that looked like a suitcase. The 2000 was brought to our house by my father, who had bought it from Germany, when he went there on business.

It was an outstanding machine, the tapes looked like gigantic c-cassettes, and you could turn the tape around, just like a cassette, and record on both sides. I used to make fancy notebooks with a ruler and a pen and a pencil, using the sticker sets with numbers that came with the tapes, to write down what was on each of the tapes, on both sides. On a quick glance, the notebook looked like a long pro-con -list. I loved to make organized lines of the many grey container cases, carefully placing the number on the top quarter of the spine, then, write the same number in the notebook, use the ruler to divide the page in two, and add a side one and two, then write what was on each side.

It wasn’t long after, father bought a VHS as well, and for a long time, we had two sets of video recorders in the house. The newer model, the one all my friends had, was used only seldom to record anything in our house. We only used it to watch rented movies, and preferred the 2000 to tape stuff from TV. The tapes were of excellent quality, and could take lots and lots of overtaping, and only after the machine broke down after almost fifteen years of use did we learn how to record on the VHS.

The 2000 was the most important technical machine of my childhood, surpassing even my admittedly very humble boombox, the kind with the dual deck and the possibility to insert batteries and take it outside in the summer. Movies were my first love, and it was on those sunny afternoons on my holiday from school, with mother yelling from outside that I should stop ruining my eyes and come out to get some sun, where I developed my life-long flair for re-watching my favorite TV shows or movies again and again. They were my friends, they made me feel happy and like I belonged, and they were always available.

The 2000 and the accompanying notebook were a fledgling movie buff’s treasure chest. Pretty much every note-worthy movie from the Sixties and Seventies and early Eighties was taped and archived. Everyone in my family liked good films and everybody had somewhat different tastes: my sister, the teenager, taped her kind of things, music programs, Purple Rain and whatnot, my mother loved crime and romance, and my father took his cue from the TV-guide, taping most everything that got a four or five star review. Most of my all-time favorites were thus first experienced in our large living room, where I curled up in mother’s favorite easy chair, ate tons of crackers or cookies or crisp bread with butter, drank Coca-Cola, and later, tea, the double-crossing sun giving his all to tempt me away from the idiot box by raying the TV screen in the most annoying way if it was summer, me fighting my family over the remote to pass the long black evenings if it was winter.

I pretty much had access all areas using the 2000. First I watched my own shows, from my own tapes where I had meticulously written my name in the upper right corner in the notebook’s pages accordingly: shows like ThunderCats, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Black Cauldron, and the anime classics for girls: Candy Candy and Hello! Sandybell. But as I got older, my appetite grew, and I started watching movies at random from my parents’ tapes. Most times I had no idea what the film was like or knew nothing much about the title I was about to see; my school mates weren’t into movies the way I was, or if they were, it wasn’t a matter that was discussed during recess. It was a small country school and the gossip and talk of things related to the school and the people there took precedence in the classrooms and halls and playfields. That was all good by me, though. I liked having my own secret thing, my own world, a second world where I could easily immerse myself and return invigorated, kind of like Alice in the rabbit hole, an analog used ad nauseam, but true.

I still remember the rush of the gradual realization of what was going on in a movie I was watching the way I described, with no pre-info whatsoever about the given film. There was a strange feeling of having done something naughty, a mixture of embarrassment and pleasure, when I just couldn’t stop watching 9 ½ Weeks after realizing that Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke appeared to just have sex, over and over, the whole duration of the movie. It was so enticing, and it couldn’t have been so very forbidden, since there it stood, in my own school girl’s handwriting, with the loops and the awkward backwards tilt, and maybe there were little hearts above the i’s, too, in the notebook, the title, and who was in it, underneath, in bullet points. I just thanked the lord I had happened to start watching it when I was alone in the house, with both my parents working late that night.

I watched Godfathers one and two on the 2000 like that, as well as Silkwood, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Mask, Out of Africa, Terms of Endearment, Ghostbusters, Kramer vs. Kramer, Gone with the Wind, all the crazy Bud Spencer & Terence Hill films, Top Gun, Heartburn, The Sting, every James Bond film available, Marilyn Monroe’s entire catalogue, the list goes on and on. To secure the weird, exotic newness of seeing 9 ½ Weeks in the freshest way possible, I carry fond memories with me of that movie, and never want to see it again with adult eyes. To this day, I have no real recollection of what actually was the plot of the film, and I don’t really care, either.

The only movie that was strictly forbidden for me to lay my hands on, was the indecipherable Sophie’s Choice. Mother was so severe when she warned me against watching it, telling me, that it was a terrible, terrible movie, and I was wise not to go near it. I had no idea what the film was, I never found out anything about the movies beforehand, even later on, after I subscribed, or my parents subscribed for me, a magazine with a monthly movie reviews column in it, where I could have easily read about lots of films, both old and new, a preference that has accompanied me to this day, and so I promised.

I was a good kid, and, knowing that I had permission for anything else on those tapes, I made good on my promise to mother. I never touched the tape with Sophie’s Choice on it, even when I was home alone and could have easily enough watched it in secret without mother ever having to find out. Only I did not. I thought I could never lie to her convincingly, and just let it go. I learned to skip the page with the name of the only forbidden film entirely, and with time, sort of forgot about the whole thing.

Old habits die hard, and I must admit that I was so good a kid, I was only able to bring myself to watch Sophie’s Choice in my thirties. It was like with Ross and Monica and the game of football on Friends. As a child, I had always thought that it must be some sort of war epic, which in a way of course it is, but the emotional content, the reason why I wasn’t allowed to see it, was such that I was sincerely shocked when I finally saw the film. I had been so careful not to spoil the movie from myself, I had managed to stay absolutely knowledge-free about anything concerning it, so when I finally tackled Sophie’s Choice, I was as virginal as the school girl I once was.

As kids, we take things very differently than as adults, and I have no idea how traumatized I would have been over the movie, had I seen it around the time when I saw, for example, Aliens, or the Godfathers, none of which gave me any life-long nightmares or traumas. Kids take stuff at face value. I never thought that my mother was going to die of cancer, or that the mafia really ruled in my town, or that the Alien queen was hiding in the attic (not until way later, after the incident with the vacuum cleaner I have told you about, and that was in my early twenties, too). Stuff we think as adults that would scare the children shitless may not move them one tiny bit.

What did freak me out, was the not being allowed to stay up and watch Jaws on TV, I was around seven I think, having to go to bed instead, and lying awake in my bed, glazed in horror, listening to the audio that was just hearable through the thin walls. I still can’t go swimming without the audio starting to play in the back of my mind. Not just the theme music. All of it. The splashing, the screaming, the hysteria. Now that was true terror.

Also, there was one episode in ThunderCats, the one with the time cave where Tygra wanders inside, not knowing that once in, it is impossible to ever get out, because the second you are inside, you start aging in accelerated speed. I didn’t matter that Cheetara, the incredibly fast lady of the lot, rescues him in the end, and that Tygra regains his youth from that fountain or pond that just happens to be laying about, near the time cave. No. I was terrified of that episode as far along as in my elevens or twelves, and while I today own the DVD collection of the short-lived animated series, I remember always how freaked out I became when that episode started. Then again, why my cousin, who is some years younger than I, started sobbing uncontrollably, when Sandybell’s father died, was simply beyond me. Sure, it was sad and all, but it wasn’t like our parents were going to die, right?

Would I have thought that SPOILER ALERT!!! mother was going to give me to the Nazis in exchange of her own life, and the life of my sister’s, had I watched Sophie’s Choice in my formative years? I don’t think so. As kids, the movie monsters are real only in a magical way, and the loving care of our homes and our parents seem everlasting, the very essence, or weave, of life itself, and I never would have thought such betrayal was possible in real life, in my house, not with the 2000 handy and the rose and peony bushes and my crayons and my sticker books and my first clumsy journal with canary yellow cover and my parents safely tucked in bed inside their cream-colored bedroom.

I am nearing middle age now, and I still consider my father the strongest man in the world, and believe with a child’s conviction that my mother is going to live forever, because I love her so very much. That my love will somehow, by magic, make her immortal, and I will never have to deal with the loss of my queen, because the whole notion is totally absurd. - Of course, this denial of the real world, and choosing the Neverland of music, movies and books over it, is a theme that runs through my very existence and all my relationships as perpetual conflict, so I guess there is a small possibility that it isn’t, in the end, them, it’s me. Perhaps it was my mother’s love that grounded me in the notion of absolute safety and foolhardy optimism in such a deep, integral way that made me forever elusive to the pains of dealing with the outside world, even when it was staring me right in the face, hence making me the sometimes clueless, naïve Gatzby that I am. Let’s just look at my cousin’s reaction to the cartoon against my own astonished disbelief.

But if I didn’t see and experience things like I do, I have no idea who I would be. And while it is sometimes hard, I like the way I am. So I want to say thank you, mother. Thank you for your love, and for always making sure I knew for a fact that nothing terrible was really going to happen.

I'll finish with a few lines from Tori Amos. I think she made an excellent point in her moving and quite heart-breaking song, The Beekeeper:

I have come for the beekeeper

I know you want my

You want my queen

Anything but this

Can you use me instead?